Why Was Mark McGwire Snubbed by the Baseball Hall of Fame?

The Baseball Writers Association of America voted for the candidates who will be enshrined in Major League Baseball's Hall of Fame this past Tuesday and the name of Mark McGwire was not on the list of those selected. McGwire fell far short of the required 75% vote necessary for enshrinement, garnering a mere 23.5% of the 545 votes cast.

To me this is a great injustice to the sport...

Much has been written and said about the reclusive, California-born redhead. He was a lanky kid who had wowed scouts with his sweet swing and 6'5" frame when he joined the Oakland A's in 1986. Before long everyone knew who he was, as McGwire impressed baseball fans of all ages & team affiliations with his Rookie of the Year campaign of 1987. That summer the man who would become known as "Big Mac" crushed a rookie-record 49 home runs with 118 runs batted in while batting a healthy .289 and slugging at a .618 clip. McGwire would go on to average 33 homers and 96 RBIs for the next 5 years and paired with fellow "Bash Brother" Jose Canseco to propel the A's to three World Series appearances and a World Championship in 1989.

After two consecutive sub-par seasons (in 1993-94 Big Mac played in a combined 74 games and hit just 18 homers due to various ailments and the strike of '94) , McGwire began to rebound with a vengeance. In 1995 he amassed 39 homers and 90 RBIs, then exploded for a league-leading 52 long balls and 113 RBIs in 1996. His batting average also climbed to the highest it had been in a full season since his rookie year, .312, after dipping to as low as .201 in 1991. It was also around this time that the once tall, lean SoCal kid began to resemble a thick, bushy Midwestern mountain man. What caused this transformation is at the heart of McGwire's exclusion from the Hall of Fame.

Two-thirds of the way through the 1997 season Oakland shocked the baseball world by trading its masher to the St. Louis Cardinals, where he was reunited with former A's manager Tony LaRussa. McGuire combined to hit 58 homers that season, 34 with Oakland and 24 with St. Louis. By now Big Mac more resembled Paul Bunyan, and it wasn't a big-barreled bat he was swinging but an enormous axe.

The following season the mystique of Mark McGwire was taken to another level. He and fellow giant slugger Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs took the country on a summer-long thrill ride filled with memorable home runs and aided by the apparent genuine camaraderie between two players with similar traits: enormous physiques capable of blasting a baseball to the farthest reaches of a stadium. As the duo took turns knocking balls out of the park night after night and day after day, it was like the ultimate game of tag being played by two larger-than-life baseball Gods, sent down to rekindle interest in the strike-afflicted sport.

Nobody was immune from the allure of the great home run chase of '98, as it became clear that at least one of the two sluggers would most likely break Roger Maris' 37-year-old record of 61 home runs. Sports fanatics and casual observers, women & children, writers and announcers all fell under the trance of the race for the record .The entire country was mesmerized by the pair; the affable Dominican and the quiet Californian reignited a spark that grew into a nationwide blaze by the time the season would end.

When the season was over, McGwire had tallied a mind-boggling 70 home runs while Sosa lagged a bit behind with 66. Both players had shattered the old record, and both had combined to bring baseball back to the forefront as America's favorite pastime. With all that success and interest came increased scrutiny, and when a jar of an over-the-counter supplement called Androstenedione was spotted in McGwire's locker, the first murmurs of HOW the man attained such magnificent home run numbers began.

The murmurs would grow to a roar in the years to follow; Big Mac continued to slug homers after the '98 season but not for much longer. In 1999, he hit 65 more bombs. After that he would begin feeling the pains of knee and wrist injuries, and he would go on to play just 2 more years, slowing to 32 homers in 2000 and 29 homers in his final season, 2001.

After his retirement, rumors started to swirl around the legitimacy of the race and the possibility that the astounding home run totals were achieved by artificial methods. Steroid abuse was coming to the forefront of the baseball conscience thanks to the admissions of guys like Ken Caminiti, Canseco, and grand jury reports from the BALCO scandal implicating Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield and others of having used steroids. By the time of McGwire's infamous testimony at a Congressional hearing on steroid use in baseball in March of 2005, the whispers that the chase of 1998 was most likely an artificially-enhanced sham were now shouts and angry outcries. The release of fellow Bash Brother Canseco's tell-all book, "Juiced," provided fuel for the flames that were singeing McGwire's reputation. In the book Canseco admitted to his own steroid abuse and that of many other MLB players, including Big Mac's, whom Canseco alleged shot steroids into his backside in the bathroom of the Oakland A's training facilities. When asked directly about his knowledge of or involvement with steroids, McGwire chose to do what many other American's chose to do when confronted with potentially self-incriminating statements while under oath; he plead the 5th. He repeatedly said, "I am not here to talk about the past," which basically was as good as an admission of guilt in the public eye.

Tuesday we arrived at the moment of truth for the man who captivated a nation and helped revive the great sport of baseball. Faced with mounting evidence and mountains of bad publicity more so for McGwire's refusal to admit the truth than for what he is perceived to have done, the same writers who covered McGwire & Sosa's chase with awe and admiration universally spoke about how they felt about artificially-inflated numbers.

McGwire ended his career with 583 home runs, good for 7th all-time, and 1,414 runs batted in. Those numbers plus a .588 slugging percentage and .394 on base percentage should have been good enough to get Big Mac in on the first ballot. They weren't. Judging by how far away he is from the necessary number of votes for enshrinement, it doesn't look like we will be saying, "Hall of Famer Mark McGwire" anytime soon, either.

My question is why has it come to this point? Even if McGwire did take something illegal during that period, the general assumption is that many other players did too. It's obvious that McGwire is being made an example of for the whole world to see, but what will be the criteria for allowing or denying any of those other players entrance to the Hall? How can the writers exclude some, like McGwire, Bonds and Sosa, but potentially allow others such as Roger Clemens, Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio entrance?

The bigger question is should a man be punished, vilified, and ostracized when he never failed a drug test, when Major League Baseball hadn't even placed steroids on their banned substance list and may have actually doctored the ball in an effort to increase home runs, and when the man did exactly what writers, fans, owners and even other players wanted him to do?

In my opinion the answer is no. If anyone needs to be punished, it is the owners who allowed the "Steroid Era" to begin and the writers who let it explode by looking the other way in order to write the stories of their lifetimes.