This was originally composed as a response to clyde_park's post, but it was too long to fit in the comments so I'm moving it over here.

If I am understanding him correctly, clyde_park is saying that steroid use is bad primarily because it is illegal, regardless of steroids' actual effects (which he says are "insignificant [in the sense of 'not important'] at this point"). I think this is a widely held position and seems reasonable, but it makes me wonder: If these steroids improved performance but weren't illegal (like andro wasn't in the '90s) would they then be OK? That's the difficult part for me to reconcile. It seems to me that from the perspective of a baseball fan, the actual effects should be much more significant than the legality.

Growing up during the Cold War and seeing the Commies "steal" Olympic medals from us taught me that steroids were evil and bad. That was drummed into my head from a young age. So I do feel in my heart that what McGwire/Bonds/half of the NFL did was "wrong," but I'm struggling to know where to draw the line.

Almost every player in baseball takes some sort of supplements. Most of them are legal, some of them are illegal, and the government hasn't made a decision on others. Some of the legal ones are chemically very similar to the illegal ones. Some of the legal ones are actually more effective (for a baseball player) than the illegal ones. So it's hard for me to say, "Oh, creatine, that's cool, but women's fertility drugs?! Be gone, sinner!"

That's why it is (relatively) important to me, as a baseball fan and a fan of the numbers, to understand what the effects of these illegal drugs are. Josh Hamilton apparently spends his offseasons on endless heroin and meth benders, and while that might give me a negative opinion of him as a person, it doesn't affect what I think of his baseball stats, because I don't think these particular illegal drugs are helping him. Same thing with Paul Molitor, Tim Raines, Willie Stargell, etc. I wouldn't withhold my Hall of Fame vote just because they were coke fiends. But then if Mark McGwire took some illegal drugs that didn't help his baseball performance at all (again, let's assume this is true even though it probably isn't), why should he be evaluated any differently — from a strictly "baseball" point of view — from Hamilton or Molitor? It shouldn't make a difference unless the drugs changed his on-field performance.

If we look at intent, I assume it's the same for every baseball player, whether the drugs are legal, illegal or undefined: They want to perform better. Baseball players are always looking to get any advantage they can. Some famous baseball man once said, "If you're not cheating, you're not trying." (I don't agree with that, but it's a common attitude in the game.) So then it becomes an issue of, "How far are you willing to go to improve your performance?" And for PEDs, the dividing line between "far enough" and "too far" seems to be defined only by the laws of the U.S. (and now the rules of baseball) — not on personal health risks or standards of "fair play" — and I find that troubling. Are all illegal steroids automatically morally worse than legal supplements like creatine? Are illegal amphetamines automatically morally worse than coffee or Red Bull? If something is legal, does that mean it's all right, even if it's a health or environmental risk? I don't know that I'm qualified to pass these kinds of judgments, and I don't know that U.S. law is either.

If you do something that is specifically against the written rules of the game, I have no problem with the umpire or the MLB head office "punishing" you for it (being called "out," getting kicked out of a game, being suspended, being declared ineligible). If MLB wants to retroactively discipline McGwire for his actions based on some vague drug policy that was in force at the time, I suppose that's their prerogative — though it's a slippery slope, as he was certainly not the only one guilty of those violations.

But if we're just talking about the law here, it's a different matter. I generally disapprove of people breaking the law, but sometimes laws are stupid. In some states it is still illegal for men to have sex with each other. Not long ago, it was illegal in some states for a white man to marry a black woman. It is illegal in Michigan to watch your neighbors' kids for 30 minutes while they wait for the bus, unless you have a daycare license. I don't think any of these things are morally wrong. (Some will disagree about the gay sex.) So even if the gummint says you can't take dura-decabolin but you can take cortisone, I'm not necessarily convinced one is morally worse than the other — that one is "wrong" but the other isn't. It seems like an arbitrary line to me. I do not believe that all illegal PEDs are immoral and all legal PEDs are A-OK.

I think that from a strictly baseball perspective, substances should be banned, independent of legality, only if they have an unnatural/unfair effect on baseball performance (and maybe not even then) and should be ignored, left to be handled by the law, if they don't. I wish baseball had been more proactive in establishing guidelines, but they weren't. And if MLB didn't care about it, why should we?

Here's another thing I just thought of: If you try to cheat but it doesn't work, is it still cheating? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Let's say you fly out using a (knowingly) corked bat. That's cheating even though it didn't help you. But let's say you hit a home run with a bat that you thought was corked... and it turns out you picked up the wrong bat, a perfectly legal one. Is that still cheating? I'm not sure. You thought you were cheating — you wanted to cheat — but in fact you were not violating any rules of the game. Do you deserve to be punished?

If you take steroids thinking they will help you, but they don't help you, might that not be the same thing? Are you really violating the sanctity of the game? I guess that's why, for me, it does matter what the effects of the drugs were, more than the legality/illegality or even the intent. If steroids had a demonstrated huge impact* on a player's stats or the outcome of games, I'd be concerned about them. If they had a tiny impact or zero impact, I'd think it's a tempest in a teapot deserving of some wrist slaps. But whether a substance was legal or illegal does not matter to me, as a baseball fan, unless it changed the game on the field. It doesn't bother me (much) that Mark McGwire broke the law. It does bother me that he might have gained an advantage that wasn't available to his law-abiding peers. But if there was no advantage gained, I'm unbothered again.

* I am not denying that steroids have a huge impact on baseball performance. It is certainly possible, though I haven't seen any real concrete evidence for it, primarily because there hasn't been any scientific testing. I think the most likely scenario is that steroids have a positive effect on baseball performance, but it's not nearly as large as the mainstream media imagines.

It does bother me that there's this big steroid mess. I'd prefer that there was no question about the validity of anyone's stats and we could compare players throughout history without making endless "adjustments." But at the same time I think the furor is way overblown. People are taking PEDs, legal and illegal, in every sport, AND IN REAL LIFE. That's the era we live in, and most of the time people think this sort of progress (artificial knees, Viagra, Ritalin, the polio vaccine) is good — except when it affects athletic performance for the pros (not us), which we consider "sacred." It's almost as if we prefer our athletes to stay in the 19th century. I know that "pure sport" is supposed to pit man vs. man, not technology vs. technology, but, really, we crossed that bridge loooong ago. And I think 50 years from now, our grandchildren are going to look at these "steroid scandals" and think, "So what?" or "Oh, how quaint!" And all our shame and moral outrage will have been wasted.

Another year, another superstar "comes clean" about his steroid use in a live interview on national TV. Mark McGwire's admission was no surprise, obviously. When he refused to "talk about the past" in front of Congress in 2005, everyone knew that he took steroids. When he hit 70 home runs in 1998 most people were already convinced of it. And even in his rookie year of 1987, a lot of people suspected he was 'roiding. So this was like Adam Lambert letting us know he was gay.

It was still a big step for McGwire, who's famously shy/surly with the press and has never enjoyed having the spotlight on him, even for good reasons. He seemed content to just disappear from baseball and let people say all the bad things they wanted about him. So I applaud him for admitting to his "mistake" in such a public manner, and seeming sincere about it to a certain extent, but I found the whole thing less than satisfying.

The biggest "takeaway" most people got from the interview is that McGwire seems convinced that steroids did not help his performance at all. He thinks he would have hit 70 home runs in 1998 without steroids. He thinks he would have hit 583 home runs in his career without steroids. The obvious question, then, is this: "Why did you continue to take steroids (for almost 10 years) if they had no effect?" You knew they were illegal, you knew most fans viewed them unfavorably, and you apparently knew it was "wrong." If you got no benefit from them, then what was the point?

He claims he only took steroids to "stay healthy" and to help himself recover from the wear and tear of a 162-game season. But isn't that in itself a kind of performance enhancement? Even if steroids didn't help him hit the ball farther (a claim that I find hard to believe), steroids helped him be able to play. If he was only healthy enough to play 130 games in 1998 instead of 155, he would have only hit 59 home runs (assuming the same HR rate). If the steroids got him 25 extra games, they got him 11 extra home runs. That's an enhancement. He could have at least admitted that, instead of saying, "I'm really sorry for what I did, but what I did had no impact on anything or anyone."

Overall, his apology seemed strangely unapologetic. Though he definitely seemed contrite on some level— you could tell he felt bad about something — he never convincingly explained exactly why. He apologized to his family, to the Marises, to his teammates and to the commissioner, but if the steroids didn't have any impact on his performance, then what exactly was there to apologize for? According to McGwire, he would have broken Maris's record without taking steroids. So why would he owe the Marises an apology? If steroids had no effect on the game on the field (which is what he is suggesting), then why does he owe Bud Selig or the fans an apology? It seemed that he mostly felt bad because people were saying bad things about him. That's not exactly an acknowledgement of wrongdoing.

There's another thing that bothers me about this admission and the aftermath, and it's the hypocrisy of the media. McGwire has fared poorly in the Hall of Fame voting for the past four years. All along, many writers have urged him to "come clean," suggesting that the public (and the media) are capable of great forgiveness in the face of a sincere apology. The implication was that maybe, just maybe, if he admitted his sins, he'd get reconsidered for election.

But tonight I heard Peter Gammons, Tom Verducci and Ken Rosenthal all say, "I haven't voted for McGwire yet because I wasn't sure about the steroid allegations. But now that he's admitted he took steroids, I don't see how I can vote for him — he's a cheater." Doesn't this suggest that McGwire would have been better off — at least from a Hall-of-Fame perspective — if he had just kept quiet? Then he would have had a small chance instead of zero chance.

If you are nagging someone to admit to something that you are already (99.5%) sure he has done, don't you owe him some degree of forgiveness or reconciliation after he does what you ask him to do? If it's not going to change anything, why should he apologize? Talk about "darned if you do, darned if you don't"!

[Side note: It appeared that McGwire's famously rugged face had been sandblasted and covered with pancake makeup, stopping abruptly at his pockmarked neck. That was distracting. His neck looked 30 years older than the rest of him.]