Opinion: Mark McGwire: The Barry Gibb of the 21st century
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The results are in and the news is disastrous for beloved slugger-turned pariah Mark McGwire -- just 128 votes, or 281 fewer than required, for Baseball’s Hall of Fame. All because he has refused to discuss (and did so, spectacularly, under oath in front of Congress) whether he used steroids during his baseball career. Even though steroids weren’t banned for most of it. Joel Stein suggests an interesting explanation about that in his column from today:
Maybe the problem is that we mortals created Halls of Fame to freeze people: Hank Aaron has to spend the rest of his public life talking about home runs. Once they retire, we can be relatively sure -- barring the occasional double murder -- that they’ll never do anything significant again. That’s why McGwire can’t go into Cooperstown. By refusing to deny using steroids in front of Congress, baseball’s savior in 1998 has changed from what we all once agreed he was.
Stein also defends McGwire in a column this week for Time magazine:
I wrote a bunch of stories for Time about McGwire in 1998 when he broke the single season home run record, and I got to spend a little time with him. Yes, he was roughly three people wide, and yes, he had backne and yes, maybe his smile was a little gum-heavy, but I watched McGwire hit a baseball harder than I’ve ever seen anyone hit one. And since more than 100 players tested positive for steroids in 2003 (when they were told they’d be tested), we know that if he did juice, he was the best steroided hitter in a vast field of steroided hitters. So even if he wouldn’t have beaten Maris or Ruth for home runs in a single season, he was the best home run hitter of his era. And for one great year he not only made baseball relevant, but tied America to its history. It took losing a war for Bush to do that. [...] [R]easonable kids who turn into very smart sportswriters have a weakness for moralizing. There’s nothing that excites a sports commentator like a basketball player fighting, a football player caught with pot or a boxer’s DUI. Sportswriters are on the far right of the culture wars, reactionaries longing for the days before they were born, when athletes were viewed as paragons of society ... because the sports writers who got drunk with them at Toots Shor agreed not to write about their alcoholism, philandering, gambling and fighting. Well, McGwire actually was a paragon of society. Unlike Hall of Famer Ty Cobb (a racist who once went into the stands to beat up a heckler—a heckler in a wheelchair), McGwire was a pretty good guy, especially for one with almost no discernable personality or intelligence. He didn’t seek out fame, but was friendly to fans. When someone close to him told him about her childhood sexual abuse, he started a foundation and cried on TV about it. And he befriended struggling stand-up comedians. I don’t know how that makes him a good person, but it made me like him. Yes, taking steroids is cheating, and dangerous. But it would be nice if sports writers faced these moral quandaries with a little more compassion. Would a person who made winning his greatest priority not use a drug that would make him better if most of his competition was? Would [Newsday sportswriter and Hall of Fame voter] Ken [Davidoff] take a drug that made him twice as good a writer? I know I would.
My own half-baked theory, after the jump. OK -- you heard it here first: Mark McGwire is the Bee Gees of baseball. Consider: By any reasonable metric, both were giants in their field: McGwire’s 583 home runs (7th all-time) and unprecendented five consecutive seasons of 50+; the Bee Gees’ highest-selling soundtrack ever and 180 million total records sold. And, most crucially for the comparison, both became symbols of eras America suddenly and decisively turned against, in part because of their own participation in the excesses. Nothing seems more retroactively embarrassing to most meat-eating Americans (though not me!) than super-wide collars, buttons down to the belly, furry chest hair, gold medallions, tight white pants, and guys singing falsetto songs about being macho. But we totally loved it at the time. Similarly, the treacly, over-compensating “they saved the game!” nonsense about McGwire and Sammy Sosa in the late ‘90s now looks retroactively unbelievable, especially since back then it was considered quite bad form to bring up that Big Mac had a bottle of Andro (since banned) in his locker. The great shame in all this is that we are seeing the wholly disproportionate tarnishing of the accomplishments of a man who was a Hall of Fame-type player before he got into weight-lifting, and whose inflated later-career numbers were caused in no small part by the inflationary context (affecting everyone) of two expansion rounds and bushel of new, smaller ballparks. But there is hope for Mark. The Bee Gees, too, got snubbed their first year (and several years after) of eligibility for the (stupid) Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and were eventually inducted. Hopefully one day we’ll stop punishing McGwire for our own sins, and recognize a Hall of Famer in his time. And yes, I recognize that this is a (self-evidently) minority opinion, but they laughed, too (actually, they egged my apartment) when I rocked the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack back in the Disco Sux days of 1987....