I hate to be a spoilsport, everyone, but numbers don't lie. Ken Griffey Jr. and Sammy Sosa are not going to break Roger Maris' home run record this year.
Mark McGwire? I think he has an excellent chance.
Today (August 4) Griffey has 41 homers in 111 games, Sosa has 42 in 113 games, and McGwire has 45 in 111 games. The newspaper says that McGwire is on a 66-homer pace, Griffey a 60-homer pace, and Sosa a 61-homer pace.
More important to me, however, is this question: what pace do they need to maintain for the rest of the season to pass Maris' record?
Look at it this way. Griffey is behind right now, so he needs to hit them at a faster pace for the rest of the season. He needs 21 more homers in 51 games. This means that Griffey needs to finish the last 51 games at a 66.7-homer clip to get himself up to 62. Sosa is slightly behind also; he needs 20 dingers in his remaining 49 games, so he needs to poke them out at a 66.1-homer pace.
Can they do it? Maybe, but who has ever maintained a 66-homer pace for any length of time in the history of baseball? It's one whale of a tall order to do it for a third of the season.
McGwire, on the other hand, is ahead of the record, and can afford to fall off a little. He needs to hit homers at a 54-homer pace (17 in 51 games) for the rest of the year. Can he do it? Of course; he hit 52 in 1996 and 58 last year, didn't he? He's hit at a 55-homer pace for two whole years!
I also peeked at the remaining schedule. McGwire has to face the Braves again for four games, but he also will see such bad pitching staffs as Florida (5 games), Cincinnati (5 games) and Pittsburgh (9 games). Throw in Milwaukee and Montreal along with two more games at Wrigley Field and McGwire can have a feast. All he has to do is hit one every three games.
I wrote an article about Tony Gwynn last year, and the lesson there applies here also. In order to hit .400 or hit 62 home runs, you have to start out fast and fall back, instead of trying to catch it from behind. Gwynn always says that if he can go into September hitting .380, he'll have a shot at .400. He's dead wrong. He can't do it, because he'll need to hit .490 in September! Ted Williams was hitting .411 in mid-August 1941, and left himself enough room to fall back to his final .406 average.
Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth's record the right way. Maris had 51 homers at the end of August 1961, and only needed 10 more in September (and October 1) to reach 61. McGwire can stand a little fall-off from fatigue, heat, or slumps and stilll break the record. In fact, I think he'll do it.