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Thoughts on Mark McGwire by guest blogger E.J. Wolborsky
0 Comments | Posted by Bill in Posts by Guests
On July 17, 1998, just past the middle of one of the most magical and captivating seasons in recent baseball memory, I saw one of the two
Mark McGwire '53 (Topps style) ltd ed litho
heroes of that season — the titanic, ginger-haired slugger Mark McGwire — hit two home runs in a home game against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Having grown up a Cardinals fan in Little Rock, Arkansas, and, as such, having made many trips to St. Louis and the friendly confines of the second Busch Stadium, I was naturally very excited to be on hand to witness not just a 4-1 victory for my team, but also a striking individual accomplishment by the season’s main headline-grabber (with all due respect to Sammy Sosa, of course).
It was a hot, dry night at The House That Beer Built, now carpeted with real grass in place of the hard, dangerous AstroTurf of yore. The Dodgers looked a formidable team coming into that four-game series; they had brought up five straight NL Rookies of the Year from 1992 to ’96, and had finished at .500 or better every year from 1993 through that very 1998 season, when they would eventually end up with the same 83-79 record as the Cardinals. In contrast to the Dodgers’ youthful exuberance, the Cards were a team led by power-hitting veterans like McGwire and the outfield trio of Ray Lankford, Brian Jordan, and Ron Gant (though the 1998 season would see them introduce Placido Polanco and the highly-touted J.D. Drew, as well as trade for the promising young third baseman Fernando Tatis).
The Cardinals’ starting pitcher, Juan Acevedo, began the game with a 1-2-3 inning, and Dodgers starter Brian Bohanon looked as though he might do the same when he struck out the first two Cards batters in the bottom of the first. But when the hulking McGwire strode into the batters’ box, he was ready for whatever Bohanon could throw at him; he took Bohanon’s first pitch deep to left field — an absolute moon shot. The ball’s accelerating descent carried it into Big Mac Land, a porch on the third deck of the left-field stands that was specially built prior the 1998 season, after St. Louis’ 1997 trading-deadline deal to acquire McGwire from the Oakland A’s. Big Mac Land was not just a constant corporate tie-in promotion for the ballpark, the fans, McDonald’s (who offered up a free Big Mac to anyone with a ticket stub from that section for any game in which a Cardinals player hit a home run there), and, of course, McGwire. Though he was personally unaffiliated with McDonald’s, “Big Mac” was the redheaded righty’s nickname, and nobody bequeathed more burgers to the citizens of St. Lou that year than McGwire.
McGwire would go on to hit another homer, this time off reliever Antonio Osuna, in the bottom of the eighth. His final line: 2-2 with two walks and two solo home runs — a more or less typical McGwire outing for a season in which he ended up with 70 HR, 147 RBI, 152 hits, 155 strikeouts, and 162 walks in 155 games, all of which contributed to his gargantuan OPS of 1.222. That home run tally, of course, set a new single-season record, shattering Roger Maris’ previous mark of 61 and cementing McGwire’s legend as the greatest slugger of his generation (at least until Barry Bonds bashed 73 dingers in 2001, Mac’s final season in the majors). It also tied McGwire’s name inextricably to that of the St. Louis Cardinals, despite it being his first full season with the ball club. McGwire would retire as a redbird in 2001, after just over four seasons with the team, the final two being blighted by injury. But the relative brevity of his tenure with the team did nothing to diminish the heroic status he enjoyed among the Cards’ fans. Simply by virtue of the fairytale 1998 season — one which reconfirmed baseball’s mantle as America’s Pastime after a decade of labor strife, franchise expansion, and aging ballparks threatened to consign baseball to the lower rungs of the American sporting hierarchy — McGwire will forever be remembered as a Cardinal, in spite of the fact that he played his first 11-plus seasons in Oakland. McGwire walked away from the Cardinals organization, but Big Mac Land remained, even being transported to the third incarnation of Busch Stadium when it opened in 2006, as a constant reminder of McGwire’s deftness with the deep ball.
"Sammy and Mac" ltd ed litho
Unlike so many recently retired star athletes, who either move into punditry or otherwise attempt to parlay their fame into a second career in the public eye (Jim Bunning, anyone?), McGwire has spent the past eight years in relative seclusion, demanding a high degree of privacy and thereby adding to the mystique and intrigue surrounding his accomplishments. Next season, though, Cards fans won’t have to look toward left field for a memento of McGwire; in fact, they won’t have to look past the dugout, where Big Mac will be sitting with his mentor, Tony La Russa, serving as the team’s new hitting coach. Despite having been hired for the position nearly two months ago, McGwire has yet to be formally introduced by St. Louis, nor has he addressed the media in any capacity. This conspicuous silence and lack of fanfare at the prospect of bringing a Cardinals legend back into the fold smacks of “something to hide,” just like McGwire’s 2005 appearance at a Congressional hearing on steroid abuse in Major League Baseball — a televised hearing in which McGwire told members of the U.S. House of Representatives that he was “not here to talk about the past.” (What, pray tell, did Mac think they wanted to speak with him about? Golf? Foreign policy?)
Interviewed last week at MLB’s winter meetings, La Russa weighed in rather unofficially on McGwire’s reticence, saying that his former player had not yet spoken on the record because he didn’t want to interfere with or overshadow the World Series or baseball’s end-of-season awards. If that’s true, then we can applaud McGwire’s class and reluctance to steal anyone’s spotlight. But La Russa was quick to deflect any question of a date for McGwire’s official introduction to the press, opting instead to tout McGwire’s skills as a hitting instructor and the seriousness with which he’s taking the job. La Russa also claimed that, once spring training begins, whatever McGwire does say to the media is “going to be about coaching.” That’s an unlikely scenario, to be sure, and one which would do nothing to dampen the suspicions that McGwire’s impressive hitting accomplishments were the result of steroid use.
While it is unclear where public opinion comes down on the did-he-or-didn’t-he questions surrounding McGwire’s use of performance-enhancing drugs, the Baseball Writers Association of America has made their stance apparent in light of McGwire’s paltry tally of Hall of Fame votes. While it is unlikely that disgraced sluggers Rafael Palmeiro and Jose Canseco will ever be seriously considered for Hall of Fame induction, it is perhaps even less likely that McGwire will be forgiven for any transgressions — even those which are unconfirmed suspicions — until he publicly addresses them. Big Mac should take a lesson from players like Jason Giambi and Alex Rodriguez, who, having been exposed ex post facto as cheaters, accepted the blame for their actions, lending further credence to the public perception that PED use has been so widespread in professional baseball in recent decades that it’s hardly even a competitive advantage, but rather more of a status quo practice. Giambi, A-Rod, and other active Major Leaguers who have admitted to PED use have more or less enjoyed the public’s forgiveness in light of their confessions, and there is no reason to believe that the same forgiveness shouldn’t be extended to the likes of McGwire and Sosa, whose magnetic personalities and nice-guy public images imparted the magic on that 1998 season every bit as much as their bats did.
Finally, all the hub-bub over McGwire’s hire begs the question: where is MLB in all this? If there is any lingering suspicion that a former player used steroids, and that player refuses to cooperate in any investigation or probe into that topic, why would the commissioner’s office, the owners, or the player’s union want to allow that player to return as a coach? Is the potential perpetuation of PED use not clear to everyone in that scenario? Coaches should be required to prove they are clean and drug-free just like players, in an ongoing effort to keep PEDs out of clubhouses and out of the sport as a whole. Anything MLB does short of that would only be paying lip service to the problem, and McGwire’s attempts to avoid the questions should be scrutinized more heavily by a league looking to restore its image. -E.J. Wolborsky
