We still have Mark McGwire’s 1985 Topps Olympic baseball card – as well as his 1987 Donruss “Rated Rookie” card, too.
They’re relics, obviously, reminders of a time when baseball was still clinging to its last strands of integrity … you know, before labor strikes claimed the World Series and steroids claimed the sanctity of some of the game’s most hallowed records.
Seriously, and you thought Roger Maris deserved an asterik?
We’re talking about the Paul Molitor era, people – a time when scrappy ballplayers who actually gave a damn about their teams and cities competed to win, not all this Manny Ramirez bullsh*t you see in today’s “sport.”
Anyway, a quarter century after we hoarded his rookie cards and marveled at his (clean) 33 home run rookie season in Oakland, former major league slugger Mark McGwire admitted Monday what everyone already knew – that his prolific power seasons in St. Louis (including a then-record 70 home run season in 1998) were artificially powered by steroids.
Yeah … “duh.”
Anyone who watched McGwire’s painful Congressional testimony five years ago (in which he basically pleaded the Fifth on steroid use) knew that already.
Hell, just look at those 1985 or 1987 cards …
(click to enlarge)
… and then look at McGwire a decade later …
Yeah …
Anyway, McGwire has now confessed to using steroids – which we presume is “step one” in some image reclamation project aimed at making him more palatable to the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York – a place that steroid users like him shouldn’t be permitted to visit, let alone be enshrined.
“I wish I had never touched steroids,” McGwire said Monday in a statement released to the Associated Press. “It was foolish and it was a mistake. I truly apologize. Looking back, I wish I had never played during the steroid era.”
Ironically, around this time last year McGwire’s brother, Jay, was trying to sell a book about about his brother’s steroid use and we (and others) laughed at it because its basic premise (a.k.a. “my brother did steroids”) was already so widely accepted as to render the whole concept relatively pointless – a view that was shared by a number of publishing houses, incidentally.
Oh well … better late than never for McGwire, we suppose, but admitting you cheated (and being forgiven for it) doesn’t mean your records should stand or your place in Cooperstown should be reserved.
It just means you finally came clean after lying to people for all these years (and ruining the pure joy felt by a 13-year-old kid when they found one of your cards in a pack).
That’s all …
