Isn’t it funny - no, not ha ha funny, but odd - that baseball’s been waiting for Ryan Howard for the past 40+ years and doesn’t even know it? In that alternate reality of the steroid-free 90s and ‘01-’04, MLB would be readying the magnums of Dom Perignon bottles for Ryan Howard’s Maris-61 chase. In the wake of the McGwire/Bonds/Sosa explosions, we’re now left with baseball’s gaudiest record - Maris’s 61 HRs - and a whole lot of questions. Fortunately, they’ve all been answered. The sluggers of the juiced ball era were juiced themselves, and Elias Sports Bureau is lucky their records are online. Just think of the ink costs from all those asterisks in the record books.

But now we’ve got Ryan Howard, a young, clean 1B who looks like he might hit 61 and make a momentary splash in Rick Reilly’s back-page-SI-world. Why momentary? Because the HR record was like the sword-in-the-stone. But forget the worthy Arthurian ingenu. In this case the stone was split by a case of TNT.

So Ryan Howard, that guy everyone kind of thought would be a huge bust or a long-time in developing, comes out his second year and posts an MVP calibre season. We’re talking about a kid who hit a 430-foot HR as a 12-year-old. Yet he wasn’t recruited by any NCAA schools, and before ‘04 he was just another good minor league player who Kd once every 3 ABs and slugged over .500.

Plus, he was a 5th round pick. But something clicked in ‘04 and Howard hit 48 jacks and slugged around .600. Then he went .371/16/54 in AAA, slugged .690, and officially replaced Jim Thome as the Phillies’ 1B of the present/future.

Howard played 2 years of high-school baseball, and, again, barely landed a scholarship at Southwest Missouri State. There’s no baseball pedigree here, no stories about dad designing a weight regimen for a 5-year-old Ryan. This is just a case of an American kid - a 6′4, 230 - American kid being big, strong, and surprising the hell out of everyone by completely obliterating the MLB learning curve.

And if he hits 61 we’ll see a segment on PTI.