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Griffey professes modesty, and is admired by teammates for his selflessness, but he also has the swagger that seems required of men who would do what no one else can. "I just go out there and do what I'm supposed to do," he says. "If we need a home run to tie it up late, I've got to do it." Want proof? Before an at bat against Texas last week he revealed to a teammate that he was about to hit one out. He took two pitches and then sent the ball into the second deck. But there's also steel behind that swagger: even when he fractured his wrist in 1995 after crashing into the centerfield wall on a dead run, he managed to make the catch.
And if somehow he doesn't get the next thing he's going for--well, he says, his life is still pretty good. His father still lets him call collect. Junior has a son and daughter of his own, and the family spends off-season in Windermere, Fla., near his friend Tiger Woods. When you're hanging with your All-Star Cafe partners, who notices another record?
Even if it is McGwire who, as most people (including Griffey and Sosa) suspect, will set the record this year, it won't last 37 years, as Maris' did, or even 34, as Ruth's. Griffey is young, and the record is most likely to be his someday. He has one of the most perfect swings in baseball history: a long, smooth, straight, upper-body cut that makes McGwire's short, compact, hip-driven swing look like a shot put. Griffey's swing is the learned, refined movement of someone who grew up in major league dugouts. "Junior's never lifted a weight that I can remember," his father says. His power, instead, is generated in his blinding bat speed, which Senior estimates to be as high as 110 m.p.h.
While Griffey has the potential to hit 62 (he hit 56 last year), the fans haven't been pulling for him in the home-run race the way they have for McGwire. Which is odd, since Griffey is more popular. Even this year he got more All-Star votes from fans than McGwire. He's a better all-around player, more affable, more telegenic, more starlike, younger, hipper and more street than McGwire (though even Dan Quayle is more street than McGwire). Three of McGwire's black teammates refused to comment as to whether the attention to McGwire over Griffey is racial. "I think you can answer that question yourself," was as close as Ray Lankford was going to come. "I don't think it has anything to do with black-white, and it irritates the hell out of me when I hear it," says LaRussa. Maybe the real reason the fans dig Big Mac is because he's built like a home-run hitter of old. In fact, old home-run hitters didn't look as much like McGwire as they should have. McGwire is who we imagine Babe Ruth to be; he's like a cartoon of Ruth in which he tightens his belt until his paunch rises into bulging pecs.