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McGwire

If it weren't for steroids, I wouldn't vote for Mark McGwire in the Hall of Fame election this year. Thanks to my suspicion the former slugger used performance-enhancing drugs, I feel I must put a check next to his name on my ballot.

If I'm going to play the hypocrite, I'll act on my own hypocrisies, thank you, not baseball's. I won't do Bud Selig's dirty work for him. Besides, as the Associated Press discovered, there are already plenty of Hall of Fame voters who will.

Prior to McGwire's either over or under-lawyered testimony before Congress in March 2005, I harbored doubts as to his worthiness for Cooperstown only tangentially related to the steroids issue. Basically, McGwire was a one-trick pony in an era where his trick was performed more often than at any time in baseball history. Homers are important, but if one played when the likes of Brady Anderson could hit 50 of them in a season, how big a deal could hitting 70 in a season be? In the event, McGwire's record was a big deal for exactly three seasons, until Barry Bonds showed what a scientific approach to drug abuse could do and hit 73.

The Great Homer Explosion of the '90s, baseball's own dot.com boom, was an obvious anomaly as it was going on. That it was in part artificially generated was also obvious. Homers have been the game's traditional remedy for crisis, and the strike and canceled season of '94 were its biggest crisis since the Black Sox. It was known players like McGwire were using LEGAL dietary supplements to build muscle. There were suspicions, small ones, some players were using the steroids endemic to sports like track and field, football, and weight-lifting. But those factors were considered part of a mix that includeed the new old-fashioned ballparks with their short porches and low walls, the dilution of pitching through expansion, and the strike zone shrinking to the size of an ice cube.

There were, in short, all sorts of artificial contributions to the homer boom McGwire symbolized, some of them created by major league baseball itself. There was and is no way to rank how much any of them contributed individually-including PED use.

In a sport where hundreds of thousands of demented fans spend their waking hours analyzing, dissecting, and God help us, inventing statistics, there has been no attempt to use the scientific method to determine the statistical effects of PED use. Let's posit that McGwire used steroids for at least half his career. How many fewer homers than 583 would he have hit without them. Ten? Fifty? One hundred? Nobody knows. We, the Hall of Fame electorate, are left to guess. I use a random figure of 15 percent, which I'll bet is too strict, which leaves McGwire with about 500, making him the borderline Hall candidate I thought he was in his playing days.

But of course, the voters who'll snub McGwire aren't truly evaluating his career or the facts about PED use. They're taking a moral stand against PEDs, one which reflects our society's hopelessly confused and hypocritical attitude towards drugs in general.

Let me put it this way. Mickey Mantle spent his entire playing career in the grip of a horrible drug addiction that wound up shortening his life by decades and inflicting unimaginable damage on his family. The addiction also HAD to affect his play-negatively. How many games did the Yankees lose instead of win because Mick was too hung over to hit? Were some of them World Series games, played in that worst of times for alcoholics, early afternoon?

We'll never know, and Mantle, quite rightly, was a first ballot Hall of Fame inductee. Given that fact, however, voting against McGwire because he took a drug to play BETTER seems inconsistent to say the least.

And that pales against what'll come when Sammy Sosa is finally eligible for the Hall. His stats and '90s physique changes are remarkably similiar to McGwire's, but Sosa denied using steroids when he testified to Congress. Doesn't matter. I predict a high percentage of the Hall electorate will use pure suspicion as a basis for leaving Sosa off their ballots.

Sorry. I don't think my Hall ballot was intended for God but got misdirected in the mail. I'm not omniscent, and have no wish to wield power for personal satisfaction. Having been relatively unimpressed by the homer boom, I find no need to participate in historical revisionism.

The truth is, many Hall voters fell and fell hard for the McGwire-Sosa homer duel of 1998, seeing it as redemption for the strike, and the return to glory of a game they truly love. Go back to the prose of that time in your local sports sections, and the color purple runs over the pages. The baseball writers conned themselves into ignoring their repertorial duties, and feel guilty about it. Selig is playing on that guilt to pass the buck on the whole PED issue.

I won't go along. As a voter, I play the cards baseball deals me. Left to my own devices, I'd vote for Pete Rose. I know it's wrong, but without Rose, my Phillies would never have won their only World Series. I can forgive a great deal of sins for that experience. That's my hypocrisy, and I'm thankful baseball took the matter out of my hands by declating Rose ineligible.

McGwire IS eligible. Officially, he's a member of the horsehide community in good standing, and his career statistics are presented to the voter without prejudice. It's not my responsibility to insert my own prejudices into the process to get baseball off the steroids hook. If MLB thinks McGwire juiced and that should disqualify him, let Bud be a man and take the heat for knocking McGwire off the ballot.

Until then, I will look at McGwire as a guy who hit 583 homers, a total that more than qualifies him for the Hall of Fame. He'll get my vote. I'll hate doing it, but I'd hate being manipulated not to do it even more.

posted by Michael Gee @ 9:18 AM