![]() ![]() The real sadness in all of this – for the Maris family, for Hank Aaron (whose career home-run record was taken from him by Barry Bonds, he of the Balco scandal), and for baseball fans in general – is that what they suspect to be true will never be reflected in the record books. "Obviously, I think my dad still holds the record," Maris's son, Rich Maris, said yesterday. If drugs did not help him "hit a baseball" – to use his narrow, self-serving definition of what it is to be a baseball player – then they certainly helped him break the sport's most precious record. As he said himself he took steroids to get himself on the field. When McGwire broke that record – with 70 – in 1998 he did so with medical enhancement. When Roger Maris set the single season home-run record, hitting 61 for the New York Yankees in 1961, he did so while enduring the pain and injuries that are a part of every baseball player's life. Even if it were true (and there is some medical opinion suggesting human-growth hormone – which he also admitted using – does in fact improve vision) it does not allow him to escape culpability for what he has done. This cliche of modern baseball parlance has become the crutch on which cheats like McGwire have sought to prop up whatever remains of their reputation. A pill will not hit a baseball," he said. "There is no pill or injection that will give me, or any athlete, the hand-eye coordination to hit a baseball. The sceptics credit McGwire for his willingness to sit down and face questioning from Costas, although they were far from convinced by many of his answers, not least his continued insistence that he took steroids for medical purposes, to help him recover from injury, and not to help him become a better ball player. Those inclined to feel sympathetic towards the slugger credit him with offering a more "complete" and "believable" confession than the likes of Rodriguez, who tried to pass off his drug use as actions of a stupid youth, or Giambi, who apologised but declined to say what he was apologising for. The reviews have landed and they can be best described as mixed. McGwire's confession was carefully filtered out through a press release and a series of brief interviews, but the centrepiece was an one-hour live, sit-down with Bob Costas of the Major League Baseball network, which was intended to address every conceivable question raised by the revelation that the man who broke the home-run record in 1998, and who in doing so was credited with reviving baseball's image after a damaging players' strike earlier in the decade, was in fact a cheat.Ĭostas is many things but he is certainly no mug and he did a brilliant job in getting McGwire to tell his (obviously rehearsed) story, as well as exposing the contradictions therein. Clearly, Fleischer is a glutton for punishment. ![]() According to this morning's New York Times, the man with the plan in this instance was Ari Fleischer, who spent the early part of this decade as the public face of the George W Bush administration in his role as the White House press spokesman. If nothing else, McGwire's mea culpa was a fine case study for students of what modern media experts call crisis management. I'm so glad they have a very strong drug testing policy now because if they had it when I was playing, I promise we wouldn't be having this conversation."Īnd in one big, teary step Big Mac landed in camp confessional, where the truth will set you free. I wish they had had drug testing when I was playing. "I can't say I'm sorry enough to everyone in Major League Baseball, the fans, everyone. "It was absolutely the most ridiculously stupid thing I've ever done in my life. ![]() Yesterday it was the turn of Mark McGwire, the one-time "home-run king", to go where Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi – to name only the most famous of the game's confessed steroid users – had gone before. ![]()
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