In other news, Man Lands on Moon...

It had to have been the worst kept secret in all of Major League Baseball. Mark McGwire admitted today that he took steriods the year he hit 70 home runs, breaking the record of 61 homers previously held by Roger Maris. According to reports that are quickly popping up on the internet, Big Mac came clean in a phone interview with the Associated Press this afternoon. He said that he had called Tony LaRussa and Commissioner Bud Selig to personally apologize for his trangressions.

Why did he decide to come clean now? I think there are a whole host of reasons. McGwire wants back into baseball and knows that this was going to be an issue hanging over his head from the start. He also wants to make the Hall of Fame, something he is assuredly not going to do any time soon. But our country tends to be pretty forgiving and if you drag yourself out on the carpet, say you were a bad boy, and a really, really sorry, people tend to forget.

McGwire is a different story though. He is part of a brash and unrepentent part of baseball history that now wants to rewrite what happened. (see also Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds) He sat before Congress and said he only wanted to talk about the future. Now, in search of a future in the sport, he is the one dragging the past back into focus. As some time passes, I am sure we all have a chance to look at McGwire's numbers and wonder what he would have been without the Andro and Steriods. My gut reaction is he would have been a pretty exciting, skinny player. He always had fast hands. There are going to be those who think differently though. My good friend Joe fired off an email within five minutes of the news breaking, "He had so many injuries in his career, if he never took them he would have been out of baseball ten years earlier than he was."

Maybe Joe is right. Without steriods, do we sit watching Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire going toe to toe as the summer slipped into September? Do we let baseball slowly gain our trust back after that awful player strife of 1994-95? Would Cal Ripken breaking Lou Gehrig's record been enough to bring us back? I doubt it highly. Baseball is a great sport, but a lot of fans felt extremely wronged by the strike.

One of my favorite quotes explains it best, "Chicks dig the long ball." So do middle aged men, ten year olds, and corporate stiffs who pay the highest ticket prices. Only history knows how this one will play out. You have hope that baseball has the worst of this behind it now and can move forward with a new crop of stars who excite the kid in all of us.