The Chris Moeller Archives

McGwire takes his lumps for return to the game

Mark McGwire said today that he used steroids during his baseball career and the media reaction is close to what I anticipated. I'm thrilled to have Mac back in St. Louis as the Cards' hitting coach this year, I'm certain that the issue will not be a distraction to the team, as it never has been for Andy Pettitte or Alex Rodriguez in New York, but I regret that Mac feels the need to apologize for any decisions he made in regards to his body during his career.

In his typical modest fashion today, he underplayed in his formal statement the reason that he took steroids, but in doing so, the public once again fails to get the chance to look at this issue honestly. McGwire missed 228 games due to injury between 1992 and 1996, going on the disabled list seven times. Then he used steroids (most of which, believe it or not, have a medical purpose) to get healthy and to stay healthy. Would he have had a career to go back to if he hadn't used steroids? Hard for me to say, or to think that I would have made the same decision, but then it's not my career or my life, is it? He did make it back, of course, and in doing so, incidentally, saved the business of baseball. (Note that I said 'business' of baseball, not 'game'. After 150 damned years, can we finally put such childish illusions to bed?)

Mark has endured a hailstorm of media and public excrement for seven years for committing an offense that observers have estimated was committed by as many as 80% of other big-leaguers at the time. For sixteen seasons, American baseball fans, most of them hopped up themselves on more caffeine, nicotine, pharmaceuticals, painkillers, and supplements than you can swing a Louisville Slugger at, demanded his every will to win, on and off the field, to justify the tickets they purchased and the prices they paid. He delivered to the tune of an astronomical growth of the sport. He broke no rules.

He was called to testify before Congress-- without an offer of immunity (even though the publicly-stated aim of the hearing was truth) and in the face of possible coerced testimony by family and friends-- even though he was not a participant in the business at the time, never one of its rule-makers, and had been out of the public spotlight for a year and a half. The fears in the legal community about the Justice Department's overreach in their steroid hunting have since been proven justified, by the way, as the courts have ruled.

He had to endure a series of accusations tossed at him and his co-workers in Washington by a distraught father who had supposedly lost his son to juvenile steroid use and needed somebody to blame-- namely, adult celebrity athletes-- for the boy's death, and then we all endured media re-circulations of the myth that steroids (the Wonder-Drugs!) somehow have the ability to create a kind of supernatural or superhuman athlete. And through it all, he refused to lie, even when he was being asked questions about his personal health and his body that no government official or media figure had the right to ask. All for a lot of public paranoia over steroids, despite the fact that there's a miniscule death risk connected to them by all even-handed scientific accounts, and studies non-existent linking their usage positively to baseball-playing success.

I'm proud of Mark today. His demonstration of courage "add(s) to my respect for him," to echo his manager on the same subject. I'm looking forward-- in a big way-- to having him around the Cardinals this summer. The players should be so lucky as to pick up just a whiff of this guy's humanity, decency, and emotional strength.

posted by CM @ 10:37 PM