Stephanie Slemer is the wife of retired baseball star Mark McGwire, who set baseball’s single season home run record in 1998. A former pharmaceutical sales rep from Illinois, she married him in 2002 and has stayed almost entirely out of public life since.
She gave just one real interview, to her college newspaper in 2001, while she was engaged to McGwire. She has not spoken publicly about herself in the more than twenty years since.
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At a glance
Full name: Stephanie Slemer (also Stephanie McGwire)
Born: 1977, Glen Carbon, Illinois
College: Eastern Illinois University, class of 1999
Spouse: Mark McGwire, married April 20, 2002
Children: Five, including triplet daughters
Known for: Wife of former MLB star Mark McGwire
Her life before Mark McGwire
Slemer grew up in Glen Carbon, a small town in the Metro East area of Illinois, just across the river from St. Louis. She graduated from Eastern Illinois University in 1999 with a degree in speech communication. In college she joined the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority and worked as a bartender at Stu’s in Charleston.
After graduation she went into pharmaceutical sales for Tap Pharmaceuticals, covering the St. Louis market. She was in her early twenties when she met McGwire, who had become nationally famous after his 1998 home run race with Sammy Sosa. She is in her late forties today.
How she met Mark McGwire
Slemer and McGwire were introduced by a mutual friend in St. Louis in 2000. They dated for about a year and a half, and he proposed in late 2001.
That December, while engaged, she spoke to the Daily Eastern News, the student paper at Eastern Illinois. She talked about her move to California, her close ties to her parents and older sister back in Illinois, and how at ease she had felt with McGwire from early on. “I’m just thankful we found each other,” she told the paper.
The couple married on April 20, 2002, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. McGwire had retired the previous fall, after 16 seasons and 583 career home runs.
The McGwire children
Slemer and McGwire have five children together. Their two sons were born first, followed by triplet daughters in 2010.
- Max McGwire, born October 10, 2002, an infielder who played college baseball at Oklahoma, San Diego, and Saint Louis University.
- Mason McGwire, the younger son, a pitcher the Chicago Cubs drafted out of Capistrano Valley High School in 2022. He has been pitching in the Cubs minor league system.
- Monet, Marlo, and Monroe, triplet daughters born on June 1, 2010.
A few websites give the triplets’ birth year as 2020, but they were born in 2010.
McGwire also has an older son, Matthew, from his first marriage, to Kathy Hughes. Matthew was born in 1987, which makes McGwire a father of six.
What is known about her net worth
There is no verified net worth figure for Stephanie Slemer herself. The numbers attached to her name online are estimates of her husband’s wealth rather than her own, and none trace back to public financial records, so they are best treated as guesses.
McGwire earned well across his playing career and later coached in the major leagues, first as hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals, then the Los Angeles Dodgers, and finally as bench coach for the San Diego Padres. The couple has never made their finances public.
Where is Stephanie Slemer now?
The family lives in California, where Slemer and McGwire have raised their children for years. She has no public social media accounts and has not given an interview since 2001. The marriage has lasted, with no public sign of trouble.
One of the few times their private life came up at all was in 2016. McGwire, then a coach with the San Diego Padres, took about three weeks away from the team to be with Slemer while she was ill. He said at the time that her tests came back clear and that it was not serious. After the 2018 season he left coaching, saying he wanted to be around for his sons’ high school baseball.
Both sons have taken the family name back onto the field, with Mason in the Cubs organization and Max having finished his college career. Their mother has stayed off to the side of it. The documented record of her own life is still short, and almost none of it has come from her.
