House Panel Scores Hits

Congress went after Major League Baseball’s drug policy, and got that and Mark McGwire’s legacy in a single wrenching day, leaving baseball to the cleanup and, eventually perhaps, its game.

By Friday, the principals had scattered from an inquest that sought major changes and probably will bring minor ones, from elimination of “the or,” as it became known in Thursday’s House hearing, to further considerations of policy and practice.

Having taken their nationally televised scolding, Commissioner Bud Selig flew to spring training sites in Arizona, union chief Don Fehr to sites in Florida, and McGwire, it is believed, to his home in Irvine. The House Government Reform Committee, which had flogged baseball and half a dozen of its current and former players for more than 11 hours, turned to the Terri Schiavo saga.

Selig and Fehr agreed during the hearing to remove from the drug policy the commissioner’s option to simply fine a first-time steroid offender up to $10,000, “the or” that baseball executives explained as a drafting error and Congress found deplorable.

The committee threatened plenty -- to strip baseball of its antitrust exemption, legislate a federal drug-testing standard for all sports, remove drug policies from collective bargaining obligation, and more -- but it appeared that baseball and union leaders would stand by the core of the new policy and tinker with the details.

“Obviously, as the commissioner said at the end of the hearing, a lot was said,” Rob Manfred, Major League Baseball executive vice president, said Friday. “We’re going to go ahead with the policy we’ve had by agreement with the Major League Baseball Players’ Assn. Don [Fehr] will talk to his people and the players, and we’ll see what happens.”

When the final witnesses trudged from Capitol Hill, it was McGwire who appeared to have suffered the lasting damage. Some observers viewed his defense tactics as an admission of guilt, and already there are questions about the effect on his Hall of Fame candidacy. He is eligible in 2007.

After having previously denied taking steroids during a 16-year career in which he hit 583 home runs, McGwire, on the advice of his lawyers, refused to do the same under oath. If, by refusing substantive testimony, he’d hoped to remain above the fray, the plan backfired.

Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, told Associated Press in St. Louis, “What I heard and saw was a confession.”

In the final days and hours before baseball’s biggest stars were called to answer questions about steroid use, the players had one last concern: Would they have to take an oath altogether, in a group?

Players who have denied steroid use did not want to be lumped together visually, their right hands raised in unison, with Jose Canseco, the former slugger who had admitted that steroids fueled his career. Their fear, according to congressional sources, was that they might look guilty by association.

The committee acquiesced, and let the players, including McGwire, take the oath one at a time. But a day after the hearing, it was clear that McGwire had brought upon himself further suspicion.

Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), who had sat on Thursday’s panel, called on the Missouri Legislature to remove McGwire’s name from a five-mile stretch of Interstate 70 outside of St. Louis. “Mark McGwire Highway” was so named in 1999, the year after McGwire hit a then-record 70 home runs.

“I don’t think he deserves a name on the highway if he can’t be forthcoming about his involvement with this issue,” Clay told Associated Press in Washington. “It was disappointing because I didn’t think he took the opportunity to make clear to his fans and the rest of America that he was not under the influence of steroids when he set those home run records in 1998. He does not come clean. He’s not forthcoming. His fans and the public want to know, where do you stand on this, Mark McGwire?”

Tony La Russa, McGwire’s manager in Oakland and St. Louis and among the first to defend McGwire when Canseco’s steroid accusations became public, told reporters in Jupiter, Fla., that the defensive tactic disappointed him.

“In my opinion, being under oath wouldn’t have changed what he said,” La Russa said. “I think he was over-coached. Mostly, I think it was a missed opportunity to explain that if you use substances like Creatine and over-the-counter stuff that’s not illegal, you can get the benefits of a hard-core weight-training program. And that was never discussed. You can get bigger and stronger doing this legally, and I didn’t hear that.

“I think he was kind of coached into saying this one thing, ‘I’m here about the future, not about the past.’ I was surprised he didn’t repeat what he said earlier. I think it would have helped his cause.”

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Times staff writer Maura Reynolds, in Washington, contributed to this report.