The American sporting public has always harboured a singular fascination with numbers and statistics. Any 10-year-old who owns a baseball glove could tell you that Babe Ruth, dead now for half a century, hit 60 home runs in 1927 and 714 over the course of his storied career, and although both figures have long been surpassed, they remain benchmarks by which greatness in the national pastime continues to be measured.
It didn't exactly require clairvoyance to forecast that the single-season home run record would come under full-scale assault in 1998. At least three major leaguers - Mark McGwire of the St Louis Cardinals, Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs, and Ken Griffey Jnr. of the Seattle Mariners - had flirted with Roger Maris's 1961 mark of 61 over the past couple of years.
An expansion year (the American and National Leagues each added a team this season, meaning that there are approximately 24 inferior pitchers scattered throughout the big leagues who would not have been playing at the same level a year ago) and interleague play (providing the opportunity to bat in several new user-friendly ballparks) contributed to optimal record-breaking conditions.
Throughout the summer the sports section of every American newspaper has run a daily box displaying the figures of the aforementioned trio (although most have by now dropped Griffey's), comparing theirs with the paces of both Ruth and Maris, and with nearly five weeks yet to play it appears a foregone conclusion that both McGwire (who has already tallied 54 homers) and Sosa (52) will surpass the record.
In the past several days, however, the pursuit of each has fallen under a cloud. Sosa's integrity was challenged last weekend when it was alleged that an opposing pitcher who happened to be a fellow native of the Dominican Republic had helped the Chicago outfielder pad his statistics by "grooving" an easy-to-hit pitch in the waning innings of a 13-2 runaway.
More ominously, McGwire, a man who had heretofore stood as a role model for American youth, admitted that for over a year he has been using Androstenedione, a testosterone-producing supplement. (Although not specifically outlawed by baseball, Androstenedione is on the list of performance-enhancing drugs banned by the International Olympic Committee, the National Football League, and the US National Collegiate Athletic Association.)
To put this in its proper context it is probably necessary to understand the place George Herman (Babe) Ruth continues to occupy in the pantheon of American sporting heroes. An uneducated orphan of prodigious appetites (for, it is said, big cigars, massive steaks, hot dogs in stupefying quantity, buckets of Prohibition-era beer, fast cars, and faster women), Ruth was nonetheless an icon in his time.
The reverence in which Ruth is held created a backlash against the men who dared surpass his records. When Maris swatted 61 homers in 1961, for instance, it was immediately pointed out that the feat had not only been accomplished in (another) expansion year, but that Maris's New York Yankees had played a 162-game season, as opposed to the 154 games of Ruth's era. The baseball commissioner at the time ordered that both figures be recorded in the official record book, with Maris's marked with an asterisk.
The suggestion that Maris's total was somehow tainted haunted him for the remainder of his lifetime.
Similar resentment surrounded Hank Aaron's subsequent assumption of the alltime home run record a quarter-century ago. No sooner had Aaron belted his 715th than the apologists began to point out that he had come to bat more times than had Ruth, and although Henry Aaron spent several of his formative years toiling in the Negro Leagues and finished his career with 755, the accomplishment remains diminished in the eyes of some.
The tandem assault of McGwire and Sosa on the record books appeared designed to bury the controversy at last, but recent developments seem destined to ensure that it will linger.
Both Sosa and Houston Astros pitcher Jose Lima deny that the latter served up a batting practice-level pitch at Wrigley Field last Sunday. But the charge, while impossible to prove - or disprove - virtually ensures that Sosa's season home run total will remain under something of a cloud.
Less guesswork is involved with l'affaire McGwire. Last Thursday, after the Cardinals had played the Mets at New York's Shea Stadium, an Associated Press reporter named Steve Wilstein was waiting by McGwire's locker for the slugger to appear when he noticed a brown bottle which was clearly labelled "Androstenedione".
When Wilstein asked McGwire about the substance, he freely admitted using it, noting that it was a "natural" product available in health-food stores and was not prohibited by baseball regulations. The drug raises levels of the male hormone, which in turn builds lean muscle mass and hastens recovery from injury.
So will McGwire's total receive its own asterisk if and when he breaks the record? Curiously, the disclosures have barely caused a ripple. Considering that we live in a nation where shot putter Randy Barnes's lifetime suspension from athletics for using the same product was greeted with profound embarrassment, the silence has been deafening.
