It’s late August 1998, and what kind of a sports world is it? It’s one in which an individual obsession–ours, not the athletes’–is the leading topic in sport. Totally secondary to the issue of winning and losing baseball games is the matter of whether Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa or Ken Griffey Jr. hits another home run and thus comes closer to catching Roger Maris. It is, I suspect, much more of an American character trait to care about personal records of any kind than it is elsewhere. This interest speaks to the nature of the game, of course. It is yet another example of how baseball will always dwarf our other major team sports as a conversational topic. No other sport can be so readily dissected into manageable conversational parts. Batting is one fascinating topic. Pitching and defense have their own endless areas of discussion.
