Um, Jose? Casn you not loom behind me like that? It looks too much like foreshadowing. Thanks.
Just kidding Mark. We’re still cool, right? What’s that? We were never cool? Because we’ve never met? Fine, be that way. So in case you didn’t hear the news, Mark McGwire is going to be the Cardinals hitting coach next year. McGwire hasn’t been involved in baseball since his retirement in 2001, unless you count this of course. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of effect he has on their hitters, and how his relationship is with the players, considering he was teammates with two of them. I’m not sure how I feel about him as an MLB employee given the treatment that Pete Rose and others have received, though Sammy Sosa was allowed to come back and have a successful season as a hitter after those steroid hearings had taken place. It’s always been hard for me to judge McGwire because he might have been using steroids his entire career. Was it natural talent? Was is all due to cheating? There’s no way to say for sure with him, whereas Barry Bonds would have been a Hall of Fame player if he had retired before he started juicing. I guess this is at least a start to understanding what kinds of talents and acumen McGwire has for the game. But I’d like to get some readers’ thoughts on this, since I can’t make up my own mind.
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Honestly, I think it’s a dumb move by the Cards. I also think it’s a desperate attempt to keep Holliday. Holliday apparently worked with him last offseason and liked working with McGwire. That said, the first two months of this season were two of the worst of Holliday’s career.
That’s not the dumb part, though. The dumb part is that the Cards have the greatest hitter of my lifetime who has not been tainted by steroids or steroid allegations in Albert Pujols. And you’re going to put that guy in daily, visible contact with Mark McGwire? Why make unnecessary questions and annoyances happen?
That said, maybe it’s possible the Cards have already decided they can’t afford Pujols after this contract. Maybe Albert has told them, “I’ll take $20 million a year from you (which is a discount), but you have to spend $120 million a year on payroll for this team.” The Cards simply can’t run a $120 million dollar payroll, and they’ll be hard pressed to put together an effective roster with an $80-$90 million payroll and one player getting $20 million of that. So maybe they’re trying to keep Holliday, realize they have two more years of Pujols, and after that they rebuild around Holliday (who will be 31), Wainwright (who will be 30), and Rasmus (who will be 25).
That said, since I think this move will cause a lot of distractions for the Cards in the short term and shows they are at least somewhat unlikely to retain Pujols past 2011, I’m a fan of it.
I hear you, but it’s not dumb if you’re a Cardinals fan. Cards fans still LOVE Big Mac and he can do no wrong. St. Louis baseball takes place within a very large bubble. They don’t care about what people say regarding the Cards if those people exist outside of that bubble. And not that they need the ticket sales, but it can only help in that department as well.
It’s kind of cool in that regard, and it also, well, isn’t.
I agree with you that St. Louis is a strange bubble baseball town that really protects it’s own. There’s a reason good players love playing and staying there.
However, I don’t think we can say that this won’t be a major distraction just because the St. Louis media and fans might be on board. Look, the San Francisco Giants fans loved Barry Bonds to the end, even when EVERYONE knew he roided up. ESPN will be in Florida a lot about this. If Colby Rasmus suddenly hits 40 homers next year, there are going to be a lot of questions on the national stage as to what the hitting coach is doing. Outside of St. Louis, having Mark McGwire affiliated with your team taints pretty much everything you do.
And that said, Jeremy has a good point: No one knows how good McGwire actually was. Between the Canseco story and others that have come out, it’s pretty clear that McGwire spent most, if not all, of his career taking some form of PED or another.
The potential for distraction is a good point, especially during Spring Training.
But again, since St. Louis is a “smaller” city, I think they will be able to avoid the heavy pressure from big media. The reporters in the clubhouse are going to be primarily STL-based, and LaRussa will just get his team to give this issue the Belichick-treatment. And based on initial reaction to this news, ESPN doesn’t even seem to care all that much. I mean shoot, Manny was suspended for 50 games this year and the Dodgers still made the NLCS, so the ‘roids distraction issue might be a thing of the past.
How good was McGwire? I’ll call that a different debate for a different day.