Mark McGwire's steroid confession

So the home run champion Mark McGwire has finally 'fessed up, sort of. Too little and too late, of course, but still front-page news. Why, though?

McGwire was self-outed in 1998 when that bottle of Andro was found exposed in his St. Louis Cardinals locker. We all looked the other way, accepted Big Red's explanation that it was an over-the-counter supplement, and got back to enjoying McGwire's home run race with the equally juiced Chicago Cubs outfielder Sammy Sosa.

Now we know that the moment defined an era, one that's still very much with us. Now we know that an entire generation's worth of baseball records are fraudulent or tainted by fraud, and that the question isn't who was using but who (if anyone) wasn't.

We'll never know for sure, unless 100% of the Major League rosters from the mid-1980s to the present confess to cheating. The American League outfielder José Canseco said that 85% of the players of his era (1985-2001) were using, and who's to say him nay?

Fallen heroes

Last year's toll of fallen heroes included David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, and Alex Rodriguez, the latter two presumptive Hall of Fame candidates somewhere down the line. Ortiz's predecessor at first base for the Red Sox, Mo Vaughn, equally jolly and equally liked, was also a user. And so on . . .

The confession of San Francisco's Barry Bonds, if it's ever wrung from him, will be anticlimactic. So will that of Roger Clemens. Both were better ballplayers than Mark McGwire. So why should his confession— not unexpected and quite unsurprising— be such a big deal?

For one thing, McGwire was the game's Great White Hope. African-American stars had dominated baseball from the days of Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, and then Latinos had taken over. McGwire was the first bona fide white slugger in a decade, and the 1998 drama of his surpassing the 1961 season home run record of the late Roger Maris— another white bread hero— had restored racial purity to the game's most sacrosanct record. (Hank Aaron, it will be recalled, had received death threats on the eve of breaking Babe Ruth's career home run record a generation earlier.)

Unlovable personality

Even after Barry Bonds eclipsed McGwire's 70 home runs three years later, McGwire's record still seemed psychologically intact. Partly this was a function of increasing skepticism about the inflation of offensive records in the game, and of Bonds's outlandish 2001 season in particular. Partly it was Barry's own unlovable personality.

But partly, too, it was because no one but a white man had ever held the single-season home run record (the Negroid cast of Babe Ruth's features aside), and because, in the Aryan Nation order of things, no one should.

McGwire was not only a white hero, however; he also seemed a gracious one, too. His first gesture after hitting the record-setting home run was to run to the box where Roger Maris's family sat to pay his respects. He accepted less money than he might have made elsewhere to play in St. Louis, where he'd become a folk hero.

McGwire wasn't a Latino hot dog like Sosa, who played the ingratiating second banana to him. He was Paul Bunyan, strong as an oak and just as silent— the perfect home run king.

McGwire had another big year, and then we watched as his knees broke down, the predicated consequence of steroid abuse. He faded into retirement, a hero we already preferred to forget. He took the Fifth before Congress in 2005, but his shrunken biceps told the tale he was unwilling to own up to.

Coy hints from his enabler

Like Bonds, Sosa and Clemens, McGwire unceremoniously entered baseball Limbo, and Hall of Fame voters shied from him. No doubt Limbo is where he belongs. But McGwire's original enabler, Tony LaRussa, has brought him back to coach as a reclamation project, even coyly hinting he might give McGwire a few at-bats for auld lang syne. So McGwire has had to make the scripted confession of what we've known for years: that he was king only of the cheaters.

It's a sad spectacle, all the more so because McGwire is still being dishonest with us, and perhaps with himself. He has admitted to steroid use going back to 1989, but not to 1987, when he broke the rookie home run record by an even greater margin than he broke Maris's record in 1998. He says he took steroids only therapeutically, to heal from injuries that threatened his career. Most disingenuously of all, McGwire denies that steroids made him a better or stronger hitter.

Confession, or accusation?

In other words, he's sorry for taking steroids because people think less of him for it, not because his records themselves are in any way tainted by them. It's a confession that accuses others, not one that takes responsibility for his actions.

Perhaps McGwire actually believes his version of events. Perhaps he or his handlers want us to believe that he really believes that a broken-down player in his 30s could achieve naturally not only what he couldn't in his 20s, but things no player had ever achieved before him. Perhaps he is trying to kid us into believing that he's kidding himself. It gets complicated.

Johnson's suspicious numbers

Meanwhile, the pitcher Randy Johnson has just announced his retirement from two decades in baseball, taking with him a career studded with Hall of Fame credentials— more than 300 wins, nearly 5,000 strikeouts, a perfect game, a clutch of Cy Young awards— but also a suspiciously Clemens-like performance curve which got better and better into his mid- and late 30s. What shall we make of that?

And what, too, of Andre Dawson, the Hall's newest inductee? Dawson was a fine five-tool player, and I got much pleasure from watching him over the years. But he was also gimpy-legged by his early 30s, and his best days seemed behind him when, at age 33, he produced a monster season with the Chicago Cubs in 1987, hitting 49 home runs— by interesting coincidence, the same number hit that same year by the rookie Mark McGwire.

Dawson had never hit nearly that number of home runs before; in fact, he had hit only 50 in his three preceding seasons combined. He never approached it again, but his career got a second wind and he played for another decade, retiring in 1996 at the age of 42. That extra decade was the first of the steroid era.

No one has accused Dawson of doping, or Johnson either, for that matter. But neither can anyone exonerate them.

Maybe the Baseball Writers' Association should concentrate on admitting worthy Phillies from days gone by into the Hall of Fame— Gavy Cravath, Cy Williams, Lefty O'Doul, Dolf Camilli, Del Ennis, Dick Allen, Bob Boone and, of course, Pete Rose—until baseball can produce a fresh and untainted crop of new stars to honor. But that assumes that the era of cheating will end some day.

If not, there's always chess. Can't cheat at that.