Photograph by Rick Dikeman
A big sports news item of the day is that Mark McGwire didn’t make the Hall of Fame again this year, receiving his lowest vote total (a paltry 19.8 percent) from the Baseball Writers of America.
The real news is that 115 of the writers thought the Big Mac Steroid Freak Show deserved entry into the Hall at all. This was, after all, the first balloting since last January’s “shocking” confession of steroid use by McGwire, so the writers couldn’t be clinging to the lawyerly argument that there was no proof that PEDs had enabled him to devalue baseball’s sacrosanct home-run records.
Maybe they were rewarding him for “coming clean,” as if the self-serving nonsense that he offered Bob Costas on MLB Network—“the only reason I took steroids was for health purposes”—did anything but make his record dirtier. The only claim more astounding was Cardinals manager Tony La Russa telling ESPN that he didn’t know of his dear friend’s steroid use until being called by him on the day of the Costas interview.
Set aside that McGwire’s pathetic story is far less believable than the allegations of former teammate Jose Canseco, who has claimed he injected McGwire with steroids as far back as the late 1980s in Oakland. Canseco may be no model citizen, but he hasn’t been disproved in anything he has to say on the steroid subject.
Assume, though, that McGwire’s steroid run was health-related and coincided with his return from his injury-decimated 1993 and 1994 seasons, in which he played a grand total of 74 games in a two-year span.
Look at his statistics through 1994—through the age of 30—after which balls magically began springing off McGwire’s bat at an unprecedented clip. After nine years in the majors, McGwire was a lifetime .250 hitter with a career total of 238 home runs and 637 RBIs.
Sound like Hall-of-Fame numbers to you?
McGwire actually had a statistical twin at the time in fellow AL slugging first basemen Cecil Fielder. The similarities were shocking. Both were born in California, 10 days apart, and they played the same position in the same league in the same years.
After 1994, at the same age of 30 and the same number of seasons, Fielder was a lifetime .259 hitter with a career total of 219 home runs and 680 RBIs, amazingly similar to (and slightly better than) McGwire’s numbers.
They were the same guy.
Fielder, who went on to have numerous personal problems, saw his career decline with age, which once upon a time was considered the law of nature. He was often ridiculed for just being fat: The only PEDs that he was accused of taking were doughnuts. Fielder played through the age of 34 and wound up with 314 lifetime home runs, a result that McGwire might have been expected to achieve sans steroids.
The Juiced Big Mac, on the other hand, would go on to become Hercules and break all of the home-run records, saving baseball in the process.
Bottom line: When McGwire’s baseball twin, Cecil Fielder gets the HOF call, so should Big Mac. And not a moment sooner.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9's Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
