NBC Sports - news, scores, stats, rumors, videos, and more Jay McGwire wrote a book claiming Mark started using steroids in 93. So now what will ,Mark say? This should kill his hall of fame chances permanently. Too bad.
Claim is that he started it for repair of injuries.
That’s really too bad. I remember well the race back at the end of the 90s and for awhile, McGwire (and Sosa, by extension) was somewhat of a hero around our household. 
I hate that he used in general, but to think he might never be in the HoF because of it is just sad, albeit probably understandable.
Why too bad? He should be punished as severely as possible. Strike the guy’s name from the history books, except maybe as a brief footnote saying he was a cheater and a drug-abuser.
Because he and Sosa had a lot to do with bringing the game back after the last strike. The normal programming on TV had cutaways when they came to bat. Everybody knew of the home run race. They were heroes for a while. Baseball was happy as hell to ride their coat tails for a couple years. There were no rules against steroids when McGwire used . He showed Andro on TV when someone asked what was in his locker.
A game that needs illegal drugs to be “brought back” might be better off wherever it wandered off to.
First of all: :dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious:
Secondly: I doubt stabbing someone in the face with a rusty, HIV-infected shiv is against the rules in baseball either, but it doesn’t mean you’re allowed to do it. Steroids have been a schedule 3 controlled substance in the United States since 1990.
I think all the steroid era HR records should be struck from the books. As far as I’m concerned the records are still 61 and 755.
Having said that, I think it’s a little sleazy to exploit your own brother like this. Not that I feel all that sorry for Mark McGwire, but his brother is still pretty scuzzy for trying to make money this way.
B-b-b-but that all happened in the past! Let’s focus on the future. Only revelations from any brothers McGwire may have in the future should count against his untarnished record, mkay?
Maybe MLB should declare a DC Comics-style “crisis on infinite Earths” and start all over.
This will let ESPN and Sports Illustrated flog the corpse of the steroid era some more, but isn’t really a big deal. Everybody already knew McGwire used steroids. The only people who differed were in total denial; even McGwire didn’t deny using in his testimony to Congress. While his performance there was sheepish, by the way, I’ve never understood why it was lambasted so much. At least he didn’t lie to Congress, which Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro did at the same hearing and Roger Clemens did later.
Yes there were, and there was also the matter of federal law. The rules were just ignored, because like you said, baseball was happy to ride McGwire’s and Sosa’s coattails and then discard them later when they became an image problem.
Andro isn’t a steroid, although it is now banned.
I did want to share this Jay McGwire quote, because it’s both the silliest, most grandiose and maybe the most dishonest reason I’ve ever heard for writing a tell-all:
“My bringing the truth to surface about Mark is out of love. I want Mark to live in truth to see the light, to come to repentance so he can live in freedom – which is the only way to live.”
Mark and Jay McGwire have not spoken in years, by the way.
Yeah, that’s a pretty half-assed justification for throwing your brother under the bus. But hey, at least Jay gets his 15 minutes and some money out of it!
Mark McGwire used steriods. This is not particularly surprising. It was illegal when he did it, and thus not allowed by MLB (even though it wasn’t specifically prohibited by the league). That said, I don’t think you can pretend that none of that baseball happened. McGwire is and always will be part of baseball history, just like Pete Rose and Joe Jackson. Pretending otherwise is pointless.
How many home runs would Mark have hit if he never used steroids? We’ll obviously never know. I will note that if we take Jay at his work (that Mark started using after getting injured in 1993), then Mark McGwire hit 220 HRs before he ever used and was a 6-time all-star. Pretending that he was nothing without the juice is as dumb as making the same claim about Barry Bonds.
Just to add a bit of proof to this. In 1991 commissioner Fay Vincent sent out a Memo (warning .pdf) outlining baseball’s drug policy. Steroids are specifically mentioned as being prohibited. MLB did not have a testing policy, nor did it have a specific set of punishments laid out, but it did have rules against using steroids.
Marks showing of Andro on Tv .in my opinion, opened the door to investigating drugs in baseball. Many sports writers started to educate themselves about potential enhancing substances . Then it winnowed down to steroids. If you think the steroid cleanup was good for baseball., you owe a thanks to McGwire.
This is a common claim. It is also a claim that has very little merit.
The baseball strike was in 1994. The year before, the World Series had a ratings average of 17.35. The year after, the ratings averaged 19.5. The year of the McGwire/Sosa HR battle, the ratings averaged 14.25.
I’m trying to find season-wide ratings, but that’s proving difficult.
Here’s a link to MLB attendance figures since 1901:
http://bss.sfsu.edu/tygiel/hist490/mlbattendance.htm
Here are the attendance number for 1997and 1998.
It should be noted that in 1998, the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays were brand new, accounting for 6.1 million attendees. Oddly enough, 7.4 million more people attended games in '98 than in '97. Now, 1.3 million is a lot of people - but it’s still only 548 seats over 2,400 games (about the number played in a MLB season).
Heh. Looking at the numbers deeper, I noticed something funny.
Both the Cubs’ and Cardinals’ numbers jumped about 500,000 each from '97 to '98 - pretty significant, and very understandable. However, across town, the White Sox’s numbers *dropped *about 500,000 over that period!
If you recall. they cut away programming to show their at bats. That is huge. Cutting away prime time for an at bat. They were front page news and all over TV. That remains big. Many who do not follow baseball were aware of the home run race.
Yeah, the same way you owe a con man for teaching you to be careful about who you trust. Sure, he made off with $3,000 and your stereo, but you owe him your thanks. :rolleyes:
I’m not sure those TV stats make for a valid comparison, Munch, although they’re interesting. The Cardinals and Cubs weren’t in the World Series to begin with, and there’s also the proliferation of new networks and satellite TV to account for.
The cutaways could generate a larger long term audience. people who were tepid about baseball may have gotten heated up and became more active fans.
Personally .i do not care what they take to play sports. Like abortion. it is not my body and I have no right to make that decision for you. If you want to take them have at it. HGH is all over the league. Those who dabble have experts inventing drugs and masking agents. There are new Balcos churning out performance enhancers every day. The field is not level.
It’s cheating. You shouldn’t have to wreck your body to be able to compete.
I love the amount of evidence we require as proof on steroids. His estranged brother is making a blatent attempt to make money off his name. Everything he says must be true!
On a number of points made:
Andro was not a banned nor illegal substance at the time McGwire was taking it. That incident should in no way be held against him.
His exploits in baseball happened. You can na na na na I can’t see them, but they still happened. Pretending they didn’t is silly. There is no such thing as a pure number. They are affected by discrimination, ball affects, umpire decisions, illegal pitches and any number of other things. You don’t get to pick and choose which ones you like. Records are a reflection of history. They don’t need to tell you why.
Yes, baseball techinically had rules against steroids. It has rules against running into the catcher too. The thing that they had in common is that they were never enforced. Do you want your player not running into the catcher on a close play, because technically it is against the rules? Sure it is a different thing, but the concept remains. I don’t think you can make no effort to enforce a rule, and in fact pretty actively look the other way, and then throw all the blame on the players afterwards for breaking it. This was a system wide failure by the players, management, and media.
Steriods is a very general term. Some are illegal and some aren’t. Some are helpful and some aren’t. Saying steroids=bad is a overly simplistic way of looking at things.
Lots of things are illegal. We don’t want to throw out the numbers of players who take cocaine or beat there wives. Remind me again why I should have more ire for Mcgwire than Bret Myers? I don’t understand. For me taking steriods is pretty low on the list of shameful things people do.
Lots of people took illegal substances. They took different things in different amounts for different reasons. Not all cases are equal, and there is no reason to think Mcgwire’s action were particularly horrifying. The fact that a hall voter voted for Matt Williams (on the Mitchell report), but not McGwire is asisine.
Oh and he was absolutely right. Congress should not have been focusing on his past. This doesn’t mean he didn’t do steriods, but congress’s priorities were severely out of whack. You want kids not to take steroids, you talk about Ken Caminiti. You don’t talk about Mark McGwire.
Plenty of people wreck there body to compete. You think pitching is a natural motion. That linemen’s natural weight is 350. Being hit the head repeatedly is good for the brain?