We Knew It All Along, Mark

Confirming what many already suspected, Mark McGwire said recently he took steroids through much of his baseball career, including in 1998 when he broke Roger Maris' single-season record for home runs, with 70. He had to do it at some point because he became the St. Louis Cardinals' hitting coach during the offseason. If he hadn't, steroids would've been the first question any reporter asked him in each city. And how could he have kept living so anonymously, as he had since his embarrassing testimony before Congress in 2005 (which essentially convinced everyone McGwire was a steroids user even as he didn't acknowledge it)?

Baseball, though, still has a serious problem on its

hands, even if commissioner Bud Selig wants to declare the steroid era over. Criticizing McGwire and other steroid users on purely ethical grounds is difficult. Almost anyone in any job would take a substance if it would improve one's performance, salary and fame. But the sport is only slowly emerging from its biggest constitutional crisis since teams refused to have black players on their rosters, which only ended in 1947. (Steroids might be an even greater problem if

you want to view sport as purely sport, divested from politics.) The past 15 years, most of my cheering life, are largely a historical distortion, too difficult to compare to what happened earlier or what will happen later.

McGwire's admission also notably came a few days after he again missed admission to the Hall of Fame. In the three years he's been eligible, he's never earned more than 25 percent of the possible votes, well short of what's needed for induction. I doubt many voters will change their minds now -- which this story suggests too -- and why should they? Again, McGwire made a tough choice. With millions of dollars at stake, few would've done otherwise. But the Hall of Fame should be reserved for those who've proven they're at the peak of the game, now and forever, while respecting the game's integrity. McGwire didn't hit home runs only because of steroids, but it's impossible to know how many he was naturally capable of hitting without their aid. Maybe it would've been the same number, maybe it would've only been half. In his case, it would've probably been closer to half because his career was nearly derailed by injuries eight years before he retired, about when he started taking steroids.

There will be many more players tied to steroid use who will become Hall of Fame-eligible in the next 10 years and whose surefire candidacy now misses the target. Should players who publicly addressed the situation be given more leeway than those who hid from it? Probably not -- they all embarrassed the sport and they all have tainted statistics. Furthermore, there are players who have never been linked to drugs but whose careers were defined by great offense and many home runs in the high-flying 1990s and early 2000s -- Jeff Bagwell and Jim Thome come to mind the quickest -- a time now proven to be a glitch. Maybe they were products of their era and not as good as we thought. It's funny and sad how baseball has come to resemble postwar countries such as Guatemala, South Africa and Germany that need truth and reconciliation committees to be able to continue with the future.