yes he admitted steroids , but he never denied it, greenies and steroids were still used and not banned by mlb. also look at old photos of mac at his locker. most of the time hgh can be seen clearly
on the top shelf, whether right or wrong to use them , you still have to pitch or hit the ball, hitting it the hardest thing in sports.plus his career ended early for all the roids injurys ,i am not a mac fan but want fairness on issue not open season

you are so right.... they only say what they have to... never another word more...

Kevin, The man hit tape measure homers before he ever heard of steroids, much less used them. He hit them in college, in high school...balls they couldn't find, because he hit them so far.

McGwire told the truth when he said he didn't need steroids to knock the ball out of the park and anyone who saw him early on in his career knows it.

As a rookie with the A's, when he still had a relatively lean, normal physique, McGwire hit 49 dingers, while playing his home games in pitcher-friendly Oakland Coliseum. He had one of the best power strokes of all time.

Yet you want to claim he needed to bulk up. Are you kidding? Look, I'll grant you steroids enabled him to hit the ball farther. That's stating the obvious, but my question is, how much did it really help pad his totals? And my answer is, not very much.

People were watching SportsCenter nightly in 1998 to see, not just whether he hit any more homers, but how far he hit them. Players on opposing teams stopped what they were doing just to stand in awe watching him take batting practice.

He was in a simply unbelievable groove as a hitter that year and the balls carried even further because of his enhancement. But here's the most important thing to remember: The vast majority of those home runs were going to go out with or without steroids. There were very few that barely cleared the fences. I'd say no more than half-a-dozen went out because of he was juiced, that is balls that otherwise would have died on the warning track had he not been taking steroids.

I mean, like, he's hitting balls that are going to would carry 350 feet, say, unaided, but are now carrying 400 to 420 feet and 400 foot homers are now travelling 450 to 480 feet, so it doesn't matter, they're going out anyway you look at it.

In short, McGwire would still have beaten Maris' mark regardless. Bonds breaking Aaron's record is something else, because he had years and years to pad the totals: If he lost six dingers a year for a decade, he wouldn't have passed Ruth, either.

Finally, I don't consider using steroids or any other performance enhancer cheating. I think there's other obvious problems with steroids involving health and legality, but just from the standpoint of using sports supplements to gain an edge, I think this is a tempest in a teapot.

And I say this because any athlete can go to a GNC or similar store and by over-the-counter products that enhance perfornance. Even something like Gatorade gives an athlete an edge, overcome fatigue by replacing lost electrolytes. Granted, were talking about enhancement at a much smaller scale, but enhancement is enhancement.

I agree with you when you say he still wasn't forthright in all that he said, but so what? I wish he would have been, but he admitted use, so let's move on.

As for the Hall of Fame, I think both he and Sammy Sosa should get in without any more hand-wringing from the media. Yes, they juiced and that's wrong, but those two also did the game of baseball a great service with their home run chase at a time when the sport was going under for the third time.

Sure, there was a taint there, but it was a taint that Bud Selig and Company chose to overlook because of the greater good that was served. Oh, and if you want to keep the steroid "cheaters" out of the Hall, I hope you'll be consistent, Kevin, and work to have pitchers like Jim Bunning and Gaylord Perry removed from it, because they both threw illegal pitches and that certainly gave them an unfair advantage. (Bunning was nicknamed "Buckles" during his career because he'd cut the ball on his belt buckle, while Perry's spitball was so notorious he even titled his autobiography Me and the Spitter.)

Right is right and if you're going to get tough concerning cheating, you've got to address it wherever it's found.

Hey Kevin, get rid of the Captcha anti-spmmer. It is a nuisance to the comment process and hinders sending comments.

If you can't do the comment monitoring yourself, why write columns online in the first place?

Ken lays out some important considerations about Big Mac and his abilities without steroids. There's probably no question that there was some assist, but the fact remains that just taking steroids doesn't cause that kind of response all by itself. He got the gains in strength because he was a workout warrior. Had there been an effective testing program in MLB at the time and appropriate penalties to discourage use, something like they finally have now, it's highly probable that McGwire would have still filled out roughly similarly to what he did because of his workout regimen. The steroids enable more effective strength gains in part because they enable quicker recovery, so to deny any impact in his HR totals is not credible. But they don't have that effect without the serious working out.

It still doesn't make it right. But there was not a dramatic transformation in body type and conformation as there was in Bonds (who was a Hall of Fame player before he juiced) or Sosa (who was a much slimmer guy without real power potential in his early years). He just filled out his frame.

I am not going to make a case for forgiveness or for inclusion in the HOF for McGwire. But let's keep things in perspective and not get caught up in hyperbole and misinformation.