The Home Run Chase In Black and White

Sammy Sosa (left) and Mark McGwire laugh together during a Sept. 7 news conference. (AP)

By Marc Fisher and Jon Jeter
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 5, 1998; Page A1

MIAMI – On the drive to the ballpark, George Cespedes, a pharmaceutical executive who immigrated to this country from Cuba at age 6, had a long, difficult talk with his sons Alex, 9, and Andrew, 8.

It was a tough subject – who they are, what they can grow up to be. Some choices in life are stark, the father explained, but the hardest ones are about shades of gray. So it is with Mark McGwire vs. Sammy Sosa.

"Frankly, being from Latin descent, we're kind of rooting for Sosa," Cespedes said as he settled in to watch McGwire launch home runs No. 58 and No. 59. "But McGwire is just about everybody's ideal hero. He looks like one, like Babe Ruth. It's the size, the way he conducts himself. Honestly, Americans would prefer to see a nice white American guy. But even I have to say, McGwire is what all of us would like our children to be like. He's a relief; I mean, we watch the Bulls on TV and I always point out Dennis Rodman as everything you don't want to be in life."

McGwire and Sosa's breathtaking race for the single-season home run record that has changed hands just once in 71 years is a godsend for baseball, a welcome respite for stressed parents, and yet another opportunity for the nation to play out its racial and ethnic anxieties.

But most of all, in an era of disillusionment with heroes, in a summer of soiled role models, McGwire and Sosa – who hit his 57th homer Friday night – have captivated millions of erstwhile fans who had soured on baseball. A generation of parents who watch their children grow up with non-competitive soccer, a nation of fans who shake their heads as professional athletes eschew any obligation to behave responsibly, has joyfully embraced the polite redhead with the Popeye muscles and the self-deprecating Dominican.

At Miami International Airport, where it seems the entire hemisphere changes planes, the Chicago Cubs' Sosa is a folk hero, a symbol of the Latinization of the American pastime. At Camden Yards and at most National League ballparks, it is the St. Louis Cardinals' McGwire who draws the greater cheers.

But whichever slugger ultimately claims the record, which now stands at 61, the increasing likelihood that Roger Maris and Babe Ruth will be relegated to third and fourth places in the history books has reminded the nation of baseball's uncanny ability to capture hearts and bridge generations.

"Look, my kid is eight, he hardly knows any baseball players," said Ken Martin, who stopped into Fanatic's sports bar on K Street NW to grab lunch and an ESPN update. "Now, I can talk to him about McGwire the way my dad talked to me about Ted Williams. He'll remember this forever."

A thousand miles to the south, Donna Klubes, who sells magazines from her home in North Miami, arrived at the Marlins' ballpark three hours before game time so her son Jeremy, 9, could watch McGwire take batting practice. As a mother, Klubes saw a win-win opportunity: She could fulfill one of her son's most desperate desires, and she could foster a form of hero worship that, for once, she really approves of.

"If your child is going to have a role model, it's very important that he have good morals," Klubes said. "McGwire is consistent. He's been working toward this for years. That has to be rewarded."

Baseball, the romanticists argue, is about tradition, about fathers playing catch with sons, about human endeavor that can be so reliably reduced to statistics that an athlete of 1998 can be sized up against one from a century earlier.

And yet for all that is wholesome and inspiring about the home run derby, it also illuminates the eternal American dilemma of race. It is McGwire who has the overwhelming advantage over Sosa in the competition for the public's heart. (Internet search engines find McGwire's name more than twice as often as Sosa's.) Is that because the Cardinal is the better slugger, or is it a matter of color, ethnicity and language?

"Sammy Sosa is a Hispanic black man and the American people want to see a white man do it," said Harry Siegel Jr., who is 33. "My personal hero is Willie Mays and he's a bitter man now because he knows he deserved more recognition than a white guy like [Mickey] Mantle got. It's the same now: The American people see McGwire as Big Red. Sosa can't get that attention."

That's certainly the dominant view in Chicago, the only place where Sosa – who almost daily insists that the record is McGwire's to grab – gets top billing. "It's racism," said Tom Flanagan, who is white and from Chicago. "People would rather see this big white guy set the record than the Latin player whose English isn't all that great."

"Nah," disagreed his friend, Todd Conroy. "McGwire's been there before. Sosa is really kind of a fluke this year." While Conroy roots for his hometown hero to set the record, he cheers for McGwire as well. "Most people would like to see the Cubs guy get the record, [but] most people feel that if McGwire gets it, well, God bless him. He deserves it."

If some white fans see a racial component in McGwire's larger following, many Latin fans are even more adamant that it exists.

Jorge Camelia, a 17-year-old immigrant from Argentina, first argues that Sosa is the better all-around player – besting McGwire on defense, batting average, speed, and dedication to his team. But Camelia says Americans prefer McGwire – a recent unscientific USA Today survey found 79 percent of Americans rooting for Big Red and only 16 percent for Sosa – because "they'd be ashamed if some immigrant breaks the record. It's like when Hank Aaron broke Ruth's home run record – the white Americans were against Aaron."

The nightly spectacle of the Cardinal and the Cub vying for a place in history is a phenomenon as much about letting go of the past as about embracing it. The home run derby is, fans say, about finding a connection to childhood and about keeping young.

The Harry Siegels – Sr. and Jr., a retiree and a grocery worker, respectively – have bonded anew through McGwire.

"Last game I went to was Maris's 61st, 37 years ago," the father said. "It's time for someone new. It's electrifying. You feel it right through your chest."

The son, who runs a small baseball collectibles business in South Florida on the side, calls the home run chase "the beginning of the change for baseball, back to a game for the fans and families. McGwire is doing this for the fans. I feel he's like us. He cares about the kids."

That optimism, that faith in the notion that players who are millionaires many times over are actually regular guys, is an essential part of the lure of this sweet September song.

Baseball, uniquely among America's favorite team sports, is a game of individual achievement, of career-long struggles to surpass milestones set by players of yore. In an era of free agency, when players drift from team to team in an eternal search for more money, fan loyalties are increasingly to players as much as to teams. Nowhere is that more true than in Miami, where the dismantling of the Marlins sent attendance plummeting this year.

Over the past generation, fans have developed a more nuanced, distanced view of the game, just as voters approach politics with a more jaundiced eye and shoppers consider retailers with a soupcon of skepticism. "The players don't really belong to the fans anymore," said Oscar Mazariegos, an accountant in Chicago. "The Cubs belong to Chicago, but there's a real distance between the players and the fans. It's the money and the agents and the attitudes and the only place you can see the players are in the ballpark. They're not your neighbors."

Yet cynicism is hardly the dominant tone in the roar of the crowd. The near-mythic depiction of McGwire in the gathering media frenzy is a rare respite from the craven cast of characters who otherwise dominate the political, financial and even sports headlines. Many Americans are still willing, even eager, to believe.

Robert "Big Mac" McLaughlin believes. The 45-year-old postman grew up smitten by baseball. His earliest memories are of sitting on his grandfather's lap, studying the back page of New York's Daily News, following the 1961 battle of home run titans, the M&M Boys, Mantle and Maris. As a boy, McLaughlin collected baseball cards, memorized statistics, worshiped Mantle.

But the boy grew up, and baseball cheated and ignored him, and finally walked out on him. The 1994 players strike stole the World Series – an inconceivable sin. Then, this summer, Florida Marlins owner Wayne Huizenga conducted a cynical fire sale, slashing his payroll by offloading last year's world championship team.

Now, the home run race has won McLaughlin back. This week, the mailman from Davie, Fla., corralled his wife and three daughters and invested $30 for five center field tickets to see the Cardinals first baseman.

"It's about heroes," McLaughlin said the other night. "I play wiffleball in the backyard with the kids, and I think about Mantle or McGwire."

Sports is fantasy, and if the home run race has permitted McGwire and Sosa to retool their images, highlighting their charitable contributions and their commitment to their teams, the contest has also allowed fans to feature their better sides. To the apparent shock of many, the last few fans to catch the sluggers' home run balls have handed the historic artifacts back to the players rather than hold them as ransom for cash-laden collectibles traders.

In an age when stadiums are too often septic tanks of foul language, boorish boasting and even fistfights, baseball fans from California to Cincinnati – and even in New York City – are packing ballparks to cheer for a rival's good fortune.

One interpretation is that when fans rise to their feet as one to roar for their team's powerful opponent, they are, in the words of talk host Rogers, "not rooting for him so much as they are rooting for themselves, to feed their own egos – 'Oh, I was there, I saw it.'‚"

But there is another view: Wherever McGwire and Sosa go, and for millions more watching on TV or listening to the radio, the home run race is about something more than a desire to witness history. It is about recalling what is good, about renewing faith. It's about who we want to be.

Fisher reported from Miami, Jeter from Chicago.