Set to take the field in Spring Training as St. Louis’ batting coach, McGwire finally comes clean about his presumed steroid use

SCOTT JACOBS

Jose Canseco, if you’re listening, I have just one thing to say:  “You win.”  You do.  I didn’t want to believe you when you burst the cover off the seams in proclaiming that baseball had been littered with steroid babies across the Major Leagues, but let the evidence speak for itself and you were right on the mark.  It doesn’t mean I like you, it doesn’t mean I think you should go to the Hall of Fame, but what you’ve done for baseball is given them a name

behind this horrendous issue.  Unlike everyone else you haven’t sugar coated anything, but you did throw a poisonous apple at quite a few players’ careers, though they made the mistake, you just reported it.  Don’t shoot the messanger right?

So even though the timing was a bit unexpected, and even though the story was in essence years in the making, Mark McGwire finally revealed to all the world what we had suspected all along.  He did ‘em.  Steroids that is.  Of course when the great home run race of 1998 got underway I was really too young to understand steroids, and few people my age really talked about them.  Instead I watched you and Sammy Sosa put on the greatest show the summer game had ever seen.  Those memories won’t change.  Whether an asterisk gets slotted in next to your home run record (at the time), or if your name gets removed altogether my feelings about that summer will nto change.

But the reality I look at when I look at baseball and you, is a far different one.  With all the steroid bombshells dropped all over the diamond the last few years this was hardly a revelation, simply another one who’s gotten in line, waited till it was safe, and then came clean.

So there’s that.

Bud Selig pronounced the steroids issue dead, now that Big Mac, or maybe we should just call him a double cheeseburger, admitted his use.  I’d like to pronounce Selig as an idiot.  Over?  You would like that, wouldn’t you commish.  That would make your life so much easier.  Over would mean the end of a black eye over all your recently broken records, it would mark the end of Supreme Court hearings,

and confessions from another former titan of the game who couldn’t take the guilt anymore.

This isn’t over.  It’s not even close.

And therein lies the problem.  Who’s next?  Barry Bonds?  Ken Griffey Jr.?  I’m not saying any of thse guys juiced, but don’t we have the right to be suspicious that anyone might have.  Bonds seems content to hide out in baseball purgatory.  Junior is still playing the game.  The problem with the steroid era is no one in baseball seems to know what to do with it.

So many guys are getting the cold shoulder when it comes to the Hall from that great decade, a decade that saw the fall of the sport, and the rise of it back to prominence.  So many stars that defined how we looked at the sport will forever be parriahs to the game they built back up.  All those great players that defined my childhood have faded by the wayside, only to resurface years later as shells of themself tired of hiding.

It’s sad, horrifically depressing, but most of all, it just sort of leaves that feeling of emptiness.  Our court system says you’re innocent until proven guilty, but anyone who played ball in the 1990’s is ripe for exactly the opposite.  Imagine the players who really didn’t do drugs, and did things the right way, and how they must feel getting grouped with the guys that did.  It must hurt.  I feel for them, however small a percentage they might be.

I learned a long time ago that our heroes are not perfect.  McGwire was one of my heroes.  I didn’t idolize the ground he walked on, but I was left in awe by the towering home runs he crushed. McGwire didn’t just hit the ball, barely clearing the fence, he annihilated it.  Watching him was like watching a greek god, if Greek gods knew how to hit  a baseball.

Nowadays, with steroid testing tougher than ever, the long balls hit seem shorter than ever.  McGwire claims he could have hit that far and that many without roids.  He claimed they were for injuries.  If you believe that, you’re naive.

But then again, maybe when you think back to the start of this whole mess, we are all guilty of being naive.

It’s unfortunate it really is.  But sugar coating gets us nowhere. Then again the truth doesn’t exactly make us feel much better.

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