If Mark McGwire can be taken at his word, his initial motivation for taking steroids was to combat a number of painful and career altering injuries. A timeline supports this. He also came clean that he did take steroids during his record-breaking 1998 season.

Sadly this morning, none of this pleases the media.

McGwire’s appearnace last night with Bob Costas on the MLB network revealed a contrite and humbled man. McGwire teared up when talking about the potential of hurting the little people involved if he had publically denied using them. It is here where McGwire departed from the pariahs Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.

A man stayed incarcerated for the former while the later waged a smear campaign against his trainer who was caught in a legal web. These two wrote the whole new chapter in throwing someone under the bus. This McGwire clearly will not be doing.

Steroids – like any medication we put in our bodies – are a mystery at first when taken. Folks just don’t know how their bodies are going to respond. We are just now finding out that these things work – and better than we beleived that they would back when the steroid era began at the end of the 1980′s. Still it’s likely that they helped some more than they did others.

Its no secret that McGwire played in pain during a large portion of his career and for him steroids quite simply kept him playing the game he loves so much. Unlike Bonds, McGwire had been a homerun hitter his entire career. It could be that during the record breaking seasons of 1997 and 1998, McGwire was just able to play realtively pain free and at his own best.

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In an ESPN story today, former Yankee strength trainer Brian McNamee says two things that are puzzling. First that one of the injectables he used on Clemens was lidocaine with B-12.

It’s easy to envision how he got the B-12, but not so much with the lidocaine. The later is a anesthetic that’s promarily used as a numbing agent to apply stiches or in dental work. In athletics its easy to see why a physician would choose to add lidocaine with any steroid. Its a technique the pysician uses to see if they “hit the spot” with their injection into a shoulder, knee or elbow. It would never be added to steroid injection into a large muscle like that of the buttocks. Nonetheless its worth questioning McNamee where he got the vile of lidocaine as this is considered to be a narcotic.

Second, McNamee says he injected Clemens at Yankee Stadium in the area which the hot tub was located. Was this area in a place where long time Yankee atheltic trainers Gene Monohan and Steve Donahue were working? If So, McNamee’s claim is questionable as there is no way on this earth that either Monohan or Donahue would have allowed a layman like McNamee to give a shot to an athlete. Nor would have Clemen’s chanced it if he felt that either of the two would have discovered them. If the hot tub at Yankee Stadium was clearly seperate from the training room does it make McNamee’s statement’s questionable.

At any rate the whole episode sheds light on the surge of “personal trainers’ whom baseball let in without vetting. Too may of them – like McNamee – had far too many links to the community of body building and traditional power lifting. Barry Bonds now notorious strength trainer, Greg Anderson is another. They saw major league players as willing dupes who could deliver the kind of access they could never obtain by going through the front door.

Still responsibility lies with players who felt they were untouchable and the suits whom run the game. It unltimately is about sceeding power and influence – something the game’s executive branch often sought to supress in their ATCs . Ultimately their lack of professional respect for ones like Monohan and Donohue helped fuel the disaster. ATC’s have long since earned the respect and appreciation by players and might have been one group if respectfully empowered by management might have been able to raise the alarm against charlatans like Anderson and McNamee.

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