KRAC Blog

Confession or no, it doesn't seem to me that McGwire has a HOF resume. The numbers over an 18 season career show him for what he was: a one dimensional slugger with injury problems, something like this guy, or this guy.

I don't think McGwire belongs in the same category as Pete Rose-- Rose actually knowingly broke an existing rule, while McGwire merely cheated. There is a place for the sort of thing that McGwire did in baseball-- Gaylord Perry, to chose one example, cheated. But Gaylord Perry was also a better player over a longer career than McGwire. (Consider Perry for a moment-- he is often reduced to a mere spitball pitcher, but this is a guy who had success spanning a couple of baseball eras-- 1962-1983, in both leagues, for 8 teams. Incredible.) What Rose did undermined the integrity of the sport by compromising transparency. McGwire's offense couldn't have been more public or apparent if he'd worn a uniform patch with a syringe on it. Context also matters here: McGwire may be the public face of the steroid era, but it was the steroid era. The use of performance enhancing drugs was sufficiently ubiquitous that we can look at the stats which were being posted and tell with a fair degree of accuracy pretty much when the period started, and when it ended. (We can do this in other sports too. Swimming and Track & Field come to mind.) If baseball's Hall of Fame is an institution that recognizes who the outstanding players of a particular era were, than acknowledging who the greatest players of the 90's shouldn't be too difficult-- compare oranges to oranges.