Columnist Dean Juipe: Public frenzy with homers beyond belief

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Sept. 9, 1998 | 9:23 a.m.

POOL SHOOTERS set their sticks on the table and direct their attention to the nearest TV.

Conversation at the bar doesn't stop so much as it streamlines at a heightened pitch to a singular topic. Even the video-poker addicts look up for a few seconds between hands.

Mark McGwire is coming to the plate.

And everyone is watching, outrageously fascinated by the rewriting of baseball history.

It's all very strange, isn't it? The day Roger Maris hit his 61st home run to break Babe Ruth's record in 1961, Yankee Stadium was two-thirds empty.

Today you can't beg, borrow or steal a ticket to a St. Louis Cardinals game.

Of course this is the Information Age, but there's more to it than simple exposure. McGwire -- and the Chicago Cubs' Sammy Sosa -- have captivated a national audience at a time and in an era in which lethargy appeared to be the country's dominant trait.

People who don't usually give a damn about baseball and who don't know the Colorado Rockies from the Colorado Avalanche are transfixed by a home-run race that is producing almost nightly fireworks and special bulletins that interrupt TV's normally staid programming.

It definitely wasn't like this in 1961.

Maris, regretfully, presented an unwelcome threat to Ruth's record. Amid the indifference were those who openly rooted against the record falling and against the dogged challenger.

When it actually happened, when Maris belted No. 61, it was newsy but somewhat inconsequential. Old-timers begrudged Maris for violating Ruth's legacy and youngsters took their cue accordingly, shrugging as Maris took his place in the record book.

You couldn't even find a person who seemed happy about it, let alone come across one enveloped in glee.

Raise a toast to Maris? Not in that lifetime.

Today, the ecstasy created by McGwire and Sosa is infectious. It has swept the country, from jostling for position outside the left-field wall of the stadium where McGwire happens to be playing to expressing yourself on the subject in the corner taverns of Las Vegas.

The world has changed, we all know that. Heck, the president can't even have an affair these days without it becoming an international issue.

But this bonding with McGwire and Sosa is almost unbelievable, given that it's occurring in prime time of a Me-First Generation that usually has more interest in a celebrity's foibles than his heroic characteristics.

Somehow, McGwire, the American with the lumberjack forearms, and Sosa, the ever-smiling Dominican, have taken a difficult although easy to comprehend pursuit and turned it into an attention grabber of unsurpassed proportions. No record in the history of sports has ever generated this type of mass appeal and unbridled reaction.

"I just wish that would have happened for him," said Roger Maris Jr., referring to the contrast between the adulation that McGwire and Sosa are experiencing and how the public responded to his father.

Sadly for Maris and his family, Babe Ruth was a personality larger than life and so, apparently, is Mark McGwire. Maris was merely a 37-year buffer, a man whose record-breaking home run was met with muted applause at best and a player who was derided at a time when he should have been revered.

If he were alive today, Maris might smile and take the belated respect that has come his way but he might also be jealous. At the least, he would be baffled by the attention his successors are enjoying.

And that would make two of us.