big-mac_needle bat copyThe St. Louis Cardinals have a new batting coach in Mark McGwire and all the joys of the media circus that comes with him.  McGwire admitted last month to juicing during the most monumental portion of his career.  Instead of just kicking off his first day on the job in the cages, he also got roped into yet another Q&A session with the media. He just wants everyone to know that he’s super sorry, and he just wants to move on from the whole debacle and focus on his new role.

“I think people understand how truly sorry I was for what I did.”

McGwire refused to back off his assertion, much criticized, that steroids allowed him to recover from injuries and stay on the field, but didn’t help him break Roger Maris’ single season home run record in 1998. McGwire said it was the evolution of his swing and not a body enhanced by drugs that enabled him to hit 70 homers that year, smashing Maris’ 37-year-old record of 61, and 65 more in 1999.

“Like I’ve said, people are going to have their opinions,” McGwire said. “Listen, it got me the opportunity to get out there and get more at-bats, and I got the chance to play.”–Fox Sports

If I just confessed to shooting up and put a juicy question mark over the legitimacy of my homerun records, I would want to hurry up and move on, too.  OF COURSE he is going to say he’s sorry, because he knows he has to in order to even attempt to regain credibility in the baseball world.  But come on, Mac, you’re really still going to compartmentalize this issue?  To say that using ‘roids only had an affect on his ability to recover and not his power shows that he either a) is in denial, or b) thinks we’re a bunch of slack-jawed knuckle draggers who sit around and drink beer and play video games all day long.  Either way, it detracts from his apologies when he says he’s sorry with an asterisk.  Maybe now he’ll try to tell us that Sammy Sosa isn’t white, or that it’s not cheating if it’s just the tip.