McGwire’s shut out is a cryin’ shame
I see where
”
Big Mac,
”
as in Mark McGwire, failed by a wide margin to get enough votes
this week to make it into the Major League Baseball Hall of
Fame.
Clearly the members of the Baseball Writer’s Association of
America wanted to send a huge statement that any questions or
concerns surrounding steroid use or its alleged use would have a
major league impact on anyone’s ability to earn a coveted spot in
the Hall.
McGwire’s shut out is a cryin’ shame
I see where “Big Mac,” as in Mark McGwire, failed by a wide margin to get enough votes this week to make it into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.
Clearly the members of the Baseball Writer’s Association of America wanted to send a huge statement that any questions or concerns surrounding steroid use or its alleged use would have a major league impact on anyone’s ability to earn a coveted spot in the Hall.
As for me, I’m kind of hanging on the homerun fence with this one. I understand steroids are illegal in baseball and they may enhance one’s physical stature in both strength and mass, but what does that have to do with one’s ability to pull the trigger on a 3-2 count in the bottom of the ninth inning?
Players have been pumping iron, taking vitamins, protein powders and shakes, and working out for years.
Clearly, the guys that use the natural supplements that are legal will bulk up, too, and get bigger than the guys that aren’t as obsessed with muscle mass and working out. But with that said, whether these guys are getting bigger and bigger natural or illegally or they’re not working out at all, none of it seems to affect hand/eye coordination or the ability to better detect a fastball from a change up.
In other words a player can take whatever he wants but that doesn’t mean that he’s going to turn a double-play ball or run down a deep drive to the warning track better than everyone else. Mark McGwire should be in the Hall of Fame for his God-given talent.
But baseball makes its rules and rules have to be followed. It’s the same reason why I think Pete Rose’s absence from Cooperstown is asinine, but then again the rules of the game stipulate that betting isn’t allowed.
There’s no question that what Mark McGwire did on the field was good enough to make it into the Hall and that’s what makes it so sad. Heck, there are guys in the Hall of Fame with numbers not even approaching McGwire’s.
Babe Ruth hit 714 homeruns and was notorious for his boozing, womanizing and famous pot belly that never saw a workout room in its life.
Nobody that played back then popped vitamins and protein shakes or had physical trainers and doctors analyzing their every move. When Babe played the only workout rooms were bar rooms – a place where a guy could smoke a few cigarettes, slam a few mugs of beer and meet a nice dame the night before a game.
Does this mean that all the guys that came along decades after Ruth, probably from around the mid-1970s on, when workout rooms became the norm, had an unfair advantage over the guys vying to make the Hall of Fame during Ruth’s time?
What about the guys who were on the Hall of Fame fence in the 1950s? Would legal vitamins and proteins have been enough to put him over the top? Probably not, which is why the steroids that McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds allegedly used were definitely not the make-or-break factor in what they all accomplished on the field.
It was all God-given talent. If it wasn’t they would have never been drafted in the first place.
A steroid might have helped them hit a ball 500 feet. Without a steroid the ball might have gone 480 feet. The problem is the homerun fence in most ball parks is about 415 feet – so all of those blasts that McGwire hit were going out of the park anyway.
And let’s say McGwire had a number of homeruns that barely cleared the fence during his alleged steroid years. Had he not taken steroids, those balls would still be triples. The guy hit 583 homeruns.
It could never be proven but I’d say at most not more than 20 of those cleared the fence because he had 5 percent more strength after popping an illegal pill. But let’s just say 83 of them were solely because of his ability to swallow an illegal substance or take a shot in the rear end. The guy still hit 500 on his own merit – and 500 is normally a shoe-in for the Hall of Fame.
Fortunately, for McGwire he received enough votes to stay on the ballot another year. The unfortunate part is that there’s so much focus on steroid use in the game, that McGwire, Sosa and Bonds will probably never get into the Hall and that’s really a shame.
I’d bet even Babe Ruth would vote for all three of these guys’ being inducted.
