Booming Bat Ended Bid as a Pitcher

Quick now! What were the all-time greatest baseball teams?

You feel you can answer right away, right? You begin with the 1927 Yankees. You move very quickly to the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals, the Gashouse Gang. The Robinson-Campanella-Snider-Reese-Furillo Dodgers come in for heavy consideration.

But that’s professional baseball. When you get into amateur baseball aggregations, there’s no contest.

Oh, some of the Arizona State teams with Reggie (do you need a last name?) on them, or Rick Monday, had some awesome lineups. So did Rod Dedeaux’s USC teams with Fairly, Lynn, Kingman and others.

But the 1984 U.S. Olympic team was, by all odds, the Murderers’ Row of non-professional baseball in the United States. This wasn’t the Gashouse Gang, it was the Penthouse Gang. Most of the men on it are riding around in limousines and eating catered food today.

How would you like to open the season with this batting order? Mark McGwire, Will Clark, Oddibe McDowell, John Marzano, Chris Gwynn, Scott Bankhead, B. J. Surhoff, Don August, Bobby Witt, Billy Swift. You pencil in that lineup and you leave a wakeup call: Wake me when we win the pennant.

The good news for baseball is, that lineup was scattered throughout the American and National leagues. If it had gone intact, it would today be a team in restraint of trade.

The reality is, that team was already all-star if it only had the first baseman.

Mark McGwire is 684 home runs behind Henry Aaron and 643 behind Babe Ruth as this is written. He’s not the pure hitter either one of them was. He’ll never win World Series games with his arm, as Ruth did.

But there is this to consider: He has hit 71 home runs so far in just over a year and a half. Aaron hit 40 his first two seasons, and it would be unfair to judge Ruth on his first two years, since he was a pitcher. But in his first two years as a batter, he hit 83. McGwire has a chance to match that.

He is in Ruth’s footsteps in another area. He didn’t set out to be a slugger, he set out to be a pitcher.

He was recruited by USC, as hard as it is to believe, as a pitcher. His arsenal consisted of a fastball, but since he was a long-armed 6 feet 5 inches, it didn’t have far to travel.

“Coach Dedeaux liked my fastball,” McGwire recalls. “Of course, he liked my three-run homers better.”

When McGwire hit 32 homers in 67 games, the coach decided that not even if he were Walter Johnson, would he stay on a mound.

“I was kind of disappointed,” McGwire says. “I always kind of wanted to be a relief pitcher. You know--a stopper.”

A lot of people think McGwire should be glad he hits, instead of throws, fastballs for a living. Their notion is, he wasn’t mean enough to be a fastball pitcher. A fastball pitcher has to have homicide in his heart.

A lot of people also think McGwire isn’t mean enough to be a home run hitter, although if meanness were a requisite to home run hitting, Ty Cobb would have hit 800. No one ever applied the description mean to Babe Ruth. Or Henry Aaron.

Can this ex-pitcher do what the other ex-pitcher did? Become a synonym for overpowering excellence?

Mark McGwire is 24. Babe Ruth hit his 70th home run at 25. Aaron had 104 by 23.

The ill-fated Tony Conigliaro was the youngest slugger ever to hit 100 in the American League. Tony hit his 100th at 24.

For McGwire, the ballpark is not an ally. Yankee Stadium was configured for Babe Ruth. Instead of being the House that Ruth Built, it may have been the other way ‘round.

“The dampness and the winds knock a lot of balls down in the (Oakland) Coliseum,” says McGwire.

In addition, the foul lines are par 5s. McGwire is hitting 62 points higher on the road, .273, than at home this year.

Still, Mark McGwire broke a record that had stood for 57 years last season--most home runs by a rookie, 49. It might have been more, but this rookie went home the final two days of the season to await the arrival of his firstborn, a son, last October. Only 11 players have hit 50 or more home runs a season.

Pitching may be 75% of baseball. Putting may be 90% of golf. But that’s not what sells tickets. It’s not what fills space, boosts ratings.

It is an act of faith in baseball that home run hitters come in pairs. Ruth had Gehrig. Aaron had Eddie Mathews. Willie Mays had Orlando Cepeda. And Willie McCovey. Mickey Mantle had Roger Maris.

And McGwire has Jose Canseco. It softens up the pitchers. It improves the menu. You can walk one hitter. You can’t walk a lineup.

McGwire, who was 18 ahead of him last season, is 9 behind Canseco in homers this season. But, as usual, they will probably deliver 70-plus. It should be enough to win the West in the American League but the runaway that seemed in the hopper only a few weeks ago has hit a few miles of bad road.

Is his personal drop-off prophetic or just the well-worn sophomore jinx?

“The second year is always going to be tougher,” he says, grinning. “In anything, not just in sports.”

In other words, you don’t surprise them anymore. They cut the cards.

Still, McGwire’s Babe Ruth Express is on time and pouring smoke. He has already emulated his hero by giving up pitching and employing the nine-finger grip on the bat, leaving the pinky finger of his bottom hand underneath the bat. Now he’d like to do one other thing the Babe did: play in the World Series annually. And, maybe, call his shot in one of them.

As for baseball, its lesson should be crystal clear: There’s more to the Olympics than just running and jumping.