The first pitch from Chicago’s Steve Trachsel to Mark McGwire was far enough outside to need more postage. Annoyed boos poured from the Wrigley Field congregation.
This home run regatta between McGwire and Sammy Sosa is not only making strange bedfellows but, it would seem, precious few enemies as well.
As was Sosa in St. Louis, McGwire was welcomed here, a visiting wonder and not a chronic enemy, though the Cubs-Cardinals rivalry has roots deeper than the outfield ivy.
Baseball needs what is happening with these two, is blessed to have it. The magic they are making is as contagious as it is providential.
In a baseball season without compelling pennant races, or any pennant races at all to speak of, there is a daily reason to check in on the game, there is an easy place to look.
Did Big Mac hit another? What did Sammy do?
Neither one happened to hit a home run Tuesday night, a double disappointment, but the wind was blowing in and Trachsel had his mojo moving, and not away from McGwire either.
Trachsel gave McGwire pitches to hit, and McGwire avoided hitting the pitches, though I wonder that the force of his swing was not enough to bruise the ball. On this night, at least, McGwire’s gripe of pitchers avoiding him seemed as hollow as the hole in his bat.
Sosa did manage to whack one ball out of the park–foul–but the kids waiting on Waveland Avenue were no less eager to chase it down.
McGwire poked five of his nine batting practice home runs out there, each one accompanied by gasps and applause.
On a night where anticipation of heroic home runs packed the park, Cubs catcher Scott Servais was the batting star without getting a base hit that mattered. One of McGwire’s foul tips went farther than all the balls hit by Servais for three runs batted in.
So McGwire and Sosa start another day where they finished the last one, tied at 47 and Roger Maris waiting with the patience of history and the assurance of accomplishment.
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An unlikely pair, McGwire and Sosa, to be resurrecting baseball as they are, poking balls over walls and chasing the real numbers and precious myths of another generation.
Sosa, the poor Dominican (“Pressure? Pressure is back home working in a factory making shoes.”), and McGwire, the golden Californian, All-American, Olympian and World Series Bash Brother.
The one is all piled power and grim impatience, the other bundled enthusiasm and cheerful congeniality, one grappling reluctantly with fame’s irritations and the other embracing it all.
“Maybe next year I won’t like it (the attention),” Sosa said. “But now I am having much fun.”
It will not matter if McGwire breaks Maris’ record, or if Sosa does. Or even Ken Griffey Jr., lagging a bit these days, but still included out of habit more than courtesy. Sosa is not sure that Griffey will not rejoin the race.
“Home runs come in bunches,” Sosa said, “so you never know. You just have to go out there and hit them one at a time.”
A philosophy that defies argument, to say nothing of logic.
What matters is the anticipation, the possibilities, the delicious suspense. Catching a record is not nearly as compelling as the chasing of it.
The specialness comes not just from a race against ghosts but against each other, the two of them now, Babe Ruth and Maris then, live and film, color and black and white, a generation holding hands with itself and with the past.
When each of them steps into the batter’s box, late in a game, when each can be the last out (Sosa) or next-to-last out (McGwire) for his team, when the pair of them can go 0 for 9, strike out six times and leave eight runners on, a ballpark can empty with satisfied witnesses.
No matter the score, no one leaves until McGwire and Sosa have had all of their cuts.
If McGwire gets his 62nd home run this year, too bad it cannot come at Wrigley, for what a crisis of conscience that would be for a Cub bleacher bum, provided the ball stayed in the park.
Imagine throwing that one back.