Baseball Will Survive This Latest Setback

“McGwire goes to bat against The Truth -- and whiffs.”

If only someone had fallen on the grenade ...

Given himself up for dead ...

Taken one for the team ...

If only one guy had the guts to say, “Yeah, I took steroids. Didn’t everybody?”

It would have been great if Mark McGwire had said it.

If only he had said, “Bought ‘em legally. Don’t ask how. Not naming dealers or doctors here. But anybody can get ‘em. Used ‘em after Jose showed me they worked. Caminiti said, what, 50 percent of players used? Sounds about right to me. Pitchers, too. I figured, ‘Pitchers using, I’m using. It’s a level playing field.’ ”

If only he had said, “And, yeah, the more I learned, the more I got scared by ‘em. And I knew about Ben Johnson and all the Olympic rules on steroids. Sure. Flo-Jo died in her bed the year Sammy and I had our run. I knew that. And the football players. Poor Alzado.

“But, look. We didn’t have any rules against it. Somebody in baseball must’ve had a good reason to not have any rules. Not my job to decide the rules. I just played by the rules.”

If only he had said, “And everybody loved it, didn’t they?”

If only he had looked down the table and said, “Sammy, you sorry we did it?”

If only Sammy had said, “Mark, buddy, it was great, but now we know better. Whatever else Caminiti did, he taught us that.”

If only McGwire had then said, “But I sure as hell ain’t giving back the 70.”

If Mark McGwire had said all that to the Congressional panel on Baseball, Steroids & The Fools Who Use Them, today he would not be a Shamefaced Loser. He would be a Martyred Hero praised for letting in the disinfectant of sunlight on baseball’s seeping wound. Instead, McGwire treated Congress as if it were a pack of sportswriters unworthy of his august presence.

Under subpoena and having sworn to tell the truth, he refused to tell the truth. Never asked directly whether he had used steroids but asked a dozen ways indirectly, his answer was an insult to the elected representatives and to anyone hoping that an iota of truth might fall from his mouth. The mewling McGwire said, “I’m not talking about the past.”

Even his most passionate defender didn’t understand that. Tony La Russa, his manager with Oakland and St. Louis, told reporters he was “surprised” McGwire didn’t repeat earlier public denials of steroid use. “I think it was a great time to make that same statement,” he said.

But no. “McGwire was tragic,” says Fay Vincent, Bud Selig’s predecessor as major league baseball’s commissioner. Not that Vincent would have asked McGwire to suffer for every player who ever practiced the situational ethics necessary to condone the ingesting and/or injecting of muscle-building drugs illegal without a prescription, outlawed in other sports and dangerous to his health. Vincent would rather have heard the baseball players association apologize for its foot-dragging on steroids.

There was no such mea culpa from the union’s executive director, Don Fehr. “Bud came close,” Vincent says, speaking of Selig, “when he said, ‘I wish I knew then what I know now.’ ” By that, Selig hoped to wash away the steroid stigma attached to his tenure as commissioner, which began in 1992.

Only the hopelessly naive, after all, believe that management from the commissioner’s office through every owner’s office did not notice the Incredible Hulks in the batter’s boxes. And one need be only mildly cynical to think the bosses were blind-eyed complicit in giving steroid boys a decade’s free swing at the record books as long as revenues rose simultaneously.

Vincent saw the hearing as a farce: “I couldn’t find a winner in the crowd.” He did believe Sammy Sosa’s denial and thought Rafael Palmeiro reacted “very elegantly.” But he called Jose Canseco “ridiculous” and Curt Schilling “a shill for management.” Also, as always when baseball is called to Capitol Hill, “Nothing ever happens, and nothing will happen now, either.”

No doubt the former commissioner is correct if he means that nothing legislative will come from the hearing. But something will happen, may already have happened, and it will be valuable to baseball. It will be the realization that baseball will always survive the fools who run it.

The fools practiced racial segregation for most of a century. They allowed a World Series to be fixed. They resisted a free-agent system as if it were Armageddon. They called off a World Series in 1994. And every time, baseball has not only survived, it has come back stronger. It is a strength it comes by naturally. No need for steroids.