Mark McGwire‘s steroid admission drags baseball back to a dark part of its history — even though it really never left.
In confessing to using steroids on and off for nearly a decade, Big Mac firmly planted himself as the chairman of baseball’s steroid-era Hall of Shame. It also invites us to take yet another look at the ugly stain that marks the game’s past two decades.
“The so-called ‘steroid era’ — a reference that is resented by the many players who played in that era and never touched the substances — is clearly a thing of the past,” MLB commissioner Bud Selig said in a statement on Monday. “Mark’s admission today is another step in the right direction.”
Does Selig seriously believe that baseball has moved beyond the steroid problem? That would be a poor calculation on the part of a commissioner who already underestimated the vice-like grip that performance-enhancing drugs had on his sport. Selig, after all, will go down as the man who could not (would not) (did not) crack down on steroids with mandatory testing until it already had spiraled out of control.
In calling the steroid era “a thing of the past,” Selig sends a message that he is resting on the success of baseball’s current testing policy, instead of focusing on expanding it to include other performance-enhancing drugs like human growth hormone. Meanwhile, the process for Hall of Fame induction guarantees that steroids will not fade into the background, especially with Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds nearing eligibility.
PEDs are not a simple issue. They are the reality of the times. World Anti-Doping Agency president John Fahey responded to the McGwire admission on Tuesday, saying that despite “incremental progress,” baseball’s drug program still falls short of the “universally accepted standards” of the international code on doping.
Jose Canseco, incredibly the one person in this whole mess whose testimony becomes more authentic on a daily basis, believes the number of players using some form of substance to enhance their statistics was much larger than originally believed.
“If you were in the game in the last 20 years, there’s a 95 percent chance you were knowingly using something,” he told ESPN’s Pedro Gomez last July.
If that’s the case, the use of performance-enhancing drugs was not limited to the game’s greatest stars, but also included middle relief pitchers, journeymen infielders and players who took supplements simply to pull even with peers who already were juicing. It means the Mitchell Report (published in late 2007 with a focus on the use of steroids in the game) was just the tip of an already melting iceberg.
Selig would have you believe that the steroid era is a thing of the past. Of course he would. He’s as responsible for it as anyone. If McGwire’s confession brings one thing to light it should be that baseball has no effective test for HGH. Selig will point to the numbers and tell you that in 3,722 player tests in 2009, only two came back positive for steroids. That’s not because the steroid era has ended, it’s because it has evolved.
This topic is a sticky one, adhering itself and ruining everything it touches. It will be the primary bullet point for McGwire and Selig when we look back years from now and evaluate their respective careers. When an issue like this infiltrates every crevice of the game, when it reaches such a saturated level — implicating players who used, teammates who turned a blind eye and the commissioner’s office that was reactive instead of proactive — then it no longer is a problem that can be solved by a single drug test.
