Sad tale of steriods and a tainted record

By LINDA P. CAMPBELL

Here’s what Mark McGwire didn’t do last Monday when he admitted having taken steroids during his home-run-record-setting pro baseball career.

McGwire didn’t ludicrously claim he thought the clear substance his strength trainer gave him to ingest was flaxseed oil and the cream he used was to ease his arthritis. Barry Bonds did that.

McGwire didn’t adamantly insist that his former trainer only gave him vitamin B-12 shots and that the guy lied in telling baseball investigator George Mitchell and Congress the shots were steroids. That was Roger Clemens.

And McGwire didn’t tell Katie Couric he was never even tempted to use steroids and then, when the truth came out, falsely accuse the reporter who exposed his secret of stalking him to get information. That would be Alex Rodriguez.

McGwire also probably didn’t redeem himself in the eyes of those who assumed the worst about him when he declined to tell all to a congressional committee in 2005. McGwire didn’t deny anything that day, as others on the panel did. But by trying to avoid legal ramifications, on the advice of his lawyers, he paid a hefty public relations price.

It turns out that McGwire wanted to confess five years ago — and did so to leaders of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, according to The Associated Press.

The most amazing factoid accompanying last week’s disclosure is that what he told those congressmen apparently never leaked in all this time.

Another revelation is that then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales could have facilitated truth-telling but nixed the idea of immunity from prosecution. Did the Justice Department — or the American people — gain anything by reserving the right to prosecute Mc-Gwire? Wasn’t there more value in having him talk?

To those who cheered him as a player, McGwire disappointed but hardly surprised when he acknowledged using steroids off and on during a large swath of his career of 15 seasons (plus 18 games in 1986). He told Bob Costas on the MLB Network that he mainly used them to recover from and prevent injuries that nagged him in the mid-1990s.

But because that included the fabled 1998 season, when he outraced Sammy Sosa to set a single-season home-run record of 70, McGwire can’t erase questions about whether he would have reached that height otherwise.

Those questions might be unfair, even uninformed: McGwire was a long-ball hitter from his rookie season, when he hit 49 home runs. And the ability to smack the ball out of the park requires more than brute strength: it takes natural talent, quick hands, good eyes, sturdy legs, uncommon focus and sharp timing. Steroids provide none of those, and might even impede them.

Praiseworthy?

How laughable that MLB Commissioner Bud Selig praised McGwire for having “confronted his use of performing-enhancing substances.”

Selig took over as acting commissioner in September 1992 and could have confronted players’ steroid abuse much sooner. It took the commissioner and players union until 2005 to get serious about drug testing and until 2006 to adopt meaningful sanctions.

Only after the congressional hearing did Selig ask Mitchell, a former senator and federal judge, to investigate a problem that had festered more than a decade.

McGwire’s contrition will probably lose news value quickly as he transitions to his new job as St. Louis Cardinals hitting coach. But it’ll come up every year when members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America vote on the next crop of Hall-of-Famers. McGwire, who retired in 2001, sits eighth on the all-time home-run lists, tied with A-Rod, who owned up to steroids only after Sports Illustrated revealed he tested positive in 2003 while playing shortstop for the Texas Rangers.

I live in a loyal Cardinals baseball household, so it pains me to say this.

If surreptitious steroid use is cheating — and I’ve said it is — then Mc-Gwire, like anyone else who partook for some kind of edge, shouldn’t get the same Hall of Fame recognition as players whose achievements weren’t artificially assisted. (Not that the hall doesn’t already have its share of cheaters and scoundrels.)

X Linda P. Campbell is a columnist and editorial writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.