There is no doubt that baseball legend and pariah Mark McGwire partook in the performance enhancing drug craze of the 1990's.

Yesterday, he finally admitted that he had used PEDs, but somehow does not think they were the driving force behind his record home-run season of 1998.

He's kidding, but only himself. First off, it was his idea to come clean. Now, he is a state of denial about the effect those substances (he can't name which ones, btw) had on his body and performance.

That is the story on the surface. What is really going on.......

In October, the St. Louis Cardinals hired McGwire to be their batting coach. In order for him to assimilate back into the game he must clear up his name and image. The last we saw of McGwire was in 2005 in front of a congressional panel investigating the use of PEDs in Major League Baseball.

His words...."Asking me or any other player to answer questions about who took steroids in front of television cameras will not solve the problem. If a player answers 'No,' he simply will not be believed; if he answers 'Yes,' he risks public scorn and endless government investigations.... My lawyers have advised me that I cannot answer these questions without jeopardizing my friends, my family, and myself. I will say, however, that it remains a fact in this country that a man, any man, should be regarded as innocent unless proven guilty."


This was construed as backhanded mea culpa. When asked if he was exercising his Fifth Amendment rights he replied: "I'm not here to talk about the past. I'm here to be positive about this subject."

Yesterday, in a statement to the Associated Press and in an interview with Bob Costas, McGwire was still elusive about his exact usage and why he felt he needed to take PEDs. Injuries, he said, were threatening to shorten his career so he made a Faustian deal that morphed his body into WWE proportions.

Bulls**t.

He cannot come completely clean. He knows what drugs he took, but cannot divulge because many of them were illegal and could possibly incriminate him.

McGwire also has to choose his words carefully so that they do not conflict with his testimony under oath in 2005. From what we see, that may not be an issue, but he is being closely advised to watch what he says.

In conjunction with that, McGwire probably wanted to deny he was a user in 2005, like the others, but was still on the juice and had he been forced to surrender blood or urine would have tested positive and been charged with perjury.

Any admission either way at that time could have opened him up for oodles of prosecution since their were many open cases regarding illegal steroids in baseball being conducted at that time.

The timing of this is no coincidence. He is only coming out now because he is clean and needs a job. The window for a sincere, contrite admission from Mark McGwire has been closed for some time.

He has actually made a bad situation worse by coming forward.  No one will ever take him seriously ever again.