Keegan: The eyes don’t lie, By: Tom Keegan
Seeing is believing when it comes to McGwire’s misdeeds
January 3, 2007
The uproar over Mark McGwire’s unimpressive appearance before Congress in the steroid hearings has a phony ring to it when used to justify not voting for him for the Hall of Fame.
What, did that appearance really change anybody’s opinion as to whether McGwire was on steroids the summer his modern muscles enabled him to slam Roger Maris out of the record books?
The massive muscles and quicker bat speed were better and earlier evidence than McGwire’s insistence before Congress that he was “not here to talk about the past.”
At the time steroid speculation surfaced during McGwire’s 70-home run season in 1998, he took two sure paths to success to keep the talk at a whisper. First, he had America’s fascination with baseball in general and the home run in particular. Second, he bashed the media, saying in angry tone that reporters more or less needed to deal with the “reality” hitters were putting up bigger numbers than their ancestors because they were just that good, just that much better. It flew because when an athlete bashes the media, it almost always flies.
And then, for some reason, the tide turned, and McGwire’s appearance before Congress did him more harm than those of Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa.
Figure that one out. Palmeiro stared straight at the interrogators on Capitol Hill, pointed his finger, and emphatically stated, “I never used steroids. Period.” Leaving little doubt as to who was telling the truth, Jose Canseco, who had outed him in his book, reflexively responded with a look of shock and disgust. Canseco’s expression was the single most real moment of hearings packed with grandstanding on one side and lies and obfuscations on the other.
Subsequently, Palmeiro failed a drug test and was suspended.
Sosa, who had been conducting interviews in English for years, suddenly needed an interpreter when facing the questions. Bright legal minds secretly wondered whether Sosa was guilty of legal parsing when he worded his denial Hurley: He said he never “injected myself or had anyone inject me with anything.” There are ways of consuming steroids other than via injection. In the final stage of his career, Sosa mysteriously lost all the mass he had gained, prompting one club official to say he, “shrunk before our eyes.”
Palmeiro and Sosa aren’t yet on the Hall of Fame ballot because one of the requirements is that a player must be retired for at least five seasons. McGwire’s on this year’s ballot and it’s not looking good for him.
A Hall of Fame ballot is not a legal document. There is nothing on it that says anything about “beyond a reasonable doubt.” A Hall of Fame vote is an opinion, based on the voter’s observations, research and gut feeling on whether a former player meets the standards of being called a Hall of Famer for eternity. No legal proof is needed for a voter to eliminate a player based on the belief a player’s statistics were inflated by using illegal performance enhancers.
Before making a decision on McGwire, let’s look at some myths and truths of steroids.
Myth: Steroids weren’t illegal in baseball when McGwire was hitting all those home runs. Not for most of his career they weren’t. Steroids have been banned by baseball since 1991. It’s just that there was no testing in place until 2005.
Truth: Steroids work. They build muscles, which enhance an athlete’s strength and speed. (Why else would sprinters take them?) The bat becomes quicker and more powerful. Anyone foolish enough to overlook the considerable risks can expect to enhance performance.
Myth: All steroid users are built like Greek gods. See Palmeiro to disprove this one.
Myth: A player who is a workout fiend can be eliminated from steroid suspicion. Wrong. Because the steroids can have a positive effect on strength and endurance, and can shorten recovery time, it’s easier to have more extensive weight workouts more often.
Truth: Pitchers have been juicing for a long time too. Although evidence suggests juicing can increase a pitcher’s risk of injury, it also can speed up his recovery time between starts and add a few mph to his fastball.
Myth: All hitters with massive muscles must be juicing. Players used to gossip about who they thought was using steroids and to a man they all thought Frank Thomas was clean. Interestingly, Thomas’ numbers compared to his peers, faded when juicing became rampant, and improved after testing was implemented. Lance Berkman of the Houston Astros, another longtime, outspoken critic of performance enhancement, never was suspected of steroid use by anyone.
Myth: The performance-enhancement era ended when steroid testing began. Human growth hormone, the stuff that gives some players that caveman look because their jaws grow, does not have a reliable test yet and is not tested for under the basic agreement. Many players look smaller, but some still appear to be kicking the ball back into the fairway.
Myth: All the home run inflation in the steroid era can be traced to performance-enhancing drugs. This theory ignores other factors, such as the sprouting up of more home run-friendly ballparks than ever. Wishing to cash in on the public’s fascination with the home run, ballclubs design new ballparks that make life miserable for pitchers.
Expansion is another factor. There aren’t enough quality pitchers to stock starting rotations, much less bullpens.
A smaller strike zone for much of McGwire’s playing career also figures into the equation. Back when umpires wore the outside chest protector, umpires stood at eye-level to the top of the strike zone. If their eyes had to move up to see the pitch, it was a ball. Once umpires went to the less cumbersome inside chest protector, they stood eye-level to roughly the bellybutton. The high strike vanished. Most muscle-bound hitters prefer the low ball because they get tied up on high pitches. Hitters such as McGwire were able to “keyhole,” meaning they could get ahead on the count and then pick out a small area and only swing if the pitch was delivered in that area. It enabled them to really tee off.
Still, even a voter who believes McGwire juiced shouldn’t eliminate him from consideration because of it, anymore than a voter who doesn’t have absolute proof should disregard the enhancement aspects of his performance.
For example, even if Barry Bonds was hyper-respondent to steroids, he was one of the two best players (Ken Griffey Jr.) in baseball when he had a normal looking body and a head that didn’t resemble that of a Klingon from Star Trek.
Aside: Once, during a home run-hitting contest at the All-Star Game, a prominent former player asked me who I thought was going to win the contest. I guessed a couple of the massive sluggers with enhanced muscles and was told no.
“Griffey,” the former player said.
Griffey didn’t hit nearly as many out in the early rounds as the others.
“They’re having to wait so long between rounds,” the player said. “The natural guys don’t tighten up. The other guys do. Griffey’s natural. Just watch. He’ll win it.”
Griffey won it.
The difficulty in assessing McGwire’s case, the toughest decision in the history of Hall of Fame voting, comes in trying to figure out how much the needle inflated the numbers. Was it to the extent a needle (at the end of a pump) inflates a flat basketball or was it more subtle? It’s a question that will be asked forever if the crooks in baseball can stay ahead of the cops.
Mad scientists predict within a few centuries, or sooner, gene doping will be the preferred method of cheating. Don’t have enough power? Inject the right genes into your system and you’ll be hitting home runs onto the street, maybe even through the street.
Fortunately, it hasn’t come to that. But the greed that so often drives competitors in any field drove ballplayers to go to dangerous extremes to get better, better, better and destroyed any historical statistical perspective.
You say McGwire has the top home run ratio in the history of baseball. I say so what? What would that ratio be if his arms hadn’t inflated and his bat hadn’t quickened. A subtle benefit that never gets talked about: The quicker the bat, the longer a hitter has to decide whether to offer at or take a pitch.
How can a voter go about trying to restore the ruins wrought by performance enhancers when trying to compare the stats of a ballplayer from the steroid era to one from more honest times?
For starters, a voter must make as educated a guess as possible as to whether a player enhanced his performance and by how much. In the case of McGwire, evidence strongly suggests something funny was going on for much, though not all, of his career. Let’s assess him a penalty that shrinks his home run total by 10 percent. Such a penalty brings him from 583 home runs to 525.
In order to better compare him to hitters from bygone eras, dock him another five percent for other factors (small ballparks, small strike zones, expansion-diluted pitching staffs). That brings him from 525 to 499, just shy of the automatic 500 milestone.
He brings little to the table aside from home run power. He wasn’t a prolific doubles hitter, didn’t steal bases, and certainly wasn’t noted as a clutch hitter, as evidenced by his poor postseason numbers. In 42 postseason games, McGwire batted .217 with just five home runs and 14 RBIs. In 13 World Series games, he batted .188 with one home run and two RBIs.
He doesn’t get my vote. Stealing a phrase made famous by the bumbling spy Maxwell Smart, played by late great Don Adams on Get Smart, best expresses McGwire’s Hall of Fame candidacy: “Missed it by that much.”
