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OpinionSeptember 23, 1998

At church Sunday my minister talked about ANGELS. ... I found it uplifting to focus on something of a positive nature with so many negatives in the media today, so I am going to share with you some positive things I've recently read or viewed. First ... let me applaud the guest appearance of Cape's DAVID LIMBAUGH (who was identified by his profession, lawyer, but could easily be called a Bible scholar) on "HANNITY & COLMES" ... national FOX TV talk show over the weekend...

At church Sunday my minister talked about ANGELS. ... I found it uplifting to focus on something of a positive nature with so many negatives in the media today, so I am going to share with you some positive things I've recently read or viewed.

First ... let me applaud the guest appearance of Cape's DAVID LIMBAUGH (who was identified by his profession, lawyer, but could easily be called a Bible scholar) on "HANNITY & COLMES" ... national FOX TV talk show over the weekend.

David looked relaxed ... was articulate and should get additional invitations as he brought some logic to the program ... as well as being forceful and convincing in his remarks.

* * * * *

How the new Sultan of Swat measures up: In 1927, when my father turned 12, Al Jolson inaugurated the era of sound movies with "The Jazz Singer," Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's "Show Boat" opened on Broadway, Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic nonstop to Paris, the state of Massachusetts executed Sacco and Vanzetti, and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in a single season.

Roger Maris bested the Babe with 61 in 1961, the summer of my 19th birthday, with teammate Mickey Mantle batting just afterward and reaching 54 in one of the two greatest home-run derbies in baseball history. This summer, Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals has already broken 61, and may even reach 70 -- with Sammy Sousa of the Chicago Cubs just behind in the other greatest derby ever. My two sons, both fans in their different ways, will turn 29 and 25.

This magic number, this greatest record in American sports, obsesses us for at least three good reasons. First, baseball has changed no major rule in a century, and we can therefore look and compare, in genuine continuity, across the generations. The seasons of our lives move inexorably forward. As my father saw Ruth, I followed Maris, and my sons watch McGwire. But the game also cycles in glorious sameness, as each winter of discontent yields to another spring of opening day.

Second, baseball records are unmistakably personal accomplishments, while marks in most other team sports can only be judged as peculiar amalgams. Wilt Chamberlain once scored 100 points in a single basketball game, but only because his teammates elected the odd strategy of feeding him on essentially every play. Home runs emerge from a two-man duel, mano-a-mano, batter against pitcher.

Third, and how else can I say this, baseball is just one helluva terrific game, long paramount in American sporting myths and athletic traditions. Babe Ruth put it best when he said, in his famous and moving speech at Yankee Stadium in 1947, that "the only real game in the world, I think, is baseball. ... You've got to start from way down ... when you're six or seven. ... You've got to let it grow up with you."

As a veteran and close student of the 1961 Mantle-Maris derby, I thrill to the detailed similarity of McGwire vs. Sosa. The two Yankees of 1961 embodied different primal myths about great accomplishments: Mantle the deserving hero, working all his life toward his year of destiny; Maris the talented journeyman, enjoying that one sweet interval in each man's life when everything comes together in some oddly miraculous way. (Maris never hit more than 39 home runs in any other season.) That year, the miracle man won -- and shame on his detractors. Fluke or destiny doesn't matter; Roger Maris did the deed.

Sammy Sosa is this year's Maris, rising from who-knows-where to challenge the man of destiny. Mark McGwire is this year's Mantle. Few other players have been so destined, and no one has ever worked harder and more single-mindedly, to harness and fulfill his gifts of brawn. He is the real item, and this is his year. No one, not even Ruth, ever hit more than 50 homers in three successive seasons as McGwire has now done. (But will anyone ever exceed Ruth's feat of hitting more than 40 home runs in all but two years between 1920 and 1932?)

Though we cheer both Sosa and McGwire -- may they each hit at least 70 -- we nonetheless rightly focus on McGwire for the eerie and awesome quality of his particular excellence. Most great records descend in small and even increments from the leader, and no single figure stands leagues ahead of all the other mere mortals. The home-run record used to follow this conventional pattern: Maris with 61, Ruth with 60 and again with 59, Jimmy Foxx, Hank Greenberg and McGwire (last year) with 58, Hack Wilson and Ken Griffey Jr. (also last season) with 56.

However, the achievements of a few champions stand so far above the second-place finisher that they seem to belong to another category altogether. Consider Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak in 1941 (regarded by most sports statisticians, myself included, as the most improbable figure in the history of American athletics), compared with second-place Willie Keeler and Pete Rose, both far away at 44. Or Jim Thorpe's lopsided victories in both the pentathlon and decathlon of the 1912 Olympics. Or, marking a single man's invention of the art of home-run hitting, Babe Ruth's first high figure of 54 in 1920, a number exceeding the sum total for any other entire team in the American League!

McGwire belongs to this most select company of superhuman achievers. He may well hit 70, thus creating the same sweep of empty space that separates DiMaggio and Thorpe from their closest competitors. Moreover, the character of his blasts almost defies belief. Four hundred feet is a long home run; the vast majority of Major League dingers fall between 300 and 400. Well, only 19 of McGwire's first 62 failed to reach 400 feet (including number 62, which was a mere 341 feet), and several have exceeded 500, a figure previously achieved only once every few years.

When faced with such an exceptional accomplishment, we long to discover particular reasons. But no special cause need be sought beyond the good fortune of many effectively random moments grafted upon the guaranteed achievements of the greatest home-run hitter in the history of baseball.

I don't care if the thin air of Colorado encourages home runs. I don't care if the ball is livelier and the strike zone smaller. And I especially don't care if McGwire helps himself train by taking an over-the-counter substance regarded as legal by Major League Baseball. (What cruel nonsense to hold McGwire in any way accountable, simply because we fear that kids may ape him as a role model for an issue entirely outside his call, and within the province of baseball's rulemakers.)

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Mark McGwire has prevailed by creating, in his own person, the ultimate combination of the two great natural forces of luck and effort: the gift on an extraordinary body, with the steadfast dedication to training and study that can only merit the literal meaning of a wonderful word, enthusiasm, the intake of God. -- Stephen Jay Gould in a two-week-old article in The Wall Street Journal

Note: I was in Chicago last week, and McGwire and Sosa are both as popular there as they are here.

* * * * *

In real America, "character" line points upward: Let's forget about Bill and Monica for a minute. (Cheers, wild applause.) Instead, let's talk about something more important: everybody else.

Hovering just above the White House sex scandal is the fear that misbehavior in the Oval Office somehow reflects a breakdown of moral standards generally. If there is immorality at the top, and if the rest of the nation accepts and perhaps even forgives that, will that be a sign that the national character is sliding?

In reality, the rest of us are doing better than these fears suggest. Character is a hard thing to quantify, of course. But William Bennett, the former education secretary and current vociferous Clinton critic, made a valiant effort to do so a few years back. He developed something he called an "index of leading cultural indicators" -- statistical measures designed to show how America is behaving.

Now is a good time to comb through the latest available statistics and update that index. Do the research, and you'll find that on many fronts the American "character" actually appears to have improved during the Clinton years. There still are plenty of flaws, but many trend lines are at least pointing in the right direction.

Consider the key "indicators:"

The epidemic of out-of-wedlock births has abated. After rising steadily through the 1980s, the birth rate for unmarried women has stabilized. From 1994 to 1996, the rate fell 4 percent, to 44.8 births per 1,000 unmarried women. For white women, the rate edged up in 1996; for Hispanics, it edged down. But the rate of births to unmarried black women has dropped significantly and now has reached the lowest level since the government began recording the statistic in 1969.

Teen pregnancies are down as well. Since 1990, the overall teen birth rate in the U.S. has dropped almost 9 percent. Among black teen-age girls, the drop has been far more dramatic, almost 19 percent.

At the same time, the nation's abortion rate has fallen to its lowest level since 1975. In 1995, the latest year for which statistics are available, 1.2 million abortions were performed, or 20 for every 1,000 women of childbearing age, the Centers for Disease Control estimates. That represents a 4.5 percent drop from 1994.

Two-parent families have begun to "stabilize in the 1990s," the Census Bureau says. The percentage of children living in single-parent families doubled from 1970 to 1990, Census Bureau statistics show, but in this decade it has risen only slightly, to 28 percent. In part, the slowdown is occurring because the divorce rate is dropping, to 4.3 per 1,000 people last year, from 4.7 in 1990 and 5.0 in 1985.

Outside the family, there are other good signs. The murder rate fell 9 percent in 1997, the violent-crime rate fell 5 percent. The high school dropout rate also has fallen in the 1990s. It stood at 12.8 percent of the 18 to 24 year-old population in 1996, down from 13.6 percent in 1990.

Though they aren't dramatic, a few signs suggest that our kids are learning more while in school. Average mathematics scores for fourth, eighth and 12th graders rose from 1990 to 1996, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Reading scores are up only slightly, though, and science scores are little changed.

And because of the welfare overhaul, the percentage of the American population on welfare is dropping, to 3.1 percent this year from 4.7 percent in 1996 ... . -- Gerald F. Seib, Capital Journal

~Gary Rust is president of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers.

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