Leaving His Mark

By ROSS NEWHAN

Sept. 28, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ST. LOUIS —

In a spectacular conclusion to the regular season, Mark McGwire virtually wrapped up baseball’s great home run race Sunday and proved Sammy Sosa right: He is the man.

The St. Louis Cardinal first baseman walloped his 69th and 70th home runs in a 6-3 victory over the Montreal Expos, lifting what is probably the most renowned and romanticized record in sports to a Himalayan level that left even McGwire gasping.

“I’m in awe of myself right now,” he said. “I can’t believe I did it. It’s absolutely amazing. It blows me away.”

It certainly seemed to blow Sosa away.

The Chicago Cub right fielder remained at 66 homers in a loss to the Houston Astros on Sunday--his own astounding total suddenly dwarfed by 70--but he will have one more game in which to add to it. The Cubs and San Francisco Giants will meet in a one-game playoff for the National League’s wild-card berth at Wrigley Field today, with statistics included in regular-season totals.

Sosa, however, would need a four-homer miracle to catch McGwire, whose 70 homers are 10 more than Babe Ruth hit in his then-record season of 1927 and nine more than Roger Maris hit in his then-record season of 1961.

“He’s not only established new heights,” St. Louis Manager Tony La Russa said, “but he’s gone into the stratosphere.”

A Busch Stadium crowd of 46,110 provided a deafening ovation when McGwire slugged 69 and topped it at 70.

The crowd was still roaring during a postgame ceremony in which McGwire became the 62nd recipient of the St. Louis Award, which has gone to three Nobel Prize winners and two Pulitzer Prize winners. McGwire, in winning the award, was credited with lifting the spirits of the community and nation.

“This season probably would not have happened without the support of the great fans of St. Louis and the support of my teammates,” he told the crowd.

One of his teammates, Tom Lampkin, shook his head later and said “the most amazing part is that he’s acted as if the home run race didn’t exist. That may have been his way of getting rid of the pressure, but his mental strength through all of this has been impregnable. Seventy. I don’t believe it.”

McGwire has maintained that it didn’t matter who won the race, that he and Sosa had already rewritten history, revitalized the game and had an impact on so many lives that neither could be disappointed no matter how it turned out.

Asked, however, if he wasn’t happy to have emerged with the record and apparent victory, he said:

“Yes, definitely [I am]. But my statement that it didn’t matter was the truth. I spoke from the heart. But doing what I’ve done this weekend, staying in the tunnel vision, getting good strokes and getting good pitches to hit, I’m proud of where I’m at. But if Sammy and I were to be tied at 70 I’d still be proud. We’ve done a hell of a lot, and I hope to be able to sit down with him sometime so that we can discuss what we went through this season and what we accomplished.”

What McGwire did this weekend was astounding. In his final 11 at-bats of a four-game series, he hit five home runs.

* No. 69 came on a breaking ball from rookie Mike Thurman in the third inning, a 377-foot drive into the lower-level seats in left field.

* No. 70 came on a 96-mph inside fastball from rookie Carl Pavano in the seventh. McGwire should have been jammed, but he fought it off and lined it 370 feet into the Batting Cage Room, a private enclosure in left.

As McGwire circled the bases and each of the Montreal infielders slapped his hand in a scene reminiscent of his record-breaking 62nd homer (but which included this time a hug and kiss from La Russa), the ball was recovered by Philip Ozersky, 26, a lab technician. Ozersky said he was too caught up in the whirlwind events to know what he would do with it.

“Right now I’m just excited to meet Mr. McGwire and shake his hand,” he said.

McGwire, in turn, presented Hall of Fame official Jeff Idelson with another collection of his equipment after the game, including the bat with which he hit Nos. 66 through 70.

Idelson also came away with Pavano’s glove. The right-hander is one of the league’s top pitching prospects, having been obtained from the Boston Red Sox in the Pedro Martinez deal. Yielding McGwire’s 70th wasn’t the way he wanted to end his rookie season, but he said:

“He hit a good pitch. He just turned on it. I was going to go right after him, but the way it turned out, he went right after me. I guess if you’re going to give up a home run, who better to give it up to? I’m not going to bother looking at it any other way.”

Said Thurman, the victim of 69: “The last three days, the last five home runs were meant to be. It’s just one of those things.”

The young Expos consistently challenged McGwire, whose concept of the strike zone, teammate Lampkin said, is almost as unbelievable as his home run total.

McGwire, who batted .299 and drove in 146 runs, drew 162 walks, eight behind Ruth’s major league record and tying Ted Williams’ 1947 and 1949 totals as the second highest in history.

In a season in which McGwire had eight more homers than singles, he homered every 7.27 at-bats to improve his record career ratio to 11.42. He now has an incredible 94 homers in 206 games with the Cardinals, who were never in the playoff hunt but attracted a club record 3,195,021, a $395,021 payday for McGwire based on $1 for every admission over 2.8 million.

“I’m absolutely exhausted,” he said. “I can’t possibly use my mind any more than I have this season. I amazed myself that I was able to maintain that tunnel vision as long as I did, considering all of the media, the expectations and the fact that every eye in the country seemed to be on me. I proved to myself that I can accomplish anything through strength of mind.”

McGwire will be headed to his Newport Beach home today and a reunion with son Matt, 10. At some point soon, he said, he will sit down with all of the tapes and the articles and attempt to grasp the magnitude of the season. He said that he didn’t think 70 would be broken soon and wasn’t sure he would want to do it, but he added that in his exhausted state he was “more or less shooting from the hip and can only hope I’m not sounding stupid.”

The home run king acknowledged that he has come a long way--from 1991, when his private and professional life was in such disarray that he entered therapy and asked La Russa, his then Oakland A’s manager, to put him on the bench because he was afraid he couldn’t even hit .200 and from 1993 and ‘94, when heel and back injuries virtually wiped out two consecutive seasons.

He could have walked away, McGwire said Sunday, but he got help, worked hard and rebuilt his swing, focusing on the extension that allows him to drive the ball so high and so deep.

“I take pride in what I’ve done,” he said. “A couple years ago I said that my best seasons were still ahead of me, and now I’m there.”

With it is certain to come a loss of privacy, but McGwire said he would not go into hiding.

“I’m a normal person who plays sports,” he said. “I hope people will allow me to lead a normal life. I’m asking people not to look at me any differently.”

A futile hope and request?

As McGwire himself acknowledged, that 70 has forever changed the landscape.

“I’ll never let this season go,” he said. “It may never happen again.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

McGWIRE BY THE NUMBERS

10: Multi-home run games.

5: Home runs in the last 3 games.

15: Home runs in Spetember.

19: Teams he hit home runs against this season.

62: Pitchers he hit home runs against this season.

180: Home runs the last three seasons (a record).

457: Career home runs (20th all time)