Ask me if I care about the whole Mark McGwire issue. Go ahead. Ask.
I do just a little, but largely I don’t.
When we get down to it, when we sit down and banter around and hash it all out, what is it that I should really care about? I’m not surprised he admitted his steroid use, although I’m pretty shocked how he denied a correlation between his taking them and his performance. The guy is a talented ballplayer, but he not just broke a record, he eclipsed it by leaps and bounds. Maybe his conscience had been beat up enough for one day and he didn’t want to diminish his accomplishments in his mind. Whatever, that’s between him and whomever he feels accountable to.
I loved watching Mark McGwire play, plain and simple. When I was a kid, I thought he and Canseco were the coolest dudes on the field. I remember him turning around a Randy Johnson 99-mph fastball in the Kingdome and banging it off the back wall. I remember him breaking the record, and then finishing at 70, and then being passed by Barry Bonds. When it comes to the on-the-field stuff, McGwire is still OK with me.
He put stuff in his body that many agree is both incredibly helpful and incredibly damaging. He reaped benefits because of it, but he also cast a shadow on himself when he slipped and left that bottle of andro in his locker. People suspected something was up with him just by looking at his physique. But he also brought a tremendous amount of excitement to the game in a time when it was badly needed.
Maybe I’m just missing the fervor that other people are feeling. I understand the shock-and-awe factor of his admission, but when you step back and think about it – does it really change how much you liked watching him play, if in fact you liked watching the guy play? And I don’t mean that you were a fan of his – but that you liked watching the guy play. You may have booed him, but you booed him because he was beating your team, or played for Oakland, or whatever.
I wonder if the fervor stems from a breakdown in the illusion of purity that McGwire tried to maintain. Is there just a thread of similarity between McGwire admitting he took steroids and finding out that Santa Claus wasn’t real? The framework of our view of something is no longer valid, and we now have to work to establish a new framework, a new reality, a new level of buy-in to the product that is in front of us. That is uncomfortable, it requires energy, it requires thought and requires a desire to get to that new level of understanding.
I just don’t get wrapped up in the fervor of it. Mark McGwire only affected my life at such a shallow level, that it just doesn’t elicit that much of a response.