Whether Sammy Sosa hits his 55th home run Monday night against Cincinnati or not, he will depart August on a dead run for the defining month of his baseball life.
Only two results are possible from here–great and lasting glory or fixed and bittersweet failure.
This is not a choice but the grim gospel that comes with reaching so high.
To get this close and then not eclipse Roger Maris’ home run record, for Sosa and for Mark McGwire, would color indelibly all that has come before.
The judgment is as old as sports and as as blunt as a single syllable. Choke.
Better to get it done earlier than later, for delay on deadline exaggerates expectation into something fearful, like some huge self-fertilizing fungus.
It is better not to wait, as Maris did, until the final game, though the drama would be priceless.
The impatience of the world will not only distort but disrupt.
Ordinariness is no longer acceptable, no 1-for-4 days with the occasional run batted in, a home run a week. There are not enough weeks.
Each of the roughly 100 plate appearances remaining becomes an occasion, each one larger than the last, each failure not the natural course of events but the unnatural response to the occasion.
This may not be fair, but it is the way it is.
Sosa and McGwire have two legs of the Triple Crown, and September is the Belmont Stakes.
It has just been baseball up until now, languid and laden with tomorrows, allowed the cadence of summer. September brings an urgency to the game and to the exploits of its heroes.
Even if this were not the Great Home Run Chase, in routine times every collar gets tighter, every swallow gets harder.
September is the time of pennant races–or playoff posturing, whatever it is called here in the age of wild-card World Series winners–of tension and suspense, those uncommon baseball rewards.
More Top Picks Kitchen
Because the playoff races are fraught with about much mystery as a sermon–save the National League wild card and the American League West–even more attention will be focused on Sosa and McGwire.
Major League Baseball has, in fact, determined that the games between home runs Nos. 58 and 62 are so exclusive as to require separate credentials for the baseball media.
This is a rare effort at organization from the commissioner’s office, which must be grateful for something to do.
It has been great fun for Sosa up to now, all happy ambush and unexpected glory, without demands or stress.
Sosa has been the glad companion of expectation, riding shotgun while McGwire has done the heavy driving. On the road to the record, Sosa has been Smokey and McGwire the Bandit.
Hardly anyone expected Sosa to be here this late with so splendid an opportunity to achieve a rather large chunk of baseball immortality.
But here he is, and no longer is Sosa’s poor-mouthing of his own stature so endearing.
That was all very well when it appeared as if Sosa could not, or would not, stay with McGwire. There was always a bit more hokum there than even Sosa believed.
It is not Sosa’s sentiment that will determine how this all works out, but his bat. And so far Sosa’s bat hasn’t been paying any attention to his public preference in this thing.
Sosa is rooting for McGwire? The best thing he can do is keep the pressure on both of them.
This is very much anyone’s game. There could be only one winner, or two, or none. Not counting baseball itself, a very, very big winner.
And the rest of us, of course.