Yesterday’s sudden revelation from Mark McGwire that he actually used, dare we say it, performance enhancing drugs, steroids, human growth hormones, and Pepsi, is enough to make me yawn.
Who cares? It didn’t take anyone with any great sense of intelligence to realize that McGwire was juiced up on something. At the time, there may have been whispers; everyone turned a blind all because supposedly chicks liked it when Mark went long.
Now we care. As a society we are just a bunch of losers with double standards. God forbid that someone cheated. Now what? Where to from here?
There is an interesting ESPN poll that raises some of these types of questions – Hall or no Hall? Asterisk next to McGwire’s records?
So why do we care? We care because baseball’s records are a sacred cow – almost holy in a non blasphemous sort of way. Because of McGwire and others during the steroid era, we have no idea which records are legitimate and which ones are frauds. In the mid to late nineties, baseball fans were desperate for some good news – McGwire’s epic homerun launches and the great homerun chase of 1998 with Sammy “I never used steroids” Sosa delivered.
Like a bad night of drinking, we now regret our enthusiasm. We all unknowingly slept with the enemy. There seems to be no way to go back in time and wash it all away; make it as if it never happened. How do you put an asterisk next to some of the players, without having a complete list of everyone that indulged in a little self gratification in the name of health? After all, according to McGwire and others that have come clean, they never took any happy juice in the name of cheating.
