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Power Couple: While last season they raced in tandem toward history, the Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa of 1999 are locked in a different kind of contest -- one measured by personality. At Wrigley, Slammin' Sammy and Big Mac made a Cards-Cubs series an anticlimactic reunion. Mark McGwire wore the uncomfortable look of a man fighting an infection that just would not go away. His brow glistened with sweat inside the artificial cool of the visitors' clubhouse before last Friday's game at Wrigley Field. Finished with a terse, didactic, pregame session with a small cluster of reporters around his locker, he grimaced at the thought of what would come next. "Think there are a few cameras out there?" he asked. McGwire grabbed his mitt and went off to face all over again the harsh light of being the Home Run King. Industrial-strength antibiotics and a day of bed rest in a hospital on Saturday would begin to subdue an ugly, puss-oozing infection between the two smallest toes on his right foot, an infection so aggressive that it traveled to his groin area. But where was the antidote for all the tired questions plus the new ones that have turned McGwire defensive? One minute he hits 70 home runs, obliterating a mystical record that had stood for 37 years, and the next he has to listen to people question whether his record will outlast a Christmas fruitcake. More persistent still is Sammy Sosa, whom McGwire cannot shake any more than he can his own shadow. The 70 home runs, the 15 through Sunday McGwire has added in the first two months of this season, the manner in which he answers questions, even a presidential invitation to light the White House Christmas tree (Mac said no, Sammy said yes) -- all of it gets measured against Sosa and his irresistible combination of power and charm. "We've been ... nice ... acquaintances," was how McGwire, the St. Louis Cardinals' first baseman, carefully referred to his bond with Sosa, the Chicago Cubs' rightfielder, two hours before the two of them, for better or worse, reunited on the field for the first time since last Sept. 8, when McGwire broke Roger Maris's single-season home run record right under his foil's nose. Friday marked the first time that the top two single-season home run hitters in modern baseball history played in the same game. It was Sosa who gleefully held a formal pregame press conference; it was Sosa who would jump on every photo op like a thigh-high fastball, reaching out to McGwire during batting practice to a symphony of shutters clicking; and it was Sosa who hogged the stage even more by scalding what seemed a hopelessly errant pitch -- the very kind of ball the selective McGwire never wants to offer at -- into the sun-dappled leftfield bleachers for his 17th home run of the season. All of it came quite naturally to him. The front page of the Saturday edition of the Chicago Tribune, stripping all pretense from the 2,063rd game between the Cardinals and the Cubs, summed it up thusly: "Sammy 1, Mark 0." Except it was never as close as the final score indicated. -- Tom Verducci Issue date: June 7, 1999 Photograph by V. J. Lovero Rookie of the Year Watch | SI's Inside Baseball Archive |
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