I leave the state for a little more than a week and look at what happens?  The Bears lose a game to the Bengals (THE BENGALS?) by five touchdowns.  Steve Phillips gets fired from ESPN for having sex with something straight out of the Shire.  The Cubs finally are un-Tribuned, and best of all?  The Genius returns for another season in St. Louis and brings Mark McGwire back as his hitting coach?

I don’t even want to think what would happen if I left the country.

But of all the things that have happened since last I posted here, it’s that last one that interests me the most.

Word out of St. Louis is that Tony LaRussa didn’t just want Mark McGwire on his coaching staff, he demanded it.  He would not return to manage without the Cardinals bringing in the 6’5 amnesiac to work with the hitters.

LaRussa claimed he’s doing it because Mark has done such a great job in the past working one on one with Cardinals immortals Skip Shumaker and Matt Holliday.  He says the thing that will impress people in and out of baseball is what a hard worker McGwire will be.  How dedicated he’ll be to making the Cardinals hitters all better.

On Monday, LaRussa held a press conference at Busch Stadium.  He showed off a new dye job and the same haircut that Valerie Bertinelli wore in the latter years of “One Day at a Time” and talked about McGwire as though Charley Lau had been resurrected and hired for the Cardinals staff.”

(From left: First base coach Dave McKay, LaRussa, Cubs shortstop Ryan Theriot, Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley.)

LaRussa was asked directly whether he thought McGwire should address whether or not he used steroids during his 16 year big league career.

The Genius immediately put his tough guy persona back on and acted like he did that time he held the press conference holding a bat to show how upset he was that people had stopped bothering to pretend that it was tragic that Josh Hancock had only killed himself when he was drunk out of his mind and high as a kite and slammed into the back of a tow truck on an interstate.

There’s only one reason Mark McGwire is going to be a big league coach next season.  It has nothing to do with his ability to teach others how to hit.

This is LaRussa’s attempt to restore McGwire’s reputation in an ill-fated attempt to get Mark inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame.  This is Tony LaRussa trying to prove that he can do whatever he wants, because he’s Tony LaRussa.

There are three pretty big flaws in Tony’s logic.

1) McGwire already had a chance to rehabilitate his reputation, it was March 2005 in a Congressional hearing room

McGwire was given repeated chances to either admit or deny that he used steroids during his playing time, and we all remember that all he would answer is that “I’m not here to talk about the past.”

There were several reasons why he couldn’t answer the question, and they all point to the fact that he treated his body like an amusement park from at least 1989 to 2001.

Maybe he wanted to admit his use and put it behind him, but his lawyers had advised him that because of a five-year statute of limitations, if he admitted to using steroids in his final season (2001) he could still be prosecuted, no matter how unlikely such a prosecution might be.  Also, he clearly didn’t want to address the subject and face any follow-up questions about whether he had seen other players use steroids during his playing days.  The A’s and Cardinals teams he played on were a who’s who of better living through chemistry.

You have to give him credit.  By taking it up the hiney for four hours in that hearing, he avoided the pitfalls of Roger Clemens (lying through his testimony in a later hearing and now facing jail time), Rafael Palmeiro (pointing his finger, declaring his innocence and then testing positive months later) or Curt Schilling (acting like a tough guy about how much he knew about steroid use in baseball then embarrassingly forgetting it all like a real-life Frankie Pentangeli.)

2) His brother (and others) already detailed Mark’s steroid regimen for us

McGwire’s freakishly huge bodybuilding brother Jay detailed his “big” brother’s fondness for Deca-durabolin, and managed to corroborate many of the things that noted steroid expert Jose Canseco had detailed about Mark’s steroid use in his book “Juiced.”

Also, as far back as the early 1990’s McGwire and Canseco were linked to steroid dealer Curtis Wenzlaff when he was busted for supplying steroids to a number of people, including the then A’s sluggers in an FBI investigation called “Operation Equine.” Wenzlaff sold Winstrol to the “Bash Brothers” among other illegal performance enhancers.

3) He wasn’t a good enough baseball player to be inducted into the Hall of Fame

McGwire’s candidacy centers around one thing.  That the one dimensional slugger could hit lots of home runs.  Because he didn’t do much else.

In 16 seasons, McGwire had his share of monster seasons.  He hit 49 homers as a rookie.  He drove in 100 runs seven times.  He hit 50 or more homers four times.  He hit 135 homers in two seasons (1998 and 1999).

But…

He also hit .260 or less six times.  He hit less than .220 four times.  He stole 12 bases in his career.  He hit six triples.  He never hit more than 28 doubles in a season.

In 2001 1991  he had to sit out the final game (he came in in the seventh but didn’t bat) to avoid hitting less than .200 for a full season.  He was 27 years old.  LaRussa admitted sitting McGwire to avoid “embarrassing” him.  Hell, he hit .201 in 154 games, I don’t think six innings off in the last one saved him from the shame.

Well, he walked a lot.  His 1317 walks are 36th all-time.  Right behind all-time greats Tony Phillips and Fred McGriff.

He finished his career with 1626 hits.  Almost as many as legends like Shannon Stewart (1653), Juan Pierre (1663), Placido Polanco (1671), Randy Winn (1710), Mark Loretta (1713), Chris Speier (1759), Jermaine Dye (1779), Royce Clayton (1904), and…oh, hell you get the idea.

Derrek Lee has more hits than McGwire did (1701).  Derrek Lee isn’t going to sniff the Hall of Fame.  He’s probably a better baseball player than McGwire was.

McGwire’s candidacy hinges on the one thing that steroids allowed him to do better than he could without them.  Hit home runs.  Without his homers he has no Hall of Fame candidacy at all, and every one those homers is tainted.

Andre Dawson’s not in the Hall of Fame yet, and he was easily 1,000,000 times the baseball player the freakishly big, ‘roided up, albino was.

Some guys, directly connected to steroids, like Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez, will probably eventually get into the Hall of Fame.  The reason will be that they were great all-around players.  While voters will still be upset with them for cheating, it doesn’t take much of a leap of faith or logic to determine that both players would have put up Hall of Fame type numbers (Bonds did for more than a dozen years before starting to cheat) without steroids.

You can’t say that for McGwire.

His return to the game, no matter how laughably endorsed by Bud Selig…

“Mark McGwire is a very, very fine man and the Cardinals are to be applauded,” said interim commissioner for life and used car salesman Selig.

…won’t make his non home run numbers worthy of induction.  Even if he were to weep his way through a full confession, it doesn’t change the fact that while he was a good player, he’s just wasn’t good enough to have made it without juicing.

So what’s going to happen?

In February, The Genius and the Fraudulent Slugger will show up in Jupiter, Florida and the media will descend and demand answers.  McGwire won’t give them (because if he was going to admit it, he’d have shown up at LaRussa’s announcement of him joining the coaching staff and gotten it over with now.)  LaRussa will get mad at the media.

(One of you needs to make a t-shirt with The Genius and McGwire on it with 583, an asterisk, and LaRussa drunkenly asking “Is that a significant number?”)

In every town the Cardinals travel to, McGwire will have to duck the media all wanting to ask him the same questions.

Some Cardinals hitters will struggle and people will blame it on the hitting coach.  Some Cardinals will exceed expectations and people will wonder if McGwire’s help is more pharmacological than physiological or psychological.

LaRussa will retire after the season, McGwire will go back to California and we’ll all wonder if this absurd scheme was ever really even attempted.

Oh, and on opening day, 42,000 Cardinals fans (with a combined total of 76,000 teeth) will give McGwire a standing ovation.  Because they’re morons.