Dear Mark McGwire, Go Suck an Egg

From True/Slant on January 17, 2010:

Open Letter to Mark McGwire.

Dear Mark,

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but I think you should know: Nobody is buying the crocodile tears, phony-baloney act you pulled for Bob Costas. Trust me, it’s not fooling anybody.

First off, nobody has forgotten your disgusting, cowardly performance in front of Congress. That’s the kind of stink that doesn’t wash off in one lame, half-assed interview. The stink of that is like skunk. Might I suggest bathing yourself in tomato juice.

I understand your thinking, my coconut-headed friend. I know you figured that, as you are returning to work in baseball with your good buddy, self-proclaimed super-genius Tony LaRussa, now would be a good time to try to cut off all those pesky little questions about your cheating at the pass. Just so you can tell every reporter at spring training, and every reporter in every clubhouse in every MLB city where the Cardinals play, that you’ve already answered all the questions about using performance enhancing drugs during your career. Silly reporters.

That you’ve chosen to speak at this moment speak volumes. You spoke to try to clear a path for your new work, but had you never returned to work in baseball, you’d have remained as mum as that statue of Stan the Man outside the new Busch Stadium. In fact, you were pulling a pretty convincing Claude Reins imitation until this week.

And of course, even though you went on MLB network to bare your soul, you didn’t really come clean. You kinda, sorta did, only not at all really. It insults everybody’s intelligence more than if you had just remained quiet. We all knew you were a cheat, now we know you’re a cheat who is so arrogant you think you can lie and that everybody would just shrug and give you a mulligan.

Your claim that you don’t believe that performance enhancing drugs helped you break Roger Maris’ record is not only inaccurate, it’s downright offensive. And it shows that you don’t have the first freaking clue.

Even worse are your claims that you regret having played during the steroid era. Dude, you ARE the steroid era. You, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are the faces of the steroid cheat era. Everybody from a kindergarten student to my old aunt Pena knows that. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist.

If you were looking for redemption, you should have told the truth. Something along the lines of, “Yup, I did ‘em. I did them so I could set records and make obscene amounts of money. I thought I could help my team win games by hitting outrageous dingers. So I did ‘em. And I hit those dingers and everybody loved me. That was fun. But, in retrospect, it was short-sighted. And it was wrong of me to break Maris’ record through chemistry. I apologize to my family, the Maris family, my friends, my teammates and the ghost of Abner Doubleday.”

That would have gone a long way. It would have showed courage, at the very least. But you’re still the same dissembling, cheating liar you were back then.

And good luck with those Hall of Fame votes, buddy. I’ll be sitting with your buddy, Jack Clark, if you get inducted.