It has been a memorable baseball season -- and that may be what is needed to bring the "national pastime" back into its customary limelight. But the effects go beyond statistics, maybe even beyond sports, especially for those inclined to scoff at the game. PNS commentator Ri'Chard Magee is on the staff of YO! (Youth Outlook), a newspaper by and about Bay Area youth produced by Pacific News Service.

A basketball and football-loving generation has been drawn back to baseball by the spectacle of a white man and a black man striving together to achieve the same goal. That Mark McGwire hit more home runs than Sammy Sosa mattered less, in the end, than that both broke the 37-year-old-record, and celebrated each other's win.

I've always found baseball a rather mundane sport to watch. And when it comes to playing, my generation chooses more energetic sports such as basketball or football. Until this year, at least, we didn't talk about baseball, we didn't watch it, we didn't live it. Our only connection with baseball has been the Major League Baseball gear we wear.

Lamont Hubbard, a 20-year-old Bay Area native, sums up the dominant attitude as "indifferent. We don't play baseball where I'm from; we play hoops or run some football. I'd never even had a single conversation about baseball before this year. It's like it didn't exist."

Then came the 1998 season. Early on, it was clear that something different was transpiring, that history might be made.

First there was Mark McGwire vying to beat Roger Maris' 1961 record of 61 home runs in one season. At 6'4" and over 240 pounds, McGwire epitomized raw homerun hitting power. Everyone became enthralled by the imminent abolition of the previously untouchable record by the seemingly perfect player.

Enter Sammy Sosa, stage left, quietly keeping up a respectable pace in relation to McGwire, then matching and threatening to overtake him.

Soon even baseball-averse young people were talking about little else. "Every time the Cardinals or the Cubs played I just had to watch," Hubbard recalls. "Had to see what would happen."

Samantha Hughley, a 17-year-old Fremont resident, says the run for the record gave her "a sense of belonging. At school I had something to talk about with dudes in my classes, and at home my brother and I talked about it all day. It brought me closer to the males in my life."

Mike Morgan of Daly City agrees that the homer race brought young people together in a variety of ways. McGwire is white, Sosa is a black Dominican. These differences meant that many people were able to identify with some characteristic of one or the other, Morgan explains.

But young people following this race on television were not merely looking at a white man or a Dominican hit a ball. They saw two different men striving on the same platform towards the same goal.

Between the two of them they got everyone from my little cousins to my friends to my mom not only interested in baseball but passionate about it. People who had expressed not only indifference but hostility towards baseball in the past started saying things like "You know Sammy hit another one?" or "I think McGwire's gonna break the record."

"It's not that often that you have two sides to a coin competing on the same level for the same thing," explains Mike Morgan. "There's something about that that makes people very interested."