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Granting Big Mac a Hall pass

The third time will not be a charm for Mark McGwire when Hall of Fame voting results are announced Monday. He is still regarded as a pariah by the majority of voters, less than a quarter of whom voted for him in each of his first two years of Hall eligibility.

McGwire received 128 votes in 2007, the exact number again in 2008. I left the box next to his name blank both years. This time, in the ballot I faxed to Jack O'Connell of the Baseball Writers Association of America, I voted for Mac.

I understand that many of my colleagues would violently disagree with that decision. In their view a vote for McGwire amounts to a whitewash of baseball at its tawdriest, a willful ignorance of bottles of andro and Jose Canseco's claims of injecting steroids in McGwire's buttocks, and McGwire tearfully telling Congress "I'm not here to talk about the past."

I understand those who now view baseball's magical summer of '98, when McGwire and Sammy Sosa held an entire nation in thrall with their pursuit of the home run record, as an exercise in consumer fraud, all of us willing dupes in chemically engineered deceit.

So why did I vote for McGwire's induction into Cooperstown?

For the same reason I will one day likely cast votes for Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds. Mark McGwire was among the greatest players of his generation, one that will forever be stigmatized as the Steroids Era. But because I consider it unfair to exclude that entire generation from the Hall, I also think it ludicrous to set myself up as judge and jury about which players were tainted and which were innocent.

We can now reasonably assume that dozens, scores, even hundreds of players were using performance-enhancing substances in that period. Ken Caminiti, one of the first whistle blowers, estimated that half the players were users. The Mitchell Report, while naming just 86 players, does not discourage that assumption. Neither, certainly, do Canseco's tell-alls, even if you have to shower after reading.

The identity of many of those players will never become known to us. There will be no wholesale rush to the confessionals by athletes who were willing to do whatever it took to keep up with their fellow cheaters, just as an earlier generation kept a lid on the widespread use of "greenies" (amphetamines) as a way to stay jacked through a long season.

So, who among us feels confident they can parse the clean from the dirty? Who can determine that one player's accomplishments were the result of old-fashioned skill, hard work and toughness, and another's the product of the right laboratory?

I can't. I can have my suspicions, many of them compelling, but outside of David Eckstein, there are few players I would name with 100 percent certainty as being pure.

McGwire hit 49 home runs for the Oakland Athletics in 1987, his first full season in the big leagues at the age of 23. He was the American League Rookie of the Year, a coming-out party for a young slugger who promised to mash with the best of them, and did.

By the time he was finished with the St. Louis Cardinals in 2001 at the age of 38, he had hit 583 home runs, which ranks eighth on the all-time list. His career on-base percentage of .394 and slugging percentage of .588 combine for an OPS of .982. Only seven players in major-league history have hit 400 or more home runs and had a higher OPS. Their names are Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, Bonds, Jimmie Foxx and Manny Ramirez.

Twelve times McGwire was an All-Star; five times he finished in the top 10 in MVP voting, finishing runner-up in '98. He hit a home run once every 10.6 at-bats, the best ratio in history.

On a personal level, I found McGwire down-to-earth and likeable; in the clubhouse, he was viewed as a great teammate. It was contrary to his nature to make himself the center of attention, but in '98, he went along with the demand to become just that because the game – maybe even the country – needed him to do so.

I didn't vote for McGwire the first two years because if he wasn't willing to talk about the past, I wasn't willing to consider his. I remain deeply disappointed that he has remained silent about whether he was a user, instead choosing seclusion while long-time supporters such as manager Tony La Russa are subjected to ridicule for insisting on McGwire's innocence.

But just as my resistance to voting for him has softened over time, I have a hunch that so, too, will McGwire find it within himself one day to talk openly about his career. Maybe when all three of his sons reach a certain age, he'll feel a responsibility to provide answers, not only to them, but to us.

For now, however, I'm willing to take my cue from Kevin Maris, one of Roger's sons, who said this summer he "doesn't hold anything against Mark'' for breaking his father's famous record. Kevin Maris is a high school baseball coach in Florida, and he told USA Today he would love for McGwire to speak to his team – mostly about hitting, but if he wanted to address the other stuff, that would be great, too.

"He's about as genuine a guy as you'll ever meet,'' Kevin Maris said. "People talk about the other stuff, but everybody makes a bad choice at times, but that doesn't take away the type of person he truly is. One bad choice shouldn't scar you forever.''