Mark McGwire to Hall Of Fame & What To Do About HRs

From The Sports Piece

Mark McGwire just admitted to using steroids on and off throughout his playing career. For most people this isn't BIG breaking news. Most people assumed this for years and just wanted him to come clean.

The reality is that he was busted while playing. A product that he had in his locker was Andro-6, a supplement by popular sports nutrition company EAS. Andro-6 was a product that was supposed to spike testosterone levels through a slow release formula of androstendione (andro for short). At the time he was caught using the product, andro was not a banned substance in Major League Baseball, (though it has been for a while now though).

However, a class action suit came against EAS and their product Andro-6 a few years later. The fact that Mark McGwire was caught using a supplement that was marketed to increase testosterone levels should have been a clue that he would "experiment" with the real stuff.

Now the questions will begin again...should he be in the Hall of Fame? Should there be an asterisk on his home run records?

There is much debate arguing both sides. The stupidest argument is from those who say that steroids only make you bigger, faster and stronger, but you still have to hit the ball.

WHAT!?  Of course, the bat isn't going to swing by itself, but if you can swing faster don't you think it would be easier to hit a ball? It would for me. Don't you think that if you were stronger you could hit the ball further? It would for me.

It also does for steroid users. Former steroid confessor Ken Caminiti would agree as well. Normally a 12-15 HR guy, Caminiti somehow began hitting 20-plus per year, then 40 in his MVP season. He openly credited his steroid use for his MVP season. The argument that steroids don't help is not a well thought out argument.

So assuming (or coming to the understanding) that steroids do in fact help a pad a player's stats, then what do we do about the Hall of Fame? Well, considering the steroid users were not ONLY batters, but also pitchers, then I think it's okay to still keep them in the Hall of Fame. Juiced guys hitting juiced pitches equals out to me, but I think that all players from the steroid era shouldn't get in until those from other eras , WHO ARE DESERVING, get in first.

Also, what should we do about their home run records? Well, I think we should come up with a system or formula that figures out how much further a person can hit a ball while on steroids. Is it 50 feet? 100 feet? 150 feet?

Then take each of the player's home runs on an individual basis and if the home run's distance would have fallen short of the fence, then count it as an out. Then recalculate the home runs. For some of those 450-plus foot shots by Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, there's no way around those as being home runs, but the ones that barely scraped the fence would be out of the books as a penalty for using the juice.

I feel bad mostly for the players in the league who never used and were still good players. The problem is that we can't trust anyone from that era.

When the players went on strike in the 1994-1995 season, I lost a lot of interest, as did many other fans. The reason I started watching again, although not as avidly as before, was because of the outstanding individuals playing the game. One by one as the players go down for cheating, a part of me regrets even watching the game.

Mark McGwire finished his statement by saying that Major League Baseball has cleaned up the league, but will we ever have pure baseball again or is it too tainted?