First, get your local baseball hero to chase Roger Maris’s home-run record. Second, make the most of it, as did the St. Louis Post-Dispatch with St. Louis Cardinal Mark McGwire. Then, print a lot of extra copies. The Post-Dispatch tripled its press run to 900,000 on September 9, the day after McGwire hit his sixty-second, and also sold half a million extra copies. So many fans lined up outside the paper’s lobby (see photo) that managers installed a pair of portable toilets. The paper sold another 900,000 copies when McGwire finished off his season at seventy, and nearly ran out of ink. An instant book on McGwire’s triumph is set for publication this fall, to be produced jointly by the Post-Dispatch and The Sporting News. Then everyone can rest, including sports columnist Bernie Miklasz. "I’m worn down physically and I’m worn down mentally," he said in mid-September. "I’ve had six or seven columns a week and only one true day off in two months. At some point you just run out of adjectives." In Chicago, where Cub Sammy Sosa was challenging McGwire for much of the season, the Tribune increased sales by 32 percent right after he hit his sixty-second.

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