Home Run Fever

"Can't wait, can't wait," Sergeant Thomas keeps crowing as the Mariners lock up an 8-3 breezer. "Cap'n's always sticking McGwire articles and pictures on my desk, and I do the same to him with Griffey stuff—but now I got this. I told him Junior would catch McGwire by the end of July! McGwire can't take the media and tine pressure. And like I told Cap'n, doesn't matter if the ball goes one inch over the fence or three miles over—you can't add that extra distance to the next hit. Love telling Cap'n that—nothing he can say!"

The five ladies at poolside must think you're daft the next morning, Day 3, swimming those 46 laps in that little L-shaped hotel pool before you hightail it to the airport to fly to Chicago. It's the only way you know to knife through the fatigue, now that you're too juiced and jet-lagged to sleep. Slammin' Sammy's next. The wild card in the deck. Holding at 36, he has jacked just one in the last 11 days, but just might hit 20 in the next month, as he did in June.

As your plane wings toward O'Hare and everyone around you is reading about the home run chase, you're wondering: Could you possibly go 4 for 4? Then you land, and the dark skies start spitting rain on your rental-car windshield, and a flutter runs through your belly. No, God, please. What if you and Sammy get washed out?

You enter the clubhouse 3½ hours before the Cubs-Montreal Expos game and find Sosa swaying to Latin music. "I'll take care of you," he tells you. "Just wait." You take a stool at a table five feet from his locker, back turned to him, delighted that you're going to speak to him alone and that this all seems so easy, just like the p.r. man promised...till Sammy shoos you away, tells you to go camp somewhere else. Over an hour you wait, and when you finally get the nod, Sammy opens a magazine of local real-estate listings. Uh-oh....

Even for Sammy, who's never been a household name, the novelty's gone. He answers your questions lifelessly, eyes rarely lifting from photographs of houses with circular driveways and swimming pools. He says the media don't bother him. He admits it's nice to be part of the big story. He admits he's been overswinging again lately, his evil habit of old. He admits he doesn't know what position Roger Maris played. He says 18 minutes is enough. You resist recommending the brick colonial. What right do you have to be miffed? Jeez, isn't each one of these guys entitled to his own little way of hiding right in front of everyone's eyes?

When you exit the clubhouse, the sky's clear, the temperature's perfect, the sun's showering pinks and golds on the earth's most beautiful ballpark, and you decide, what the hell. It's the final night of your tater tear, so why not go drink beer with those bare-chested kids in the first row of the rightfield bleachers?

They're a whole different herd from the people you've met in San Diego and St. Petersburg. Everybody's got wit, everybody's got beer, everybody's got a desperate clear-eyed love for his team and an astonishing intimacy with it. Everybody's trying to decide whether he'll betray rightfield—family—and sneak over to left when Big Mac comes to town next month, and mulling how to stash an extra ball somewhere so that if Mac sends one into his palms, God willing, he'll have something to hurl back on the field when the mob chants, as it always does, "Throw it back! Throw it back!"

Nobody, nobody, thinks Sammy's got a prayer to bust Maris's record, not even the Sosa Boys, each of whom wears a letter of Sammy's surname in dripping blue paint across his bare chest. "Wore Sammy's number in high school," says Jake Abel, who's a letter S. "Got two dogs, named Wrigley and Sammy. But Griffey's gonna do it."

"Sammy won't even break Hack Wilson's team record of 56," declares Chris Ramirez, a bartender and rightfield diehard. "Sammy thinks about it a little too much."

"That's exactly why he's never hit a grand slam," chimes in Linda Eisenberg, a 48-year-old rightfield regular for 20 years. "Not one. He can't resist swinging for the fences. He's better about it this year, but still.... See that bare spot he dug out with his spikes? That's so he'll remember where to stand. He and [shortstop] Manny Alexander share a brain. That's why we're always asking Sammy how many outs there are. We're doing it to make sure he knows."