McGwire Sets Sights on Snapping Slump : Baseball: Oakland’s not-so-brash Bash Brother homers to help Athletics defeat the Angels, 8-6.

Mark McGwire’s vision is imperfect. He looks out on the world--and at incoming pitches--through contact lenses of an unsettling brilliant green.

But corrective lenses do not mean he does not have a good eye.

Nor does the fact that when he walked into Anaheim Stadium Friday, McGwire was batting .216 and in the clutches of a 1-for-19 slump, with eight strikeouts among those outs.

The outs have kept coming-- strikeouts and groundouts, hard-hit balls that might have been hits. Everything but actual hits, and that includes walks, of which McGwire now has 68, third most in the American League.

“Some people look at my strikeouts and don’t think I have a very good eye,” McGwire said. “I look at my walks, and they’re in the 60s. I look at my strikeouts, and they’re in the low 70s. You keep that even, that’s a pretty good ratio. I have to have a good eye to walk as much as I do.”

McGwire went 0 for 3 Thursday night in Oakland’s victory over the Angels--and walked twice. He went 1 for 3 Friday in Oakland’s 8-6 victory at Anaheim Stadium.

He walked once Friday. And broke through his slump with a hit in the eighth inning--the kind of hit that is expected from one of the Bash Brothers. McGwire, the less brash, hit a solo homer to right-center, scoring the final Oakland run in a game they won after trailing, 6-0.

McGwire’s homer, his 28th, combined with Dave Henderson’s two-run homer to add a dose of power to a team that was without its main power source. Jose Canseco left the game in the early innings because he felt ill.

McGwire is hitting in the low .200s in the next-to-last month of the season--or the next-to-last month of most players’ seasons.

“I’ve got two months left, and probably a pretty good chance of going to the championship series and World Series,” he said. “It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.”

He has hit .289, .260 and .231 in his three full major league seasons.

“People emphasize my average too much,” he said. “How about my on-base percentage? How about my walks? My home runs? My RBIs?”

His on-base percentage is not to be overlooked. It is .344, which does not touch Rickey Henderson’s American League-leading .441. But it is nearly 130 percentage points higher than his average, and that is a rare difference.

“It doesn’t matter who you are,” McGwire said, “some area of your game, people are gonna say things and write things about you. But hey, I’m a streaky hitter.”

Cold, and then hot. Before his recent slump he had hit in seven straight games, batting .346.

He takes a big swing, and he undergoes big swings.

The last big swing he took Friday sent a ball over the fence--the eighth time he has homered in 21 career games in Anaheim Stadium--bad eyes and all.