Is Hiring Mark McGwire In The Best Interest Of Baseball?

The St. Louis Cardinals have announced that Mark McGwire will be their hitting coach next season, replacing Hal McRae.

Mark McGwire is back in baseball, reunited with Tony La Russa as the St. Louis Cardinals’ hitting coach. McGwire was not at the news conference at Busch Stadium, but La Russa and general manager John Mozeliak said there will be no effort to shield McGwire from questions about steroids. The team anticipated a telephone news conference with McGwire.

“By no means is he trying to hide, and by no means are we trying to hide him,” Mozeliak said.

He didn’t even show up for his own press conference…

It seems like odd timing for McGwire to finally return from oblivion.

The last time we heard from McGwire was during the 2005 congressional hearings regarding PEDS in baseball. At that time McGwire said he wasn’t there to talk about the past. Pretty shady testimony if you ask me.

The Cardinals have always been one of baseball’s more classy organizations, so why would they bring back McGwire now?

If McGwire did not use PEDS, why didn’t he admit it at the congressional hearings in 2005?

Instead he danced around the question and faded into darkness for four years without so much as a peep.

In the late 1970′s Charles Finley owned the Oakland A’s. Finley knew he had no chance of re-signing a bunch of his stars, so he traded them away for cash. Bowie Kuhn, who was the baseball commissioner at the time, voided the trades. He claimed that the trades “were not in the best interest of baseball”.

That’s exactly what commissioner Bud Selig needs to do now.

He needs to tell the Cardinals that hiring McGwire as a coach, is not in the best interest of a game that is still suffering from the the stigma and aftereffects of the steroid scandal which isn’t even completely dead yet.