Pastime Takes On a New Meaning

Which moment, which number, which achievement will follow Mark McGwire most closely into baseball’s history book?

Will it be Sept. 8, 1998, the night McGwire hit the 62nd? Or March 17, 2005, the day he took the Fifth?

“I’m not here to talk about the past,” was McGwire’s spin on the self-incrimination issue Thursday as he sweated and fought back tears during his testimony before Congress about drugs in baseball.

“I’m here to talk about the positives and not the negatives about this issue,” McGwire said, and wasn’t that the way it worked in ‘98, when he and Sammy Sosa had only to smile for the cameras and keep hitting home runs to the delight of a fallen national pastime blinded by the light of potential resurrection?

It was somewhat different on St. Patrick’s Day seven years later. McGwire and Sosa were united again, and photographed again, only this time their uniforms were business suits, their teammates were attorneys and there were no high-fives anywhere, unless you count the right hands raised as they were sworn in to testify before Congress about steroids in baseball.

First Sosa, then McGwire, taking the oath, back to back, before taking reputations and legacies into an unimaginable place where the spotlight was suddenly the enemy and every question a beanball.

“I’m not here to talk about the past,” McGwire said over and over as he squirmed in his chair when asked about steroids and baseball experiences that were pertinent today but anchored in the past.

McGwire is retired. He has been implicated in at least two published reports as a steroid user during his playing career. One was a book authored by former Oakland teammate Jose Canseco, also seated at the same table Thursday, only feet away from his one-time Bash Brother.

McGwire didn’t want to hear it, but there was only one reason he was summoned to speak before Congress: To talk about the past.

Or, as Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) testily said at one point, “As far as this being about the past, that’s what we do. This is an oversight committee. If the Enron people come in here and say, ‘Well, we won’t want to talk about the past,’ do you think Congress is going to let them get away with that?

” . . . If President Nixon had said about Watergate, when Congress was investigating Watergate, ‘We don’t talk about the past,’ how in the world are we supposed to pass legislation? When you’re a protected monopoly, and all your salaries are paid because you’re a protected monopoly, how are we supposed to figure out what our obligations are to the taxpayers if you say we won’t talk about the past?”

Souder was speaking for the room -- and, no doubt, the television viewers waiting for McGwire to step up to the plate and say something worthwhile about the issue. No use. Whenever McGwire was questioned about the past, he passed.

Sosa, meanwhile, suddenly seemed to forget how to speak English. He brought an interpreter to the hearing and kept his answers as brief as possible, specializing in three short words in particular: “I don’t know.”

It was remarkable television, watching some of the most-feared sluggers in baseball history flinch and waffle in the face of questions about the legitimacy of the great home run feats of the last decade.

Canseco, whose recent finger-pointing book was a major reason why some of the sport’s biggest names were dragged to Washington to endure this interrogation, appeared to be the coolest head on the player panel, even if he had to be sequestered in a different holding room from the others.

When others at the table defended baseball’s current drug policy, Canseco called it a “complete joke,” adding that if a proper system of testing and penalties had been in place, “no major league player would use steroids.”

When the rest of the panel tried to talk their way around a question about whether players knew about steroid use in the sport, Canseco was the only one to answer, “Absolutely.”

After listening to so many half-answers and non-answers from his former colleagues, Canseco peered out from between the hedges and mused, sarcastically, “From what I’m hearing, I was the only individual in major league baseball to use steroids. That’s hard to believe.”

Curt Schilling seemed to resent Canseco for the inconvenience and the intrusion on his holiday schedule. He described Canseco as “a liar” and a “so-called author” and dismissed the book as “a disgrace

When it was over, ESPN’s Dan Patrick and Buster Olney tried to make sense of a session that played like a nervous game of big-salary dodgeball.

“If you would have asked baseball a month ago, ‘What is your worst nightmare?’ it would be to have one of the great stars stand before Congress and refuse to answer questions about taking steroids and to plead the Fifth,” Olney said. “And that’s exactly what happened with Mark McGwire today.”

Patrick: “He did not deny taking steroids. In the court of public opinion, what does that mean?”

Olney: “It’s a guilty plea in the court of public opinion. It certainly is not [an actual guilty plea], and to this day we still don’t know if Mark McGwire took steroids, but in the court of public opinion, he lost.”

Earlier during ESPN’s coverage of the hearing, Bob Ley and Olney picked apart inconsistencies in statements made by baseball Commissioner Bud Selig as to when he first became aware of a possible steroid problem in his sport. Selig has steadfastly stuck to 1998, but Ley and Olney discussed a 1995 article published by The Sporting News quoting Selig about holding talks about the steroid issue possibly as far back as 1993.

Olney described the session as “a day of contradictions.”

Was it all just a highly publicized waste of time?

Was anything gained, aside from more sales for Canseco’s book?

If something was, it will be up to Congress to take, or force, the next step, Canseco maintained.

“Steroids were a part of the game,” Canseco said, “and I don’t think anybody really wanted to take a stance on it. If Congress does nothing about this issue, it will go on forever.”