By: John ShafferFriday January 15, 2010
Mark McGwire broke the major league's single season homerun record in 1998, and from that season, through the rest of his career and beyond, he has been plagued by accusations that he used performance enhancing substances. After years of dodging the question, this week he admitted the truth behind the charges, and confessed to using the substances for more than ten seasons, including that storied 1998 season.
His manager at the time, Tony LaRussa (himself a lawyer) says that everyone makes mistakes, and that Mark McGwire made one, and that should be the end of it. We think that if someone does something wrong once, it is fair to say he made a mistake; if he repeats that offense for ten years, it no longer is "a [single] mistake," but is a way of life. Mr. McGwire says that he did not take the steroids to make himself stronger, only so he could play a full season. The 162-game season, he says, is a grind. He did not tell us how the other major league players coped with such a brutal schedule, but (with the exception of a couple of strike years) the majors have employed 162-game seasons since 1961 for the American League and 1962 for the National, and the vast majority of players did not use performance enhancers to get through it, so that tough schedule complaint is a weak one.
He also claims that steroids did not help him to hit homeruns, leaving us to wonder why they are called "performance enhancers" if they do not enhance performance. He should be reminded that every major sport from hockey to football to golf to tennis to basketball to Olympics to soccer (except baseball), to name just a few, banned steroids and tested for them.
We truly are sorry for the fans who were cheated by Mr. McGwire's use of drugs, and for the opponents who did not use steroids, who were therefore at a disadvantage, and for his teammates who did not use, but are tainted by his actions. Mr. McGwire is by all accounts a "gentle giant" type, a decent, quiet, unpretentious chap, and we won't say nay, but he also was, to put it bluntly, a cheater. We are sure he now wishes he had never used the drugs, and he told interviewers that he wished he had never played in "the steroid era," neglecting to point out that if players hadn't used them, there would have been no steroid era. He also wishes that drug testing had been part of the regimen for major leaguers at that time he played. Testing was not allowed under the collective bargaining agreement. He says he wouldn't have used any illegal drugs if there had been testing. We believe him, and we also believe that he is sincerely sorry. However, we cannot let that expunge his offense and we cannot pretend that it did not happen.
We give him credit for (belated) honesty, and he certainly can take steps to reclaim his reputation, from this point onward. But his drug use should not be excused or minimized or whitewashed or forgotten. A man who cheated over the course of ten seasons should not be rewarded by election to the Hall of Fame. He says that the Hall doesn't matter to him, so that should not present a problem for anyone. If he provides details of his drug use and can help others to come clean, he will have performed a great service. He also can use his failure to show other players, high school and college athletes, why illegal substances must not be condoned. That would be a great step toward his rehabilitation.
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