1998: A Storied, Um, Steroid Summer

Getting a bit nostaglic lately, as I think back to a decade ago.

Ten years ago marked America's Summer of Falling Back in Love with Major League Baseball.

That's the year Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa captivated fans--and recaptured many who had grown disillusioned by the 1994 strike that deep-sixed the season in mid-August.

At the time, I was a reporter for The Courier News in Elgin, Ill., with a side column called "By the Numbers." The column was all the excuse I needed to research 80 years of baseball's most fearsome sluggers' statistics.

Along the way, I invented a stat, which I dubbed the Home Run Power Ratio. It's a sort of inflation index for homers so you can compare players from various generations by objectively gauging how they fared against their peers.

I wrote various pieces on the HRPR, including one for a grand baseball publication called The Elysian Fields Quarterly.

My true grand-slam moment, though, came at the end of the 1999 season, when Sports Illustrated, the magazine I'd dreamt of writing for since I began subscribing as a 10-year-old in 1978, published a brief piece on the HRPR.

In recent years, the romance with America's Pastime has been tarnished, a sense of betrayal having set in after we discovered that everyone but the batboy, seemingly, was using steroids to swing for the fences.

But it sure was fun when we were in the midst of it, huh?

PR 101: Tell the Truth

5WPR, the former fastest-growing PR firm in the nation, has run into some negative and embarrassing Gawker publicity over questionable activities, to put it mildly.

In a blog post last month, I shared my e-mail interaction with the firm's president, Ronn Torrosian. At that time, I noted that he had been slow to update his website to make it clear that 5WPR was no longer the reigning fastest-growing PR firm across this great land.

I also suggested he refrain from using a stream of one-word sentences, since they can come across as arrogant gloating.

In the wake of the recent fiasco, I hope that Ronn has gathered his troops and issued a reprimand straight out of PR 101: Tell. The. Truth.