BBWAA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

To this day, I regret failing to convene a grand jury to investigate Mark McGwire's drug use.

It haunts me.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

Finally the regret and contrition that abbott was looking for. Maybe you should see a shrink, sloan. Don't let it eat you up inside.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

Marijuana is against the law. So, in some places, is sodomy. Should we used that to keep people out of the Hall of Fame too?

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

Shawn Merriman used illegal performance-enhancing drugs. He's in the Pro Bowl.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

I'm sure Bob Woodward is pissing in his pants with the same regret about Richard Nixon. Oh, but that's real journalism, this is only sports. For slobs that couldn't play the game and writers that can't really write?
Are you a member of the BBWA? Did you vote for McGwire? Did you write a column celebrating baseball's rebirth due to Big Mac in 1998?

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

Goddamnit, why didn't I subpoeana his pharmacy records? WHY?

Son of a bitch.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

This is an interesting discussion, one I see both sides of.

I think it's asking a lot to demand that journalists find hard proof when shit was kept on the down-low very well. Many elite college athletes are driving around nice-ass cars to this day, and us reporters aren't able to do anything about it because there's no proof that John Q. Booster bought it for him. Yeah, he's 19 and broke with a Range Rover. But I can't write a story full of accusations just based on those three facts and not much else. I've already got 50 hours worth of work a week along with an impatient wife and three kids.

The steroids scandal finally came to light because of three different events: 1. Ken Caminiti admitting to use and saying a ton of colleagues did; 2. Jose Canseco admitting to use and naming names; 3. A federal investigation into BALCO that originally started because Trevor Graham snitched on Victor Conte.

The MLB clubhouse is a very tight-knit family with one big unwritten rule. Don't tattle. 99 percent of ballplayers, on and off the record, abide by that. Caminiti got a ton of heat by players for saying what he said, to the point where he went on Jim Rome in near tears to take it all back. Canseco is the exception to the rule, and he's got credibility issues. Example: Among all the steroid accusations in his book, he claims he can run a 3.9 40-yard dash.

This might be rambling, but to say that the writers didn't do their job is a little bit unfair. Not totally unfair, but a little bit. That's moot, though. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence that Mark McGwire took steroids. Without those steroids, there's reason to believe he wouldn't have put up HOF numbers (or even been around in his mid 30s with all the injuries).

If he's got a problem about the truthfulness of all the accusations being thrown around, he should speak out. He's not.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

Ricky Williams didn't really improve his game much by smoking the ganja. Then again, I'm just a sportswriter, so I shouldn't serve as judge, jury, and prosecuter when it comes to evaluating his skills.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

No, you're right. A lot of people bitch to me about how people with criminal records are in the Hall, dope smokers, heavy drinkers, wife beaters.

None of those guys became Hall of Fame-caliber players with their illegal actions, except maybe Gaylord Perry. McGwire may have.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

Abbott, I'll give you this: I do understand the part of the argument that says everybody was on these guys' bandwagon during the homer wars, while probably at least thinking something was fishy and winking at it. So maybe all of us in the business could have been less worshipful during that "amazing summer." And that does make the current righteous indignation a little harder to swallow.

I'm just saying that even if they had been more subdued, they just couldn't throw a lot of innuendo out there concerning steroids without anything concrete. And I'll repeat: Yes, the Chronicle guys DID do a hell of a reporting job. They also had a significant insider who put them in a position to do it.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

Do you have any idea how freaking hard it is to play an NFL game six days after playing one? Any clue how painful it is? Without painkillers and weed, almost impossible, especially for a collision-heavy position like running back. Weed absolutely helped Ricky Williams play well again one week after getting 25 carries, just as it helps countless NFL players get out of bed on Monday and Tuesday. Brett Favre will be in the HOF someday, and it's pretty much a fact that he took massive amounts of pain killers so he could get on the field, pain killers he got from teammates and not from a doctor, which is illegal by law (just ask Rush Limbaugh). To argue that weed and pain killers are not a performance enhancers is extremely naive.

But we're straying from the point here, which is baseball. If you were along for the ride in 1998, and pretty much everyone was, and it wasn't against the rules but was against the law, I'm not sure how punishing McGwire makes it all right again.

And SF, again, who was leaking Tom Verducci information? What grand jury testimony did he have to blackmail Camenitti into talking? None.

I understand why the information didn't come out. It was hard to get. I couldn't have done better had I been in the position that many baseball writers were. In fact, I'd likely have done much worse.

Which is why I would put McGwire, Sosa, and Palmeiro into the Hall of Fame, and then remind myself that having a HOF vote was a privilege, and that I had one because I'd covered the game for 10-plus years, and from now on I'd do a better job as a reporter so I could do a better job as a voter in the future. The two are connected. We seem to have forgotten that.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

If 50-80% of the league (and probably even higher when you confine the sample size to sluggers only), took steroids, and Big Mac still outplayed most of them, wouldn't he still be signifantly better than them, enough so to deserve Hall of Fame induction?