McGwire Not a Hall of Famer?

The merits for getting into the Baseball Hall of Fame just continue to be purely unregulated. With former St. Louis Cardinals' slugger Mark McGwire up for the Hall of Fame ballot this year, it looks as if the Hall of Fame ballot will once again be tainted.

There was an individual poll done on a sample of Hall of Fame voters that discovered that McGwire will not get into the Hall of Fame this time around. Clearly, this is not a decision based on his play or his stats, because he has justified himself in both instances. The gorilla in the room that everyone is talking about is the fact that many people believe that McGwire was tied to steroids in some form or fashion during his Major League baseball career.

All of the Hall of Fame voters are certainly aware of the despicable performance McGwire put before Congress at a Congressional hearing in Washington, D.C. When asked questions about his past and the idea that he used illegal performance enhancing drugs during his playing days, McGwire was defensive and extremely evasive. He failed to answer any of the questions to the best of his ability and he read a prepared statement in which he claimed that "I'm not here to talk about the past."

ESPN Analyst and Denver Post sportswriter, Woody Paige, responded to McGwire's aforementioned statement by saying that "Well, if you don't want to talk about the past than us voters are not going to bother looking at your past and we won't vote you in."

Seems pretty fair to me when you look at it that way.

Unfortunately, just like with most things in life, you can't really just look at if from good old Woody's point of view.

While McGwire's evasive and defensive statements on Capitol Hill were evidence enough for me to personally convict McGwire within in the confines of my own head, they were not enough to outwardly convict him.