MAKING NOISE, QUIETLY

Picture this: On a cool September evening, with the baseball season close to expiration and millions of eyes sharing the moment through you-are-there technology, the hallowed record finally falls.

Albert Belle of the Chicago White Sox hits his 62nd home run of the season, ending the decades of the Roger Maris chase. Belle circles the bases, shakes hands with teammates and disappears into the clubhouse, perhaps to grab a sandwich or await a card game.

Reaction? You want a reaction from this guy? Thrills, chills, whatever? Sorry, pal. Just because you make history doesn’t mean you have to talk about it.

With Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Ken Griffey Jr. having fallen behind the pace of Maris--61 homers in ‘61--the slugger best equipped to handle the media crush might be the one who would not acknowledge it. If Belle chased Maris over the final month of a season, fans could witness a September to remember.

“If he was the guy that got close, he’d have the ability to turn it up,” White Sox Manager Jerry Manuel said. “He thrives on that kind of stuff.”

Imagine a studio spending hundreds of millions on a film that the star refused to promote, and you have some idea of what could be a major league problem: one of baseball’s least beloved personalities shooting for one of baseball’s most beloved records. Belle dismisses the media like a fly buzzing around his locker, letting others sell the games while he prepares for them.

Pressure? What pressure?

“I think he’d handle it great,” said Baltimore Oriole publicist John Maroon, who handled the Indians’ publicity when Belle played in Cleveland. “He doesn’t deal with the media as it is. He wouldn’t start then.”

McGwire, weary of weeks in the national spotlight, has described feeling like “a caged animal.” Seattle Manager Lou Piniella has compared the attention flooding Griffey to “a nagging wife . . . or husband . . . it doesn’t go away.”

Said Atlanta Brave shortstop Ozzie Guillen, a former White Sox teammate of Belle’s: “Albert Belle is so tough mentally. He’s tougher than any of those guys. He focuses. Media, fans, whatever, he doesn’t care. He just puts up his numbers.”

Big numbers, every year. This year, Belle joined Hall of Famers Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx as the only players to hit 30 home runs and drive in 100 runs in seven consecutive seasons. With 37 home runs, Belle trails Griffey by five.

With his next hot streak, Belle could crowd McGwire, Sosa and Griffey in the Maris derby. His entry in the race to 62 might be late this year, but what about any year?

“Albert can do it,” said former Angel Manager Doug Rader, who was a coach with the White Sox last season. “He can hit a lot of home runs in a hurry. That’s really what it’s going to take. It’s going to take somebody hitting 10 home runs in two weeks.”

Sosa didn’t join the Maris chase until he hit 20 home runs in June. Belle hit 16 homers in July, setting a major league record for the month. He hit 17 in September of 1995, tying Ruth for the record for that month. He hit 14 in August of that year and 50 in all, in a season shortened three weeks by the players’ strike.

And, although home runs die in the spacious alleys of Comiskey Park--”I’ve already counted 14 he’s lost this year,” said Belle’s brother, Terry--Belle has hit more home runs at home than on the road this season.

Give Belle half those 14 homers, and he trails McGwire and Sosa by three, and the cameras and microphones trail him everywhere. And then what?

Maroon, who limited and organized media availability when Cal Ripken Jr. broke Gehrig’s record for consecutive games played in 1995, said he would suggest a similar strategy if he were still working with Belle.

“I would really try and sit down with Albert and Terry and try to pound in the importance of doing it,” Maroon said. “It’s a historic feat. The public wants to hear from him about it.

“I have a feeling, for something that big, Albert might understand the historical significance of it. It’s important that Terry would understand. If Terry believed in it, I think Albert would too.”

Terry Belle, Albert’s twin brother and business manager, said he thought his brother would go along with a few interviews should he challenge Maris, but not in any organized fashion.

“It would probably be pretty impromptu,” Terry said. “He might accommodate some of the interviews, but not so many as to vary his routine.”

Albert Belle, who rarely speaks with reporters during the season, declined an interview request for this story. In a spring training interview with The Times in 1996, Belle said, “Maybe, the less you talk to the media, the more home runs you hit. Maybe I might have to keep doing that.”

In 1977, Hall of Famer Rod Carew flirted with a .400 batting average, a standard last reached by Ted Williams in 1941. Carew finished with a .388 average and as much aggravation as attention.

“You can lose your concentration,” said Carew, now the Angel batting coach. “I couldn’t make plays I could have normally made if my head wasn’t so clouded. I was worried, if I got a couple hits, about how many guys I was going to have to talk to after the game.”

Carew’s manager that season, Gene Mauch, allowed him to skip out of the clubhouse--and away from the media--before games. But even should Belle skip out on interviews, Carew suggested he could not evade the media entirely.

“I think even Albert Belle could be touched,” Carew said. “It could get to him if he had to go through that. It would be constant. Everywhere you go, everything you do, you’re under a microscope where you have no escape.”

Media aside, Belle’s temperamental behavior would stir hecklers across the country, eager to stake out their own tiny piece of history by inciting Belle over his throwing a ball at a fan, his suspension for corking a bat, his chasing youngsters away from his home on Halloween, his $50,000 fine for verbally abusing a television personality, and on and on.

If a Maris chase carried Belle through such hostile East Coast outposts as New York and Boston in September, the pressure would mount exponentially.

“The pressure is going to be there regardless,” Chicago catcher Chad Kreuter said. “You either can’t help but get caught up in it or you can’t help trying not to get caught up in it.

“It’s not just pressure from the media. You’re human. You get pressure from within. You’re well aware you’re getting close to a record.”

Said Rader: “I’m not so presumptuous to think I know the inner workings of a man that would be subjected to that kind of pressure. Even though he seems to be oblivious to that sort of thing because he removes himself from that [media] arena doesn’t mean it might not wear on him inside.

“I’d love to be able to say he could be that guy, but I really can’t. I don’t think any of us can truly appreciate anything that goes along with something that historic.”