So Mark McGwire has finally admitted, or halfway admitted, what was always obvious about his slugging career: it could never have happened without steroids. He says he took the drugs only to treat a career-threatening plague of injuries, which is a funny and backwards little delusion or lie, but which highlights a turning point in the story of baseball and steroids. McGwire had injury problems because he was overmuscled, because he was abusing steroids. That was the original tradeoff with steroids--power for fragility. But in the mid '90s, someone finally figured out how to tweak the recipe to make juicers more durable, and the rest is history.
Or it would be history, if people would tell it straight. Via Romenesko, veteran sportswriter Dave Kindred offers his all-too-typical account of why sportswriters didn't talk about steroids while Mark McGwire was slugging all those home runs:
If any sportswriter suggested during that season that McGwire used steroids, I can not find a record of it. Without Wilstein's reporting, in fact, McGwire likely would have reached 70 home runs without a hint of performance enhancement being written. A Nexis search of The Washington Post and The New York Times shows 53 mentions of "steroids" in McGwire-related stories, but none of those makes a direct connection of the man and the PEDs.
Why did sportswriters not connect the dots?
To start an explanation -- as silly as it now sounds -- those were simpler times.
They were days before BALCO.
[...]
Before BALCO, we were gullible, the media, the public, baseball fans everywhere. Whatever we knew about steroids, we knew in connection with football and track, not baseball. And now came this great home run chase - ". . . .the story was so darn good, you know?" We dared not blink lest we miss another astonishment. Who, then, would turn away to shout, "Are you people blind? Don't you see STEROIDS blinking on McGwire's forehead?"
Funny, that's not how I recall it. Here's what some other guy had to say about McGwire's heroism in August of 1999--not quite during the 1998 season, but while McGwire was still America's home-run darling, and long before Balco:
A few weeks ago, he announced that he'd quit using the anabolic steroid --er, "nutritional supplement"--androstenedione. But if Mark McGwire is a drug-free athlete, Wallis Simpson was a virgin when she brought the former King Edward VIII to the altar.
McGwire is what people in the bodybuilding business refer to, accurately, as a "freak." He is bloated and deformed beyond normal human dimensions. His condition is usually ascribed to strength training--as if some free-weight routine could make his cheek muscles swell up like a pair of grapefruits. If he is not abusing steroids, then he is suffering from a pathological endocrine condition.
Does anyone remember the Chinese women's swim team of the early '90s? At the 1992 Olympics and the 1994 world championships, China's female swimmers scandalized the sports world by showing up with 24-inch necks and linebacker shoulders, and they smashed a bunch of records. Everyone knew they were cheating, because their bodies and their performances were too abnormal to explain any other way.
Last year McGwire hit almost 15 percent more home runs than anyone ever had before. He looks like The Thing from the Fantastic Four comics. He admits to using an anabolic steroid. He's done everything to taint his accomplishments short of injecting himself with bovine growth hormone between at-bats.
(I also wrote that all-around players better than McGwire included Doug Glanville. Can't win 'em all!)
