Mac Hall Vote Screams of Hypocrisy

By Mike McGann
Posted Sunday, January 14, 2007

Well it seems Barry Bonds is in trouble again, if you believe the media reports saying he failed a drug test for greenies. Mark McGwire can’t get in the Hall of Fame because he may have used performance enhancing substances.

If you read the sports pages, blogs and forums, few seem to be willing to give either guys any slack.

In contrast, George W. Bush announced he wanted to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq. No, Bush didn’t use any performance-enhancing substance (obviously), but instead lied about why Iraq had to be invaded, messed up the Afghanistan war, failed to pursue Osama Bin Laden (you might remember him as the guy responsible for killing 3,000 people in New York City).

Interestingly, some of the same people excoriating Bonds and McGwire are cheering on “the surge” of troops and pointless taunting of Iran. Many of them belong to the troglodyte species known as sportswriterus americanus, a group of people on average too conservative to be members of the John Birch Society. Sure, there are exceptions to be sure, ESPN’s Peter Gammons comes to mind, but this is a group that likes to prove their hipness by smirking at Britney Spears failure to wear underwear and then piously denouncing Bonds, McGwire, Sammy Sosa, et al., while supporting mass homicide and the deflowering of the U.S. Constitution.

I want to be clear in understanding this logic: naked, shaved crotches bad (except in the strip clubs sportswriters hang out in), juicing bad, lying and killing tens of thousands of innocent people, while allowing a mass murderer of Americans top go free, good.

Somehow, I missed that in my college journalism classes. It’s probably why I didn’t quite fit in with the typical sportswriter, who seems to think having to write a sports figure obit or having had to cover spot news once in a while at the shopper at the start of their career makes them hard-core journalists. As proven by the fact that a couple news-side guys from the San Francisco Examiner broke the Bonds story while most of the sports guys were busy eating in the media room at the ballpark.

Look, if you’re one of the people who despise Bush, Bonds and Britney, more power to you. All have cheapened and weakened America in their own way, the former far more than the latter two, of course. Denouncing them all is a linear line of logic, certainly and one that can be defended. I don’t and won’t take issue with it.

Similarly, if you think that all of the fuss about all of them is overblown, well, I don’t agree certainly, but at least it is consistent.

So, this dichotomy is a bit confusing. But hey, let me throw this in to further muddy the waters: some sportswriters think that no one from the “steroid” era should be voted into the hall of fame. Cool, I guess, as long as no sportswriters from the same era are voted into the writers wing, since they failed to even hint what was and remains common knowledge within the game: a lot of players juiced and still juice.

I would bet any amount of money that players already voted into the hall were habitual juicers. That’s no inside knowledge, that’s just math. Somewhere between 25 and 75 percent of players have juiced — so let’s assume a similar number of inductees since the mid-1980s juiced.

How are those guys different than McGwire and Bonds? Simple, they didn’t get caught. The media, in many cases, knew and didn’t even hint at it. Until law enforcement got involved, no one was talking about cheating. In fact, some of the guys who are killing McGwire now were spinning hagiographies of Big Red in 1998 and 1999.

Not that behavior makes them much different from the mainstream media, which spent three or four years kissing Bush’s butt before only recently realizing they had repeated the president’s lies without once questioning their truth. But now these high and mighty sportswriters see keeping McGwire out of the hall of fame as some sacred duty.

Tying it all together, of course, is Bush’s term as managing owner of the Texas Rangers, where at minimum, he was an accessory to this big, fat performance enhancing scandal, by, like his fellow owners, ignoring the issue as long as the home runs kept coming.

But at the end of the day, this isn’t about Bush, who whatever reason just doesn’t seem to know better. It’s about the media, patting themselves on the back to keeping McGwire out of the Hall of Fame while many personally profited from the home run explosion and they failed to do their basic duty as journalists.

And none of them even had the decency to take the fifth.