McGwire admits to steroid use

[Sammy Sofa]

Bingo. There's a reason that a lot of mediocre middle relievers were/are taking this stuff. Recovery time is shortened.

 

I had hoped that the whole Clemens mess would force people to also start looking at pitchers as well as hitters if they're so determined to keep crying about this, but it was too easy to just joke about his gigantic ass and "'roid-rage"-type incidents instead. He's clearly looked at as exception to the steroids stereotype because he's a pitcher.

[fromthestretch]

Bingo. There's a reason that a lot of mediocre middle relievers were/are taking this stuff. Recovery time is shortened.

 

I had hoped that the whole Clemens mess would force people to also start looking at pitchers as well as hitters if they're so determined to keep crying about this, but it was too easy to just joke about his gigantic ass and "'roid-rage"-type incidents instead. He's clearly looked at as exception to the steroids stereotype because he's a pitcher.

 

Yeah, it really didn't change a damn thing. Everyone still equates steroids with home runs and bulk.

 

Felix Heredia tested positive for steroids, for crying out loud. The guy weighed like 80 lbs.

[XZero771679666304]

The whole issue has willful ignorance in every facet. Ignorance about why it is used, who uses, how long players have been using, and on and on. The level of reaction over something that should have been implicit (McGwire's use) is indicative of willful ignorance. Or ignorance over the fact players have been cheating in any way they could since they first set foot on a diamond/court/field. Ignorance over the fact that the Hall of Fame is littered with cheaters of various types. Willful ignorance when we were all thoroughly enjoying what was obviously an anomalous power spike in the game. Willful ignorance over the fact a league like the NFL is fueled by PED's, because we enjoy the speed and violence as much as we enjoyed all those homers.

 

The history of sport is littered with competitive imbalances, and honestly, the imbalance that steroids caused is among the least stark. But you can never underestimate the willingness of the masses to focus with pinpoint vision on the hot button topic, to the exclusion of common freaking sense.

[chasinf5s]

Cancesco used for so long that his body no longer makes testosterone if i just heard correctly. he has to get a shot every 2 weeks or something. He pretty much just came out and said his balls are the size of marbles

[chopsx9]

Cancesco used for so long that his body no longer makes testosterone if i just heard correctly. he has to get a shot every 2 weeks or something. He pretty much just came out and said his balls are the size of marbles

 

In fairness to Canseco his testicular impairment is probably due as much to the time he spent with Madonna as it is to steroids.

 

Incidentally that also lead to him having to get a shot every two weeks.

[Guest]

The whole issue has willful ignorance in every facet. Ignorance about why it is used, who uses, how long players have been using, and on and on. The level of reaction over something that should have been implicit (McGwire's use) is indicative of willful ignorance. Or ignorance over the fact players have been cheating in any way they could since they first set foot on a diamond/court/field. Ignorance over the fact that the Hall of Fame is littered with cheaters of various types. Willful ignorance when we were all thoroughly enjoying what was obviously an anomalous power spike in the game. Willful ignorance over the fact a league like the NFL is fueled by PED's, because we enjoy the speed and violence as much as we enjoyed all those homers.

 

The history of sport is littered with competitive imbalances, and honestly, the imbalance that steroids caused is among the least stark. But you can never underestimate the willingness of the masses to focus with pinpoint vision on the hot button topic, to the exclusion of common freaking sense.

I'm not nor have I ever been willfully ignorant of the taint of steroids in baseball. I'm also outraged by the likes of McGwire etc.

 

I'm not sure what your point is here. Are you trying to condone cheating or are you saying that this type of cheating isn't any worse than any other type of cheating?

[Sammy Sofa]

ARE YOU DENYING THAT THIS IS THE WORSTEST KIND CHEATING WE'VE EVER KNOWN, YES OR NO?!?!?!

[The Voice of Reason]

I can't wait until Cardinals fans give him a long standing ovation on opening day and the media creams their pants over the "greatest fans in baseball"

 

I am sure all the Who's down then in Hooterville will continue to defend him like the blind sheep they are. Their argument will just change from "he's never flunked a drug test" to "big deal, everyone was doing it."

 

I'm down in Hooterville right now and it's not a praisefest. The local alt-rock radio station morning DJs were ripping into McGwire pretty hard. They replayed the Costas MLB interview with sappy music and made snarky comments. Even most of the callers were between "meh" to irritated.

 

But I will give the Cardinals one thing: this was run about 100% better than A Roid's admission last season: carefully structured and perfectly timed. Tiger Woods' people should be calling whatever PR firm handled this right away.

 

I was referring more to the fans than the media. Any doubt he won't get a standing ovation from "the best fans in baseball"?

Edited January 13, 2010 by The Voice of Reason

[17 Seconds]

is it really even cheating if every team had players who were doing it?

[Garwilly]

is it really even cheating if every team had players who were doing it?

 

Yes.

[DivineBovine]

McGwire is an fool. He had a golden opportunity to come completely clean, and pulls this crap. He deserves all the crap he's getting.

 

I can't believe that he honestly thinks that it was his swing and the spin he put on the ball that made him hit all those home runs.

 

I used to be one of those guys who said- "Hey, getting bigger isn't necessarily going to help you hit more home runs. You still need the hand-eye coordination. Making solid contact is more important."

 

What an ass I was to think that. It has been clearly proven now that steroids make you hit more home runs and make you a better hitter. Maybe McGwire honestly took roids to help him recover from injury. I don't know. But if he honestly thinks it didn't help him hit any more homers or improve his performance even when he was healthy, he's an idiot.

 

I'd vote for Barry Bonds to go into the Hall of Fame. He was clearly a HOF worthy player, even if you take steroids completely out of the equation. But McGwire (or Sosa for that matter), is a big fat no. Maybe McGwire gets HOF worthy numbers without roids, but I highly doubt it. And he doesn't get the benefit of the doubt. He probably had more natural power than Bonds or Sosa, but so did Dave Kingman. And McGwire very well might have retired with Dave Kingman's stats.

 

It's funny that he says he regrets having played in the steroid era, when he might've benefitted more from steroids than anyone of the era.

[DivineBovine]

Haha, Canseco is hilarious.

 

He's saying LaRussa knew about McGwire.

 

 

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=4819250

 

 

I demand Albert's blood! The man can't be natural! :-))

[XZero771679666304]

The whole issue has willful ignorance in every facet. Ignorance about why it is used, who uses, how long players have been using, and on and on. The level of reaction over something that should have been implicit (McGwire's use) is indicative of willful ignorance. Or ignorance over the fact players have been cheating in any way they could since they first set foot on a diamond/court/field. Ignorance over the fact that the Hall of Fame is littered with cheaters of various types. Willful ignorance when we were all thoroughly enjoying what was obviously an anomalous power spike in the game. Willful ignorance over the fact a league like the NFL is fueled by PED's, because we enjoy the speed and violence as much as we enjoyed all those homers.

 

The history of sport is littered with competitive imbalances, and honestly, the imbalance that steroids caused is among the least stark. But you can never underestimate the willingness of the masses to focus with pinpoint vision on the hot button topic, to the exclusion of common freaking sense.

I'm not nor have I ever been willfully ignorant of the taint of steroids in baseball. I'm also outraged by the likes of McGwire etc.

 

I'm not sure what your point is here. Are you trying to condone cheating or are you saying that this type of cheating isn't any worse than any other type of cheating?

 

 

Isn't it obvious? I'm saying the media and public at lasrge focuses on a tiny segment of a problem to the exclusion of the rest, and sensationalizes and beats it to death. You have people like Goose Gossage coming out and saying "there's no place for cheating in the hall" (LMAO), and people demonizing a few for doing what so many did and what so many more would have. The same people who ignored the obvious when indulging in the spectacle of the steroid era, and the same people who are mum about PED use in the NFL, where it has even more of an impact.

 

I'm not condoning cheating, I've just reconciled with it. Steroids were the cheat of the era. Before it was other things, and in the future it will be still different and new things. To focus on one aspect (baseball power hitters) of steroid use in one era where it ran (and still runs) rampant and rail on it like it is the only thing that matters is just willfully ignorant and ridiculous.

[fromthestretch]

I'm not condoning cheating, I've just reconciled with it. Steroids were the cheat of the era. Before it was other things, and in the future it will be still different and new things. To focus on one aspect (baseball power hitters) of steroid use in one era where it ran (and still runs) rampant and rail on it like it is the only thing that matters is just willfully ignorant and ridiculous.

 

Well said.

[mojorisen]

IMO he just did it so he wouldn't be a distraction come spring training. I don't think anybody was surprised that he did it.

[chopsx9]

is it really even cheating if every team had players who were doing it?

 

Yes.

[kujay]

Haha, Canseco is hilarious.

 

He's saying LaRussa knew about McGwire.

 

 

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=4819250

 

 

I demand Albert's blood! The man can't be natural! :-))

 

TLR comes out of this looking like almost as much of an ass as McGwire does. And now he's mad at the media for being so skeptical of his golden calf. The nerve.

 

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/sports/stories.nsf/cardinals/story/BE7AC4E6FC5699C3862576AA001585DD?OpenDocument

[champaignchris]

The other thing about willful ignorance that bothers me is that everybody started acting as though nobody even heard of steroids before the Balco story. It's a ridiculous notion. I vividly remember talk of steroids in the 80's and all the warnings about staying away or your balls would shrivel. There were numerous high school kids rumored and/or known to be on them, and calls to test high school athletes all the times, and check lockers for drugs, yet somehow the elite sports media had no idea?

 

I distinctly remember a high school football teammate of mine in 1990 being traumatized because some other student accused him of doing steroids. I recall another football teammate and I doing a presentation on steroids in Speech class as sophomores in about 1988. If high school athletes in small-town Illinois knew about steroids in the late 80's/early 90's, you can sure bet that professional athletes and professional team knew about steroids then as well.

 

If I recall, the first major news stories involving steroids in American team sports (there'd been jokes about the East German "women's" swim team for years) was when Lyle Alzado admitted using shortly before dying of cancer in the early 90's. In the famous Sports Illustrated article, he admitted using steroids as early as 1969. It's widely accepted now that the Steelers teams of the 70's had rampant usage, and there's no real reason to think that it was confined solely to that one franchise.

 

Mark Gastineau was another prominent admitted user from about the same era as Alzado. It was widely and quite vocally suspected at the time (now confirmed) that Tony Mandarich was juicing in college; in fact, one of the things Mandarich attributes to his failure in the NFL to was that he stopped doing steroids due to the drug testing and started taking pain killers to help him through once he got to the NFL.

 

One of the big reasons why the NFL gets a lot more of a pass in the media than MLB on steroids is that the NFL instituted a testing policy for roids in 1989. Baseball didn't institute their policy until 2004. That's 15 years later, if you're counting. We can argue the effectiveness of the individual policies, but you can't deny the NFL at least started paying lip service to the problem way, way, way before baseball even admitted it had a problem. Baseball, after all, didn't even do the anonymous test to determine the extent of steroid usage until the infamous 2003 test.

[champaignchris]

The other thing that bothers me about steroids and the Hall of Fame is that the gate-keepers acting as morality police indignant at the usage of steroids are the same people that completely dropped the ball on the steroid problem in the first place... the baseball reporters. If steroids were so damning, why weren't these guys paying more attention back in the 90's?

 

The one guy who said anything back in 1998 - Steve Wilstein - was basically told to "shut up" by the rest of the press. Instead of doing their jobs - investigative reporting - the sports media bought the whole dog and pony show hook, line, and sinker. Now, a significant number of these people who didn't do their jobs back then want to retroactively vilify the guys they let get away with cheating.

[XZero771679666304]

The other thing that bothers me about steroids and the Hall of Fame is that the gate-keepers acting as morality police indignant at the usage of steroids are the same people that completely dropped the ball on the steroid problem in the first place... the baseball reporters. If steroids were so damning, why weren't these guys paying more attention back in the 90's?

 

The one guy who said anything back in 1998 - Steve Wilstein - was basically told to "shut up" by the rest of the press. Instead of doing their jobs - investigative reporting - the sports media bought the whole dog and pony show hook, line, and sinker. Now, a significant number of these people who didn't do their jobs back then want to retroactively vilify the guys they let get away with cheating.

 

 

This is a big part of my problem. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to see something was off when you had 3 guys blow up the single season HR record in the space of four years with numerous other marginal power hitters in the 40's and 50's. But we were are enjoying the crap out of it, and I don't feel the least bit guilty about that.

 

But then you have these sanctimonious douches in the media prattling on about how we were fooled and betrayed by these conniving cheats. After they, the ones who are supposedly paid to explore all sides of the issues, carried on like doe eyed school girls while it was all going on.

 

Seriously, STFU.

[champaignchris]

The other thing that bothers me about steroids and the Hall of Fame is that the gate-keepers acting as morality police indignant at the usage of steroids are the same people that completely dropped the ball on the steroid problem in the first place... the baseball reporters. If steroids were so damning, why weren't these guys paying more attention back in the 90's?

 

The one guy who said anything back in 1998 - Steve Wilstein - was basically told to "shut up" by the rest of the press. Instead of doing their jobs - investigative reporting - the sports media bought the whole dog and pony show hook, line, and sinker. Now, a significant number of these people who didn't do their jobs back then want to retroactively vilify the guys they let get away with cheating.

 

 

This is a big part of my problem. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to see something was off when you had 3 guys blow up the single season HR record in the space of four years with numerous other marginal power hitters in the 40's and 50's. But we were are enjoying the crap out of it, and I don't feel the least bit guilty about that.

 

But then you have these sanctimonious douches in the media prattling on about how we were fooled and betrayed by these conniving cheats. After they, the ones who are supposedly paid to explore all sides of the issues, carried on like doe eyed school girls while it was all going on.

 

Seriously, STFU.

It reminds me so much of that scene in Casablanca,

"I'm shocked, SHOCKED, to find gambling in this establishment!"

"Here are your winnings, sir."

[NonProfitCow]

McGwire is an fool. He had a golden opportunity to come completely clean, and pulls this crap. He deserves all the crap he's getting.

How is admitting that he used steroids for over a decade, including 1998 when he broke the single season HR record, not coming completely clean?

[17 Seconds]

i watched an interview with canseco on mlbn last night and it was one of the most disgusting things ive ever seen.

[erik316wttn]

McGwire is an fool. He had a golden opportunity to come completely clean, and pulls this crap. He deserves all the crap he's getting.

How is admitting that he used steroids for over a decade, including 1998 when he broke the single season HR record, not coming completely clean?

 

Because he denied it for so long and now he's finally admitting it as a desperate ploy to garner sympathy to get into the Hall of Fame.

[Andy]

McGwire is an fool. He had a golden opportunity to come completely clean, and pulls this crap. He deserves all the crap he's getting.

How is admitting that he used steroids for over a decade, including 1998 when he broke the single season HR record, not coming completely clean?

 

Because he denied it for so long and now he's finally admitting it as a desperate ploy to garner sympathy to get into the Hall of Fame.

I think part of it too is that he still is saying 'roids didn't actually help him hit home runs. Because his homer per at-bat rate suddenly doubled 7 years into his career by logical progression. Also, by coming back sooner from injury (which is exactly what you said you used roids for), you'd hit more home runs by being in the game at all, you dolt.