McGwire? I thought you said MacGyver

Well that's finally over, though it was painful to watch the man weeping on TV (Costas is tougher than George Stephanopolous). I think Steve Goldman sums up my thoughts on the subject.

Whether you consider McGwire a Hall of Famer or not depends on the degree of outrage you feel over steroid use, that is, over the dishonest act rather than the effects of the cheating, because (again) when it comes to the latter, we just don’t know. The problem is that we’re now talking about matters of character rather than performance, surely a hypocritical and subjective thing to be doing. Let he who is without sin etcetera, etcetera and so forth. The Hall of Fame is already so compromised, so corroded with the sanctimonious drool of so many writers and their quasi-religious “first year” rule and odd embrace of Jim Rice, the way they betrayed the elderly Buck O’Neill, that it’s difficult to make any qualitative argument and instead say simply this: the Hall of Fame is the museum of baseball. For better or worse, Mark McGwire was an exemplar of a certain kind of baseball, just like Cap Anson was an exemplar of another kind. Like it or not, those years happened, those events happened, and we should keep remembering them, keep talking about them forever. Hell, yes, Mark McGwire should be in. We made him and he’s ours, so we should keep him.

Especially the bit about the betrayal of Buck O'Neill.

Now, what will Bonds or Clemens do? McGwire wanted to return to the game and to the St. Louis organization so he did what he had to do. I'm not sure Bonds cares about the HoF and he certainly has no plans to return to the game, and Clemens is too wrapped up in his own self-imagery to admit anything other then self-discipline and working harder than everybody else that played. And surely some sort of Maoist self-criticism/confession is now a BBWA requirement for HoF consideration.