McGwire not in the Hall? That's a farce

I was planning to write this column yesterday, but ran out of space. I was going to talk about the NCAA Tournament, but since Oklahoma State lost yesterday ending my hopes at winning any polls, I am no longer in the mood.

Besides, when I came into the office this morning and checked the wires, I found a story about how Mark McGwire may not be elected to the Hall of Fame because of steroid rumors.

This about caused me to blow a gasket.

How do you keep a man out of the Hall of Fame that legally hit 583 home runs, drove in 1,414 runs and had a career slugging percentage of .588?

Once again the emphasis has to be on the word legally. Because baseball did not crack down on steroids until the post-McGwire era, there is no way you can hold his possible (not admitted, or yet proven) use of performance enhancing drugs against him.

If holier-than-thou sportswriters want to get on a high horse and say they feel that McGwire cheated, they are entitled to their opinion. Even if their opinion is 100 percent wrong.

Mark McGwire did not cheat. Even if he used steroids, it would not have been cheating. Anybody in the league was free to use steroids as far as Major League Baseball was concerned, because they refused to police the matter.

If you are going to hold McGwire out of the Hall of Fame for using steroids, then you have to take Stan Coveleski, Red Faber and Burleigh Grimes out of the Hall of Fame as well.

Who are Coveleski, Faber and Grimes? They are three early-1900s pitchers who used an illegal pitch called a spitball.

You see the spitball was legal in the majors until 1920, when the league banned the pitch that gave an obvious unfair advantage to the pitcher. Of course Coveleski, Faber and Grimes had built their careers on the spitball and everyone knew it, including the league. The league even went as far as to allow those pitchers to continue throwing spitballs after the rule was implemented, saying that they, along with 14 non-Hall of Fame pitchers who used the spitball, were grandfathered in. Nobody else was allowed to use the pitch, but Grimes won 236 games using the spitball, after it was banned.

Of course nobody argues that Grimes was not a Hall of Fame pitcher, because he was legally allowed to throw the pitch by the league.

That is compelling enough evidence for me to include McGwire in the Hall of Fame. He was legally allowed by Major League Baseball, along with everybody else in the game, to use steroids and should not be punished for doing so.

Since there were no tests during his career, there is no way to prove that McGwire used performance enhancers unless he admits to it. So unless every power hitter in the league for the last 25 years is left out of the Hall of Fame, you can't leave Big Mac out. You can't have different standards for a guy just because they didn't answer a couple questions in front of Congress.