You wouldn't be reading this story right now if Mark McGwire weren't practically addicted to Starbucks coffee.
The guy's been drinking it for 10 years. The home-run world record holder even convinced his team, the St. Louis Cardinals, to serve the coffee in the clubhouse, allowing him to down it in the dugout all season long.
McGwire's spokesman can't explain exactly what the attraction is here. But it's the reason why this baseball season, every time McGwire hits a home run, Seattle-based Starbucks will donate $5,000 to a literacy organization in the city where the home run is hit.
Last year, McGwire homered 70 times, setting a major league record. Starbucks promised recently that whatever the number this year, it will donate at least $250,000 to literacy causes under a program it's formed with McGwire called "Out of the Park -- Into the Books."
But let's go back to the beginning of this tale. Or rather, the near beginning, when after a decade of sipping the coffee, McGwire strolled into a Starbucks store in Santa Monica, Calif., last October and asked if he could buy a company hat.
The latte server behind the counter told McGwire that Starbucks didn't sell its hats. But if McGwire would sign his green apron, the baseball star could have the hat off his head, according to Jerry Archambeault, McGwire's spokesman.
Next thing the Starbucks folks know, there's McGwire on national TV, tossing out the first ball of the final game of the 1998 World Series, a Starbucks cap on his head.
The next day, Starbucks chairman and chief executive Howard Schultz did the polite thing.
"I sent him a little note, congratulating him on the season and thanking him for wearing the hat," Schultz said.
Two weeks later, McGwire called to thank Schultz for the note, and Schultz complimented McGwire on the way he handled himself the entire season. The men traded stories about their two young sons. They got along great -- so great, in fact, that in December McGwire visited Seattle and stayed overnight at Schultz's home.
"We spent the entire evening and the following day getting to know one another, talking about the responsibility to be a role model that he felt as an athlete ... and the responsibility we feel as a company to fiscal benevolence," Schultz said.
Those talks led to the literacy pledge.
"Underlying all of this is the fact that I'm so moved by who he is and how he views his personal responsibility," Schultz said of McGwire. "I'm also touched by his love of Starbucks coffee.