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	McGuire and Sosa? They are so last year. This season, keep your eye on the men on the mound. They're the dey to any team's success. Ah, the beauty of baseball. They play 2,430 regular-season games in the Major Leagues, in nice weather, mostly outside and with no clock. Abominations such as the three-point basket and the MLS shootout are nowhere to be found. (Yes, Astroturf and the designated hitter are abominations, but one league doesn't have the DH and most new ballparks don't have turf.) This game has no lockouts (at least none this year), and, of course, the whole season is on television; see "Into Extra Innings" on page 14 for how you can watch just about all of it. And if you're the kind of fan who likes balls flying all over the place--and listening to Kenny Mayne yell, "Yahtzee!!!" every night on SportsCenter--then you're really in clover. Folks, we're living in the High Noon of the Home Run. Consider this: • Last year, the stars of the Show hit more dingers--5,064 of them--than in any single season before. • Five of the top 16 sluggers of all time, based on career percentage, are active players. Sammy Sosa is not one of them. • Four guys hit at least 50 round-trippers last year--a record. • The "old" record for homers in a season by one team used to be 240, by the 1961 Yankees. Since the lockout/strike ended in 1995, that mark has been eclipsed three times, with the Orioles' 257 in 1996 being the current mark. • Once upon a time, a "slugger" was a guy who hit 25 HRs and drove in 100 runs. Last year, 19 guys in the AL and 17 guys in the NL turned that trick, guys with names like Shawn Green, Jason Giambi, Matt Stairs, Jeff Kent and Javy Lopez. Still, we predict 1999 will be the Year of the Pitcher. Because anybody who can get these guys out automatically becomes the most important player on the field. And, as history bears out, the teams with the best earned-run averages (the one pitching stat that really matters) are the teams with the best chances to extend their seasons into October (see "How They Fared," page 15). In short, good pitching is always a key to any divisional race; this year it may be even more important. The first $100 million man in baseball history is a pitcher, Kevin Brown, who signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers over the winter for $105 million over seven seasons. His signing, along with Randy Johnson's arrival in Arizona (for a mere $52.4 million over four seasons), has turned the National League West race on its ear. Let's get this out of the way right now: Brown is overpaid, way overpaid. He will be 34 years old on opening day, and in the last 20 years, only one guy who didn't throw the knuckleball has been able to average 15 wins a year after age 34 (Steve Carlton). Yes, Brown got the Marlins into the '97 Series and the Padres into the '98 one. He may even pitch the Dodgers into this year's, but he's no Carlton. Brown has had just one 20-win season in his career: 21-11 for the 1992 Texas Rangers. Brown becomes the ace of a Dodgers staff that also includes Carlos Perez, Chan Ho Park, Ismael Valdes and Ramon Martinez. These guys have 371 Major League wins combined, and last year--while Brown was still down the freeway in San Diego--they posted an ERA of 3.81, the fifth-best in baseball. Even if the Dodgers didn't have Gary Sheffield, Eric Karros, Raul Mondesi and speedster Eric Young in the everyday lineup, they would be favored to win the division. Johnson's joining the Diamondbacks doesn't change that assessment, either. Yes, the Big Unit went 10-1 with a 1.28 ERA in his two months with the Astros last season; yes, overall he racked up an extraordinary 329 strikeouts in 244 1/3 IP (that's an astonishing 12.1 K's per nine innings); and yes, he's the bellwether of Baseball's Most Improved Rotation (Todd Stottlemyre, Armando Reynoso, Andy Benes and Omar Daal have won 307 games among them). But...all these guys pitch for the weak-hitting Diamondbacks, a team that in '98 led the Majors in most times striking out and getting shut out and finished with the lowest team batting average. Steve Finley, the only decent free-agent bat they were able to sign, will help, but Finley is not exactly Babe Ruth. The best staff in the National League still toils in Atlanta. Three of the seven winningest pitchers in the 1990s (see "The Magnificent Seven," page 16)--Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz--work here. Together, they've won seven NL Cy Young Awards. With Kevin Millwood (17-8 in '98) set as the fourth starter and Kerry Ligtenberg (30 saves as a rookie in '98) established as the closer, Atlanta has more than enough pitching to romp home in the NL East. The biggest rap against the Braves' offense is their reliance on the long ball; new hitting coach Don Baylor is making that his first priority. The weeping and gnashing of teeth you're hearing comes from over in the NL Central, where the Houston Astros lost Randy Johnson to free agency and then were beaten to the punch on Roger Clemens' services by George Steinbrenner. That leaves unheralded but underrated Shane Reynolds, Jose Lima, Sean Bergman and Mike Hampton (a combined 58-32 in '98) to hold the fort against the likes of the Cubs' Kerry Wood, last year's NL Rookie Pitcher of the Year, and Cincinnati's Danny Neagle. In the last three years, only two pitchers­Smoltz and the Yankees' Andy Pettite­have won more games than Neagle, but the Braves are so deep, they could afford to trade him. Actually, they couldn't afford not to. In exchange, Atlanta got an All-Star quality position player, Bret Boone, who not only led the Reds in HRs (24) and RBIs (95) in 1998, but also led all NL second basemen in fielding­for the fourth year in a row, the only time in history a player has done that. Over in the American League, the World Champion New York Yankees were odds-on favorites to win the East all winter. On the first day of spring training, they became odds-on favorites to conquer the universe when they acquired Roger Clemens from the Blue Jays. Last year, five of New York's starters won 10 games or more (the first time a Yanks team had managed that since 1942), and this year, they'll have a full season of Orlando Hernandez ("El Duque" to you and me) to complement David Cone, Ramiro Mendoza, Hideki Irabu, Pettitte and Clemens, the AL pitching triple crown champion (winning percentage, ERA, strikeouts) two years running. Clemens has a record five AL Cy Young Awards, including the last two, and Cone has the one he won for Kansas City in 1994, but no Yankee has won the Cy Young since Ron Guidry in 1978. That should give this gang something to shoot for. We've christened '99 the Year of the Pitcher; notice we aren't calling it "The Year of Pitching." The National League hit .262 last season, the AL .271, and the ERAs reflected that: 4.24 for the Senior Circuit, a Colorado Rockies-like 4.66 for the AL. Still, it is safe to say that in many ways, pitching at the end of the 20th century is better than it has ever been. One hundred years ago--even 50 years ago--most pitchers threw two kinds of pitches, and no one ever threw a breaking ball with the count at 2-0. Nowadays, everybody, even Brian Anderson and Pedro Astacio, has a splitter or a slider he'll throw even on 3-0. (Anderson and Astacio are singled out here because each gave up 39 HRs in the NL last season--and none of those 78 dingers were hit by McGwire or Sosa. Go figure.) Certainly one indication that pitching isn't on total life support is no-hitters. In the nine seasons of the 1990s, there have been 13 no-nos pitched in the NL and 15 in the AL, including David Wells' perfect game last year. That's twice the number pitched in the 1980s (six in the NL, seven in the AL) and on a par with the number hurled in the 1970s (16 in the NL, 15 in the AL). Indeed, the 15 no-hitters pitched in the junior circuit already this decade is the most since the teens, when AL hurlers threw 17. (The high-water decade for no-hitters in one league remains the 1960s, when NL hurlers spun out 22--four of them by Sandy Koufax.) The other huge factor is strikeouts. The old record for single-season K's by a staff--1,221 by the 1969 Astros--has also been bettered three times, twice by the Braves, who set the new mark (1,245) in '96. Last year, the Braves, Padres and Cubs all whiffed more than 1,200 batters. The Phillies' Curt Schilling fanned 300 batters for the second straight season--a feat last done in the NL by J.R. Richard of the 1978-79 Astros. The tireless Schilling also pitched 15 complete games in '98--most in the NL in a decade, and more than any other entire staff, except the Braves' and Dodgers.' As the '99 season gets under way this month, the pole shots and the strikeouts will probably continue to multiply. But inside all this mayhem, there will certainly be matchups to delight the purists--matchups like the pair Schilling and Maddux had last year (both decisions going to the Phils), including the game on April 5, when Schilling went the route, yielding five hits and punching out 15 Braves. Kevin Brown head-to-head with Randy Johnson, Johnson vs. Maddux, Glavine or Smoltz ...these are the kind of games that buck the trend in Major League Baseball, but they're the ones we can't wait for. Art Durbano is a contributing editor to Satellite DIRECT. Back | Next | DSS Daily News | DSS Plus | Net TV | DSS FAQS Customer Service | Subscribe | Press Releases | Contact Us | Hotlinks | Homepage ©1999 CommTek Communications Corporation - All Rights Reserved. Copyright and legal disclaimer DIRECTV is a registered trademark of DIRECTV, Inc., a unit of Hughes Electronics.