Mark McGwire finished his Major League Baseball career as one of the most prolific and legendary sluggers of all time. The former 12-time All-Star hit over 500 home runs and won the World Series in 1989 with the Oakland A’s. He set the then-single-season home run record with the St. Louis Cardinals in the famed 1998 season with 70.
But obviously, steroid accusations and admissions have brutalized McGwire’s career in retrospect. He still isn’t in the Baseball Hall of Fame and has hardly been considered seriously over his many years on the ballot. While he got reacclimated in baseball as a coach for three different franchises in the 2010s, McGwire is still upset over the disrespect that’s followed him.
The iconic McGwire made headlines on Wednesday after sounding off on Foul Territory TV. Co-host A.J. Pierzynski asked McGwire if he felt he and other Steroid Era players had been unfairly punished and disrespected.
A.J. Pierzynski: “Do you feel like you’re being… unfairly punished? Or, maybe you’re a group. Maybe I should say the group of you, not maybe singling you out as just yourself. But kind of that whole group of, again, the same kind of people are being unfairly punished because of bias or whatever you wanna call it?”
Mark McGwire: “Well, it seems like it. That’s what it is. I think I heard Barry say it the other day. There was no rules and no regulation. Believe me, trust me, if there was any rules in place that stuff would have never happened. There was no testing, no nothing. So it’s like, and I agree with what Barry was saying. Listen, that was the culture. That’s what was going on back in those days. And uh… whatever. But I can personally tell you, from me, knowing me, listen–I didn’t need to do it and I apologize for it. But there was a lot of ******* hard work that went behind all the **** that people wanna give me to do what I did.”
McGwire is hardly on the wrong side of history here, even if the BBWAA and others have found a way to disagree. The fact that Steroid Era players have received so much bias and backlash hasn’t done much to help the sport in all earnest. There’s an entire generation of players that won’t be accounted for at the Baseball Hall of Fame. They’re some of the game’s greatest players: Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Manny Ramirez, Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, and a slew of others face absolutely improbable odds to make the Hall of Fame. Yet the commissioners who presided over those eras, Bud Selig most notably, were allowed entry into the Hall of Fame. Make it make sense.
When you consider the fact that it was part of the game, and that there’s nothing anybody can do about it, you would think the great gatekeepers of the game would understand that context. Unfortunately for guys like McGwire and Bonds, no such context is ever considered in great numbers. So all this resentment is understandable.