Mark McGwire Admits Steroid Use in 1998

I’ve been trying to grasp this for a while, and a great opportunity to ask has never come up, so this feels like as good a place as any to do so. When pitchers and hitters are on PEDs, doesn’t that (at least partially) balance things out?

I know I’m probably vastly outnumbered on this stance, but when the argument is always “player X from era Y never had benefit Z, so this guy is a baby eating cheater” shouldn’t we also consider that player X from era Y also never had to play against anyone who had benefit Z?

Like I said, just trying to better understand why players who took PEDs get such a lashing when they hit well, vs. the guys who were on them to improve other aspects of the game.

Before today (in the eyes of the BBWAA, at least, and probably a good portion of the public) Mark McGwire was a steroid user and a liar. Today he’s just a steroid user. The sooner everyone admits to what they did the sooner we can make an honest assessment of what the steroid era really meant for baseball in general and stop blaming the few individuals that happened to be the best at the sport while juicing.

the outrage/shock over player steroid use always seemed like a blatant cover from the rest of the baseball community. It was obvious to anyone with a brain in their heads that certain players were using steroids. Yet baseball refused to implement strong rules to prevent it. Everyone was complicit as a result. owners, managers, fans and especially writers.

Rather than own up to our collective participation in the steroid era we can all act shocked about these revelations and effectively blame the individual players. Baseball loved McGuire and his obvious steroid abuse at the time. To make him (and others) into a villain now is just a hypocritical attempt to pretend that we weren’t parties to the action from the beginning.

I think he’s covering for someone.

I’ll never forget watching this game.

Same pathway, same result.

The demarcation between legal and illegal is ridiculous.