Hitting The Cutoff Man

Seeing as how there have been some rather significant developments in the Mark McGwire saga since I wrote about him last week, I figure it’s a good time to revisit the subject.

In my original piece, I wrote that McGwire, as a product of his times, deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. Sports Illustrated columnist Joe Posnanski, the best sports columnist out there today, summed up my thoughts on this much better than I ever could in his piece about McGwire’s admission, which is definitely worth a read:

“Let's be brutally honest here: McGwire was not the only person to use steroids in his era, and he's not one of only a few, either. He played baseball in an era when there was no testing and no real stigma attached to using performance-enhancing drugs. He had teammates who used steroids. He faced pitchers who used steroids. He had hits robbed by fielders who used steroids. Amphetamines had been part of baseball going back several decades. Steroids had been a prominent part of football for at least that long. Supplements that stirred smaller but similar effects to steroids -- such as andro -- were legal both in and out of baseball. I don't mean that as an excuse, I mean it as context. Mark McGwire used steroids in a very different emotional time.”

Posnanski goes on to talk about being ready to forgive McGwire, even when so many other baseball pundits out there are not.

Big Mac’s grand media tour didn’t exactly have that effect on me. The guy did what he did and should have admitted it a long time ago, but failed to because he was afraid of the consequences. Now he’s changing course, not because the beating of the tell-tale heart finally drove him mad, but because he wants to coach the Cardinals this season without the media badgering him about the issue every day.

The fact is, I already forgave Mark McGwire, long before his big confession. His admission of something everyone already knew doesn’t change much. I don’t agree with or respect what he did, but I understand it.

What I don’t understand is why so many people are so caught up in the fact that he refuses to say steroids had an effect on how many home runs he hit. Look, the important part was him admitting he took the 'roids in the first place. I don’t see why it’s necessary for him to also talk about their effects. If McGwire didn’t have supreme confidence in his own ability to hit a baseball, he never would have become a star in the first place. If he said now that he thought drugs helped him set the home run record, he probably would be lying to tell the public what it wants to hear, and didn’t being less than truthful help get him into this mess in the first place?

To use a somewhat clunky analogy: If a store gets robbed, and a while later a guy comes forward and turns himself in, admitting he committed the crime, wouldn’t that be enough? Or would we make him talk about the economic impact of his actions on the business? No, of course not.

But McGwire doesn’t even get off as easy as an actual criminal.

As St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bernie Miklasz aptly put it:

“And reticence is a problem in our Dr. Phil culture. We demand full-blown confessionals, and you'd better open some old wounds and then tap into a new vein or two, and it better be messy and bloody, and by God it must be televised.”

In 1998, McGwire gave the public what it wanted: a home run chase and a reason to fall in love with baseball again. Now he's fallen short of its demands. I forgive him for that, too.