Chase On, but McGwire Out of Running

Mark McGwire will talk about what Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa and Luis Gonzalez are doing in baseball’s latest home run onslaught, but not about what he isn’t doing during a second consecutive season of disappointment and frustration.

“It’s an old, beat-down story, and I don’t want to keep repeating myself,” McGwire said before his St. Louis Cardinals opened a three-game series with the Dodgers on Friday night. “I’ll be back next year. That’s all I can say.”

The current year isn’t over, of course.

The Cardinals are still alive in the National League Central and very much alive in the wild-card race, and Manager Tony La Russa believes his first baseman will find a way to make “an important contribution between now and the end of the season.”

Perhaps it will come during an ensuing series in San Diego. It probably won’t happen during the weekend series in Los Angeles.

McGwire sat out his eighth consecutive game Friday night because of a sprained right hamstring. He spent six weeks on the disabled list in April and May because of his ongoing recovery from off-season knee surgery.

After he slugged a record 70 home runs in 1998 and 65 more in ‘99, the knee condition restricted McGwire to 32 homers in 236 at-bats last year, when he was limited to four pinch-hitting appearances in the postseason, and he has been restricted to 22 homers and a .194 average in 232 at-bats this year because of his prolonged recovery from surgery and the current hamstring siege.

“He’s a very proud guy and it’s been a struggle for him, a very tough year,” La Russa said. “The only thing we’ve asked of him is to tough it out the best he can, and he has. I’m proud of him. He hasn’t said, ‘it’s not my year, see you next year.””

At 37, however, McGwire’s swift ascent up the home run ladder has been reduced to a crawl.

Instead of joining Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth and Willie Mays as the only players with 600 or more home runs, as he surely would have if it hadn’t been for the injuries of the last two years and those two years (1993-94) with the Oakland A’s when he was limited to 74 games because of heel and back injuries, McGwire is fifth on the all-time list with 576 home runs.

Instead of staging a new assault on his home run record, he has basically been a spectator as Bonds (56), Sosa (52) and Gonzalez (51) have launched the assault.

Three over 50?

McGwire said the amazing part was that neither Bonds nor Gonzalez had ever done it before, that Bonds could jump from a career-high 49 to possibly more than 70 (“that’s a huge discrepancy”) and that, despite the fact that all three of their teams are in the playoff race, they’re “still getting pitches to hit. I mean, that’s pretty surprising. You would think that the managers of the other teams wouldn’t want those guys to beat ‘em. I laugh at people who say they’re getting pitched around. I was pitched around all year in ’98 (he walked 162 times) and still hit 70.”

McGwire, however, said he wouldn’t be disappointed to have his record broken. He said that because of the game’s emphasis on offense (two homer havens--Houston’s Enron Field and San Francisco’s Pacific Bell Park--have opened since ‘98), it’s inevitable that someone will hit 70 again.

“Those three aren’t going to be the only guys to hit more than 50 this year,” he said. “Check out the number of guys in the 40s already. I just hope that whenever the guy who does it gets close, he has to go through the same media attention I did. Of course, the situation is entirely different. I wasn’t chasing 70. I was chasing 61 and a 37-year-old record.”