Asking Absolution on the Half Shell

A belated point to make, but with pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training this week, it’s worth pointing out again: Mark McGwire and that little confession of his last month about using performance-enhancing drugs?

Man, he’d never cut it as a Catholic.

See, you’ve got to be “heartily sorry.” That’s the operative phrase. That’s all it takes to wipe the slate clean, and McGwire whiffed completely.

No surprise. McGwire wasn’t sorry about juicing so much as he was sorry about what the lingering black cloud would keep him from becoming.

His unspoken preface was essentially “in order that I may coach with the St. Louis Cardinals, in order that I may generate Hall of Fame consideration so sadly lacking in my first two years of eligibility, I hereby confess...”

One act of contrition and a few days of heat in the media, he figured, and the whole chemical business that defined his career would be in that convenient little closet called “the past,” which, as Big Mac once so awkwardly told Congress, he doesn’t care to talk about.

That seems to be standard operating procedure for most pro athletes who transgress these days. Guns, gambling, philandering: The vices vary. The one constant is that once caught — and they’re always caught; in this high-tech I Spy, YouTube world there is no place to hide — we are subjected to the quick admission and ghost-written apology.

That’s to close the door. The catch-all “I’ve moved on” is to keep it locked, as if their say-so holds sway over justice and absolution. Perhaps we’ve empowered them to do so when, really, we should barely have a passing, never mind rooting, interest in these guys. If they were neighbors, we’d tell the kids to steer clear.

As for McGwire, even if his admission was sincere, he undermined its legitimacy by insisting performance-enhancing drugs had nothing to do with his freakish home run totals of 1998.

And 1+1=1.

Who knows, maybe he’s one of those people who build up altered realities in their conscience, who truly believe what they’re saying and, therefore, aren’t lying. But what does that matter when virtually all proof and reason scream otherwise?

Major League Baseball, with its drug policy now in place, would like to think the Steroid Era is in the rearview mirror, but who can swallow that? Not with the track record of performance-enhancing drugs staying one step ahead of the tests to detect them. Not with the record book pocked with needle marks.

I suppose there’s no helping that, just as there’s no escaping all those gaudy pitching records passed down from the days of legal spitballs and the Dead Ball Era.
In a perverse way, you could call the Steroid Era the second Dead Ball Era. And that’s the irony. McGwire said he juiced to stay healthy, and for a while it worked. But in the long run, it put him prematurely on the shelf.

And that’s the only shelf he should remain on. If Tony LaRussa wants to employ him, fine. (The professed ignorance of steroids among the managerial ranks, especially from a super-sharp guy like LaRussa, is a whole other underbelly to this sad story, but one left for another day.)

For now, forever, there should be no Hall of Fame talk for any of these guys — the McGwires, the Barrys, the Mannys and all those not content to simply ride their vast God-given talent.
Steroids damned the game. A check swing of an apology shouldn’t throw open its pearly gates.