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Even more than his World Wrestling Federation looks, the reason McGwire gets the crowds is because his home runs are so incomprehensibly long, while Griffey's are really just perfectly hit line drives. "McGwire hardly ever hits a home run that's under 400 ft. How isn't that going to capture your imagination more than anybody else out there?" asks LaRussa. Explains Cubs manager Jim Riggleman: "The American public loves to see power. If the ball scrapes the wall on the way down, they aren't that excited. If it goes 500 ft., they're doing flips. You know, we love the dunk in basketball. Guys can score 25 points a game, but if somebody slam dunks over somebody, that's what gets people fired up."
There have been plenty of home runs to fire people up. But don't think you're seeing the epic resurgence of baseball. What you're seeing is an amazing confluence of talent that is not likely to be duplicated. Commissioner Selig can't afford just to collect his nickel from this freak show and wait for the next one. He and the other custodians of the game need to speed up play, lower ticket prices, market to women and minorities and get inner-city kids playing the game. More than anything, baseball should learn from the record chase that it needs to peddle nostalgia. That includes the real nostalgia--Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, Lou Gehrig's farewell speech, the first appearance of the San Diego Chicken--but more important, the fake stuff. Because baseball, after all, is built on a yearning for a false past. It's a game created for industrial-age cities to remind them of the easy life of the farm. So build more beautiful retro parks based on some Disney idea of what an old park should have looked like. Give us more reckless acrobats like Ken Griffey Jr., more courteous musclemen like Mark McGwire. Let us bask in the never-was.
--With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Maureen Harrington/Denver, Staci D. Kramer/St. Louis and Romesh Ratnesar/Seattle