Baseball has already forgotten how former Oakland Athletics’ slugger Mark McGwire saved the sport.
In 1998, Mark McGwire had already moved on from the Oakland Athletics. The former Rookie of the Year had been traded to the St. Louis Cardinals the previous season, in the midst of a battle with Seattle’s Ken Griffey Jr. to be the first to break the major league record for home runs. Both fell short, but McGwire’s 58 homers topped Griffey’s 56 – one of many seasons in which he would lead the league.
McGwire and Griffey continued to battle in 1998, but it was Sammy Sosa who became McGwire’s true competitor. The two battled back and forth, but McGwire eventually won the home run chase. He hit 70 homers that season, compared to Sosa’s 66. Both blew away Roger Maris‘s record of 61 home runs in a season.
Fast-forward to 2016, and McGwire’s infamous summer isn’t regarded with quite the same awe that it once was. The PED scandal that rocked baseball in the early 2000s transformed McGwire, Sosa and dozens of other big league sluggers into villains instead of heroes. For the last ten years, McGwire has been on the Hall of Fame ballot each year, but has received only a fraction of the vote – and it’s largely due to the fact that he has admitted to using steroids during the epic summer of 1998, as well as throughout his career. His numbers are seen as tainted, given that it’s impossible to determine how much of an effect the steroids had on his ability. He had always been strong, but would he have stayed healthy enough to break Maris’s record? There will always be questions about how much of a difference PEDs make, but there is undeniably some impact on a player’s performance.
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For those who may not know, baseball recently changed their Hall of Fame ballot rules to deal with the backlog of players on the list, decreasing the time maximum time that a player may stay on the ballot from 15 years to 10 years. Players who are not elected after 10 years are removed from the ballot for good. This means that McGwire’s 2016 appearance was his final one, and he is no longer eligible to be elected by the writers. His only hope for Hall of Fame status is to be selected by the Veterans’ committee later on, perhaps after the hatred for PED era players has died down.
But what the league and its writers seem to have forgotten is that without McGwire – perhaps one could even go as far as to say without PEDs – there’s no guarantee that baseball would be the sport it is today. After the strike-shortened 1994 season, Major League Baseball had lost a lot of its appeal. The players’ strike started on August 12, and the season was eventually cancelled altogether. There were no playoffs, and no World Series to draw attention to a sport that was already waning in popularity.
McGwire brought life back to the game, first as a powerful Rookie of the Year, then with the help of Griffey and Sosa. The league promoted the home run chase of 1998 beginning in Spring Training of that year, using it as a selling point to draw fans to games. Home runs are exciting, and McGwire provided plenty of them for fans to cheer about. The season-long chase was one of the most memorable events in sports history, and it convinced fans who had grown disinterested in the game to return.
But less than two decades later, baseball has already forgotten the way that they used McGwire’s talent to put the sport back on the map. Sure, he profited from his PED use – but baseball profited even more. Should McGwire and other steroid users be punished, when the Commissioner and other high-ranking officials who knew about the activities of their players were not?
At the time that McGwire was using PEDS, it was widely accepted – and in many cases, encouraged – by other players and allegedly even teams. MLB never issued a decree suggesting that players become bigger, faster and stronger by using steroids to help them bulk up and stay healthy, but they never took steps to prevent it from becoming an issue. By the time the BALCO scandal brought PED use to the forefront of the conversation, McGwire was out of the game. The congressional hearings he testified at happened after he was retired as well.
During his playing career, steroids did not have the stigma that they do today, and it seems unfair to hold a player responsible for something that “everyone” was doing as the league pretended not to notice. Players who took “greenies” in earlier decades were not held out of the Hall of Fame for their transgressions. What makes modern PEDs any different?
McGwire’s career numbers and his place in baseball lore as the savior of the game in 1998 made him a shoo-in for Hall of Fame status. If the writers are going to elect a player like Craig Biggio to the Hall, it’s hard to believe they could turn away McGwire – steroids and all. Instead, one of the greatest power hitters in modern history will not receive a place in the Hall of Fame, and that is a far bigger embarrassment for baseball than anything McGwire did during his time as a player.
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Was McGwire snubbed, or does he deserve to be left out of the Hall of Fame? If he had been a “clean” player, would he have gotten in?
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