Excerpt from Mark McGwire's opening statement to the Government Reform Committee"What I will not do, however, is participate in naming names and implicating my friends and teammates. I retired from baseball four years ago. I live a quiet life with my wife and children. I have always been a team player. I have never been a person who spread rumors or said things about teammates that could hurt them. I do not sit in judgment of other players, whether it deals with their sexual preference, their marital problems, or other personal habits, including whether or not they use chemical substances. That has never been my style, and I do not intend to change this just because the cameras are turned on.The above quote - originally spoken very carfeully by Mark McGwire in front of a Congressional committee self-charged with rooting out the evils of steroid use in baseball - came to me from an article on The Hardball Times exploring the results of the recent election for the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Nor do I intend to dignify Mr. Canseco's book. It should be enough that you consider the source of the statements in the book, and that many inconsistencies and contradictions have already been raised.
I've been advised that my testimony here could be used to harm friends and respected teammates, or that some ambitious prosecutor can use convicted criminals who would do and say anything to solve their own problems and create jeopardy for my friends.
Asking me or any other player to answer questions about who took steroids in front of television cameras will not solve the problem. If a player answers no, he simply will not be believed. If he answers yes, he risks public scorn and endless government investigations. My lawyers have advised me that I cannot answer these questions without jeopardizing my friends, my family, and myself. I intend to follow their advice.”
The article points out a number of inconsistencies among the results. For example, the author questions the disparate vote totals of Steve Garvey and Don Mattingly; Jim Rice and Dale Murphy; Albert Belle and Jim Rice; Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, and Lance Parrish. The major thrust of the article, though, is the voting results for Mark McGwire. In an earlier article, the author wrote his belief:
If I had a vote in 2006, I’d vote no. Not because I don’t feel he belongs, but because I think we need a bit of perspective before we come to a firm decision. He has 15 years to be on the ballot. During that time, hopefully more information will come to light. How long did McGwire use? Generally, how much did the “juice” skewer offensive stats? Was he a borderline player who got pushed over the top by it, or was a Hall of Fame talent who simply goosed his totals a bit? How are the non-player enablers of the steroid era treated by history?His argument is that we don't yet know what we should do about Mark McGwire, not enough time has passed. We should take time, evaluate what did or didn't happen, and how that should color our view of McGwire's legacy. Until we do that, we should err on the side of keeping him out - a "reversible [mistake]".Right now it’s too early to tell. A mistake Hall of Fame induction "stands forever in the guide." A player mistakenly left out can always be put in.
If a mistake is to be made, let it be a reversible one.
I disagree, because of another statement that the author makes in his article:
Never forget this: as to the statutes of major league baseball as they existed from 1986-2001, Mark McGwire broke no rules.I can even ignore the next few statements:
He played in an environment where players were encouraged to use steroids. Management lavished huge contracts on players who could crush the ball regardless of how they managed to do—no questions asked. Jason Giambi’s agent, Arn Tellem, asked the Yankees to remove a clause that could cause the contract to be voided if Giambi was caught using steroids. If Tony LaRussa knew of Jose Canseco's steroid use then he probably knew about McGwire too—however he never notified his bosses so they could invoke the "probable cause" rule and have him tested.To me, that isn't nearly as relevant. Yes, McGwire was playing in a time where the administration of the game was in a very permissive mode. The kernel of the argument to me is very simple - Mark McGwire broke no rules.
Every baseball fan during the summer of 1998 watched the epic home run chase between McGwire and Sammy Sosa with eager anticipation. There have been entire books written about that summer's baseball drama, and I would argue that only the most naive of baseball fans truly believed that the transformations of both sluggers - from their lithe, agile rookie seasons to the mammoth, muscle-bound sluggers of the 1998 season - came about without the assistance of some non-prescription aide.
We watched. We drooled. We turned a blind eye and didn't give a diddly darn what those two were eating, drinking, shooting up, or freebasing behind closed doors. We didn't care. Baseball had done us wrong five years before, and we were just happy to be able to turn back to the sport that so many of us had turned out back on. (Let me be clear on that: baseball did not turn its back on us. It changed. That was inevitable. It is we who put the expectations of what we want baseball to be who turned our back on the sport. Baseball owes us nothing. We are stupid enough to invest our hearts and souls in groups of men who are doing nothing more than a job. Sure, it's a job they enjoy, but it's their job. If we're stupid enough to continue to throw money at them - buying tickets and stadia - without any express, written contract of what they have to do fur us in return, then we deserve to get exactly nothing in return. I love baseball, but it owes me nothing whatsoever.)
And then that summer's two heroes turned out to be less than the perfect Adonises (sp?) that we had wanted them to be. Our heroes fell from Olympus and turned out to be imminently human. Sosa corked his bat and shrank before our very eyes. McGwire, however, went out an untarnished hero - forgoeing a contract extension and retiring when we wanted him to retire - while he still was able to amaze us with his titanic home runs.
But then we called him back. We asked a very private man to stand before us and humble himself. We had all but convicted him in the court of public opinion, and now we wanted his contrition. We wanted him to either come to us head bowed, asking for our forgiveness or to betray his teammates and competitors by naming names, taking down so many of our other heroes on his own so that we didn't have to.
And he would do neither.
So, we convicted and hanged him anyway.
If you have any interest in the Baseball Hall of Fame, please take a little time to read Bill James's outstanding - if now a bit dated - book Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?, originally titled The Politics of Glory.
No comments:
Post a Comment