McGwire comes clean

In the latest chapter of baseball's ongoing steroids saga, Mark McGwire, the former baseball player who shattered Roger Maris's single-season home run record by hitting seventy home runs in 1998, admitted yesterday that he used steroids for a decade leading up to and including his record-breaking year. He had previously acknowledged using androstenedione, but that was not a banned substance at the time. This news is disillusioning, if not entirely surprising. After all, have you seen the size of the man's arms?

As far as the impact on the single-season home run record, things are unclear. Barry Bonds, who broke McGwire's record with seventy three home runs in 2001, is also beleaguered with allegations of steroid use. According to Yahoo! Sports, the Maris family feels that Roger's total of sixty one home runs in 1961 should be restored as the official single-season record. Although Sammy Sosa has also surpassed Maris's single-season total--he hit sixty six home runs in 1998, the same year that McGwire hit seventy--he too tested positive for steroids, according to the 2003 anonymous survey conducted by Major League Baseball that came to light last year.

Will Major League Baseball make any official adjustment to the record? It's unlikely. For starters, it has not been proven that Bonds actually used steroids (though I suspect that's just a matter of time) or that Sosa was using steroids in 1998. More than that, though, the league is extremely reticent when it comes to revising records, most likely due to "slippery slope" concerns. If they change one record, they'll soon be flooded with requests to change them all. Then again, video replay on home run calls has begun to undermine the traditional inviolability of an umpire's ruling, so perhaps more change is in the wind.

In other news, Dartmouth men's basketball head coach Terry Dunn resigned last Friday. He had amassed a 47-103 record over six years with the team. The search for his replacement is ongoing. Go Big Green!