Forgiving Mark McGwire

With Major League Baseball season just around the corner, it remains to be seen whether Mark McGwire will survive media scrutiny as the new hitting coach of the St. Louis Cardinals.

The team named their retired first baseman slugging champion as new coach last October, promising he would be available to the media. For most of the past decade, McGwire has dodged accusations that he used steroids, even refusing to answer questions before Congress in 2005.

But in January, in a tearful interview with Bob Costas on the MLB Network, McGwire admitted what nearly everyone has suspected: he used steroids throughout most of the 1990s, including the 1998 season when he broke the single-season home run record of Roger Maris.

In a round of sorrowful phone calls, McGwire expressed sorrow to Maris’s widow, his parents, baseball commissioner Bud Selig and Tony LaRussa, Cardinals manager then and now. All offered forgiveness.

But unlike movie stars and politicians who confess to wrongdoing and then are quickly absolved by the general public, McGwire’s apology only stoked the flames of controversy. Vitriolic responses from those who played in the era before show that the controversy won’t die soon.

Jack Clark, a Cardinals first baseman in the 1980s and now a Fox baseball analyst in St. Louis, said McGwire and other steroid users — those who haven’t come forward — are “liars” and “creeps” who should be banned from baseball. Former Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog concurred with Clark, saying “they’re all lying” about steroid use. Ferguson Jenkins, a Chicago Cubs pitcher in the 1960s and 1970s now in the Hall of Fame, said McGwire needs to apologize to all the pitchers he tagged for home runs.

Cynics complained that McGwire is only taking the step now because he wants to earn an income off the game which he betrayed.

Certainly McGwire’s confession should have happened years ago. Whatever the offense, from sexual abuse to murder, it’s better for the perpetrator to fess up sooner rather than later. That conveys a genuineness to the action that somehow is missing when a person is more or less forced to own up to the bad behavior.

Yet I know how difficult it is to come to grips with long-covert sins, especially if in denial for years. It’s obvious watching the Costas interview that McGwire’s penance was real — and difficult. Carrying around the open secret has been a burden to him. He has taken the necessary first steps to begin healing. Nobody can be in right relationship with anyone else — co-workers, friends, spouse or pastor — until bringing an end to covering up the shameful deeds of the past.

McGwire will be dogged by detractors all season. I hope he can be even more honest and forthright in his responses, and that his presence on the team doesn’t become a distraction. With a thick enough skin, he’ll be able to move on, regardless of those who judge him.