Home Run Slump Tests Confidence of Rookie Slugger Mark McGwire

It’s two hours before game time and the Oakland Athletics clubhouse is almost empty by the time Mark McGwire leaves the trainer’s room and begins to pull on his uniform.

It’s the fifth month of his magical rookie season and, for McGwire, it clearly has been a long one. He chased the 60-homer ghosts of Babe Ruth and Roger Maris for a few weeks. He broke the all-time rookie-season home-run records of Frank Robinson and Wally Berger. He made the all-star team. He created expectations.

You almost had to love this polite, red-haired slugger, who, at 23, appeared to have it all, including incredible talent, a happy marriage and the brains to make it all fit together. People magazine said so.

Then, just as quickly as the mammoth, breath-taking home runs began, they stopped. McGwire still leads the American League with 39 (one more than Toronto’s George Bell), but he has hit just two in his last 21 games and went 41 at-bats between Nos. 37 and 38, his longest dry spell of the season.

He now appears to be in an important adjustment period, one in which he must decide if he’s going to be a Reggie Jackson-type slugger or an Eddie Murray-type slugger. So far, he has opted for being Murray because, while the home runs have stopped, he’s walking more, getting lots of singles and keeping his batting average in the .280s. He’s not hitting home runs like Jackson once did, but he’s not striking out like Jackson once did, either.

“A walk is just like a hit,” he said. “It gives someone else a chance to drive me in.”

The problem with this logic is that the A’s count on Jose Canseco and McGwire to be driving in others, not being driven in. “Well, that’s true,” he said. “But we’ve got a lot of capable hitters here.”

Just about this time, NBC broadcaster Joe Garagiola spots McGwire and, from across the clubhouse, yells, “I’m coming over there to ask you about Babe Ruth and Roger Maris and 60 homers.”

He’s teasing McGwire about the silliness that went with McGwire’s early spurt of homers -- 31 by the all-star break. McGwire laughs, but all of this appears to have taken a toll. His face is burned and drawn from too many afternoons in the sun, and thin, too, a result of a flu bug that took 14 pounds off an already lean body (6 feet 5, 225 pounds). A deep, hacking cough remains.

“Pitchers aren’t pitching me any differently,” he said, loudly and with emphasis. “They’re just pitching me tougher. They’re working hard to make good pitches, and they’re making them. The first part of the year I was getting good pitches to hit. Right now, I’m seeing a lot of pitches on the corner or at the knees.”

Bob Watson, the Athletics’ hitting coach, constantly reminds him to stand straight, don’t lunge, don’t overswing. “He has gotten into a couple of bad habits here recently,” Watson said. “But he’s still getting his hits.”

But not his home runs.

“At the beginning of the year, when I got a pitch over the middle of the plate, I drilled it,” McGwire said. “Now, I’m seeing a lot fewer pitches like that and, when I do see one, I’m fouling it back. It has definitely been a lot tougher. Maybe it’s all me, but I have to think it’s the pitchers working harder to make better pitches.”

He says it with the confidence of a 10-year veteran, which is the way he has struck a lot of people in a rookie season that began with his sharing the first-base job with his best friend, Rob Nelson. He has accepted both the hot and cold streaks with humor and grace, and, if the five or six interviews a day have bothered him, he hasn’t shown it.

“The attention has been good to a point,” he said. “The problem now is that even if we win or lose, reporters want to talk to me. I’m 23 years old, and this is the first time I’ve been in a pennant race. But I’m asked all kinds of questions about things I have no idea about. I try to answer, but there are times I just don’t have an answer.”

Two weeks ago, Jackson had told him his biggest problems would be expectations. If he hit 30 homers in the first half, fans would expect 30 in the second half. If he hit 40 homers his rookie season, fans would expect 41 his second season.

“What if he hits three more the rest of the year?” Jackson asked. “The press will say he had a bad year. Hey, the guy will have had 42 homers in his rookie year. Come on, be fair.”

McGwire has noticed.

“That’s the one thing I can’t deal with,” he said. “It looks like the fans expect me to hit one every game. I mean, every game. Maybe that’s because I was compared to so many Hall of Fame players before I’d played two months. I’m not sure. But it does start to seem that whatever I do won’t be good enough. I hit so many homers so quickly, the people think it ought to be easy. It’s not easy for anyone. Jose got a lesson in expectations like that.”

Teammate Jose Canseco, last season’s AL rookie of the year, is the other half of the biggest and strongest No. 3 and 4 hitters in the game. At the ripe old age of 23, they have combined for 66 homers and 187 RBI.

Canseco fulfilled the Jackson formula for failure perfectly, hitting 33 homers and driving in 117 runs as a rookie last season. His problem was that he divided his season badly, hitting 23 homers in the first half, 10 in the second half.

“People want to break it down,” Jackson said. “That’s dumb as hell. Give the guy his due. He had one helluva year.”

He’s having an even better one in 1987, hitting .277 with 28 doubles, 27 homers and 94 RBI, but because McGwire has gotten so much of the attention, Canseco’s season has gone almost unnoticed.

“I’ve had a little more privacy this year,” Canseco said, “and I’ve