Deep affection

Sporting News, The, Sept 20, 1999 by Dave Kindred

Two weeks before he was to get married, minor league baseball player Chuck Antczak heard from his girl that she'd changed her mind. She had her reasons. He'd be gone on all those road trips, riding buses to scruffy places, and for what? If you put a pencil to the hours and the money, it came out to maybe $5 an hour to play baseball.

"So she gave me the ol' boot," the poor guy said.

The way these things happen, when it rains, it pours. He lost the girl and lost the job, too. That was in 1997. He was out of baseball for the first time since he was 6. Never a phenom, a good college pitcher/outfielder, he hung on in pro ball as a backup catcher. There's no glory in that dust, except for this: It kept the dream alive.

"And when I got back in the game in '98," Antczak said, "I promised myself I was going to have fun."

Which brings us to Chuck Antczak's 77 home runs this summer. He hit them for the Clearwater Phillies of the Class A Florida State League. Unless you're a reader of the little stories in newspaper sports sections, you may not know about the 77 homers. That's because he hit them all in batting practice. In real games, he hit none.

"If the single hardest thing in sports is hitting a baseball, the single hardest thing to do when you hit a baseball is to hit it out of the ballpark," Antczak said. And who would know that better than a guy who hits 77 dingers at 5 o'clock but can't go yard even once when real pitchers start throwing curves?

We introduce Chuck Antczak as preamble to one more examination of the mighty work being done by Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. In this summer of Taters Tremendous, they again have made this hard thing look easy.

Baseball purists, traditionalists and other grouches, go ahead, say what you will. Say the ball is juiced. Say it must be juiced if two men hit more than 60 home runs in successive years when not even one man did that in a century and more. Say the players are juiced. Say ballparks are smaller and that second-class pitchers are squeezed into a postal-slot strike zone. Say all that, and, yes, you may be on to something.

Baseballs are winding up in the next time zone. Cal Ripken Jr.'s 400th home run broke a fan's nose. Greg Vaughn sent Waveland Avenue residents into the basement seeking shelter. The Reds became Murderers Row reborn. Steve Finley hit three in a day. STEVE FINLEY!

Still, if major league baseball created a ticket-selling conspiracy to make everyone a power hitter, wouldn't there be a stampede to 60 home runs? There isn't. Only two men are on this march. In fact, Sosa and McGwire are so good at what they do that they have separated themselves not only from today's pack but from history.

If they were to hit 60 apiece this year, they'd have 256 in successive seasons. That's 47 more than the next-best ever by two men in the same league, the 209 of Ken Griffey Jr. and Juan Gonzalez ('97-98). It's also 62 more than Mickey Mantle-Roger Maris ('60-61), and 68 ahead of Babe Ruth-Lou Gehrig ('27-28).

Midway through this summer, our hero Chuck Antczak realized he could put up what he calls "McGwire-ish numbers." In his first minor league season (1995), he hit a home run off Jose Jimenez, who pitched one of the big-league's three no-hitters this season. "He had a nasty, just nasty, slider, and when I hit it, guys were saying, 'Man, you're gonna rake.'"

Antczak sighs. "Five years later, that's still my only professional home run."

But a boy can have baseball fun a hundred ways. Every time Antczak hit one out in batting practice this summer, he marked a line on his helmet. When the lines added up to 25, he had an idea. Why not go for the record? Why not hit 71?

Clearwater manager Bill Dancy and coaches Darold Knowles and Tony Scott "did their best to hit my bat," Antczak says. "Finally, we got past 61. Who hit 61, Gehrig?" Roger Maris. "Oh, past Maris, past Sosa's 66. But we were running late in the season to get to McGwire, and it got kinda anxious."

To celebrate his 71st BP home run on the last weekend of his team's regular season, Chuck Antczak circled the bases, slapping high-fives with his teammates and coaches. Then he fashioned a trophy to give to the coach, Knowles, who threw the historic pitch. The trophy was a little cardboard box with a ball of adhesive tape perched atop it.

From 71 he flew to 77, which sounds like a good number until you hear Antczak say, "Hey, McGwire's probably got 7,000 BP home runs. What he and Sosa do is unbelievable. Every at-bat they see 90 mph fastballs, nasty sliders, the ball cutting and diving, and they stand there like nothing's going on. They're so special."

At 25, Chuck Antczak has only 200 pro at-bats; he went 3-for-4 in Clearwater's season-ending game, raising his average 73 points to .258 with two doubles and, of course, zero/nada/zilch dingers. Though he no longer thinks of playing in the big leagues, he'd like to make it as a coach. Thus, the grunt work in bush league bullpens.

He's also avoiding marriage for the moment. "My last girlfriend threw me a curveball," he said, "and, Lord knows, I can't hit a curve."