An Odyssey of Homeric Proportions

By Thomas Boswell
Washington Post Columnist
Sunday, September 20, 1998; Page D1

The faces in the crowd are what you remember. It's not just that people are smiling. They're grinning so broadly, talking so animatedly, that you can see their teeth – rows and rows of teeth – from the upper deck in Chicago's Wrigley Field to the grandstand in Milwaukee's County Stadium. Everywhere Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa play, America's mouth is agape.

For the next week, which constitutes both the last days of this season and the final act of the greatest home run chase in any year, hundreds of thousands of fans will be smiling, screaming, chanting and applauding in packed ballparks from St. Louis to Milwaukee to Houston. They'll be having the time, and the memory, of a sports lifetime. They're the lucky ones. And I know just how they feel. On Friday, I was one of them. Yes, my teeth are still showing, too.

Even busmen deserve a holiday. I went to Chicago in the afternoon to see Sosa, then drove a couple of hours to Milwaukee to see McGwire. Now, that's a doubleheader. As one of my childhood favorites, Ernie Banks, might've said, "Let's see two."

Like anyone who has latched onto this summer's movable baseball feast, I saw plenty. I gasped at one home run (Big Mac's 64th) and groaned as two of his titanic 450-foot blasts hooked around the left field foul pole. I chanted, "Sammy, Sammy," and, twice, on full-count pitches, went into that long full-throated banshee wail that fills a park, chills a pitcher and thrills a home town hitter on a "payoff" pitch. And twice, Sosa barely missed hitting bombs of his own, shooting pop-ups so high in the cloudless, crisp, late-summer sky that infielders staggered under them, necks arched, awed by the true slugger's unique style of a 500-foot blast: 250 feet up, then 250 feet down.

Most of all, like fans from coast to coast who have been collecting parts for their personal piece of the drama, I got a hundred memories for my time. My favorite came at Wrigley Field.

Because every person in the park was standing as Sosa batted in the seventh inning, a man had to hold his 5-year-old son, wearing a Sosa jersey, on his shoulders. What a view that little kid had. From the middle of the upper deck, directly behind home plate, a panorama was spread out before us that included glimpses of Lake Michigan beyond the right field bleachers and slices of a passing El train.

What lucky family was this? An heir to the Wrigley fortune? A season ticket holder? Someone who plotted this visit months in advance?

"We called Ticketmaster a couple of weeks ago. Paid $11 each for these tickets," said Ray Tromba of Shreveport, La., sitting next to his wife, Kathy, with Layton still on his shoulders. "But I only got tickets for one game. If Sammy doesn't hit one this last time at bat, I may have to look into 'alternate possibilities' for tickets [Saturday]."

"He might hit one right now," I said.

We were quickly disappointed.

"Could be scalpers [Saturday]," said Tromba, who said he once pitched a year of Class A ball for the Cards, McGwire's organization, but is a Sosa fan.

In a ballpark, you can meet anybody. And, because it's a ballgame, you can talk to them. As I left the Trombas, I bumped into a tall young man followed by dozens of screaming adolescent girls. With this clue in hand, I realized I'd just collided with a Smashing Pumpkin – lead singer Billy Corgan. Now that Harry Caray's dead, they'll let anybody lead the crowd in "Take Me Out To The Ballgame."

"Billy, you wrote my favorite lyric of the '90s – 'In spite of my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage.' "

"That's cool." Shaved head. Floppy black hat. Shades. Black kick-'em-when-you've-got-'em-downgrunge boots.

"My kid loves your music even more than I do."

"That's cooler."

"You don't seem too angry today, man."

"Ballgame."

Indeed.

Ballgames aren't "destinations," in the current jargon of the travel industry. They are, as they've always been, lazy journeys. It's all about the process. That's why we don't care "if we never get back." Exactly 100 percent of the people who love baseball understand that the final score is just more syrup on the ice cream sundae. It's the game in which the highlight of the day might be a long foul ball.

Don't all great 19th-century novels – the form most akin to the long, intricate baseball season – start in a train station? The journey begins. The characters and incidents arrive in their own sweet time. And we follow it all, not with modern flashbacks and cutaways, but with devotion to the simple forward motion of real time.

In baseball, that's not how it works. You blurt out the best. "Saw McGwire on Friday. What a show! Smoked one into the bleachers – 417 feet like a clothesline. But he almost had three. Just about killed two people in the upper deck with foul balls. Flied out to the warning track in right. If the wind hadn't been blowing across, that one might have carried out, too. He's right on everything. Sosa hit four homers off the Brewers last weekend. How many'll Mac hit this weekend?"

Then you chill.

Late September may have the most perfect days for baseball. No clouds and no temperature, either. Not hot, not cold. As you walk down Addison Street, you want to go much slower, and yet much faster, all at the same time. Slower, to savor the approach, the glimpse of the top of Wrigley sticking out above the roofs of row houses. Faster, because you want to arrive so you can walk in the cool smell-drenched promenade under the stands where ancient men, who look like they knew Hack Wilson, sell Sammy Celebration programs and disinterested women interrupt their conversations long enough to slide an Italian sausage pizza in your general direction.

If an ancient record is to be broken, shouldn't it be shattered by a man playing in the most venerable of yards? Even Fenway Park in Boston does not feel as intimate as Wrigley. One second, you are shoulder-to-shoulder with the crowd, trying not to step on Cub scouts. The next, you're suddenly through the gate in the brick wall and standing on the field. There's no decompression chamber, no tunnel through the clubhouse, no psychological period of adjustment.

One second, you're a fan and the next, Reds Manager Jack McKeon, who has bounced around the game for 49 years, is deciding whether to spit on your shoes. If you want to know how baseball itself feels about McGwire and Sosa, ask McKeon, because he is baseball itself, right down to his unregenerate cigar.

"Aw, this is the greatest, isn't it. Now don't get me wrong, we've pitched both these guys tough," says McKeon who, like almost all old-timers, is an integrity-of-the-game freak. "But you love to see two good guys, two really genuine people, doing something like this instead of some of the jerks we've got.

"I hope they end up tied. I like 66. Good number, don't ya think? Let 'em both have their share of the accolades," says McKeon. "I loved the way McGwire picked up his kid after he hit number 62. And I like the way Sammy's mother is so nervous watching [on TV] back in the Dominican that she can't hold her [drinking] cup when he's at bat."

Sosa pops out of the Cubs' dugout and heads straight to McKeon for some backslapping. A few weeks ago, when few thought Sosa would stay in this chase, much less have a fine chance to win it, McKeon sought him out to tell him how proud he was, as a career baseball person, that Sosa was representing the game so well. No rival manager ever had sought Sosa out to praise him. He was so tickled that he's been sending McKeon cigars.

When the Reds were in Houston last week, and Sosa was driving in six runs in two innings, in a late game in San Diego, McKeon held up the Cincinnati team bus so everybody could watch Sosa. "This is part of our history," said McKeon. "Watch how he acts, how he carries himself. Think about how hard you want to work so that, someday, we'll be good enough to have people pay that much attention to us."

"Jez, don't write that story," says McKeon. "They'll be all over me saying we're givin' him fat pitches." Not if they know what an ornery old coot you are.

True to his word, McKeon's Reds pitched Sosa tougher than if he'd been Babe Ruth after a visit to a dying kid in a hospital. Even though Sosa went 0 for 4, as I flipped on the radio at random for the drive to Milwaukee, the first words on the news were, "Sammy Sosa." The timing of this chase may work out perfectly. One more week of such a saga is the best fun we can imagine. And about all we can take, too.

On Route 94 North, you know you're in Wisconsin when you see Mars Cheese Castle. To sportswriters, it might as well say, "Abandon hipness, all ye who enter here." Milwaukee is so square it's adorable. Everybody acts so easy with each other you'd think they all went to the same high school. For example, who should take batting practice in County Stadium but Brett Favre, quarterback of the Green Bay Packers.

McGwire hit three balls over the bleachers and out into the construction of the enormous new Brewers' park called Miller Field. For his part, Favre provided mostly infield-fly-rule material. Perhaps more interestingly, when McGwire shook hands with his buddy Favre, he made the football star look positively puny by comparison.

In Chicago, you may run into a Smashing Pumpkin, but in old-shoe Milwaukee, you can be sitting in an ancient run-down press box, where some of the windows are opaque, and hear a voice behind you say, "Mind if I sit down?" And it's commissioner Bud Selig. In broad-shouldered Chicago, it'd seem inappropriate. In genial Milwaukee, you're surprised he doesn't try to pitch you a season ticket.

What's a pilgrimage without a grail, a shrine, an epiphany? So, in his second at-bat, McGwire unleashed No. 64 – a line drive into the middle of the left field bleachers. "That's my first time in 30 years that I've ever cheered for the opposing team," says Selig. "It brings tears to your eyes."

You never know what will stick with you. You'd think it would be McGwire's home run. Or the two majestic swats he cracked later in the game that looked like they'd hit the pole at second-deck level but barely hooked foul, nudged by the breeze.

But for me, it wasn't. Baseball's always the whole experience, the unexpected residue, the detail that clings to you. Sosa greeting McKeon. Or McGwire's forebearance, answering more questions at yet another late-night news conference.

"A role model isn't somebody who 'puts up numbers,'‚" said McGwire, finding the precise words to make his central valuable point for – who knows – the thousandth time this summer. "A role model is a person who lives his life right. Everybody on this earth makes mistakes. People who are role models overcome their mistakes and become good people."

Somehow, Sosa and McGwire – perhaps because their eyes and thoughts have been so fixed on each other – have kept their dignity, their craft, their heroism and their sport, on higher ground for one summer than much of the culture that surrounds them.

Near midnight, McGwire was asked by one TV crew if he would send a message – exclusively via its broadcast, of course – to Sosa in honor of the Sammy Celebration in Chicago on Sunday.

"Don't worry," said McGwire. "I'll get in touch with him myself."

For Sosa and McGwire, this is their finest moment and their game's rejuvenating hour. The nine-stomached information age that surrounds them wants to dissect, invade, hyperbolize and, ultimately, digest them like some enormous meal. Yet they have, so far, retained some irreducible and untouchable quality. They have shared themselves, but not squandered themselves.

That mysterious light within us that's called identity – the flame you never miss until it's gone out – still burns in them. In fact, it shines out of them brighter all the time, it seems.

And it's worth a trip to see.