John, Paul, George, Ringo--and Mark

The kid’s eyes light up, as if he has just been given a lifetime pass to Fannie Farmer’s warehouse. In fact, he says: “I’m like a kid in a candy store here.” Only this is better than candy. This is a chance to watch Mark McGwire up close and personal from a real, honest-to-goodness major league dugout, and the kid is pinching himself over his good fortune.

“I can’t wait,” the kid says. “When does he hit?”

And when the Cardinals’ McGwire finally steps to the plate to take batting practice at Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix, the kid presses himself into the railing in the Diamondbacks’ dugout and watches, wide-eyed, as baseball after baseball after baseball blasts off McGwire’s bat and into some distant dimension.

“Holy mackerel!” the kid says when it’s all over. “Goodness gracious, that was unbelievable. Let me tell you something: He hits balls farther in one swing than I could do if I hit it, walked out to where it landed, picked it up and hit it twice more.”

The kid is 24 and a major league ballplayer, one who has hit well enough himself to win an everyday outfield job with Arizona. Nonetheless, David Dellucci, the Diamondbacks’ rookie, pinches himself over this chance to watch one of his peers do what every player routinely does before every game of every season.

McGwire, of course, is a peer to other players on paper only. No other player hits the ball the way McGwire hits the ball, which is high, higher and highest and long, longer and longest. Nor does any other player hit those highest, longest home runs as often as McGwire hits them. He had 37 home runs after 85 Cardinals games (through Sunday), which projects to an unheard-of 71 by the time September’s song has ended.

And no other player single-handedly takes baseball to peaks of popularity and excitement that were all but forgotten during the recent seasons of work stoppages, price hikes and salary demands and salary dumps. No other player, in short, makes people pay attention like McGwire is doing with his assault-and-battery treatment on Roger Maris’ 37-year-old home run record.

“He is a walking show,” says White Sox third baseman Robin Ventura, who witnessed McGwire Mania firsthand during a June 8-10 interleague series in Comiskey Park. “Every time he comes to the plate, you can sense the excitement. You don’t even have to see him to know when he’s batting. The guy two hitters in front of him in the batting order can hit a routine fly ball, and even before it’s caught, you can tell that McGwire is stepping out into the on-deck circle. It’s like instant gawking.”

When McGwire is at bat, activity at the concession stands and bathrooms stops and all eyes stay on the field, as if someone has pushed a giant pause button on the normal hurly-burly in the stadium concourse. When the at-bat is over, the commotion resumes.

When the at-bat produces a home run, the electricity in the crowd is palpable. “That’s my favorite part,” Cardinal Manager Tony La Russa says. “When he hits one, you hear the buzz for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes. In St. Louis, it goes on for two or three innings. A bunch of us were sitting around talking about trying to describe it. You can write about it or talk about it all you want, but it’s still inadequate.”

They’re still buzzing in St. Louis over the drive McGwire smoked to straightaway center May 16 in Busch Stadium against Florida’s Livan Hernandez. The inexact science that estimates home run distances pegged that one at 545 feet. But the ball might still be rising today if it hadn’t hit the giant St. Louis Post-Dispatch sign some two stories above the eight-foot outfield fence. Some clever stadium wonk pasted a gigantic Band-Aid over the wound where the ball did its harm to the sign.

During batting practice June 12 in Phoenix, McGwire became the first player to hit a ball out of the confines of The Bob, which is how Bank One Ballpark is known. It landed on a catwalk 90 feet above the left field fence and bounced out of the yard through a huge sliding panel door that was open for the breeze. The Diamondbacks sent a couple of stadium employees out to Jefferson Street to search for the ball, to no avail. Estimated distance: 510 feet. And it may still be rolling.

In part because the legend of Babe Ruth is built on that same sort of hyperbole, it’s easy to connect McGwire to baseball’s first Home Run King. Some of the yarns making the rounds about McGwire take on an urban folklore aura not unlike the Babe’s fabled called shot. One highly placed team official, who in the interest of integrity shall remain nameless, insists he knows someone who caught a ball hit so hard by McGwire that it carries a brand of the word “genuine,” which is wood-burned into his bat.

No wonder Big Mac is getting the rock-star treatment from fans.

“We had like a 2 1/2-hour wait after a game in Philadelphia because our plane was delayed, and we waited in the clubhouse,” Cardinal third baseman Gary Gaetti says. “And even after 2 1/2 hours, there must have been 1,000 people standing outside where our bus was. And I mean it was just like, ‘Maaaarrrrrrk, Maaaarrrrrrk, Maaaarrrrrrk.’ He’s the fifth Beatle. You’ve got John, Paul, George, Ringo and Mark.”

With McGwire in town, baseball’s gatekeepers wisely open the stadium doors earlier than the standard 90 minutes or two hours before game time, to allow fans time to jockey for position from which to watch batting practice. Hard-to-sell seats in the left field stands become hot commodities when McGwire plays, presumably because the chances of catching a souvenir home run ball are better than usual.

Meanwhile, baseball’s marketing wizards are dreaming up ways to capitalize on McGwire Mania. In Minnesota’s Metrodome, where the Cardinals played an interleague series at the end of June, the Twins ran a promotion around McGwire’s presence, in which each fan holding a ticket for the 7,000-seat lower left-field stands was issued a hard hat. For protection.

When the Cardinals played at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego, a local radio station stamped its AM frequency on a handful of baseballs and promised to pay that number of dollars to fans who caught them in the stands during McGwire’s batting practice. But McGwire drew the line at that one.

“They were like Nerf balls,” McGwire says. “I hit one, and it didn’t go anywhere. It wasn’t a regular baseball. I told Dave McKay (the Cardinals’ coach who pitches batting practice to him) not to use them anymore. It was throwing my swing off a little bit.”

The mania leaves the man himself in something of a state of wonder. He had a name and a following since becoming a fixture with Oakland in 1987. But after McGwire was traded to St. Louis last July 31, his visibility has rocketed off the charts. The batting-practice scene became a sensation almost immediately last August at Busch Stadium and spread throughout the majors, wherever the Cardinals play, early this season.

Now, as the homer chase gathers speed, McGwire is spending a good deal of his limited spare time in search of his private life.

“The thing is, I’m not doing anything any differently than I did for all those years in Oakland,” he says. “Then all of a sudden I get traded to St. Louis, and the media craze has gone nuts. When they told me I was getting traded to the Cardinals, they said, ‘You’re going to love it there. There’s no media.’ But there’s more in St. Louis than there was in the Bay Area. And I try to sign autographs every day; but some days, I’m so tired I just want to go home.

“I mean, it’s all very, very overwhelming. It’s pretty incredible. The whole thing is just 1,000 times more than it’s ever been, which is a little uncomfortable. I’ve been recognized my whole career, but now I just can’t go anywhere. So now I know what those guys feel like--especially actors and actresses. Or Jordan or Shaquille. I know what they feel like.”

He probably does. But unless he stops hitting home runs, which isn’t likely as long as he stays healthy, he has only scratched the surface of McGwire Mania. In the next 2 1/2 months, the mania will reach epidemic proportions that make the current delirium seem like a common cold.

Mike Shannon, who played for the Cardinals in the ‘60s and was a close friend and St. Louis teammate of Maris, has yet to sit down with McGwire and talk about Maris’ legacy and the toll that chasing Ruth’s record exacted on him in 1961. But when Shannon--a Cardinal radio analyst--does, he will have some words of warning.

“He’s going to have to realize that the scene coming up is something that’s never been seen before,” Shannon says. “There are so many different ways this thing is going to go. And the press is not going to be his biggest problem. His biggest problem is the animal he’s created by himself.

“He’ll go to the bathroom one of these days, and there will be a guy who jumps out of the commode. It’ll be [someone] with a ballpoint pen and a baseball. Or he’ll be in a closet for 4 1/2 hours trying to get away from it all, and he’ll finally crack the door a little to let in some light, and there will be two other guys in there with him. His problem is going to be his friends and the public.

“That’s going to be his problem, because he’s such a nice man. He wants to do the proper thing, and he wants to be kind and helpful to people.”

It won’t be easy. But if it happens, if he hits 62 home runs, we’ll all be wide-eyed kids again. Every last one of us.