The suicide squeeze is cool, and the double steal is all right, but a guy who can smack the bejeezus out of a ball--that's the guy for us. Like most great things American, the home run deconstructs strategy with a beautiful act of aggression. So Mark McGwire, 250 lbs. of muscle in a game full of the fat and unfit, doesn't really shock when he sends the ball more than 500 ft. And Ken Griffey Jr., hat backwards, grin cocksure, seems almost bored as he gently taps homers over the fence. The crowd expects it, the crowd gets it, and the crowd goes home happy. We delight in the obvious. Give us a 6 ft. 5 in. guy named McGwire, and we're going to nickname him "Big Mac." Give us a guy named Ken Griffey Jr., and we'll call him "Junior." We are not a complicated people.
With Big Mac and Junior closing in on the 37-year-old home-run record, baseball has hit itself out of a jam. Just four years ago, baseball was on strike, without a commissioner, canceling a World Series and generally running a brilliant anti-p.r. campaign for a sport that already was too long and too slow. "They've got to address their own house," says Fay Vincent, baseball's last real commissioner, who was fired in 1992 by owners who wanted more control. "They've got to market the game, move it back into the inner city, bring in blacks and Hispanics," he says. "All this is going to take 15 years. The past five years have been basically lost."
But despite all this ineptitude, baseball accidentally saved itself, with a mixture of talent and nostalgia. The geriatric sport has suddenly remembered how to tell its own story. ESPN ads feature not McGwire or the eminently marketable Griffey, but a Ty Cobb impersonator, who is oddly recognizable for a guy who hasn't played a game since 1928.
The old-school names are back because many of those cumbersome numbers that baseball fans love more than the game itself (whisper the statistics 755, 56 or 61 softly enough to their real fans, and eyes will glisten) are in danger of changing. Cal Ripken Jr. sets a new record for consecutive games every time he steps onto the field. Juan Gonzalez may beat the record for RBIs that Hack Wilson set in 1930. The Yankees threaten to win more games this year than the 1906 Cubs, who won 116. Rookie pitcher Kerry Wood tied the record of 20 strikeouts in a game--and did it at age 20. The most famous mark in sports, Roger Maris' single-season home-run record of 61 in 1961 (Can you see why we weep?), is being attacked on three fronts: McGwire, who had 42 homers as of Saturday (only a bit more than halfway through the season), has been joined by Griffey (39) and some guy named Sammy Sosa (36).
Ball parks are selling so well--shooting for an overall attendance record, even discounting the two expansion clubs--that Bud Selig, Brewers owner and "acting" commissioner for nearly six ugly years, crawled back into daylight to crown himself "real" commissioner this month. "The fact that we were doing so well had something to do with it, definitely," he says. When all other business plans fail, find a guy you can compare to Babe Ruth.