Back in 1998 Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were credited by many with saving baseball.
The sport had been in the doldrums since 1994 when a strike did what wars, natural disasters and the Great Depression couldn’t do – it canceled the World Series.
McGwire and Sosa traded homeruns back and forth while chasing the 37-year-old record of 61, achieved by Roger Maris in 1961. McGwire won that race, beating Sosa 70 to 66.
Four years later Barry Bonds got in on the act, breaking McGwire’s short-lived record and finishing with 73. Six years later he broke another hallowed baseball mark, trumping Hank Aaron’s all-time record. His total now stands at 762.
Each of these characters should be going into the Hall of Fame and living their lives basking in the glow of their achievements (Put Roger Clemens in this collection as well).
Instead, each is disgraced, having allowed themselves to be tied in and tarnished in some way by baseball’s steroid era. None of them have admitted to it and all of the allegations, no matter how strong the evidence, are still just that, for now. Allegations.
But there is strong evidence out there against each of these fellows, leaving two of baseball’s most prestigious records in the hands of alleged cheats.
For the Bonds haters, Alex Rodriguez stood out as somewhat of a beacon-in-waiting. While not the most popular player in the game and not the most successful at this point in terms of winning championship rings, he had at least until this past weekend managed to put himself in position to be the guy to overtake Bonds’ career record and at least restore that position to a non-cheater (allegedly).
Now even that hope is gone. With CNNSI.com’s report Sunday that he tested positive for steroids back in 2003 and his subsequent admission, Rodriguez has assured that even if he passes Bonds the record will remain in tainted hands until someone can overtake him as well.
Rodriguez deserves credit for coming clean. Future Hall of Fame voters and history will treat him better than it will treat his compatriots.
According to Sports Illustrated, he called himself stupid, sorry, naive, negligent and regretful – and guilty. That’s respectable. But it doesn’t change the past.
The thing that I find most maddening about these facts is that with the possible exception of Sosa, each and every one of the players mentioned in this post would have been a Hall of Fame player without juicing up. McGwire and Sosa were fantastic players and had personalities that transcended the game. Bonds is allegedly a jerk but his status as one of the best hitters to ever wield a bat is indisputable. And Rodriguez? Well, Rodriguez might have been the best of them all.
But now their collective legacies will be a permanent stain on this generation of Major League Baseball.
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I think I liked it better back when we all just assumed that they were on steroids. We all noticed the fact that the “Bash Brothers” arms were growing and ready to pop and the Barry Bond’s head quadrupled in size keeping new era’s hat division from going out of business year after year, and everyone used to say, “it’s from all the roids”. It was a great joke that we knew was probably true but didn’t seem to care about at the time.
Now we talk about it in the news daily, how these players are cheaters and we need the government to step in and blah, blah, blah. I think all it is doing is ruining Major League Baseball for the next generation of kids. They will either ignore baseball all together because they realize their heroes are cheaters and liars. Or they will assume the only way to be great is to hit the gym and start sipping some creatine and injecting some roids.
It is time we take baseball back! The records are already scorned by names of these cheaters and liars; the only way to save any integrity is to get rid of the people whose lack of regulation and punishment caused this problem to get so far out of hand in the first place. Selig and his goons need to give the game back to someone who cares about the integrity of the game. The records will be broken again someday. And with the right people in charge, those people who break those records next time around might actually be baseball players.