mark mcgwire

One regret about my journalism career (actually, there are many, but this is the one bugging me today): for two years I was the sports editor in Longmont and for two years I was a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America. If I had just been able to stick it out for another eight years, I would be voting for the Hall of Fame. Stressful jobs come and go; a Hall of Fame vote lasts a lifetime.

The line between banned substances and approved substances is very thin. How a player bulks up or what he takes to recover more quickly after a game is less important than that he does it all. To put it another way: going back more than a decade, andro was OK until it wasn't OK. But the net result was the same: Mark McGwire, once a skinny kid with a big hole in his swing and frequent knee injuries got big enough and stayed healthy long enough to break the single-season home run record and finish his career with 583 home runs, which at the time he retired that was a no-brainer number for the Hall of Fame. What if he had accomplished the same thing -- bulking up and staying healthy -- with totally approved and legal substances? Some players have actually done that. Even if the player remains untainted, the numbers for the era have been skewed.