So it turns out that Mark McGwire won't finish up as the man with the most. Looks like he'll have to settle for being the man who went first.

	After a dismal playoff series against Arizona, Mark McGwire again hinted at retirement.

McGwire announced Sunday night to ESPN that he's now done with baseball. St. Louis manager Tony La Russa, whom you figure would know, has been saying McGwire has been sounding an awful lot like a baseball player about to retire. This could be, of course, because McGwire looks like a player who needs to retire.

Two years spent in more or less constant pain because of a condition in his right knee have left McGwire especially glum, and I say "especially" because to have known McGwire as a player was to understand that he wasn't ever going to fill your notebook with knock-knock jokes and suggested party gags. The man didn't wear a lampshade to work.

But the end of this season was different, even by McGwire's generally serious standard of decorum. He struggled through a hideous end-of-schedule slump, his swing all out of kilter because of his inability to push off that knee, and then went 1-for-11 in a playoff series with Arizona in which the Cards' first baseman never once appeared to be having fun. He spoke of retirement with St. Louis baseball writer Rick Hummel as early as mid-summer, and he seemed to reiterate that notion after the Cardinals were eliminated by the Diamondbacks.

Asked then if he wanted to continue to play, McGwire replied, "It doesn't come down to 'want.' It doesn't come down to playing. It comes down to what I can do physically. My body is pretty worn out. And my mind is definitely worn out."

Sounds like retirement skid-greasing from here. And if there is a shame in it, it is simply that McGwire leaves at a time when he perhaps won't be appreciated for the real magnitude of his most significant accomplishment.

People who follow baseball certainly know that McGwire hit a record 70 home runs in 1998, just as they know Barry Bonds eclipsed that record with 73 this past season. What they may not see is how remarkably dissimilar those two achievements were.

As we squat here today, Bonds stands as Most. McGwire stands as First. (Sammy Sosa, for those keeping score, stands as Best of Show, but that's a discussion for another day.) Of the two, there's no question that McGwire's was the more difficult feat.

It's easy to forget the human element in the headlong rush over to the Dept. of Number Crunching, but the truth is that McGwire getting past the ghosts of Ruth and Maris was ever so amazing a journey. It was amazing, and amazingly complex, and it was sort of the new frontier in the land of the sluggers.

Sosa pushed too, of course, but it was McGwire, during that long, hot Missouri summer who ultimately (and repeatedly) was called to answer the questions of history. It was McGwire who was asked, almost daily, to articulate the heart of the chase. It was McGwire to whom the family of Maris was presented. The mantle, in almost every way, landed on McGwire's overtly broad shoulders.

He was fortunate in that he had Sosa along, not only for peer companionship but for much-needed comic relief. It's something that the solitary Bonds didn't have at any point down the stretch of the 2001 season. But it is equally true that Sosa happily drafted off McGwire in that summer of '98, deferring to McGwire when it came to the mental and emotional heavy lifting that the media and public required on a round-the-clock basis.

It didn't come naturally to McGwire, just as it so obviously does not come easily to Bonds. But Bonds had the cushion of recent history with him. The press had spent its homer-energy on McGwire three seasons before; as Bonds charged along this summer, he did so amid a general reassessment of the significance of the home-run record altogether. Because people weren't sure whether they could genuinely embrace a new mark so quickly after the other had been set -- 37 years from Maris to McGwire; just three from McGwire to Bonds -- there were times in which Bonds was out there amid surprisingly little fanfare, just doing his work.

That's not to suggest that it was ever easy. Bonds never enjoyed the public embrace that the McGwire-Sosa chase prompted; his own history and porcupine personality made that impossible. In some ways, Bonds swam against tides that flowed in the direction of McGwire, and there is no denying the offensive genuis of the Giants outfielder's summer.

But McGwire came first, and that explains so much. It explains the particular pressures that were brought to bear in 1998, and it explains his almost unbelieving reaction to hitting No. 62 into the St. Louis night -- half exultant, half utterly relieved.

It's shocking to think that a thing that loomed as such a magnificent achievement at the moment could be reduced to runner-up status in the span of a couple of seasons, but that's baseball. Mark McGwire won't leave the game with the record. He most certainly will leave as the player who made it a thing to be imagined.

Mark Kreidler of the Sacramento Bee is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.