When Mark McGwire was hired to be the hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals, everyone knew that he would eventially have to address the allegations that he used steroids and other performance enhancing drugs (PEDs).  It was going to be necessary for him to do this in order to avoid a media circus when he showed up at the Cardinals Spring Training facility in Jupiter, FL.

McGwire finally addressed the issue earlier this week when he sat down with Bob Costas of the MLB Network and confessed to using steroids during his career, including during the 1998 season when he battled Sammy Sosa for the single season homerun record.

In the interview, a sometimes weepy McGwire indicated that he first tried steroids briefly after the 1989 season and again in 1993 to help him recover from injuries.  McGwire claimed that his steroid use was strictly for health purposes, not for a performance advantage.  He said that his constant injuries were a source of frustration and he used PEDs to help him get back out on the field.

During a five year period in the mid-90′s, McGwire was placed on the DL seven times and missed a total of 228 games.  By 1996, he was so frustrated that he called his father to tell him that he was thinking of retiring.  After the phone call, McGwire began using steroids more frequently because he believed steroids could help him recover from injury and stay healthy.

McGwire also confirmed that he was using steroids during the 1998 chase to beat Roger Maris’ single season homerun record.  However, McGwire denied that steroids helped him to hit homeruns or set the record.  He maintained throughout the interview that the steroids only helped him be on the field, not to hit.  He claimed that he was blessed with the God-given abilty to hit homeruns and that there is no pill or supplement available that can give a person the hand-eye coordination necessary to hit a baseball. 

Over the past two days, bloggers and reporters alike have been brutal in their coverage of McGwire’s confession.  I’ve read everything from one blogger calling the the 1998 homerun chase a “sham” and nothing different than watching the WWE to a reporter who claims to know that McGwire isn’t sorry for taking steroids, he’s only sorry for getting caught.

Many people are upset that McGwire’s greatest feat, breaking Maris’ single season homerun record, was only accomplished through cheating and they urge baseball to return the sacred record to it’s rightful holder.  They want any and all records set by McGwire to be expunged and they want McGwire and his other steroid-using ilk to be banned from the Hall of Fame.

There are so many angles to this story, it’s hard to know where to start.  First, I think it’s good that McGwire came clean.  Sure, it’s been 10 years since he retired from baseball, but better late than never.  According to former-Rep Tom Davis of Virginia, McGwire was prepared to come clean to Congress in 2005, but the then-Attorney General would not agree to give him immunity from prosecution.  Because of this, McGwire’s lawyers advised him to not talk about his steroid use.

Unless he’s an Academy Award-winning actor disguised as a former baseball player, I think he was being sincere when he apologized for his PED use.  I think he understands the damage he did to himself and the game, and he is sorry that he did it.  I also believe that his confession is not designed to garner him support for the Hall of Fame.  He honestly doesn’t seem that concerned with whether or not he ever get’s into the Hall.

When analyzing McGwire’s statements, you have to look at the whole picture to get a true sense of what was going on.  From a young age, McGwire was a baseball prodigy.  A prodigious hitter who hit a homerun in his very first at-bat as a little leaguer.  His power hitting continued into high school, college, and into professional baseball.  The 49 homeruns McGwire hit during his Rookie-of-the-Year season in 1987 was impressive, but not entirely out of the ordinary for him.    

He was, from the beginning of his career, a homerun hitting machine and his ability to hit the long-ball earned him a lot of money.  The pressure to stay healthy and continue to be on the field to hit homeruns was intense.  His teammates were counting on him, and in the late 1990′s, the game of baseball was counting on him. 

Following the strike year of 1994, baseball’s popularity had plummeted and the game needed a feel-good story to once again build interest in the sport.  McGwire, along with Sammy Sosa, provided that story in 1998 when both players engaged in a chase to break the single season homerun record; one of baseball’s most sacred records.  

From the beginning of the 1998 homerun chase, McGwire was unhappy about the pressure and attention he was receiving.  Much like Roger Maris before him, McGwire wasn’t interested in breaking any sacred records or being a poster boy for baseball.  He simply wanted to play the game and help his team win. 

At some point during the season, he saw how Sammy Sosa was handling the pressure of breaking the record and decided he too wanted to enjoy the experience.  He changed his approach with the media and he embraced the possibility of breaking record, and he started having fun.  Even so, the pressure to perform never eased. 

Putting myself in that same situation, I have to believe that I too would have turned to steroids (or any other drug) if I thought it could help me recover from injuries.  It would be easy to justify.  Why shouldn’t I take steroids?  They’re not banned by MLB and MLB doesn’t test for them, so the powers that be in baseball must not care.  If I take them, I can come back from injuries more quickly and they will help me stay healthy (at least that’s what I believe), so I’d be foolish not to take them.  Plus, if I stay healthy I can continue making a lot of money.  Taking steroids seems like a win-win for everyone.

Let me put that last paragraph into a different context.  Let’s say I’m a bright guy working for Corporation X.  I make a lot of money at Corp. X, but I know that one slip up and I could be out on the street looking for a job.  I also know that there are no other jobs like the one I have and truth be told, I’m really not qualified to do any other jobs.  I really like the prestige that comes with my job, but more importantly, my family is counting on me to continue to bring home my large paychecks.

Let’s also assume that Corp. X is counting on me to boost company sales.  Revenue has been down the past few years and suddenly I’m in the spotlight and being asked to make the company relevant and profitable again.  Unfortunately, I’ve been struggling with my health over the past few years and I’ve missed a lot of work.  When I’m in the office, I’m one of the best, but I’ve struggled to make it into the office consistently for a while now.

If you were in that situation and you found out there was a pill that you believed could help you stay healthy and make it into the office, wouldn’t you try it?  You could keep your job; you could keep getting bigger and bigger contracts; you could continue to provide for your family; you could continue to enjoy the prestige that comes with your job; and you could save Corp. X in the process.  Of course you’d take that pill.  Who wouldn’t?

It’s for this reason that I have a really hard time with people who condemn McGwire for his steroid use.  They hold him to a standard that they themselves would not have been able to meet had they been in the same situation.  Being a professional athlete doesn’t relieve you from having to make tough decisions.  It also doesn’t guarantee that you’ll always make the right decisions.  In McGwire’s case, he made the wrong decision, but it was the decision that just about everyone else would have made given the same circumstances.

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St. Louis Manager Tony LaRussa was on ESPN’s Baseball Tonight following McGwire’s confession and said that he didn’t know that McGwire was using steroids until McGwire called him shortly before his confession to the Associated Press on Monday.  Others in baseball have said they were unaware of steroid use in their clubhouses, although some like Curt Schilling, has said that he had suspicions.

I remember reading a blog post a couple of years ago by Richard Justice of the Houston Chronicle who said that he was in and out of locker rooms throughout the 1990′s and was completely unaware that PED use was going on.  He said this in defense of team owners, managers and GMs who were being criticized for saying that they were unaware of drug use by their players.  Justice’s point was that he couldn’t join in the criticism because he was right their with the players, but didn’t know steroid use was going on.

Phil Rogers of the Chicago Tribune claims that he knew something was going on.  In his article, he says:

“Like others in my profession, I knew something smelled bad. But reporters were handcuffed by the lack of information then available, so we picked our adjectives carefully and looked for contributing factors — smaller ballparks, a pitching pool diluted by expansion, shrunken strike zones, baseballs that doubled as super balls.”

What a bunch of crap.  Rogers now says he knew something was going on, but he was “handcuffed by a lack of information then available.”  Really, Phil?  If you suspected something, maybe you could have actually investigated the matter.  Isn’t that what reporters do?  If Woodward and Bernstein had shared Rogers’ mentality, we never would have heard about Watergate.

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When asked if he thought McGwire’s confession would help him get into the Hall of Fame, 91-year old HOF pitcher Bob Feller said he thought it might help a little, but not much.  Feller went on to say, “I wouldn’t vote for him, and I don’t think he’ll get into the Hall of Fame in my lifetime.”

Was that last line supposed to be a joke?  McGwire could get voted into the Hall of Fame next week and there’s a good chance it won’t be in Feller’s lifetime.  He’s 91-years old and unless he turns out to be immortal, he could go at any minute (Of course, in a larger sense, isn’t that true of all of us?).

I don’t mean to be disrespectful of the man.  After all, he was a very good pitcher and a WWII veteran.  But why do people keep going to him and asking him his opinions on issues like this?  There are other living Hall of Famers, you know.  It’s as if a reporter decides he needs a curmudgeonly quote for his story, so he immediately calls Feller.  “He can always be counted on to say something crazy.”

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I did see a quote from one other Hall of Famer.  The story, written by the AP and published on FoxSports.com began:

Goose Gossage watched Mark McGwire’s televised confession to steroids use and was happy his former teammate came clean. That’s where the praise ended, with the Hall of Fame reliever saying there should be no place in Cooperstown for McGwire or any other player who used performance-enhancing drugs.

“I definitely think that they cheated,” Gossage said Tuesday in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “And what does the Hall of Fame consist of? Integrity. Cheating is not part of integrity.”

I like Gossage.  I always liked the way he pitched and I felt he deserved to be voted into the Hall of Fame long before he actually made it in.  Regardless, I think his comments are off base. 

Perhaps Gossage has forgotten that many of his contemporaries used amphetamines rather routinely to boost their energy levels and help them shake off the effects of a long night.  There are a lot of similarities between the amphetamine use of the 1970′s and the steroid use of the 1990′s.  Both drugs were used to help players recover; one from long nights and cross-country flights, the other from injuries. 

Some people will claim that amphetemine use was different than steroid use because steroids were used to give players an unfair advantage.  I don’t see much of a difference.  Both drugs were used to help players play better.  How can one be wrong and the other acceptable?

And when Gossage talks about the integrity of the Hall of Fame, is he talking about the integrity of Ty Cobb’s overt racism or the way he purposely tried to injure opposing players?  Maybe he’s talking about the integrity Enos Slaughter displayed by initially refusing to play on the same field as Jackie Robinson or his reputation of being the dirtiest man in baseball.  If that’s not the integrity he’s talking about, perhaps it’s the integrity of Gaylord Perry’s spitball or Phil Niekro’s use of an emory board to scuff baseballs, or Paul Molitor’s drug use, or Fergie Jenkins arrest for possession of marijuana.

In order for Gossage to claim that McGwire and other players that used steriods can’t be in the HOF because they are cheaters and lacked integrity, he first must look passed the current members of the Hall with all of their character flaws and past transgressions.  If Gossage himself truly exhibits integrity, I don’t think he can make that statement in good faith.

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I think it is somewhat ironic that people are calling on baseball to restore the single season homerun record to 61 and make Roger Maris the record holder once again.  When Maris set the record there was an outcry that the record wasn’t legitimate because the season in which Maris set the record was two games longer than the season in which Babe Ruth originally hit 60 homeruns.  Ruth’s record was considered sacred and people wanted Maris’ feat to be entered into the record books with an asterick.

Now, suddenly, Maris’ record is sacred and people are demanding that McGwire’s 70 homerun season be stricken for all time.  The outrage is the same as it was in 1961.  It is also just as misguided.

McGwire is a product of his era.  He was a PED influenced hitter hitting against PED influenced pitchers.  Were all hitters and all pitchers using PEDs?  Obviously not, but PED usage was widespread enough that it had a major impact on baseball culture. 

Joe Posnanski says it very well in this quote from his Sports Illustrated column: 

Let’s be brutally honest here: McGwire was not the only person to use steroids in his era, and he’s not one of only a few, either. He played baseball in an era when there was no testing and no real stigma attached to using performance-enhancing drugs. He had teammates who used steroids. He faced pitchers who used steroids. He had hits robbed by fielders who used steroids. Amphetamines had been part of baseball going back several decades. Steroids had been a prominent part of football for at least that long. Supplements that stirred smaller but similar effects to steroids — such as andro — were legal both in and out of baseball. I don’t mean that as an excuse, I mean it as context. Mark McGwire used steroids in a very different emotional time.

Forty or fifty years from now, people will look at the steroid era much the same way that people now look at other eras in baseball.  The passage of time will allow for more perspective.  We’ll all view Mark McGwire and others implicated in the steroid era much differently than we do today.

I can tell you that my opinions of steroid use in baseball have changed radically in just the past five or 10 years.  For instance, I was incensed when it was suggested that Barry Bonds had taken a substance that could help him get stronger and hit more homeruns.  As revelations of steroid use by other players started to leak out, my anger was reduced to disgust. 

More and more information came out about steroids, as well as HGH.  Additional names were included in the Mitchell Report.  Failed drug tests performed by MLB were leaked.  As time passed, it became clear that a lot of players were using PEDs, not just a few.  My disgust changed to reluctant acceptance and then understanding about not only the culture that existed in baseball that allowed PED usage to flourish, but also the fact that every era in baseball has had its issues. 

I’m not happy about steroid use in baseball, but like other regrettable actions and circumstances, it is a part of the game.  It’s a part that has and will make baseball stronger.  Contrary to what some claim about the steroid era, the game is not tarnished nor will it be destroyed.  It is just one chapter in a wonderful book.  Other chapters may be better or worse, happier or sadder, but it takes all chapters to tell the entire story.

And as one character in that book, Mark McGwire is neither evil nor is he a villian.  He is simply a flawed individual who made some poor choices.  I believe the choices were made for all of the right reasons, but the choices were wrong nonetheless.