McGwire A Tragic Figure

Today, Mark McGwire admitted to having used steroids during his playing career.

For anyone with even a passing interest in baseball, this won’t be surprising.

What’s surprising to me is how sad I find this whole situation.

“I’m not here to talk about the past,” McGwire so infamously stated during a 2005 Congressional hearing ostensibly called to determine just how pervasive steroid use was in Major League Baseball.  I say ostensibly because while that may be how the hearing was portrayed to the public, in actuality it was little more than a cynical witch hunt designed to put a few of our more, shall we say, ambitious Congressmen in front of a national television audience.

They wanted to appear tough to their constituency.  They wanted to act as guardians of our nation’s great pastime.  They wanted blood.

March 16th, 2005 certainly wasn’t one of Major League Baseball’s greatest days.  We saw Rafael Palmeiro, one of his generation’s very greatest baseball talents, state with conviction, “I have never used steroids, period”.  This statement  began to live in infamy when, in August of that same year, Palmeiro tested positive for a banned substance and was suspended for 10 games.

Baseball fans watched intently in July of 2005 as Palmeiro became 1 of only 4 players in the game’s great history to collect 3000 hits and 500 home runs.  Just one month later, the man had to wear cotton balls in his ears to drown out of the chorus of boos and cat calls he was receiving on a nightly basis at visiting ballparks.

Just like that, in the blink of an eye or the prick of a needle, Rafael Palmeiro was transformed from finger-wagging, steroid-denying braggadocio to lowly, sad, broken former superstar.   His reputation will never fully recover.  He has slipped from a shoo-in first ballot Hall of Famer to now occupying the same purgatory as McGwire, whose testimony at that same Congressional hearing was so disastrous, so shockingly unconvincing, that for 5 years it has been looked upon as a covert confession.

Or at least until today.  McGwire, with languishing support for his Hall of Fame candidacy and a new job as the St. Louis Cardinals’ hitting coach, felt today was the right time to admit to everything everyone has suspected him of doing long since.

Think about it – what has changed in this nation’s consciousness between 1998 and 2010 to make us all so cynical when it comes to big guys putting up big numbers?  In 1998, we watched in anticipation as McGwire and Sammy Sosa both embarked on a chase to shatter one of baseball’s oldest and most hallowed records – Roger Maris’ 61 homeruns, set in the year 1961.  McGwire finished the 1998 season with 70 homeruns, Sosa with 66. In 1998, baseball fans could look upon those numbers and smile.  Nowadays, we look upon them and frown.

We collectively made these guys into folk heros just 12 years ago.  Now, there’s a constant campaign to denigrate them with nasty rumors, with vicious innuendo.  McGwire has been routinely mocked for his Congressional performance, his reluctance to discuss the past morphing into a national punchline.  He’s been portrayed as a hermit, a liar, a fraud, a bad person.  Sosa, meanwhile, is a particular kind of punching bag.  He’s been mocked for his shaky English during the 2005 hearing, was mocked for making a comeback attempt in 2007, and more recently, was mocked for appearing ‘too white’ at a public event.

When it was all happening, it was so exciting.  Baseball took a hit following the 1994 strike, but during the 1998 season, as McGwire and Sosa slugged their way into the history books, fans began to crawl back to the game they used to passionately love.  These were big guys with big personalities, hitting baseballs a very long way, and the country was enthralled.  I’ll never forget watching McGwire’s record breaking homerun quickly disappear just over the left field wall in St. Louis, and the joyous celebration that followed.  Everyone was in the big guy’s corner.

Four years later, he followed some bad legal advice and kept his mouth shut at a Congressional hearing that felt a lot like baseball’s own version of a witch hunt.  His eyes filled with tears.  It hurt him to be there, clearly, and the barrage of questions from our nation’s concerned Congressmen made it difficult to stick to the script.  He was drowning up there, and it was sad.  A lot of people thought it was funny.

The truth is a lot more complex than simply saying “Mark McGwire broke the rules”.  Yes, of course, he did break the rules; he used steroids, and steroids were not legal in baseball despite the absence of what one could term an MLB steroids ‘policy’.  That didn’t occur until 2003, and even then was only used as a survey to determine how serious it all was.  Turns out, it was pretty serious.

But a larger part of the truth is that taking steroids helped keep McGwire on the field, doing the things that he earned millions of dollars for doing – and that earned him the adulation of millions of people.  It’s not so black and white as “he cheated”.  Yes, he cheated, but there was an culture of cheating in baseball at the time, a culture that the public and particularly the baseball press chose actively to ignore.  McGwire could have sat idly by as countless peers used steroids to extend their careers, to improve their offensive output, to get stronger, faster, better.  He could have taken the high road – of course he could have – but what’s the likelihood that you, or I, or anyone in that particular climate would have chosen peace of mind over millions of dollars in salary and endorsements and the chance to break some storied records and to be admired?

Everyone enjoyed the ride 12 years ago.  We thought baseball was entering another Golden Age.  Now, people want to look at the the numbers compiled during this era and demolish them, strike them from the books as though they never happened.

They did happen.  And you probably loved it.  Baseball owners loved it.  Fans loved it.  The press loved it.

I’m not saying what McGwire did is right.  But he’s one of many, and he’s only human.  To single him out, to ridicule him and denigrate his character seems unfair.  My takeaway from all this is not to tear down those that did use, but to have a heightened respect for those whose character was strong enough to abstain.  McGwire was only going along for the ride, giving the people what they wanted, doing the thing he most loved to do, quite possibly the only thing he could do.

Were you not entertained?