Mark McGwire Talks, in Sufficient Detail, about the Past

…I still feel as if HOF voters should embrace the steroid-era players and at least give them a LOOK.

I think this confession will significantly hurt Marky-Mark’s HOF chances, but in reality, it shouldn’t have that effect. Everyone suspected it, those who suspected and voted for him shouldn’t change vote because he confirmed their suspicions.

Though I suspected it but denied it adamantly for years, I lose no respect for Mr. McGwire in this entire debacle. Hell, if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be a baseball nut nor a Cardinals devotee.

Great entry, Dan.

… and i agree completely. and i say that as someone with no particular affinity for McGwire.

(his Cards years were in the Dark Ages between when i moved away from StL and before i got regional cable; i believe the only HR i saw that season was #62, and i couldn’t see the ball through bunny-ears static.)

i’ve been sick of the moralizing for years. mac said it took it for his health. what he meant was that he took it for his livelihood, or at least he thought it had come to that. does that excuse it?

excuse what? bobby knight presented the case very ham-fistedly, but i think he’s right: everything is a performance enhancer, from gatorade to coffee to red bull to greenies to andro to creatine to hgh. perhaps the line must be drawn somewhere, but anywhere it’s drawn is arbitrary. in the 1990s it was drawn in a different place than it is today. that’s the story.

witch-hunting serves no purpose.

i couldn’t have said it better myself. i also agree with Bernie. he didn’t do this for the HOF, he didn’t do this for MLB, or the Cardinals, the Maris family, his former teammates or us fans. he did this for himself, and that’s good enough for me.

damn the media & their faux anger & outrage. damn their blatant hypocrisy for doing everything in their powar to build him up in the past & now do everything they can to destroy him in the present. any one who saw the MLBTV interview who has half a heart & a quarter of a soul could see this entire thing is killing him. while it may be easier to pile on & vilify him for his past sins, the only thing we should pay any attention to are the few who take the road less traveled & say enough is enough with the Big Mac bashing & have some mercy on the poor guy. yes, he totally brought this on himself, but like the good book says, let those who have no sin cast the first stone. he’s clearly hurting & he’s clearly in pain. give the man what he needs, give the man forgiveness so he can finally began to forgive himself.

They love controversey, they love the drama and most of all they love to bitch and see it in print and themselves on TV or on radio.

Listening to some of the sports radio guys tonight was an eyerolling experience for me. JT "The Brick and Tom Looney were tearing into McGwire like he killed someone. It’s funny…these same two clowns were preaching back in the summer how great it was for A-Rod to admit his “sins” and how it was time for everyone to move on. Of course they are big Yankee fans so that was to be expected. But going for the kill on McGwire has been a little pathetic. They want these players to fess up and take it like a man…but when they do they still rip them to pieces.

The way I see it. All McGwire owes the media/press now is a news conference to take questions and leave it at that. After that anything else they “demand” is abuse and uncalled for. And I’m not saying this just because it’s McGwire…I would say the same for Palmerio, Sosa, ect.
Time to move on…..

I just finished reading a couple of articles after my above post…

I think a lot of people writing on this have little to no perspective at this point. Yes, the summer of ‘98 was important to baseball. But that’s what it was… important to baseball. Is it now, retroactively, not important? Or less fun? Well, I don’t see how that’s possible. Even if it comes out that it actually didn’t happen and all we saw was actually just holographic images projected onto the playing field, it will still have been important for baseball and fun for fans.

I don’t feel lied to. I don’t understand the convoluted mechanism that results in believing McGwire lying to me and others. I don’t know, maybe he did actually lie to his family, or maybe TLR, or maybe teammates, and for those he would have some ’splaining to do mein.

But did he lie to me? If they say so, but I don’t feel that way.

Anyway, he seems to be really in emotional pain and I kind of hope the feeding frenzy will eventually die down because what does make me uncomfortable is seeing someone’s heart and soul get stomped on and commented on all over the news cycle.

…but he didn’t. I didn’t watch/hear him speak, but from his quotes he seemed rather remorseful and I genuinely believed him when he said something to the effect of “I wish I hadn’t played in the Steroid Era.”

I think this goes right to the heart of the steroid problem… Baseball let it happen. I mean, seriously, Jose Canseco was quite clearly not natural and I seem to recall Tom Boswell calling foul at the time. For the entire nineties, MLB and the MLBPA turned a blind eye (except for Frank Thomas and a few others who I can’t recall at the moment) and then left these guys out to dry when shit hit the fan. Writers mostly ignored it until it became an interesting story and then out comes all the horsecrap self-righteousness. My anger is directed at them and my disappointment is directed at the system Baseball let develop.

inferral that his home-run totals are no by-product of steroids. I agree with Danup (and McGwire for that matter) that taking steroids does not coincide with having better hand/eye coordination, or picking up the ball better, or providing better contact to your swing, or learning pitcher tendencies. Also, I can see both sides of the argument about steroids and muscle mass. The one side that says more muscle mass increases muscle and therefore when you do make contact, the ball is hit with more force and therefore either is hit harder or travels farther. Then there is the other side that says muscle mass does not equate with extra strength (necessarily) and, in addition, can really mess with the mechanics of a baseball swing, thus not equating to extra stat totals like HRs.
But what he is not acknowledging, and what I find as a great flaw, is how steroids indirectly helped his HR totals. They helped because he was able to use steroids to recover from injury faster and more aggressively. This gave him more time on the field, and thus more at bats and chances to hit those home-runs. In addition, though I have always believed his work ethic to be exemplary, using steroids to recover from injury gave him more time and opportunity to concentrate on hitting rather than concentrate on rehab, thus indirectly making him a better hitter.
The fact that McGwire does not acknowledge the connection does not make him a villain to me. But it does give me insight into his character (and possibly ego), which shows that he still does not realize how steroids cheat the system. He seems genuinely remorseful, and I believe that he is. But he also appears to be still be “hiding” admissions even from himself.
All that said, what I really (selfishly) hope is that he comes out and becomes the public advocate against steroids that fans of his hoped he would be. I understand that he is a private person and that he contributes to charity in a private manner. But, he can do the most good by publicly advocating against steroids, their dangers to athletes, and showing college athletes and high school athletes that using is not only illegal, it is dangerous and costly in more ways than one.

There are too many real villains in the world for me to reserve my anger for; this doesn’t do much to raise my blood pressure, and I’m glad at least it’s out there and sooner or later will blow over. I choose to take the selfish Cardinal-fan position—as I anxiously try to figure out if a March trip to Jupiter is possible—that this is the necessary pain before we can find out what we really want to know: Namely, whether Mac can instill some discipline in some of these Cardinal hitters!

We have delved into this subject in the comments of other main threads, and I think some our points are very on point today. I don’t understand members of the media riding in on their high horse and condemning McGwire. There was a systemic problem in MLB that allowed this to happen. Every party had a part in allowing this to happen and every party shares in the blame. Some of the major parties are the commissioner, the owners, the MLBPA, the individual players, managers, training staff, coaches and sportswriters. However, each acted in what, at the time, they perceived to be their own self-interest. Attempting to recover from the strike, owners seem to have looked the other way because long home runs and high run-scored totals fills the seats and gets folks to tune back in. The MLBPA fought for the privacy rights of their players. Individual players made the decision, for a variety of reasons that have not at all been adequately discussed in the mainstream moralizing media, to use PEDs. Training staff looked the other way to maintain player trust. Sportswriters turned a blind eye to maintain their access which allows them to write good articles. This could have been nipped in the bud, but it was not. That isn’t the fault of McGwire, Sosa, A-Rod, Bonds, Clemens, Lawton, Franklin, or Glaus. The blame spreads much more broadly than that, and this reality is completely lost on those spewing forth righteous indignation in print and on the airwaves.

• TLR on Mike and Mike – there were “hurdles” at the time re: what was he supposed to do about it (except in TLR lawyer-talk. I missed hearing the whole thing by a few minutes)

• congressman asked attorney general Gonzalez for immunity for McGwire, did not get it

• …statute of limitations expired in 2006. apparently.

• Buster Olney suggests that writers shouldn’t even be making that (sole) decision re: moral decision – direct conflict of interest. Mike Schmidt says kudos to that.

• apology to the Maris family very touching (to them), though son finished by saying obviously I think my dad has the record

• hitting ball ≠ hitting the ball far. or staying in the game to hit the ball.

• ex-players (like Kruk) who “played naked” angered that McGwire did not make the connection between PED and performance

• first public duty of Cardinal-for-a-long-time Matt Holliday? commenting about this to the press. ’it’s like if you have friends and you don’t agree with what they do, they’re still your friend’

• We are, once again, a “one-newspaper town” that’s pretty much forgiven him. heh.

Personally, I’m mostly concerned that this is now officially a distraction. Especially with La Russa in the mix, essentially professing neglect (as did the rest of the game at the time, but he’s the manager now). I give it two minutes before the underbelly of this story starts affecting Albert.

There better be some plate patience, or somewhere McRae will be laughing.

Oh, also, I’m guessing this means dinger camp is over with. Makes sense, as Winter Warmup is coming up.

Pujols>Babe

http://espn.go.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/2010/is-mcgwire-right-about-pujols

what’s this about McGwire using steroids? Sounds like conjecture to me.

Darn [sarcasm] brackets don’t work in the Subject line, might want to look at that…

Quick OT: stupid Surf Control they just installed at work won’t let me get to Viva from there, but I get to work from home today, and my firewall doesn’t care…

When I was seeing and hearing the commentary from last night into this morning, I was reminded of a line from Pixar’s Ratatouille:

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.

Where I have a problem is in the idea that it’s justified to put Mark in double-jeopardy for his transgressions. He’s being damned for being suspected of doing PEDs and not admitting to it before a Congressional committee, and then damned again when he finally does admit it. I don’t see his admission gaining him any support in his HOF candidacy, because too many BBWAA members will see this as additional justification for their earlier refusals to include him on their ballots, not as a reason to truly reconsider his accomplishments – rather they would flatly refuse to reassess them at all.

I can understand, to a limited extent, the disparity between the commentary of the past and present. In 1998, there wasn’t enough evidence, with support from enough sources, to paint any ballplayer with the brush of PED use, so they left that out of their comments, and the damning in their recent words is seen in such stark contrast only because all of the years of shutting up added fuel to their vitriol. Should they have investigated more then? Maybe, but local writers (and national outlets, too) also make their living on having access to the teams and their players, and they are not about to risk losing that if they don’t have enough support in actually getting the proof. However, hypocrisy with cause is still hypocrisy.

I’ve always said, the key for commentators in putting this era of baseball, and the players within it, into perspective is in understanding how many of the players were using and to what extent the total usage had on the numbers put up, by everyone. Various eras within baseball have had positive impacts on certain facets of the game while acting negatively on others at the same time, and other eras have done just the opposite. Yet in all other eras, this has simply been accounted for (to a lesser or greater extent) and assimilated into the consciousness, but the Steroid Era is viewed in a completely different light, as though it can never be made part of the whole.

It’s bullshit.

Thank you, Mac, for being honest about your mistakes and taking responsibility for them. Good luck in ever seeing any lasting positive impact from doing so.

I don’t really care that Mac did roids. I don’t really care that any athletes have to this point.

But it does bother me that he can’t be honest about why he’s confessing. He says he’s “using this opportunity” of returning to baseball to come clean; as if it weren’t the other way around … he’s coming clean because he wants to return to baseball.

I understand pleading the fifth in front of Congress. His lawyers were right. But if this has really been the ethical burden he claims it’s been, he could have confessed long before it became professionally necessary for him to do so. It strikes me as disingenuous that he had not. I wonder, if Mac had never been offered the hitting coach job, if we would have heard this confession now or any time in the near future.

In the end, what bothers me the most is that people laud him for coming clean. He’s not noble or honest because he’s confessing he did something wrong; he’s doing exactly what he should do and should have done. He shouldn’t get extra credit for that.

But you can already see how someone like TLR will allow this to demonstrate what a stand-up guy Mac is. As if he’s a different breed of liar than Bonds or Clemens or anyone else. Bullshit, imo.

PS – La Russa is a liar, and a sanctimonious one if he expects us to believe he never knew about Mac’s PED use prior to this confession. Strangely, that bothers me more than anything related to Mac in this whole story.