Word: larussa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa says he's never known a ballplayer so able to keep his eye on the task. "He has this technique that allows him to totally tune out distractions," says LaRussa, who has been McGwire's manager, in Oakland and in St. Louis, for all but 18 months of the player's 12-year career. "And he did this with the whole world watching." Fifteen minutes or so before game time, "Mark would withdraw from the clubhouse horseplay and stare into his locker. You'd see him, and you'd know he was spacing...
...McGwire at-bat would be accompanied by the gaudy detonation of thousands of flash cameras. "It was blinding," says McKay. "I asked him if it bothered him, and he said, 'I don't see them.'" He didn't see what was on the periphery of his concentration because, says LaRussa, "he knew where he was going." This made it easy for the manager, whose only contribution to McGwire's record, he confesses was "making sure he knew what time the game started...
...wool pants, his game scowl gone, he doesn't look like that robot. He looks almost unintimidating, like the metarational man he's become. "The one thing I've learned is the mind controls everything," he says. "Your mind can throw the attention off to the side." Tony LaRussa, his manager at both the A's and the Cardinals, says McGwire has a unique ability to "control his emotions, to stifle them." His best friend on the team, catcher Tom Lampkin, says McGwire "has such control on the mental side. He doesn't let things stew inside him. He puts...
...seemed that everyone in the world with the last name of Maris had to put his or her life on hold to sit in Busch Stadium. "He put more pressure on himself that day than any other time I've seen him," Tony LaRussa, who has managed McGwire almost all his career, told TIME. "There are certain things you can't force. You just do the best you can, and it happens or it doesn't happen. I think he was going to try to force a home run that day." He was. McGwire choked during batting practice, overswinging...
...McGwire over Griffey is racial. "I think you can answer that question yourself," was as close as Ray Lankford was going to come. "I don't think it has anything to do with black-white, and it irritates the hell out of me when I hear it," says LaRussa. Maybe the real reason the fans dig Big Mac is because he's built like a home-run hitter of old. In fact, old home-run hitters didn't look as much like McGwire as they should have. McGwire is who we imagine Babe Ruth to be; he's like...