Mark McGwire Took Steroids

I feel compelled to write on this topic since it's kind of a big deal right now, so I'll give my two cents on Mark McGwire admitting to taking steroids in the past.

Duh.

Was I the only guy who saw him go from this to this?

Not to mention the fact that Jose Canseco mentioned him in his book, Juiced, which has a batting average of about 1.000 right now. If Jose dropped your name, chances aren't good that you were clean. Luckily for me, Cal Ripken Jr.'s name is nowhere near that book. If it were, everything about my childhood would be meaningless and I could be found sitting out on the curb in front of my house, drinking hard liqour, wondering what the meaning of life is right now. Seriously.

Let me also say that I believe Mark McGwire should still be in the Hall of Fame. This guy was putting up numbers before he started juicing. 49 bombs in his rookie year? 104 combined in the three seasons after that? It's pretty clear that this guy was going to hit home runs regardless. Despite being injured and missing most of the 1993-94 seasons, he still put up 583 career homers. Yes, I know that some of those years are tainted by his steroid use, but you can't tell me that we're going to strip 100+ homers from his career total because of the juice. That just won't work for me.

If we're to believe he juiced from 1995 (post-injury) to 2001 (retirement), that gives us seven years with which to work. If we subtract 10 home runs per season in each of those seasons (which is really steep, but will help prove my point even better), he still ends up with over 500 career home runs. To put it bluntly, the guy is a Hall of Famer no matter how you slice it. Sure you can talk about the "purity of the game" or "cheating the game" or whatever; but the fact remains that he didn't break any rules with what he did, and there's no evidence that he ever broke any rules to get to the level at which he played. Skinny Mac would have made the Hall of Fame, so how can we keep out McGwire for what Big Mac did? It just doesn't make any sense.

I don't know if McGwire coming forward about his steroid use will help or hurt his Hall of Fame chances, but I don't care, either. I know a Hall of Fame player when I see him, and Mark McGwire is a Hall of Famer. I don't like that he used steroids, nor am I defending his usage. However, let's not pretend like we all weren't captivated by the 1998 home run chase with McGwire and Sammy Sosa when we all knew they were juicing. We'd all seen the before-and-after pictures; there was more than a good diet happening there. To go back now and penalize him for something we turned our heads away from then is just stupid. Yes, what we did as fans then was wrong, but we should be mature enough to admit it.

You know, like Mark McGwire did.

~~ Lank