This was the summer of 1998, back when the greatest show in baseball would happen a couple of hours before game time, when Mark McGwire would lug his lumber to a batting cage and take aim at places baseballs weren’t supposed to reach.
Forget, if you can, what we know about the illicit tricks of the trade McGwire used to hammer 70 homers that year. In that summer, when the St. Louis Cardinals were on the road (meaning they’d hit second, after the ballpark doors were open), stadiums that were barely half-filled for many weekday games would be that full by 5:30.