Ever since I first started posting to a blog, I have been trying to get my head around the steroids scandal in baseball, and how that affects my feelings on my once childhood hero, Mark McGwire. If anyone was to read everything I have written about it, you would not find a lot of consistency, but instead a spectrum of thoughts and feelings that change based on new developments. I have to admit from the start that it is an extremely difficult issue for me. Deep down, I know McGwire to be a good person who was very talented at baseball and a hard worker. He had a few bad years, due in part to nagging injuries, but he stayed focused and made a major comeback, culminating in the magical season of 1998. It was that season that I, and many other fans, forgave baseball completely for the strike of 1994.
Like many people, I did all I could to give McGwire the benefit of the doubt and trust that he never used steroids. But it became apparent that there was too much evidence, culminating in his testimony before Congress in which he refused to answer questions about his past.
I think it was that incident that pushed me over the edge. I felt that if he only admitted to what he did, I could forgive him. Instead, he chooses to hide from his past in what I used to think was a hope that people would soon forget that and only remember his performance.
A new article at ESPN has softened me a little bit. The article tries to shed some light on his current life and state of mind. The way I interpret it is that McGwire isn’t hoping that we forget about his misdeeds. Instead, he merely wants to leave that part of his life behind completely. Some people who used to know him speculate that he is so hurt by the whole situation that he doesn’t know how to deal with it, and wants to just forget about it and start over.
I still maintain that much of the blame lies with Major League Baseball. They refused from the beginning to do anything significant to deter the use of illegal and dangerous performance enhancing drugs (I also think the players’ union is as guilty, if not more so). There is tremendous pressure to use these drugs because, as Jose Canseco has said, they make mediocre players good, good players great, and great players exceptional.
In the world of professional sports, athletes are often isolated and forced to make decisions without any guidance. In that case, it makes sense that someone like McGwire, Canseco, or Barry Bonds, would look at the rules on the books and decide that MLB tacitly condones the use of steroids. It is understandable therefore that someone like McGwire would be crushed to watch MLB do a complete 180 and act like they had no idea and have been against it from the beginning. The owners have gotten rich off the resurgence of baseball, but have thrown McGwire et al under the bus (in my opinion, McGwire’s story isn’t the most tragic, especially compared to someone like Ken Camenitti who had serious problems and needed guidance).
The point of this post is that I can understand how McGwire might feel completely betrayed by what has happened. In that case, it makes sense that he wants to leave the pain of that experience behind him and start over with his new family and invest himself in his golf game.
But that doesn’t mean that I completely forgive him. I do think a reasonable person should have known what they were doing was not in the spirit of the game. More importantly though, when someone makes a mistake, they should come clean and take responsibility for their part of it. If he did that, and then completely disappeared off the face of the earth, I would definitely understand. The fact is that there are countless other people who could make the same mistake he did, and his silence is doing nothing to prevent them from doing so. I can only hope that maybe he will break his silence this year, once he finds out that he has been denied the Hall of Fame on his first ballot. But I am not holding my breath.
