McGwire is Ruth's rightful
heir
Posted: Wed May 13,
1998
Roger Maris certainly looked like an athlete. And he was
indeed a very good athlete. It was just that he didn't look
like a home run hitter. And there was the general sense
that he didn't
deserve to hit 61 home runs in a season. In a very real way, for a
lot of people, Maris has just been keeping, temporarily,
Babe Ruth's record on hold until the next rightful owner
comes along. And never mind that it's been 36 years
now.
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Like the Babe, McGwire has an epic swat.
(John Iacono)
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The home run record belonged to the Babe. The Babe was the
very vision of a home run hitter. What seemed like that
little twig of a bat would leave his hands in a flip as he
stared after the deep damage he had done. We want every
slugger ever after to
live up to
that.
Why, I think maybe if there was one thing I'd like to be
able to do just once in my life, it would simply be to
stand there at home plate, admiring a huge home run I'd
just hit. It may be the most God-like thing a human being
can do, staring out after a
home run he has
wrought.
And then beginning what is always called the home run
"trot." I have no idea whether the expression
home run "trot" originated with Babe Ruth, but I
bet it did. It should have. The swing. The long look. The
bat toss. The trot. The
handshakes.
This brings us to Mark
McGwire.
It has been decided, in some form of national referendum,
that Mark McGwire is the person for whom Roger Maris has
been holding Babe Ruth's record all these
years.
McGwire
looks like the Babe's heir, an absolute monster of a man, and
yet, like Ruth, so obviously warm and gentle. McGwire's
home runs do not merely clear the fence. They are not
parabolas. Rather, they just go out until they run into
something. McGwire is,
really, the first athlete since Michael Jordan who does something
which so evidently, to the naked eye, seems to defy
physical
laws.
Superiority is not all that easy to discern in athletes.
How many baseball fans could pick out Kerry Wood, the Cubs'
new 100-mile-an-hour pitcher, from a bunch of other guys
throwing 95? Could you go to the gym and watch boxers and
tell which one
possesses a knockout punch? But McGwire, like Jordan, is simply
and obviously different from every other human being.
Ever since he shook off a series of major injuries and
settled in a year or so ago, McGwire has begun drawing
crowds in batting practice. At his home St. Louis park and
every National League stop, thousands of people are showing
up a couple hours before
game time simply to watch him take practice swings against
70-mile-an-hour puff
balls.
For all I know, there has been nothing like this in the
entire history of baseball—more than 125 years. Did
huge numbers of fans show up to watch Ruth practice? I
never heard about
it.
McGwire, a California boy, who has fallen in love with St.
Louis—and it with him—is a bit confounded by all
the attention. He keeps talking about how somebody or other
is ahead of him by a homer or two a month into the season.
McGwire doesn't quite
understand about myths. Roger Maris was a mere human who did one
legendary thing, and that irritated us because it seemed
out of context. We have already made McGwire a legend, and
now we will be just as disappointed if he
doesn't do a Ruthian
thing.
These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National
Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by
CNN/SI.
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