The Chris Moeller Archives

Hall voters set to deny McGwire

The hypocrisy of baseball writers knows fewer and fewer limits with the passing of time. Modern scribes had their suspicions that Mark McGwire was using steroids in 1998 during the time he was clubbing a record-70 home runs in a single season. They knew definitively that he had used the over-the-counter performance-enhancement drug, Androstenedione. Yet they praised him wildly, and loudly, and in many cases, quite lucratively.

Nor was there an avalanche of fury by sportswriters in 1998 that baseball players were not being subject to steroid testing. The sport would not have an agreement with its players union to ban steroids until after the 2002 season. McGwire retired in 2001.

Even in the immediate aftermath of the sham Congressional hearings in 2005-- at which the retired McGwire pronounced before the assembled charlatans that "he was not there to talk about the past"-- a full 56 percent of 117 Hall of Fame voting writers polled said they would vote for McGwire's enshrinement. Less than two years, but thousands of column inches later, that percentage has perplexingly dropped to 20 percent.

One New York writer says he was approached by veteran Hall of Famers while in Cooperstown, and asked that he "protect" the integrity of the Hall by turning out the steroid cheats, rumored or otherwise, and that he intends to honor those requests. It's unknown whether these unidentified Hall of Famers were among the early amphetamine abusers of the game in the late 1950s and 1960s, or if it was Bob Feller, who passed the Hall's "character" threshold long before he shared with the world in 2005 his belief that Carribean players "don't know the rules of the game."

The biggest cowards in the pressbox, though, are the ones who have attempted to skirt the entire issue by claiming that McGwire's career statistics-- even without the specter of steroids-- wouldn't warrant his enshrinement. This, despite 583 career home runs (7th on the all-time list,) seven 100-RBI seasons, a higher slugging percentage than Joe DiMaggio, and the fewest at-bats per home run in history (10.61, better than even Babe Ruth's long-standing record of 11.76.)

They claim that McGwire's numbers ballooned late in the so-called "steroid era," despite the fact that the red-headed slugger owns the majors' rookie home run record with 49 in 1987, and that he hit a total of 153 long balls in his first 4 seasons. Indeed, McGwire very possibly would have hit even more homers in his early days but not for having to play his home games in Oakland's cavernous Coliseum. In those first four full years, he hit just 59 of those 153 home runs at home.

Members of the Baseball Writers Association get off on playing God. That's the real reason we're seeing them change their own tunes now on McGwire's Hall candidacy. They just need to get that first foot in the door. First, by rejecting Pete Rose so publicly (despite not being allowed to vote for him in any case,) and then by sticking it to an entire generation of sluggers (and you watch, eventually, pitchers,) they get to make themselves the story. They get to stand and be counted as part of the great, sweeping epic of the game, even though they carry neither glove nor bat, and are forced to live out their failed athletic dreams by proxy through the chronicling of the great talents who earn 20 to 30 times their salary.

Soon-- with McGwire, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, Pete Rose, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, and others denied admission, there'll be a better assembled ballclub banned from the Hall than enshrined within.

---

Moeller TV Fest Countdown (10 days)- This Day in TV History: On November 29th, 2001, Spanish-language talk show host Cristina Saralegui decides to leave her daily talk show "El Show de Cristina" after a 12 year run on the U.S. Spanish-language network Univision. Earlier in the year, Saralegui had inaugerated Blue Dolphin Studios, becoming only the fourth woman in film or television history-- behind Mary Pickford, Lucille Ball, and Oprah Winfrey-- to own her own production facilities. She subsequently moved her show to prime-time in a weekly format for Univision.

---

Quote of the day: Sportscaster Brent Musburger, when it became clear that USC would beat Notre Dame on Saturday, becoming the likeliest team to play Ohio State for the national championship in Arizona: "The road to Glendale, Arizona is paved with Trojans."

posted by CM @ 8:53 PM