Ask Joe: What If McGwire Stopped at 62?

LOS ANGELES — Yep, I’m here in LA for the next few days to catch some Dodgers-Cubs baseball and to do a bunch of work on the super-secret project that some of you already know about. And I’m up at 4 a.m. because I’m too old for time zones so let’s get to a few of your Ask Joe questions.

But first … check out the impressive softball pitching stylings of my dear friend Tabitha Soren. Some coaches taught her the softball pitching form so she could properly throw out the first pitch in the Dixie Lewis Memorial Softball tournament, named in honor of her and Michael Lewis’ beloved daughter Dixie.

This week was Dixie’s birthday, which is of course a crushing day for Tabitha and Michael and the family and friends. I’m in awe of human resiliency. Tabitha posted this video, which is beautiful, and I’m sure she would appreciate a message of love.

The fallout from the PED era is undoubtedly messy and quite baffling. Another BR sent in this question: How many players who are in the Hall of Fame do you think used performance enhancing drugs? It’s not a question I can responsibly answer because (1) Performance Enhancing Drugs can mean a lot of things and (2) I have never had a Hall of Famer confess to me that they used steroids. What I feel confident in guessing is that it’s a non-zero number.

The thing about 1998 — and it still makes no sense to me that the year was more than a quarter century ago — is that it was an absolute baseball party. I’d say that if you go all the way back to the strike and maybe even back to the 1986 Mets, there have been only two years — 1998 with McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and 2016 with the Cubs — when baseball was at the center of American pop culture again. They opened up ballparks early so that tens of thousands of people could come just to watch McGwire take batting practice.

Let me pause on that for a second … Mark McGwire was so absurdly good at hitting a baseball in 1998 that stadiums would fill up just to see him take a few swings against a coach standing behind a screen. A speculative question: Do you really think that was steroids? If every single person on planet Earth loaded up on steroids, all 5.994 billion people, how many of them do you think could have hit a baseball the way Mark McGwire did?

Anyway, it was a baseball celebration, attendance records were smashed, late-night hosts told baseball jokes, the game was on the front pages of all of these old-fashioned dispatches called “newspapers,” multiple celebratory books were written, it was quite the thing. And when McGwire took it all the way to 70 — putting just a little bit of distance between himself and Sosa, who finished with 66 — it was seen by just about everybody as an earth-shattering achievement.

Would the anger have been less had McGwire hit fewer home runs and only just broken the record? It’s certainly possible; the logic of the Selig Era reaction is always very hard to follow.

Let me counter your hypothetical with another: What if Barry Bonds had retired just before breaking Henry Aaron’s home run record? That was something being floated at the time, and even though there’s no possible way he would have done it, I do think about it now. On Independence Day, 2007, Bonds had 751 home runs. The Giants were going nowhere, and Bonds was approaching his 42nd birthday, and it was clear that even though he still hit bombs and was still feared (he led the league that year with 43 intentional walks, a number no one has even approached in the last decade) he was no longer an all-around great player.

What if on Independence Day he said, “Time catches up with all of us, and I believe time has caught up with me. I realize that I’m only a few home runs away from the great Henry Aaron; I believe he should be now and forever the Home Run King.”

Again, there’s no way at the time he’d ever even had considered doing that, and if he had, many people would have viewed it as a steroid admission, and he would have been skewered by that group. But he also would have been celebrated. And I honestly believe that if he HAD done that, he’d be in Cooperstown right now. Remember, he came VERY close to being elected. He got 66% of the vote in 2022. If he had retired before breaking the record, I feel almost entirely sure he’d have gotten the added votes.

Instead, he stuck around, set a record that very few people find authentic, and was out of baseball at the end of the season. And I don’t think he will be elected to the Hall of Fame in his lifetime.