In May of 1998, early in his historic 70-homer season, Mark McGwire was featured in ESPN The Magazine. Here is that story.

Mark McGwire is looking at you -- hard. He is wearing a sleeveless shirt and holding onto the metal grate above his locker with his left hand. His arms are unusually large, like wrestler's legs grafted onto shoulders, and you stand there hoping he doesn't lose his balance and drop the arm on you. He is discussing something with fierce intensity. The topic might be media saturation or the science of hitting or his fight against child abuse, but the subject is irrelevant; we're dealing with an aura here, a concept. His lawn-green eyes are searing into your retinas, and that arm is hanging above your head, and you experience a bright burst of clarity. Suddenly you understand. You empathize with all those hapless mortals who must stand 60 feet, 6 inches away from this man who has dedicated his life to hitting a baseball as hard as humanly possible. You can almost comprehend what it's like to look down from that lonely dirt hill at someone who is looking back at you as if straining to read a distant street sign, his bat waving underneath him like a broom. The look in his eye is where intensity meets obsession and decides, after considerable thought, to turn the other way. Looking at McGwire, you know exactly what Colorado Rockies reliever Chuck McElroy means when he says, "The man's enough to make you shake out there."

Mark McGwire is the mythical king of a hypothetical world. Everything he does today is viewed in terms of what he might do tomorrow. No question he is asked has a concrete answer. He is the only man in baseball whose every trip to the plate is seen through the prism of 162 games of wild possibility. His home runs are not allowed to stand alone; they are individual steps on the way to somewhere else. He does not want this, and yet he can't escape it. In a world that rewards size and strength above all else, McGwire is the biggest and strongest of them all. In a game that regards its numbers and records as religious symbols, he is expected to topple the holiest. He hits them farther and higher and with more awe-inspiring authority than anybody -- maybe anybody ever. It is his gift and his burden.

McGwire hit 58 homers last season, the most since Roger Maris hit 61 in 1961. So now the world awaits, anxiously. This is the year, right? It has to be. This year, there's all that expansion pitching just waiting to groove a fastball or leave a flat slider over the heart of the plate. Kids who should be in Double-A, old-timers who should be playing golf. There have to be at least four more homers in the middle of somebody's bullpen or in the arms of a few of the National League's dismal No. 5 starters. Four more can't be too much to ask. All that time in the weight room, all those hours spent refining a swing that Cardinals hitting coach Dave Parker says is shorter than a bat handle and carries more torque than a jet engine. Wasn't it all leading up to this moment? The alignment seems almost cosmic, too perfect to be random.

So why isn't McGwire having fun? You feel the gravity in his words, the relentless seriousness of his demeanor. Why does he see today as a chore, something to endure as a prelude to enduring tomorrow? He has transformed batting practice into a cultural phenomenon. Each of his at-bats is infused with a giddy sense of anticipation. So why does he refer to every day at the ballpark as a "constant struggle"? Why does he describe his daily goal as "to wake up every morning and hope that 10 toes hit the ground"? At the very least, it seems a rather fatalistic credo for an icon.

McGwire has become king without trying, and almost without noticing. He has surpassed all those who yearn for the attention and adulation that has simply dropped, like one of his parabolic homers, directly into his unsuspecting lap. He homered in his first four games of this season, and there was the attention, scratching at his doorstep, panting to get in. The words "on a pace for" seem soldered to his name. The world hangs on his pursuit of Maris, and nothing McGwire says can stifle the anticipation. He tries, Lord knows he tries. He never talks about it unless asked, and even then, he avoids it like a fastball under the chin. He says the talk gives the wrong impression, making it look as if he plays the game for the sake of the home run. He says everyone can come back and talk all they want if he has 50 homers by September. He says -- and these, frankly, are the words of a man desperate to be left alone -- he doesn't even think he's the serious push for 62, then offers up Ken Griffey Jr. as a possibility. He has fought back the only way he knows how, by diminishing his accomplishments and emphasizing the difficulty of the process. But it's no use. Nothing he says works.

In truth, this isn't McGwire's pursuit. It's ours. Maris' 61 has been deemed the next erasable number, the next notch on the evolutionary timeline. It's human nature to seek ways to transcend limits: McGwire is entrusted with the responsibility to show us where we are and also where we can go.

McGwire doesn't quite get this, just as he doesn't quite get much of what comes with being a celebrity in a celebrity-driven culture. He doesn't understand autographs, for one. He signs, assiduously, before and after every game, but he still hasn't grasped the allure of the concept. He much prefers someone approach with a handshake and a smile than a scream and a pen. "If it was me, I'd rather look someone in the eye and tell him I appreciate the way he plays ball," McGwire says. "The whole name-on-a-piece-of-paper thing, I don't know what the fascination is."

Maris chased Babe Ruth, caught him and paid dearly. He was hounded ceaselessly. His hair fell out. He died young. The chase was a big success and a bigger failure. Cardinals manager Tony La Russa says access to McGwire will be limited if the demands become too much. "We'll take care of it," La Russa says. Cardinals players speak in idolatrous tones about McGwire, and La Russa says those teammates will turn themselves into human shields if the need arises. "McGwire is a good man," says Willie McGee. "He's a superstar who treats everybody with respect. That's what impresses me."

McGwire's relationship with the media -- and media pressure is perceived to be the most cumbersome obstacle to a 62-homer season -- consists of an awkward, unfulfilling shadow dance, with both sides knowing exactly what's coming. It generally happens before the first game of a series, when the writers and cameras and hairdos elbow their way for a prime spot to hear McGwire's wholly unsurprising comments. In San Francisco, the questions and answers die a slow, agonizing death, with McGwire -- who spent the first dozen years of his career in the Bay Area as an Athletic -- finally shrugging his shoulders: "You guys know me, so you probably know I'm not going to say much." Afterward, alone by his locker, he says, "I'm stuck. I don't know what to say. There truly is nothing to talk about. I honestly have no answers."

He leaves for the field, his sanctum sanctorum, to do some stretching before batting practice. As the stretching breaks up, a man wearing a media pass approaches with a tailor's tape measure. "Mark, can I measure your biceps?" the smiling man asks. McGwire, as stunned as someone who has seen everything can possibly be, tries hard to remain polite while simultaneously making the answer clear. It is no. Moreover, the question speaks of a larger ignorance. Everyone knows the answer is 20 inches.

***

Gary Gaetti is watching batting practice for maybe the millionth time in his career, only this time with a little-boy grin creasing his face. He is walking behind third base at Coors Field, holding a ball in his right hand. His eyes are pointed toward the purplish-gray sky, and he -- along with everyone else -- is watching McGwire make the stadium's vast green expanse look like a putting green. McGwire hits one just right, and Gaetti lets out an involuntary, guttural laugh. The ball begins to disappear into the day's fading light, and something happens to Gaetti. Some cellular shift causes him to skip toward left field, as if pulled there by the force of the baseball. Everyone in the building is standing and watching as the ball -- by now a three-dollar cab ride from home plate -- heads straight for a concession stand behind the leftfield bleachers. And Gaetti is skipping and laughing and screaming, "Grille Works! Grille Works! Look out, Grille Works!" at the top of his lungs.

Such is the power of Mark McGwire. Even if he isn't infected with the home run virus, he is the world's best carrier. Whenever he has a bat in his hands, regardless of how he is feeling, there is collateral joy. "He pumps me up," Gaetti says. "After 16 years in the big leagues, I've seen quite a lot of stuff, but I can't say I've ever seen anything quite as impressive as how high and far Mac hits the ball. And the thing is, I don't think we've seen the longest. I think it's still out there. This guy is the modern-day Babe Ruth."

The Ruth comparisons have a statistical as well as aesthetic relevance: Ruth and McGwire are the only players with consecutive 50-homer seasons. McGwire's ratio of one home run for every 11.9 at-bats is second only to Ruth's 11.8. Calculated over the past three years, McGwire's ratio is a ridiculous one dinger every 8.6 at-bats. This year, after starting the season with 387, he becomes the 26th member of the 400 Homers Club.

Like Ruth, McGwire has a disarming presence. He is revered in St. Louis, where line drives to the alleys had been a fixture of the landscape for so long. McGwire's majestic homers are now a perfect match for that other fixture, the Gateway Arch. "Any great baseball town would love McGwire," La Russa says. "But people in St. Louis really take to good people. Once they found out Mark had a human side, it was all over."

Outside of St. Louis, McGwire is treated like a one-man Mardi Gras. He received a standing ovation for a BP session in Wrigley Field. When he hit a home run in Montreal in late April, one of the notoriously small and distracted Olympic Stadium crowds stood and cheered. In Denver, epicenter of home run culture, the crowd was so loud during McGwire's turn in the cage that it managed the impossible: It overwhelmed the cochlea-rattling pregame music.

McGwire's at-bats stand apart from the rest of the game, becoming micro-dramas within the larger spectacle. McElroy, the Rockies' lefthanded reliever, recently faced McGwire in the eighth inning of a close game with one out and two runners on base, and committed a usually catastrophic pitcher's mistake -- he grooved a thigh-high fastball over the middle of the plate. This time, though, McGwire topped a bouncer to short for an inning-ending double play. McElroy hopped off the mound with a look of abject surprise on his face, then ran to the dugout as fast as he could. He appeared to be trying to get off the field before someone could tell him it was all a dream. "You don't want to leave one out over the plate," McElroy said. "If he hits it back up the middle, you might never get back up. I'll tell you what: After I got that out, I could not have signed an autograph. My hand was shaking too much to hold a pen."

This isn't the kind of praise that flows freely from athlete to athlete. The usual blandishments are grudging and platitudinous, more dutiful and less wide-eyed. McGwire cuts through that. Dave Parker and Hall of Famer Willie Stargell, teammates on the Pirates' 1979 world champion Lumber Company, stood and watched McGwire take batting practice this spring before an exhibition game. After a few minutes of humbled silence, Stargell said, "You know what, Dave? People used to think we beat on that ball, but this McGwire -- he really beats on that ball." (It was once said of Stargell that his 475 career homers traveled farther than Hank Aaron's 755.)

The monstrous homers, the batting-practice displays and the Ruth comparisons apply a god-like veneer to McGwire's persona. He can't simply be a guy with insecurities and vulnerabilities, a divorced father who longs to see his 10-year-old son Matthew more than is currently possible. He can't be someone who worked hard to get where he is and then worked harder to stay there. He can't be someone who missed 250 games over a two-year span ('93-94) and cried because it was the first time since he was a little boy that he was deprived of playing ball. He can't be the emotional wreck who made a lonely, endless walk from his locker to La Russa's office before the final game of the A's 1991 season to ask out of the lineup as a means of preserving his anemic .201 average. "I'm scared to death," McGwire told La Russa. "I don't want to hit below .200. I don't think I could handle it." La Russa complied -- he was, in fact, thinking along the same lines -- and after the season, McGwire began seeing a therapist. It's a practice he continues to this day.

"The counseling started out as a personal thing, but before long it was everything -- personal, professional, dealing with the media, dealing with fans, dealing with life," he says. "I got my mind straight, and everything followed."

McGwire's performance in St. Louis provides a window to his contentment. Is it possible for a town to embrace an athlete and see tangible returns? Renovations have made Busch Stadium less cavernous, but that doesn't begin to explain McGwire's home production. Eight of his first 10 homers were hit in St. Louis. Through his first 24 games this season, his batting average was more than 100 points higher at home. A question arises: Does it all come together -- the adulation, the familiarity of La Russa (his manager in 11 of his 12 major league seasons), the modest media pressure of a one-newspaper town -- to create an atmosphere barometrically tuned for a run at Maris? "I think Mark enjoys the place he's in right now," says Gaetti. "In baseball, in St. Louis, in his personal life."

Aside from their ability to hit a baseball and excite a crowd, there may not be two more dissimilar people in history than McGwire and Ruth. McGwire is meticulous about conditioning -- no steroids, he says, just serious weightlifting and serious family genes. (When the four McGwire brothers get together, they look like WWF refugees.) The Babe never credited therapy for getting him out of a slump. The Babe never cried at a press conference while pledging a huge sum of money to fight child abuse. And chances are, the Babe never walked through the clubhouse before a game holding an electric razor, looking for someone to shave the back of his neck. "I understand the fascination with the home runs -- I really do," McGwire says. "But I've always said I'm just a guy like anyone else. I always tell people, 'Sure, we're role models, but we're not gods.' You find heroes in your home."

Says longtime Cardinals traveling secretary C.J. Cherre: "You do something for the guy and every time it's, 'Thank you very much.' People always ask me, 'Is he really that way?' They expect me to reveal some dark secret, but I sure haven't seen one."

Know this about Mark McGwire: He loves baseball. When he gets home from a game, he flicks on the TV to see if he can catch a West Coast game before bed. He watches for all the right reasons -- studying pitchers and the tendencies of their managers -- but mostly he watches for a far simpler reason: He loves it. Loves it as much as he did back in 1985, his first full professional season, when he was stationed in Modesto, a California League town about an hour's drive from Oakland. Current and former A's officials remember looking up into the stands during afternoon games and seeing their prized prospect sitting there, his feet on the seat in front of him, watching batting practice. He didn't call ahead for tickets or demand a preferred-lot parking pass. He drove to the park and stood in line. "I couldn't think of anything I'd rather be doing," McGwire says now. "Still can't."

When the A's drafted McGwire out of USC, scouting director Dick Wincek told his employers they were looking at someone who could be one of the great home run hitters of all time. After McGwire's phenomenal college career -- the very thought of him wielding an aluminum bat now could work as a premise for a gruesome horror flick -- it didn't sound like a ridiculous leap of faith. One of the people who never gave it a thought, though, was McGwire himself. He hit 49 homers his rookie season, and reporters who covered the team still laugh at his naiveté. Early in the season, McGwire hit five homers in a three-game series at Tiger Stadium. After the second game, several reporters quietly gathered around McGwire's locker while he dressed with his back to them. Startled, McGwire spun around as if expecting to be handcuffed and taken away. "What's going on?" he asked. "You guys all want to talk to me?"

McGwire is a private man, maybe as close as you'll find to a DiMaggio in this day of information overload, but at the same time, he has proven himself to be more openly human than most high-visibility athletes. At the press conference announcing his three-year, $28.5 million contract with the Cardinals, he pledged $1 million per year over the length of the contract to begin a foundation to aid abused children. This was a totally unscripted moment, and McGwire broke down, crying for more than 30 seconds before regaining his composure. Through a female friend in Southern California, he had met victims and survivors, and their stories and faces rushed past him as he stood at the podium. "I didn't know I had that in me," he says. "It just all came out. I don't regret any of it." There was a remarkable outpouring of support for McGwire, and the response itself was remarkable in the context of our skeptical age. He says, "The money we make in baseball is so ridiculous, how can you not do something like that? When you do it, you think, What a great feeling." Mark's brothers received phone calls saying, "I think it was great what Mark did, but I'm sorry to hear your brother was abused." McGwire laughs at the recollection and says, "If there was one thing I'd change, it would be that. I would have made it clear that my parents were wonderful and that I wasn't abused. But those emotions weren't planned."

In fact, none of this icon stuff was planned. McGwire was every suburban kid of the '70s who pined for the girl with the feathered hair and listened to AC/DC in the parking lot before football practice. He grew up in the L.A. suburb of Claremont, and the rules were simple: You played the sport in season, but you lived for baseball. Baseball was king. Basketball was pre-Bird, pre-Magic and mostly tape-delayed. Football was fun on game days but too much hassle the rest of the week. Baseball was Reggie and Goose, Bench and Morgan, Fisk waving one fair. You dreamed of driving one deep against Tiant or Seaver. Maybe you even allowed yourself the indulgence of standing at home plate and watching a few of them sail away.

But McGwire didn't have those dreams. He wanted to be a policeman or a fireman. He was like a page out of the Boy Scout handbook. He would play a game and then look forward to the next one. "I can honestly say I never once remember a conversation where any of us said, 'Yeah, I want to be a professional athlete,' " he says. "I mean, how could you?"

We leave McGwire standing in the on-deck circle, awaiting the moment when he will step to the plate and the unmistakable sound waves of anticipation will modulate concentrically from the crowd. It could be anywhere, any town, any ballpark, any day. The on-deck circle is an appropriate place to observe McGwire, since everything in his life has taken on a certain on-deck quality. We await his next at-bat, his next homer, his next string of jaw-dropping blasts. As he waits his turn, he looks out at the mound, waving the bat underneath him, squinting and examining. There are no casual looks into the stands, no frivolous movements. He stares at the pitcher as if the poor guy owes him money. He is enduring, going about his constant daily struggle, feeling his 10 toes as they lie solidly on the ground. He is searching for any sign of weakness, attempting to gain even the slightest edge that might help him get to a place he can't be sure he wants to go.

This article appeared in the May 18, 1998 issue of ESPN The Magazine.