In Sight

He has carved most of the fat from his 6'5", 250-pound frame and all the frills from the most savagely compact swing in baseball. He is divorced and living alone. Oakland As first baseman and designated hitter Mark McGwire believes in stripping things to their bare essentials.

So successful has McGwire been in streamlining and simplifying his life that, paradoxically, it is about to be surrounded by chaos. As he heads into September stalking baseball's most renowned single-season record, Roger Maris's mark of 61 home runs, McGwire can expect little peace.

His off-the-end-of-the-bat 400-foot home run against the Baltimore Orioles on Sunday in Oakland increased his season total to 43 and ended a ghastly drought. "Has gone 13 at bats since his last home run," tuttutted that day's As media game notes. When you are averaging a home run every 7.3 at bats, as Big Mac was at week's end, and have averaged a home run every 12.4 at bats during your career to rank second all time (chart, page 34), you create certain expectations. What McGwire will be expected to provide during the final month of this season is the thrill of the chase.

Let us extrapolate. Should he continue to leave the yard at his current pace, he will finish the season with 59 homers. Thus, despite having already missed 23 games because of injury, he poses a threat to the record Maris set in 1961, when he broke by one Babe Ruth's 34-year-old mark. As the subject of Maris's record arose after Sunday's game, McGwire, scowling, stood on a chair with his back to reporters as he rummaged through a cabinet over his locker. "I'm not close to anything," he said. "I don't know what the big deal is."

His teammates know what the big deal is, even if McGwire professes not to. The most exciting thing about these As, long shots to make the playoffs, are the long shots of their chiseled slugger. "Nobody misses a McGwire at bat," says Oakland outfielder and McGwire's weightlifting partner, Jason Giambi. "Because you never know how far the ball's going to go."

A's third baseman Scott Brosius calls his decision to leave the dugout for a soda during a McGwire at bat on July 25 against the Toronto Blue Jays "my biggest mistake of the season." By obeying his thirst, Brosius missed seeing Big Mac launch a 488-foot shot into the fifth deck of Toronto's Skydome. That blast, according to estimates provided by a long-distance phone company, was the most titanic in the majors in five years. This same company calculated that, after Sunday's game, McGwire's home runs this season had traveled 17,616 feet.

It was consistent with his refusal to stand transfixed in the batter's box admiring the flight of his home runs that McGwire was embarrassed to learn that someone had actually bothered to calculate the distance his taters had covered. "When I broke in," he said, "they didn't keep track of things the way they do now. These days they have a stat for how many times a guy goes for a cup of coffee."

McGwire broke in nine seasons ago by hitting .289 and cranking out a league-leading 49 homers. He assumed, with the certitude of youth, that things could only get better. They grew steadily worse. Bothered by marital difficulties, he experienced a four-year regression that culminated with his batting .201 with only 22 homers in 1991. In the season's final days Tony La Russa, Oakland's manager at the time, took him out of the lineup so that McGwire's average wouldn't dip below .200.

When Doug Rader joined the A's as a hitting instructor the following season, McGwire was a mess. "There were some very negative feelings about Mark around the league," he recalls. "It was almost as if his manhood was in question. He was very defensive at the plate. He had lost his approach to hitting."

So Rader supplied McGwire with a new approach, teaching him to think during each at bat about "what the pitcher is allowing you to do—walk, hit a single, drive the ball in the gap or drive it out of the park." If a hitter tries to take more than is being offered, Rader preached, things start to deteriorate.