A Hit of a Season

It’s been a baseball year to remember--or forget. The Dodgers played .500 ball, barely, and Mike Piazza and Hideo Nomo became New York Mets. The Angels were in the American League race till the final days, then flopped.

But all of Southern California’s fans can share the joy hammered out by Mark McGwire, a local, who astounded baseball by demolishing past home run records--the Babe’s, Roger Maris’--by knocking 70 over the fences for the St. Louis Cardinals, with the Chicago Cubs’ Sammy Sosa on his heels all the way.

San Diego’s Padres played superbly and made it to the playoffs despite an “off year” for 38-year-old Tony Gwynn, who, hampered by injuries, hit only .319. For most players that would be a career high.

In Baltimore, where since 1982 nothing was certain but death, taxes and Cal Ripken in the Orioles lineup, the iron man finally sat out a game, voluntarily. He had played 2,632 consecutive contests, three seasons ago having broken the “unbreakable” record of New York Yankee Lou Gehrig. The Yankees, the 1996 World Series champions, won 114 games in the regular season this year, second only to the 1906 Cubs. That performance happily overshadowed season-long angst over Yankee management’s proposal to abandon the team’s historic stadium in the Bronx and move downtown.

Major league baseball starts at the end of March, when some games are postponed by snow. It continues until late October, when chill again sets in. Many seasons drag through monotony. Not this one. What we’ve seen is as hot as it gets.