A MAC FOR ALL SEASONS
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Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa says he's never known a ballplayer so able to keep his eye on the task. "He has this technique that allows him to totally tune out distractions," says LaRussa, who has been McGwire's manager, in Oakland and in St. Louis, for all but 18 months of the player's 12-year career. "And he did this with the whole world watching." Fifteen minutes or so before game time, "Mark would withdraw from the clubhouse horseplay and stare into his locker. You'd see him, and you'd know he was spacing out. It was not a good time to talk to him." McGwire would simply gaze ahead, concentrating on the game to come, lost in the intensity of his focus. During batting practice, with tens of thousands showing up two hours before game time simply to watch him propel rockets into the upper deck, he kept his calm. Dave McKay, the St. Louis first-base coach, says McGwire would occasionally want to work on hitting line drives, or ground balls into the hole, and the fans who had come out for BP would boo him.

He didn't much like being turned into a carnival sideshow, but he never let it distract him. When a reporter spotted androstenedione, a legal but controversial steroid, in McGwire's locker, the slugger explained that he used it to protect himself from the muscle tears that so often plague finely conditioned athletes, especially those few so well muscled as he, and he left it at that. Though he was criticized, McGwire marched ahead, not even pausing to rip off the head of the reporter who'd gone peeking into his locker. What kind of a modern athlete would fail to do that? As for "andro," whatever else it does, it can't help a player's timing, his hand-eye coordination, his ability to discern a slider from a splitter. But even if andro improved his power by an unlikely, oh, 5%, then instead of 70 home runs, McGwire this year would have hit... maybe 67. Take 5% off a 450-ft. missile, and you've got a 427.5-ft. missile--long enough to clear any fence save center field in Detroit's Tiger Stadium.

In September, when every game offered the chance for a record, each McGwire at-bat would be accompanied by the gaudy detonation of thousands of flash cameras. "It was blinding," says McKay. "I asked him if it bothered him, and he said, 'I don't see them.'" He didn't see what was on the periphery of his concentration because, says LaRussa, "he knew where he was going." This made it easy for the manager, whose only contribution to McGwire's record, he confesses was "making sure he knew what time the game started."

Unquestionably, McGwire's feats of 1998 were granted a deeper dimension by the presence of his confederate, the ecstatic Sammy Sosa. Here was a joyous, ebullient counterpoint to McGwire's more sedate self. From the moment in midspring that Sosa launched a sudden torrent of home runs like none ever seen in baseball history--he hit 20 in June alone--the two men were flawlessly scripted antagonists cast in the same play. This was rapture vs. gravity, spontaneity vs. self-restraint, Latin brio vs. California cool. Their collision seemed inevitable; yet what ensued was less a crash than a hug. The two men cheered each other on, praised each other's skills, slapped hands, dissipated the heat. They became allies in this drama, united against the two-digit foe that lay blandly impassive in the record books: 61.

The enemy collapsed sooner than anyone expected. By Sept. 8, the record was McGwire's. Sosa, trying to lift his team into postseason contention, didn't flag. On Sept. 25, with McGwire stalled at 65 home runs, Sosa hit a pitch out of County Stadium in Milwaukee and pulled ahead.

And this was the instant in which McGwire's character was annealed. It would have been lovely for him to acknowledge he'd had his moment--the record breaker--and was now generously stepping back and letting his accomplice have his. But heroics aren't made from, or for, loveliness. Three-quarters of an hour after Sosa's 66th home run, McGwire concentrated harder than he had before, focused more intently, more thoroughly blocked out distraction. The last week of his season was nearly unimaginable, a season of its own. In his next 11 at-bats--his last 11 at-bats of 1998--he hit five more home runs. The tenor, having finally hit high C after years of trying, suddenly leaped to a G. "Reality," wrote Red Smith in a different baseball context a half-century ago, "has strangled invention." It was not enough for McGwire to be merely excellent. He had to be--he willed himself to be--a wonderful and beautiful beast who just happened to carry a nation on his back.

You could argue--many do--that this was only baseball, McGwire a highly paid mercenary, the home-run chase a convenient contrivance engineered to boost television ratings and sell magazines. All correct. But don't you think the McGwire we watched during his moments across the national stage last summer would never surreptitiously tape conversations with a friend? Would never defend his behavior by retreating into the technical meaning of innocuous verbs? Couldn't possibly pursue his own fanatic agenda by rooting about in the private peccadilloes of another? Don't you think it's more likely that Mark McGwire would sit in front of his locker, stare intently ahead, think about what he needed to do, knowing that no one could help him, that the task was his alone?

Yes. And then he would slowly rise, pick up his bat and go to it.

--WITH REPORTING BY DAVID E. THIGPEN/NEW YORK