Ever wonder what it would be like to go on a three-day long-ball bender, chasing the men who are chasing Roger Maris's epic record? So did the author.

More flashbacks

by Gary Smith

Issue date: August 3, 1998

You're out of it, pal. You're hungry, and the kitchen's closed. You don't live in St. Louis or Seattle or Chicago, where the story of this American summer of 1998 is cooking, nor in the other big cities where the dailies bring it piping hot to the breakfast table every dawn. You live a 5 1/2-hour drive from the nearest big league ballpark, and your newspaper's serving it up like bulletins from the front in World War I—GRIFFEY HITS 39TH; SOSA'S 36TH LEADS CUBS; MCGWIRE MASHES 2 MORE—followed by a bare-bones sentence or two, and Christ, there's not even SportsCenter to fill your belly because your wife bears a deep grudge against TV and sneers whenever you creep down the stairs at 7 a.m. to turn it on.

But you're a sportswriter, and people assume you know. "What do ya think?" they ask. "Is Maris's record gonna fall? Which one's gonna do it? What kind of guy's McGwire? Who do you like?" You don't know who you like. Never met any of the three men in your life. It's scary, not being able to answer the watercooler question.

So you get this idea. It's too good to be true, but you ask your boss anyway. How about letting you chase the chase? Three cities, three nights, three men—go on a long-ball bender, a four-bag jag. Enter the bubble to feel what it's like to be one of them right now, belting homers and stalking legends. Then become one of the mob up in the seats, rising to snag history. Big Mac in San Diego on Monday, Junior in St. Petersburg on Tuesday, Slammin' Sammy in Chicago on Wednesday, back-to-back-to-back...pretty please?

Sure, says your boss. Why not?

Hot damn! You're going...going...gone!

IT'S ONLY WHEN you're up in the air at dawn, a week ago Monday, blinking on four hours' sleep and staring at the travel schedule you've scribbled out, that you start thinking, Man, this is lunacy, and what are the odds you'll actually see any of the big boys launch? Two flights, 2,500 miles and 14 hours later you're sitting in a football locker room next to the visitors' clubhouse at Qualcomm Stadium, waiting for the press conference that Mark McGwire holds on his first day in each city when he's on the road. You remember reading about the media horde that swallowed Roger Maris in 1961. Ten to 15 reporters would converge on him before and after each game. That was in September, when Maris had 55, 56, 57. Today is July 20. McGwire has 42. There are 30 of us. There were 50 on the last road trip, in Cincinnati, a writer tells you.

McGwire walks in, St. Louis Cardinals cap tugged low on his head, dressed for battle. He sees the four cameras aimed at a chair and a table holding a half-dozen microphones. He shakes his head in disgust. "I'm not gonna sit down," he says. "This is informal stuff, so...." He leans against one of the lockers, his green eyes blinking like those of a cornered ox as the humans and their hardware close in. Someone takes pity on him, lobs him a lollipop about his team instead of about what everyone's here for. He shakes his head grimly again. "This is for Mark McGwire home run questions," he says. "That's the only reason I'm doing this. I talk about the team after the game."

Haltingly, the questions come. You have this feeling that if you ask the wrong question, he might chomp your head off, and you would absolutely deserve it, so you wait for someone else to ask it. "I don't know how anybody can get used to this," McGwire says. "I don't play the game for this. I'm sick of seeing my mug. I've always believed that the more people know about you, the more they get sick of you. The media sets this up like it's going to happen ... so how are they going to write it if it doesn't happen? I assume people want this record to be broken. So let's use some sense. Why not wait until somebody gets close to breaking the record? If people want to see something done, it makes sense to do this in a way that won't wear the person down."

Is he having any fun? "Between the lines, I have a lot of fun," he says.

What does he think of Mexican pitchers? He rolls his eyes. The cameras and microphones reap the 20-second snip they need and begin peeling away, and as the crowd dwindles to a dozen men with notepads, McGwire's stiff, mammoth body loosens—the cornered ox is gone. He looks every questioner in the eye and answers earnestly. He wraps an arm around the divider between two locker stalls, lets it have some of his 250 pounds and smiles. "I wish every player could feel what I've felt in visiting ballparks," he says. "The receptions I've received....It's blown me away. It's absolutely remarkable."

After the All-Star break, he says, he pulled the shutters over the looking glass. No more SportsCenter—his finger clicks right past it on the remote control. No more sports pages—he extracts that section from newspapers, folds it and drops it in the trash. No more reading the mail.

You follow him into the Cardinals clubhouse, feeling bad because now you like him, and your eyes feel like cameras. There it is, blaring from the television that hangs from the ceiling and faces all the lockers—an ESPN segment on the home-run-swinging styles of McGwire, Ken Griffey Jr. and Sammy Sosa, the crack of McGwire's bat and the bark of his name coming over and over. You watch how swiftly he walks past the screen to retrieve something from his stall and then strides back to remain on the TV's dark side until it's time for batting practice, ferrying his bat to the trainer's room, to the manager's office, to the corridor outside, the look in his eye that of a man on his way to do something very important, although he's really just killing time. You can't help feeling that here's a guy who wishes to hell he could do this without expectations, without the dread of letting people down.

A teammate, pitcher Todd Stottlemyre, watches him hurry by. "It's like a starting pitcher in the seventh inning of a no-hitter," Stottlemyre says. "We don't say anything to him anymore about home runs. We can tell he doesn't want us to talk about it, and nobody's gonna question him, because it's too damn big."

You're startled, as you follow McGwire down the tunnel to the dugout, to hear the cries begin even before he emerges. "McGwire! McGwire!" He walks past the bleating fans, never looks up. Every head, every camera is on him. His face is a mask, eyes gripping a nothingness before him. He lifts his arms overhead to stretch. A woman with a tiny camera taps his armpit with her fingernail, asking him to turn and pose. He never looks at her. She doesn't exist.

Two hours before game time, the leftfield stands are choked with people wearing mitts. The air crackles. Foul territory is thick with writers and photographers and special guests—a hundred, easy. Every few minutes McGwire's eyes meet those of someone he knows. Immediately the mask vanishes, the eyes and lips become animated; you see how grateful he is to be human again. There's Scott LaRose, his comedian buddy who tells you that McGwire cackles so loud at comedy clubs that he brings a towel with him to bite on rather than draw attention to himself. There's George Will and his two sons. "It's not about the pennant races anymore," Will tells you. "It's about the home run race. You'd think I'd want Sosa, because I grew up a Cubs fan, but I'm rooting for McGwire. The base of achievement is there—he's earned this. He's got the swing down, it never varies, so he won't have any long periods of mechanical trouble. But all three of them seem to be nice human beings. There's not a Sprewell in the house."

Three of them? Or is it four now? You look up, and there's San Diego Padres outfielder Greg Vaughn standing 10 feet away. His 34th home run, yesterday, has brought him within two of Sosa, to the lip of the volcano, and since you're here, hell, why not nudge him in too? He gives you a big, warm, no-way-in-hell grin and says, "I won't even think about it. I don't want to hear or see anybody blowin' smoke up my butt. It's so far-fetched, so unrealistic, it hasn't even entered my mind. Man, McGwire's a monster. He's got Nintendo numbers! Junior, he was born to play baseball and be a superstar, and Sammy, he's like a little kid having fun. I love to watch those guys go over the top."

As if to prove he doesn't belong, he goes homerless his first four rounds of batting practice and exits the cage with a sorrowful shake of his head. "Got the worst BP swing in baseball," Vaughn laments. Then, looking over your shoulder, he cracks up. "McGwire just called over to me. Says he wants to rub me, I'm so hot. Imagine that!"

Vaughn trots to McGwire's side, spilling laughter. Nobody back home has ever even asked you about Vaughn, but for pure warmth alone, maybe he's the dark horse you should pull for.

Big Mac walks toward the dugout. He reaches above it to sign a few autographs, looking at no one as he signs, his face a blank. The crush of people mashes a redheaded little boy against the railing atop the dugout. The boy breaks into sobs. His father and a security guard shove and shout to set him free.

McGwire strides to the plate for BP. You park yourself right at the rope that keeps noncombatants back from the cage. Everyone's on his feet. A couple of grounders, ohhhh, a couple of fly balls, ahhhh, and then the thunder, whoooooah! Twenty-two compact swings in all, seven bullets into the sea of begging bare and leathered hands. Just before McGwire finishes, a boy runs out to the cage in a Cardinals uniform with McGwire's name and number on the back—Mark's son, Matthew, reporting for duty as batboy and Nation's Luckiest Child. Big Mac grins, slaps five and hugs the boy, then heads back to the clubhouse.

You go up into the stands, buy a soda and a hot dog, and grab an empty seat near the Cardinals' dugout. Along the way, in three conversations, you hear men explaining to their women about Ruth's 60 and Maris's 61 and the history afoot here tonight. Big Mac approaches the plate in the top of the first to a standing O. He's not a Cardinal anymore. He's on everyone's team.

Lord, those thighs. In McGwire's knock-kneed stance, they scream to burst out of his pants, and as he takes those swift little warmup swipes, his 33 ounces of northern white ash becomes a toothpick. With distance, up here in the crowd, you can see the appetite for legend that he's feeding. He's the caricature that a children's artist would draw of a home run slugger; he's Bunyan swinging an ax, the gentle giant whose charity for abused children everybody you'll meet tonight is amazingly quick to point out. Camera flashes pop all around the concrete bowl. McGwire lashes a white-blur single to left, Little Mac gallops out grinning to collect his daddy's shin guard, and you're thinking, Damn, wouldn't it be nice if your son could be beside you to see this, and how can you not root for this guy?

Bottom of the second. Vaughn launches number 35, which goes 433 feet to dead left. Look out, people tell you. Here comes Vaughny. Sitting on the third base side, watching that home run descend, you know where you need to go—on the double.

Up in the leftfield seats, everybody wants McGwire to take the record and smash it over one of those thighs. Junior? "Great player, the best, but ... a little arrogant ... kinda smug." That's what you're hearing. Sammy? "He won't last." Big Mac is their choice because of the kids he's helping. Because of his humility and respect for the game. And most of all: "Because he's so extravagant, so monstrous," says Daria Zanoi, a 24-year-old nurse who examines sexual-assault victims, of all things, and who's giving McGwire the I'm-not-worthy bow as he steps in and singles once more. "It's like he should be on his own team because he doesn't match anyone else. I just want him to break the record, nobody else. That would make it even more special."

Second deck, that's too obvious. For Mac's third at bat, in the fifth, you guess first row, lower deck, pure rope, and man your battle station. Fool! There she goes—good god, they really are as long as you've read!—a 458-foot bomb into the second tier in left center, the second-deepest one since distances were first recorded in this ballpark. You jump to your feet with everyone else, jam your notepad under your arm and pound your hands together, hardly believing your good luck. You've got to find who snagged that baby, but when you get up there, it looks like a hospital tent at Shiloh. A silver-haired man is holding a wet folded paper towel to an ugly red welt high on his forehead. A seat away, a man with a Padres hat tugged over unruly blond hair is wincing and fingering a humdinger of his own on his left cheek. "We're victims of McGwire!" cries Bob Colwell, a 46-year-old machine operator from Ocean Beach, Calif.

"McGwire did this?" you ask. "To both of you?"

"To both of us!" shouts Colwell. "Can you believe it? I'm up here during batting practice explaining to her"—he jabs a thumb at his girlfriend, Dawn Mariani, a dispatcher for the San Diego police—"about Roger and the Babe, and she's barely listening, she's reading Sphere by Michael Crichton. All of a sudden I see McGwire hit one that's coming straight for me, and it's like a scene from The Natural, it's surreal, and I'm wearing a glove, which I haven't worn in 20 years, thinking, I've got a chance! I reach up, but everybody bumps me, and it hits the top of my glove and then hits my cheek, and there I am bumming out, bleeding profusely, when I turn and ... there's my honey holding the ball! Thank God, thank God! Then what happens? Lightning strikes twice! The home run McGwire just hit? It comes right up here again! And this guy, who I didn't know before tonight"—the factory worker reaches across Dawn to thump attorney James Conway on the back—"this time he gets nailed! Do a story on us! Victims of McGwire!"

So who got number 43? you ask. They point to the row behind, where a thick 49-year-old high school football coach named Robert Byers Jr., from Moreno Valley, Calif., took it on the ricochet off Conway's noggin. "As I watched it coming, I just kept telling myself what I always tell my receivers," Byers says. "Soft hands, soft hands. I just turned down an offer of $700 for this ball."

Big Mac goes 4 for 4, with a walk. Cards win 13-1. What you want to do right now is go get a cold one with James and Robert and Bob, but there's no time for that. Junior's waiting back on the other side of the country, and the only way to get there in time for batting practice tomorrow in Florida is to take the red-eye, but it's 11 p.m., too late to catch the last flight to the East Coast out of San Diego, so you've got to drive two hours up I-5 to catch the 1:55 a.m. out of L.A. and change planes in Dallas.

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