Friday Baseball Post

I guess the big news of the week was Mark McGwire.

Mark McGwire was a great baseball player, one of the five or so greatest first basemen in the history of baseball.  He was a lot of fun to watch, too: one of the great "three true outcomes" guys, and in a lot of ways the single player who took Babe Ruth's all-or-nothing style to the farthest possible point.  I happened to have lived in Oakland during most of his years there (and he was a star on my Blue Sox roto team for a while until I lost him when he was traded to the Cardinals)...he was probably the second-most-fun player for the 1990s A's to watch, after Rickey Henderson. 

He also took advantage of chemical aid that was basically legal within baseball.  As did virtually everyone (my guess is that Dale Murphy is the best candidate for a superstar who didn't do that), in one form or another, between (at least) the 1960s and the end of the century. 

Alas for McGwire, a bunch of jerk sportswriters have decided to treat him as if he was a moral leper.  They've invented a completely bogus -- ethically, legally, and baseball-rules-wise distinction between the various things that players used, and put McGwire on the wrong side of it.  And they begged him to put on a show of contrition that might have embarrassed Stalin.  And then they still beat up on him some more.

(If anyone thinks that they know of some distinction between the uppers that everyone took for decades and the steroids that many players took in McGwire's time, I'd like to see the case made.  Indeed, I'm not entirely convinced that there's any baseball distinction between what McGwire did and what Greg Maddux did for his eyes).

And that is all I have to say about Mark McGwire.