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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