The slugger comes up (very) big.

We Have a Winner in the Arms Race

By Rick Horowitz

It's unfair -- that's what it is. He's not playing by the rules.

And boy, it's impressive.

Pretty much a daily event lately, isn't it? The St. Louis Cardinals play a baseball game, and Mark McGwire launches a baseball (unless it's two baseballs) into the stratosphere. The splashdown comes 400, even 500 feet away -- we're talking monstrous. The flashbulbs flash and the fans go crazy as he circles the bases yet again.

Roger Maris? Babe Ruth? Pretenders! Sammy Sosa? A prince of a guy -- but right here right now, McGwire's the one.

That's not the impressive part.

When McGwire's finished with his nightly blast, he sits down and talks about it! Just showers and changes and plops himself down in front of a cluster of microphones and a forest of cameras to tell the world how he's feeling about things.

You'd figure -- setting history on its ear, I mean, and pounding legends into dust -- you'd figure he might beg off from the extra pressure of postgame self-analysis to concentrate on the task at hand. But no -- he's right out there, in front of the world, and he's friendly and funny and he seems to be having a fine old time.

That's not the impressive part either.

Here's the impressive part: He's wearing a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. That's also the unfair part.

His arms are showing. Have you seen those things?!

The first time I saw Mark McGwire's arms, I thought there was something wrong with my television. There was McGwire's head, large but recognizably a head, under a baseball cap. There was McGwire's chest, larger than his head but still recognizably a chest, straining at his shirtfront as he sat for his chat with the media.

But what were these mammoth patches of pale filling the rest of the screen? What were these vast territories of something-or-other extending east and west of McGwire's neck? It took me a minute, but then I figured it out: These were Mark McGwire's shoulders, and below Mark McGwire's shoulders, Mark McGwire's arms.

They were enormous. These weren't arms -- they were telephone poles with elbows!

I knew he was large. Even with his uniform on, even with the relevant body parts mostly covered during a game, he was obviously bigger than most humans, and several kinds of farm equipment. But it was only when he dressed down, when he let it all hang out after the game, that the full extent of his full extent became clear to me.

Unfair. Totally unfair.

I'm not talking about the various substances -- all perfectly legal, apparently, in Baseball World -- McGwire wolfs down to help him bulk up; we'll have plenty of time in the off-season for the great debate about performance enhancers.

I'm talking about the intimidation factor. Did Yogi Berra really say that 90 percent of baseball is half mental? Who cares whether he said it? Everybody knows that a positive attitude counts for plenty in sports.

So tell me: How many pitchers, watching the nightly highlight clips and happening to catch a close-up glimpse of those arms, are going to be brimming with confidence the next time they have to take the mound against the man who's attached to them?

First he clobbers their psyches, then he clobbers their fastballs.

Unfair.

Posted 9/4/98. Fresh stuff right here twice weekly!

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