These Are The Good Old Days

By RICHARD CORLISS

It wasn't supposed to be this easy. Baseball isn't easy; ask Michael Jordan. And hitting a home run can be very hard; ask Larry Bowa, who did it just 15 times in 16 productive major-league years. Think about it. You swing at a tiny ball thrown by a fellow who knows something you don't--where it will whiz past you and at what ferocious speed--and you hit it 350 ft. or more in the air. That is why the homer is baseball's most explosive event, an eruption of sex (the swing) and violence (the wallop) in a gentle sport. And that is why, of the 2,500 or so pitches a healthy player sees each season, so few are driven out of the yard. Once upon a time, in the year of Lucky Lindy and The Jazz Singer, a giant named Babe hit 60 homers. Decades later, decades ago, in J.F.K.'s first year as President, a man named Roger Maris spanked 61. Great hitters emerged before and since, but hardly anyone challenged the sacred stat.

So why, in major-league baseball's 123rd year, are two men--Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs' Sammy Sosa--suddenly destined to cream the home-run record as if it were a pitiful little Rawlings sphere? And, dammit, with so little suspense! Since 1961, hot stovers have debated whether Maris' feat, in a 162-game season, truly equaled Ruth's in a 154-game span. But on Saturday, when McGwire pummeled his 60th homer against Cincinnati, his team was playing only its 141st game. Sosa had a just slightly less preposterous 58 dingers in 142 Cubs games. By the time you read this, one or both of these sluggers may have made a fan's anticipation meaningless. They had to hit only a few home runs in the next two weeks to pass Ruth, Maris and any need for record-book asterisks.

For some scrupulous folk, the news that for the past year McGwire has taken doses of androstenedione (which is either a muscle enhancer or Viagra in vitamin form) will forever place an ethical asterisk next to his achievement. Andro is legal in baseball--partly because the mouse men who run the game are unwilling to wrestle over drug policy with a balky and powerful players' union--but banned in other sports; last week the NFL suspended Paul Wiggins of the Pittsburgh Steelers for sampling andro over the summer. (Sosa was recently seen "hiding" a bottle of Flintstones vitamins in his locker.) But how much extra fizz does the 6-ft. 5-in., 250-lb. McGwire need? He's always been a hefty guy, a goateed Gigantor, and his 49 homers in 1987, his first full season, are a rookie record. In 1995 he broke Ruth's season record, established 75 years before, for highest home-run percentage; his career percentage is second only to Ruth's. Besides, his four missiles against the Florida Marlins last week averaged an astral 469 ft., which is greater even than the circumference of his biceps. With or without supplements, McGwire is pure protein power: casein at the bat.

The boys of summer are bigger these days; that's one explanation for the homerpalooza. In workout rooms they sculpt their bodies like works of art and war, partly because they know the big hits generated by big muscles will earn them big bucks. Ruth knew that too, but he was able to belt taters while defiling the temple of his body. He indulged in illegal drugs (alcohol during Prohibition) and occasionally the illicit honey of a hooker's caress. No one seemed to mind. The Babe was a swaggering kid, a genius and a naif, having fun being the best. McGwire took some time reaching that state of athletic nirvana known as "the groove." For his good and the game's, he seems to be there now.

He and Sosa are likely to stay there, becoming the first non-Yankees to hold the homer record since 1919, when a Red Sox pitcher-outfielder named Ruth hit 29. They won't have diminished the Babe's achievements--partly because he was so much better than the best of his day. (In 1927, when Ruth smacked his 60, only one other player, Lou Gehrig, hit more than half that number.) And partly because baseball fans, the most traditional of mammals, believe deep in their atavistic hearts that then was better than now.

It will take some time for the long-ball Luddites to accept that these are the good old days--the days of damn Yankees, of pitching phenoms like El Duque and Kerry Wood, of a glorious Griffey, surely of the mad bombers McGwire and Sosa. We may have to wait 20 years--when, say, Matt McGwire, now 11 and a weekend bat boy for his father's team, threatens to hit 100 homers in a season--for reality to set in. Then the geezers will sigh and say, "Ahhhh, remember the glory of '98?"