Columnist Dean Juipe: Baseball’s sacred record due to fall

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, March 25, 1998 | 9:38 a.m.

COMING SOON to a conversation near you: Emphatic opinions on a treasured record that has defied time and evolution.

For sports fans, it's an unavoidable discussion that figures to have a summer-long shelf life in spite of the fact it's a simple yes or no, believe or don't believe, issue.

re: Roger Maris and his 61 home runs in 1961.

"I couldn't care less about the record," says a man with a good shot of laying it to waste this season, Seattle's Ken Griffey.

In terms of his indifference, Griffey stands alone. Fact is, anyone who knows a dinger from a dinghy has a view on whether the time has come for Maris' record to fall and most are compassionate about it.

Rival bandwagons are ready for the dual. Clutching the reins of the one dubbed Do Not Disturb is your basic pragmatist, content with Maris and the fact his record has now stood two years longer than the one Babe Ruth established with 60 home runs in 1927. Giving chase: Those who see the record as inevitably doomed now that expansion has further diluted pitching, hitters are bulking up and ballparks are cozy to a fault.

Griffey, in his prime at 28 and a left-handed hitter in a park that measures only 312 feet down the right-field line, launched 56 last season. Equally menacing is St. Louis' 6-foot-5, 250-pound strongman Mark McGwire, who sent 58 into orbit last season despite hitting only three during the month of July.

They're not a two-pronged attack. No less than seven other players currently in the majors -- Albert Belle, Brady Anderson, Cecil Fielder, Larry Walker, Andres Galarraga, Kevin Mitchell and Juan Gonzalez -- have had a season of at least 47 home runs.

Before 1990, only 10 players in the history of the game had hit 50 home runs in a season. But in the last eight years five players have done it, and last year there were 12 who hit at least 40.

Add in UNLV alum Matt Williams, now playing in hitter-friendly Phoenix and with 43 home runs for San Francisco during the strike-shortened 1994 season, and that's a baker's dozen of contenders to snap what may be the most revered record in all of sports.

Funny thing -- and you have to have a little mileage on your odometer to know this -- but back when Maris hit 61 it was generally believed that record would be in jeopardy on a yearly basis. Instead, it's 36 years and counting.

But it's going down this season.

Choose your assailant: Griffey may not want to be pestered by the speculative talk, but he's the centerpiece in a Seattle lineup that hit a record 264 home runs in 1997 and there's no pitching around him; McGwire, 34, admits he may do it and in terms of frequency of home runs per at bat he has three of the top six seasons of all time; and the short list of others who could take a stab at it expands daily when you hear of guys like Colorado's Dante Bichette muscling up to 260 pounds.

Sixty-two home runs is only 10 per month plus a couple of spares. And if one of baseball's best teams, the Cleveland Indians, has a spring ERA in excess of 7.00 it's indicative that this is the year where any and everything goes -- over the fence, that is.

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