This offseason, leading right up to the 2021 Baseball Hall of Fame announcement, we’re counting down the 100 greatest eligible players not in the Hall of Fame and ranking them in the order in which I would vote them in. Each player will receive a Hall of Fame plaque based on the pithy ones that the Hall used to use back at the start. We continue our essay series with No. 14, Mark McGwire.
Mark David McGwire
Oakland — St. Louis, 1986-2001
Perhaps the greatest pure home run hitter the game has ever known. Big Mac’s homer per 10.6 at-bats is by far the best rate in the history of baseball, ahead of even Babe Ruth. Became an American sensation when he broke Roger Maris’ single-season home run record. Admitted using steroids: “It was foolish, and it was a mistake,” he said.
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I’ll say this right up front: I’ve never fully understood why Mark McGwire hasn’t separated from the other players of his time who used steroids and other PEDs. I realize this might make me sound naive and easily duped, which I undoubtedly am.
But my thinking is this: McGwire, unlike pretty much every single other player of his time, admitted using steroids. He apologized for using steroids. He didn’t just admit it in passing or apologize as some sort of half measure. There was no, “I only did it once and I didn’t even know they were steroids” in his apology and admission. No, the guy sat down with Bob Costas for an in-depth television interview. He gave various other interviews on the subject (full disclosure: including one with me). He called it the worst mistake of his life. He said he would for the rest of his life speak out against PEDs. He blamed no one but himself. He called Roger Maris’ widow Pat to apologize for claiming to be clean while breaking her husband’s cherished record of 61 homers in 1961.
Costas: “The (Maris sons) consider their father’s 61 the authentic single-season record.”
McGwire: “They have every right to.”
Now, I’m not saying McGwire’s apology was perfect. It wasn’t close to perfect. McGwire, for instance, was not specific about the drugs he used. He refused to say that steroids turned him into the mash bro he became, even though Costas gave him numerous opportunities to do so. He kept insisting that he used steroids (and HGH) in order to get healthy, not to get superhumanly strong, which seems a half-truth at best. McGwire was defiant in his belief that he turned himself into a home run hitter with countless hours of study and practice and experimentation and work.
And it is also fair to say that his apology was not entirely altruistic; he had been hired to become the hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals and it was reported that a public apology was a condition for the job. Also his brother, Jay, was publishing a book called “Mark and Me: Mark McGwire and the Truth Behind Baseball’s Worst-Kept Secret.” So it was good for him to get ahead of that.
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But to all these fair criticisms, I would counter with this: Who else has come even close to doing what McGwire did? Sure, it would have been better if he had been more forthright, but on the most basic points — he admitted using, expressed regret, apologized without limitation, promised to make amends and asked for people to forgive him so he could be around the game he loves — he went further than anyone who comes to mind. It has been more than two decades since the height of the Steroid Era in baseball, and in that time just about everyone else involved in that era has denied, distracted, lied, obstructed, stayed silent and admitted as little as possible. McGwire stepped forward. He talked about righting his wrong. He talked about giving back to the game.
And he accepted that people would never look at him the same way.
And that is something. You will often hear people say how much good would come if players would just acknowledge what they did and sincerely apologize. But McGwire’s effort, whatever you think of it, suggests this is not what people want at all. I mean, look, McGwire wasn’t going to get elected to the Hall of Fame anyway, but his numbers tanked after his apology. Most people wrote him off as a fraud. Few seem interested in taking up his Hall of Fame case now.
In 2017, Mark McGwire was included on the “Today’s Game Era” veterans committee ballot.
Two years later, he and Joe Carter were the only two players dropped from the ballot. Realistically, McGwire might never appear on another Hall of Fame ballot.
And, best I can tell, he seems at peace with that.
I’m fine with that too — I mean if people don’t want to put McGwire in the Hall of Fame because he used steroids, then so be it. But I’d put him in. I’d put him in because he was the greatest home run hitter I ever saw.
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From 1996 to 1999, four seasons, he hit a home run every 8.13 at-bats. Ruth never managed that kind of ratio for even one season. Mickey Mantle, Hank Greenberg, Roger Maris, Sammy Sosa, Jimmie Foxx, none of them ever came close even for one season. These were not normal-sized home runs either; they were moon-landings, again and again. After one of McGwire’s titanic home runs, the pitcher who gave it up had a genuine impulse to go out and high-five the guy.
He was such a phenomenon that people would fill the stadium just to see him take batting practice. As absurd as Barry Bonds became, as prolific a home run hitter as Sammy Sosa became, as famous as Reggie Jackson or Harmon Killebrew or Darryl Strawberry were for hitting home runs, no one else ever drew the kind of attention that McGwire did.
And I’d put him in because his steroid use was a reflection of his times and the way that baseball was being run. Here are a few things I suspect about the pre-testing baseball era:
• Many players used steroids and other PEDs. I don’t know the percentage, obviously. I don’t know that it was in that 50 percent range that has been thrown around, though I would not be surprised if it was that high. There was no testing. There was no oversight. There was no public campaign against it. Heck, supplements like Andro — which were banned in the Olympics — were perfectly legal in baseball and being used in the open.
• Some players got their names caught up in the steroid scandal. Others didn’t. There was nothing at all scientific about how a player became categorized. People would suspect a bulky player who hit an unexpected number of homers but completely overlook a regular-looking reliever who threw 93 mph and had a 3.68 ERA. If there’s anything that has been proven by drug testing, it is that it doesn’t work like that, you can’t simply pick steroid users out based on their stats.
• Almost nobody has come forward voluntarily. Yes, a handful of players have made grudging admissions involuntarily, after they were caught, usually by downplaying their own level of participation. They tried PEDs once, you know, on a bad day, when they were down on their luck, and they didn’t even know they were PEDs really, and someone talked them into it, and really the whole thing was just a misunderstanding.
Most players do not even do that. They deny, deny, deny, deny, even when their denials are obviously preposterous. I do not think many people doubt there are multiple players who used steroids and are now in the Hall of Fame. Everyone knows it is irresponsible to postulate who these people are, and it’s comfortable enough for them to hide behind that cloud.
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And don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting that I would be better than any of them. Sure, I would like to believe that I would have not used steroids even though there was no chance of me getting caught and it might have meant the difference between a big-league career and a job selling furniture. I would like to believe that I would have not used steroids even if it meant the difference between being healthy, strong and an All-Star versus being injured, brittle and a waiver wire candidate. I would like to believe that I would have seen players all around me — players I considered no better than myself — using steroids and breaking records and making hundreds of millions of dollars and I would have stayed clean.
I’d like to believe all of that.
And I’d like to believe that if I had used steroids, that I would come clean, accept the consequences, do what I could to make amends.
But here’s what I know: All of that cuts hard against human nature. There’s a reason they make movies about people who go against the tide like that.
To be clear: I am NOT saying they should make a movie about Mark McGwire. I don’t think his admission or apology was heroic or anything like that. Neither does he, by the way. All I’m saying is that he is the one who came closest to taking responsibility for what happened to baseball in the 1990s. That puts him in a different category for me.
He was also the most remarkable home run hitter I ever saw.
(Photo of McGwire: Ron Vesely / MLB Photos via Getty Images)