When will baseball admit they're guilty?

So Mark McGwire has admitted that he took steroids. Is anyone surprised?  Sooner or later he was going to come around to the truth.  The question for me is when will baseball come around to the truth?

I’ve listened to the arguments of players, some of them Hall of Famers who say McGwire and others like him should never gain entry into the Hall because they cheated when other players didn’t.  Excuse me?  Players have been cheating in baseball in one form or another for over a century and it hasn’t kept them out of the Hall of Fame.  McGwire was a home run hitter before he ever took a steroid.  He hit 49 home runs as a rookie.

Steroids revived his career and helped him overcome injuries and may well have helped him hit the ball farther, but first he had to hit the ball.  Steroids don’t make you a better hitter.  That’s a natural gift.

Look, I’m not condoning what McGwire and others did, but baseball has to come clean and admit they aided, abetted and supported the steroid era.  When baseball was at it’s lowest and still trying to recover from the strike of 1994 that wiped out the World Series, McGwire and Sammy Sosa pulled fans back to the game with their home run chase of ’98. 

Commissioner Bud Selig and Major League knew they were on steroids then and did nothing because what they were doing was good for the game.  They still won’t admit they were complicit and instead want to throw the players that saved the game under the bus.

I remember being at Wrigley Field for the last weekend of the season with Sosa still trying to catch McGwire.  It was a magical atmosphere I’ve never seen matched at a ball park.  In many ways, McGwire and Sosa saved baseball.  Was Big Mac wrong in taking steroids, yes and so were the hundreds of other players who took them but have never been outed or admitted it.  

The steroid era was an ugly time in the sport of baseball, but it existed and baseball needs to acknowledge it’s part in it.  If they don’t, the Hall of Fame will be voided of the most of the greatest players over a twenty year period because of a stain that is never allowed to go away.