Night after night you sit in front of your big-screen TV licking the orange Chee-tos stains from your fingers, transfixed, along with the rest of the nation, by Mark McGwire's and Sammy Sosa's joyous assault on baseball's hallowed home-run record.
It's not just McGwire and Sosa who're touching them all and punching the sky on ESPN's "SportsCenter" highlights, either. Ken Griffey Jr. has 47 dingers. Greg Vaughn has 47. Raffy Palmeiro has 41. Hey, what about me? you think. Can't a regular Joe get a piece of this action?
Finally, you can't take it anymore. So you pick up the phone and call the Orioles. You reach John Maroon, their crack PR guy, and you don't beat around the bush.
"Look," you say, "I want to hit a home run out of Camden Yards. How hard can it be? Everyone but my grandmother has 30 jacks this season. Oh, I know, I know. It's probably out of the question, right? Your wimpy lawyers would have a coronary, even if I signed some chickenspit insurance waiver that isn't worth the paper it's ..."
"Come on down," Maroon says.
"Beg pardon?"
"We'll get you some bats and a bucket of balls. You'll need someone to pitch, right? We'll get you a pitcher, too."
Oh.
Well.
That's, uh, more like it.
So on yesterday's hazy, muggy morning, with the Orioles in Seattle trying to stem the bleeding from a 10-game losing streak, you step to the plate in the dazzling green cathedral that is Camden Yards.
In St. Louis, they're probably slaughtering two or three steers for Mark McGwire's breakfast, after which he'll hit the weight room and bench the equivalent of a Winnebago before the Cardinals take on the Reds and his quest to break Roger Maris' home-run record of 61 resumes.
But here, as you take your warm-up swings, all is quiet. Three workers high in the upper deck are power-washing seats. A few members of the Orioles grounds crew wander about.
Virtual solitude is good for the task you're trying to accomplish, you decide. Let McGwire, with his 59 taters, have his capacity crowds and his fawning media herds. Hey, on the day in '61 that Roger Maris hit his 61st homer, there were only 23,154 fans in Yankee Stadium.
"See that Helix Health sign?" you say to one of the grounds crew, pointing with your bat. "Second deck in left field? What is that, 360 feet away? You might want to cover that baby with a protective screen. 'Cause I'm going deep right there."
The grounds crew guy looks at you like you're speaking Aramaic.
You step into the batter's box. No, you don't step into it, you take command of it.
You dig your back foot into the soft, red soil first, then the front foot -- big-league all the way.
You reach across and tap the bat purposefully on the far corner of the plate, indicating that you have it covered, that no breaking ball will leave you lunging awkwardly.
On the mound, the pitcher stares in at you and sneers.
Your date with destiny is at hand.
McGwire says his philosophy throughout this wonderful cosmic journey into the record books has been: "Just ride the wave, enjoy it while it's happening."
"Just ride the wave, baby," you whisper as the pitcher goes into his windup.
Hard-hitting
McGwire's home runs don't just leave the stadium, they scream out of it, huge, arching shots that seem to trace a parabola in the sky.
The source of this power is deceiving, despite his Bunyonesque 6-foot-5, 250-pound frame. He has a minimal stride into the ball. His swing is compact; nevertheless, his arms are always fully extended on contact.
He once hit a ball so hard that it traveled 545 feet in Busch Stadium and cracked a St. Louis Post-Dispatch sign. To this day, a giant Band-Aid is affixed to the sign to commemorate the damage.
Your swing, on the other hand, proves not to be quite as honed, even though the dimensions at Camden Yards are cozy: 333 feet down the left-field line, 318 down the right-field line.
For the record, you're wielding a Louisville Slugger, 34 ounces, Model S44 Pro Stock, a generic big-league bat. You picked up one of Mike Bordick's old autographed models, but it felt like you were swinging a steel beam.
Also, for the record, the pitcher is Kevin Behan, 24, one of the O's PR assistants. The friendly Behan is a University of Maryland grad and attended Calvert Hall before that, but he hasn't pitched since Little League, when he was a "relief specialist."
Thankfully, he's no Randy Johnson; the only heat you'll be seeing comes from the exhaust of the grounds-crew tractor. But even though Behan's throwing about 35 mph, you feel compelled to warn him that if he pitches you inside, you'd have no choice but to charge the mound.
Of the first 25 pitches he throws, you beat five into the dirt on the left side of the infield, pop a few up to third base, hit a few line drives the shortstop would have gobbled and the rest are harmless fly balls to left.
Can of corn for B.J. Surhoff, all of them.
"This is supposed to be a bandbox, a hitter's park," Behan sings out, cruelly, it seems to you.
At this point, it occurs to you that jacking the ball out of the park might be slightly harder than you thought. The Helix Health sign, in fact, seems so far away now it might as well be in Pennsylvania.
As you flail away at pitch after pitch, Behan brings up the delicate subject of steroids. Specifically, he seems to want to know why you're not on them, given your obvious lack of ability to "go yard."
In recent weeks, McGwire has been dogged by questions concerning his use of androstenedione, a testosterone-producing protein supplement. Olympic athletes
and NFL players are not allowed to use androstenedione. But baseball players are, and while McGwire doesn't exactly down the stuff by the scoopful like it's Nestle's Quik, he admits to using it regularly.
"So you're not on andro?" Behan asks.
"Nah," you grunt between swings. "Took a Flintstones vitamin this morning."
WHACK!
"A Barney, I think it was."
WHACK!
"Or maybe it was a Dino."
WHACK!
"Dino was the little dinosaur, right? Sometimes you can't tell. My eyes are going, anyway."
Suddenly -- whoa, what's this?! A power surge!?
You crack one and it soars to deep left field. Maybe it's not the majestic tracer that McGwire hits, the missile that shatters a car windshield in the parking lot -- legend has it one of his blasts broke the window of a BMW in the parking lot in college.
But, heck, you got all of that one! It lands in front of the warning track and rolls all the way to the wall and stops right under the Crown Quality Gasoline sign.
Behan smiles and whistles softly. Your next two shots are launched, too: One rolls in front of the warning track, the other screams into the padding near the foul pole.
A delicious thought dances in your head: Maybe it has just taken you 50 or 60 pitches to get your home-run stroke down.
Yeah, maybe that's it.
Or maybe you're just dreaming, pal.
Sound effects
NTC When Mark McGwire strides toward the plate during a game at Busch Stadium, the PA system blasts the Guns N' Roses teeth-rattler "Welcome to the Jungle."
The effect on the big man is almost mystical. You can almost see the adrenalin coursing through his veins. He seems to expand before one's very eyes, the way Popeye did after tossing back a can of spinach.
McGwire's mighty forearms bulge, the veins in his neck stand out like twin ropes, his powerful shoulders hunch and the muscles ripple in anticipation of the first pitch.
Anyway, here at Camden Yards, you decide maybe that's your problem: It's too damn quiet.
You're still popping the ball pretty well, but you're nowhere close to jacking one. And now, after 75 swings, your arms are getting tired.
The Helix Health sign looks like it's in Malaysia now. Maybe some Todd Rundgren or Little Richard wailing from the sound system would perk you up.
A sell-out crowd of 48,000-plus wouldn't hurt, either, although maybe it would, since you'd probably be paralyzed with stage-fright. In fact, you'd be so rigid they'd have to wheel you out to home plate on a dolly.
As your final 25 swings devolve into a sad procession of weak line drive after weak line drive, ground ball after ground ball, McGwire's glorious assault on Maris' home run record seems even more impressive.
Big Mac's 58th home run traveled 497 feet on a pitch that was three inches off the ground when he hit it. A normal human being doesn't hit a pitch like that with a bat -- he hits it with a Big Bertha.
His 59th homer came off a breaking ball, which he crushed 458 feet into the left-field seats, where it banged around like a cue ball.
Wearing down the pitcher
Here at Camden Yards, you're facing Kevin Behan, whose arm is so dead by now it belongs on an autopsy table. By contrast, every pitcher McGwire faces gets sky-high for the challenge, squeezing out another 5 or 6 mph on his fastball, teasing him with curve balls that break somewhere out by the third-base dugout.
The stress of chasing Babe Ruth's home-run record of 60 so unnerved Maris that his straw-colored hair began to fall out in clumps. And when the season was over, he had aged like a two-term president.
McGwire, after a testy period in midsummer, looks as if he's thoroughly enjoying himself.
You, on the other hand, are not enjoying yourself right now at all. After 100 pitches and zero dingers, you wonder what in the devil got into you, what compelled you to think that you, an aging weekend athlete, might actually be able to park one at a major league stadium.
As the sun climbs high in the sky, the muscles in your arms are screaming. So you do what any sane individual would do.
You put the bat down and shake hands with Kevin Behan.
And you go home to watch McGwire and Sosa and all the rest on TV, where it's always the best seat in the house.
Pub Date: 9/05/98