With one line, offered several times in different forms during a brief testimony at a Congressional hearing back in March of 2005, Mark McGwire's baseball legacy was seriously and forever tainted.
Since then, McGwire, 46, has been largely out of the public eye, fading into "bolivian" (as Mike Tyson would likely say).
So Monday, when St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa officially announced that he'd be returning to the team in 2010 and that he was bringing in McGwire to be the team's hitting coach, my first reaction was surprise.
And not just because McGwire was a lifetime .263 hitter who in six seasons had more strikeouts than hits.
It's because since retiring from the game, McGwire has valued his privacy, willingly entering into baseball's version of the witness protection program. He chose not to definitively answer those steroid-related questions on Capitol Hill back in 2005, though in the eyes of many, his non-answers served as an admission of guilt. After that, he quietly disappeared from the game.
"I've just moved on with my life," McGwire told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch last fall. "There are other things in my life, my family" — McGwire and his wife have two sons — "that are so much more important. They're more fulfilling than baseball."
So who in his right mind would want to return to the game, knowing that a re-examination of his potentially steroid-filled past is as imminent as the Yankees overpaying for free agents?
My guess? Part of it is that he wants to return to the game that he loves.
"Mark is passionate about the game, passionate about the Cardinals," team chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. told the Associated Press. "Tony thinks he'll be a great coach, and I think he's got a lot to offer."
Fair enough.
McGwire's other driving force, though? He wants to repair his legacy in the game. And he knows he can only do that by addressing the steroid questions and by apologizing to the players, to the fans and to the game itself.
Is an honest-to-goodness confession from Big Mac on the horizon? It's not clear. McGwire was not at Busch Stadium on Monday for the announcement of La Russa's new contract, but the Cardinals' brass said that a news conference may be forthcoming and that there will be no effort to protect McGwire from questions about steroids.
"By no means is he trying to hide, and by no means are we trying to hide him," said general manager John Mozeliak.
La Russa told the AP that he first contacted McGwire about the coaching job a week ago. McGwire reportedly showed immediate interest, but La Russa said the steroids issue was not discussed.
"It's up to Mark how he wants to handle it," La Russa said. "What we want him to do is coach our hitters, and if he does that well, we're going to be happy."
"I'm a big fan of his," the manager went on to say. "He's back in uniform and, hopefully, people will see his greatness. But the No. 1 reason he's here is to coach our hitters."
Yes, he had plenty of greatness during his 16 seasons in the majors. His numbers — especially that gaudy home run total of 583 — are worthy of the Hall of Fame. But in his three years of Hall eligibility, he has fallen well short of the 75 percent of votes needed. I'm not a Hall of Fame voter, but it's safe to say that the steroid stigma has played a major role.
And whether or not he cares about being enshrined in Cooperstown, he cares about baseball and he cares about his legacy in the game. So don't be surprised if we see an explanation or full-fledged admission of guilt from McGwire in the near future.
As Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote Monday, McGwire's taking the job with the Cardinals "will mean a perp walk to a news conference in which McGwire will have to say something more substantive than what he did with those crack politicians or be hectored for months afterward."
It's hard to imagine La Russa deliberately bringing Big Mac back with the possibility of a continued distraction looming throughout the season. He'd have to know that McGwire's going to deal with it — sooner rather than later.
It remains to be seen whether or not an admission of guilt will allow McGwire to reinvent himself as the positive role model he once was. But it's likely his only shot.
