The Week Baseball Became America’s Sport Again

I watched Mark McGwire with my sons this week the way I watched Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle with my father in their own amazing September, in 1961. I listened to Jon Miller and Joe Buck make home run calls on McGwire the way I listened to Mel Allen in ‘61, and Scooter Rizzuto. It was all baseball this week at our house, the way it was everywhere. Baseball came all the way back, because of McGwire.

On Wednesday morning, when I was taking my 8-year-old to school. The 8-year old is the one with the catcher’s mitt. He wants to be Piazza.

This was a morning when no parent wanted to let go of the night before. So we were still talking about No. 62.

“Someday you’ll watch something big in sports with your children,” I told him. “And you’ll remember how we all watched McGwire last night. You’ll tell your kids about McGwire.”

“It won’t be as good as last night,” he said solemnly.

I thought the same way after Maris hit No. 61.

Usually my kids have turned to football by now. Not this season. If McGwire is on television, or Sammy Sosa, they watch. If they go to bed and the games are still going on, I am required to leave notes in their rooms if one of them goes deep again, so they don’t even have to wait to turn on “SportsCenter” in the morning.

We have gone to the ballpark this season more than we ever have before. We have watched more baseball on television, played more ball.

In the spring we went to Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter, Fla., sat on a lawn out in right field, watched McGwire. My sons have rooted hard for McGwire ever since, the way the country has.

“Baseball is back to being the country’s pastime,”McGwire said on last Tuesday night.

He helped bring it back with home runs the way Babe Ruth helped bring baseball back from the Black Sox with his home run records in the ‘20s. The problem is that McGwire stops playing in two-and-a-half weeks. Somebody else will have to take care of October. Because baseball can’t stop here.

If you have loved baseball all along, if you are not one of the wise guys who wrote it off, you do not want this moment to end.

The country has given baseball the second chance we heard it would never get, not after the season ended in August 1994, not after the owners finally canceled the World Series.

John Elway finally won a Super Bowl in January. Michael Jordan won his sixth NBA title in June. It is McGwire’s year now. It is baseball’s year. That is why Tuesday night didn’t just seem like a celebration of him and his record but of baseball itself, all the way until the sound system at Busch Stadium gave you Ray Charles singing “America the Beautiful.”

McGwire didn’t fix everything that is wrong with baseball by hitting 62 home runs. He didn’t fix a strike zone that changes from day to day and umpire to umpire. He didn’t change the gap between rich teams and poor teams or speed up the games or even give the sport a real drug policy. He didn’t get us a real commissioner, or take the hammer away from the Major League Baseball Players Association or improve the level of pitching.

He just made the country all baseball again. He grabbed us by the heart and would not let go, from the time he swung the bat for No. 62 until he got on the team plane for Cincinnati. There has never been a pro football moment like this, no matter how much it costs the networks to show pro football. Not even Jordan, who has done everything, won everything, ever gave us a moment like this.

Does this mean baseball is in the clear now, and all the empty ball fields in your town and my town will suddenly be filled with kids? Of course not. Baseball will always be fighting for its life against the other sports. But if you can’t feel the rumbling of the sport’s great engine again, if you don’t understand the hold baseball still has on this country, you don’t want to.

McGwire leaves the stage soon. Then it becomes somebody else’s season, the Yankees’ or the Braves’ or Randy Johnson’s or Tony Gwynn’s. Maybe the Yankees can get a rematch with the Indians. Maybe they really can play the Red Sox in the American League Championship Series. Maybe they can get another World Series with the Braves, one that can top the one they gave us in October ’96.

We look for a great October. We look for baseball not to let go of this moment. It wasn’t just fathers and sons talking about No. 62 on Wednesday morning, because baseball has never just belonged to fathers and sons. If you don’t believe me, read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s marvelous book about her own baseball childhood, called “Wait ‘Till Next Year.” This week was for all who watched that baseball game Tuesday night. The beauty of Tuesday night was that it belonged to all of us. We will all remember where we were.

Baseball was big again this week, bigger than I everthought it would be again. You better believe we will all remember the night Mark McGwire hit No. 62. I only wish he could stay around for October.