The (Steroid) Needle and the Damage Done
Wondering just now about separate but connected questions:
1.) Why anyone feels compelled, on the subject of Mark McGwire, to “give the man credit” for finally acknowledging his obvious, ongoing, career-enhancing, career-wrecking abuse of performance enhancing drugs; and
2.) Whether Barry Bonds understands he’s just been placed on the clock.
I’ll go ahead and guess the answer on Bonds, because it certainly goes to the heart of the man – and perhaps because it delineates his character from McGwire’s, too. Under almost no circumstances can you expect Barry Bonds to come clean. It’s just not him.
Mark McGwire, though – that’s different. From the start of the steroid talk, I understood McGwire to be almost catastrophically humiliated by his own actions and by getting found out. That humiliation seemed to inform his every action, from McGwire’s widely mocked ducking of Congressional questions in 2005 to his retirement into an utterly private post-baseball life, where no such questions were forthcoming.
McGwire is talking now for one reason: His friend and baseball mentor, Tony La Russa, convinced McGwire to return to the baseball spotlight as a coach, and La Russa helped his former player understand that he had to come clean in order to be forgiven (or, more significantly, to forgive himself). Sounds highfalutin’, I know, but that’s the La Russa way.
I have a hard time giving McGwire credit for this, because he had to be talked into it. At any rate, he’s merely acknowledging what those in the sport have long since dismissed as yesterday’s news. His PED use was simply a given, as were Sosa’s and Bonds’s. It helped McGwire reach historic heights, and it almost certainly contributed to his awful demise as a competitive athlete.
If it brings the man peace, I’m all for it. But there can be no pats on the back for a person who had so many, many chances over the past several years to positively influence kids by admitting his mistakes, but declined. Wish him well, but, please, no hero’s welcome.
(By the way: Forget the Hall of Fame. Mac’s credential for being on the ballot was his career home-run total, which we now know to be significantly achieved via under-the-table, back-room cheating. That doesn’t make McGwire unique, but it does bust his HOF balloon, no matter how quickly anyone rushes in to forgive him.)
Still, his admission puts McGwire a long step ahead of Bonds. And this is not a distance you should expect to be closed anytime soon.
When McGwire said Monday that he wished he hadn’t played in the steroid era, it was a thought to hang on to. You can understand: McGwire, who probably thinks of himself as a very different person than Bonds or Sosa or A-Rod or even Jason Giambi, nevertheless is destined to be grouped with those men when people discuss the drug-cheat years in the sport.
But where McGwire was shamed into silence, Bonds has taken a different tack, especially privately. His take, boiled down to its essence, has always been, “I gave you people a show. Isn’t that what you wanted?” This image of Bonds as a defiant one is grounded in fact and observation, not demonization. Defiance is the man when it comes to Bonds and his baseball life. He’s not going to apologize for trying to be the best in the game.
For that reason among many others, some of them legal, the wait for a come-clean moment from Bonds is bound to be a long one. If you’re into confessionals, Mark McGwire will have to do for a while. Hope it’s enough to sustain.
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