Saturday, October 3, 1998

Mark and Sammy help keep 2 friends together

By Lauren R. Stanley

Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- Thank you, Mark McGwire, for all the memories, for the highlights, for the magnificent 70 home runs hit in one glorious baseball season.

Thank you, Sammy Sosa, for all the memories, for the grace and the humor, for your magnificent 66 home runs hit in one glorious baseball season.

Thank you, Mark and Sammy, for making baseball magical again (especially as I watched my beloved Baltimore Orioles tumble from oh-so-high to oh-so-low).

But most of all, thank you, Sammy and Mark, for keeping together my wonderful relationship with a 13-year-old boy who lives three states away.

It's because of the home-run chase that Bart, my teen-age buddy, and I have talked to each other almost every night since McGwire hit No. 50 on Aug. 20. In fact, I've tracked the chase by waiting for phone calls from Bart.

If he called, McGwire or Sosa had hit a home run.

If Bart didn't call, there were no long balls that night.

A simple way of tracking the chase, and a simple way of keeping a relationship intact.

Bart is the son of my best friend in seminary. For three years, he and his mother and I spent time together, played together, studied together, ate together, went to movies together and, most of all, were friends together.

When I first met Bart, he was 10 years old and a foot shorter than me. Now he's 13, is already 2 inches taller than me and has begun shaving.

While he and his mother lived in Virginia, we three were inseparable buddies.

In June, all that changed.

Because his mother graduated from seminary and was ordained and moved to Albany, Ga., to begin her life as an ordained deacon of the Episcopal Church.

Their leave-taking was painful.

It's a 10- or 12-hour drive from Alexandria to Albany, a two-hour drive after a one-and-a-half hour flight to Atlanta. That's a long way when you're trying to keep a relationship going with a teen-ager.

We pledged to visit each other, me first in August.

But we worried, secretly, in our hearts, that the move would change our relationship in ways none of us wanted to contemplate.

Distance may make the heart grow fonder, but it also makes it harder to keep in touch -- wholeheartedly -- with a teen-ager who's growing more interested in girls and sports and music and church and his studies.

So I worried a bit, and made phone calls and even learned to e-mail him messages.

But then, of course, McGwire and Sosa began belting out homers like there was no tomorrow, and the chase became front-page news, and the phone started ringing.

"Hello," I would answer.

"Hey," he would say.

(No, "Hi, Lauren, it's me, Bart. How are you? What are you doing?" Just, "Hey.")

"Did he hit one?" I'd ask. (No, "Hey, Bart, how are you? How's Mom?" And no, "he" was never identified. We really didn't care whether it was McGwire or Sosa hitting one out -- just that one more homer was hit, pulling either of the men closer to the magical, mystical Maris record.)

And then I would get the play-by-play, the recounting of each inning, and each pitch thrown, and where McGwire or Sosa hit the ball, and how many men were on base, and oh, yeah, the score's now ...

After a while, I realized that not only did I not have to stay glued to the TV to keep up on the news, I didn't want to.

Because I really preferred talking to Bart -- and letting Bart be the one who brought me up to date.

Every once in a while, during the course of a call, I would ask to speak to Bart's mother. But only every once in a while. For she and I have a different relationship, not based on baseball, and these calls, very clearly, were reserved for baseball.

"Who are you calling?" she used to ask Bart early on in the phone-call marathon.

"Lauren," Bart would reply. "I have to tell her about Mark's (or Sammy's) home run."

"Don't I get to talk to her?" she'd ask.

"No."

So the phone bill climbed, and all of my neighbors learned that through Bart, they, too, could track the race, and a relationship built on love flourished and deepened.

Thank you, Mark McGwire. Thank you, Sammy Sosa.

Not only did you achieve mythical heights in baseball.

You also helped keep together two people who love each other very much.

Isn't baseball wonderful?

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(The Rev. Lauren R. Stanley is a priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia. Readers may write to her care of Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, 790 National Press Building, Washington, D.C., 20045.)

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(c) 1998, Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.