Photo by George Bridges/KRT

A lot has changed since Mark McGwire retired in 2001. He was seen as a hero to some after his record-setting 1998 season, but after his testimony as the Congressional hearings, seen above, McGwire has fallen from grace.

Hall voters deal McGwire a taste of reality, not snub

Josh Brewer

Fourth Estate

Commentary

Baseball is America’s pastime. It’s the sport we, as Americans, boast about bringing to the world. Baseball was never perfect, but there used to be a calming serenity to its air of purity.

The night of Sept. 8, 1998, was a perfect illustration of baseball’s now-faded purity. The site was St. Louis’ old Busch Stadium. Then-Chicago Cubs pitcher Steve Trachsel wound up and delivered to perhaps the best slugger in Cardinals history not named Albert Puhols. Trachsel was dealt a case of whiplash, as Mark McGwire sent the pitch into the left field seats, breaking Roger Maris’ single-season home-run record.

There were no thoughts of steroids that night. The only worry fans held was how the game could get any better after a history-altering home run ... and how it could get any worse after McGwire and Sammy Sosa shared an all-too-awkward man hug.

Fast-forward to the here and now. Eight and a half years have passed since that historic night, and the baseball landscape has changed dramatically. The Boston Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 years. The Chicago White Sox won it all in 2005, breaking an 88-year championship drought. Heck, even old Busch Stadium has been replaced, albeit with an upgraded ballpark bearing the same name.

McGwire and Sosa are both out of the league, too. And they — along with the physically inflated Barry Bonds, who reportedly failed a drug test last season — are at the forefront of the steroid problem in Major League Baseball.

Voting for election into the National Baseball Hall of Fame concluded last week. In were Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn, a surprise to no baseball fan that has a fully functioning brain. Out was McGwire, left only with his 583 career home runs and a 23.5 percent vote.

While McGwire’s vote percentage will keep him on the ballot in 2008, it will need to increase by more than 300 percent if he’ll head to Cooperstown to join the game’s greatest players.

The figurative backlash McGwire has been dealt by Hall of Fame voters is deserved. There may be many places that McGwire may truly deserve to be — in his apparent self-induced exile, or maybe even the Hall of Shame — but a shrine that honors such players as Hank Aaron, Nolan Ryan and Roberto Clemente is not one of them.

I don’t care that McGwire is eighth all-time in home runs. What else has he done? A .263 career batting average, only seven more runs batted in than Jose Canseco, and an average of nearly 100 strikeouts per year are not stats that scream Hall of Famer. It took Gwynn two and a half years, on average, to strike out 100 times.

Not only do his career numbers beckon questioning, but so do his actions, especially those taken in front of Congress. While nobody is required to say anything while on trial, and every person in this country has the right to not say a thing, McGwire still took a cop out. He is a smart man, so I am sure he knew exactly what his penchant for not discussing the past would do in the court of public opinion. Not saying a word was just as good as admitting steroid use.

McGwire never admitted to using steroids, but if he was clean, how hard would it have been to say so? Had McGwire told Congress he was clean, the Hall of Fame Class of 2006 would include Big Mac.

As long as he continues to get more than five percent of the vote, McGwire will stay on the Hall of Fame ballot for the next 14 years.

I really hope the voting sports writers do what they did to Pete Rose and keep him out of Cooperstown. The only way McGwire deserves the 75 percent vote required is if those same voting sports writers do the right thing and elect the deserving Rose into the Hall. If we can’t have the leading hitter in the history of the game in the Hall of Fame, the eighth-best home run hitter of all-time definitely shouldn’t be there.