Maybe Mark McGwire was the only player who got it after all (cont.)

Selig, of course, brought up his usual talking points about how the Player's Union prevented him from putting in steroid testing, and he could not have known the depth of the problem, and look how far baseball has come. That covers the whole gamut -- powerless, clueless and guileless. Mostly, though, he just sounded ticked off.

"I don't want to hear the commissioner turned a blind eye to this or he didn't care about it,'' Selig told Newsday's Wallace Matthews, using that always popular trick of referring to himself in the third person. "That annoys the you-know-what out of me."

And the lesson might be that Mark McGwire really did have it right. People keep trying, but it's becoming more and more apparent that there's no going back and fixing those years before baseball tested for steroids. There's no making many people feel better about that time when offensive numbers exploded (for reasons that, no doubt, go beyond steroid use). There are no new apologies, no total admissions, no way to rewrite history.

We are where we are. Everybody seems pretty entrenched in their views. Some feel like the whole thing has been wildly overblown. Some feel as if the users should be brought to justice. And some of us just wish we could get back to baseball again.

McGwire appeared to have understood that four years ago. Sure, he paid a hard price for his performance before Congress. He will probably not get elected to the Hall of Fame*. His 70-home-run season and the 65-homer season that followed are viewed by many as less than baseball achievements, more like marvels of chemistry. Many people will not remember the thrills he gave the nation. They will remember a man who would not talk about the past.

*The voters have spoken clearly on this -- McGwire only received 21.9 percent of the Hall of Fame vote this year, down from last year. A player needs 75 percent to be elected. Unless there is a huge momentum turn for him (and it's hard to imagine what that could be) his Hall of Fame candidacy is pretty much dead in the water.

But, looking back, I'm not sure there was much that he could have done about it. When McGwire was 30 years old, his career seemed in jeopardy. He had a bad back. He had a badly injured heel. We don't know exactly what he did to build himself up, but he did build himself, he came out bigger and stronger. He definitely used supplements like Andro to get there. And because there was no steroid testing in baseball and no real chance of getting caught, we can guess he used what was available to him.

He then became the greatest home run-hitter the game had ever known. Maybe that was his goal. More likely, it just happened. Looking back, he never seemed entirely comfortable with it all. I'm not saying he felt guilty or contrite while he was mashing home runs, no, I can't know that. I just don't think he particularly enjoyed being the American idol. When his career ended, he more or less disappeared.

People who know McGwire now say he's pretty happy with his life. He plays golf. He does charity work. He does not worry too much about his legacy. You know, when McGwire refused to talk that day in Congress, many people thought he made a mistake. I was one of those people. My feeling was: What did he have to lose? He was retired. His home-run record had been smashed by Barry Bonds. Why not be valiant? He could come clean, apologize for what he did, give a little insight into baseball at that time, become a new kind of sports hero.

Looking back, though, I realize that he probably could not have done much to save himself that day in Congress. Looking back, I believe McGwire was probably true to himself in his own way. He did not ask for forgiveness. He did not lie. He did not tell the truth either. He did not even claim to know the truth.

*****

Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio): What can you say right now ... to America's youth with respect to the use of steroids? ... Mr. McGwire.
Mark McGwire: I would say that steroids are wrong, do not take them, it gives you nothing but false hope. That's what I would say.

Joe Posnanski is a columnist for the Kansas City Star and the author of joeposnanski.com.