McGwire will be first victim of steroid era, By: Larry Bohannan

January 7, 2007

A colleague who is a member of the Basbeball Writers Association of America reports he voted for Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn for the baseball Hall of Fame this year. He also voted for Goose Gossage and Lee Smith, believing relief pitchers are woefully under-represented in the Hall.

Mark McGwire? The writer went back and forth, back and forth, then finally decided that the player with 583 career home runs, seventh on the all-time list, would be left off his ballot.

Too one-dimensional, the writer said. And if that one dimension was chemically enhanced with steroids or performance-enhancing drugs, then how legitimate is that one dimension?

That writer will likely find himself in the large majority when the BWAA's Hall of Fame voting is announced Tuesday. Ripken and Gwynn are no-brainer Hall members. Gossage might get in this time. And McGwire will reported fall well, well short of the 75 percent of the ballots he needs to make the Hall this year.

For all the talk of Barry Bonds and grand juries, of Sammy Sosa and Raphael Palmeiro and B-12 shots, it is this Hall of Fame vote that will be the first tangible backlash of baseball's steroid era. And that backlash will fall squarely on the board shoulders of McGwire, the sport's Paul Bunyan of the 1990's.

Evidence vs. perception

The Hall of Fame announcement will simply stoke the fires of the debate over steroids and the players. McGwire never failed a drug test, but most feel he didn't come clean in testimony before a congressional panel on steroids in sports. He might have helped save baseball in 1998 (along with Sosa) by hitting 70 home runs, but his name has been raked through the chemical mud by former teammates like Jose Canseco and fans in general who now seem to look back and wonder why they didn't see that Big Mac and others were using performance-enhancing drugs at the time.

There is a failed drug test in Palmeiro's past, and the circumstantial evidence and even grand jury testimony is stronger against Bond. But my colleague will join others in weighing McGwire's statistics against the strong belief that at least a few of those tape-measure home runs came from the end of a needle.

Bonds has been hounded but not suspended or officially punished. Sosa is out of baseball but was a player clearly on the decline in his final year.

Fair or unfair, rooted in fact or belief, McGwire is about to become the highest profile victim of the steroid era - for now - by being kept out of the Hall of Fame.