“I thought he received some bad advice from the attorneys on that tack," Jay wrote. "I sat there hoping he would confess. Even though we'd had a falling out, I felt for Mark; he took a beating that day. Had he just taken the same route as Jason Giambi or Andy Pettitte, and said he was sorry, nobody would be worried about what he did today.”

Oh, McGwire would still be stained by steroids, but he wouldn’t be the pariah he is. If he groveled a bit and put things in perspective, he might even revive his hopes of getting into the Hall of Fame.

I’ve always thought he should be there, and I’ve voted for him in his two years of eligibility. McGwire, after all, didn’t break any of baseball’s rules. Whether he broke any laws by using an illegal drug is irrelevant. We don’t ban ballplayers from the Hall of Fame and spit at the mention of their names for gobbling handfuls of amphetamines before every game as was the general practice for decades. And you can’t have one set of rules for one illegal drug and another set for another.

Either they’re all evil and you throw Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and a few score of other immortals out of the Hall for amphetamines, or they’re all just things that players did to get whatever edge they could and you look the other way. Thanks to the new testing policies, both steroids and amphetamines are now against the rules and subject to random tests.

McGwire could point that out. It’s not his fault there were no rules against steroids. He could even argue he was just keeping up with the other hitters taking them and the pitchers who were juiced, too.

He can say anything he wants — once he comes clean on what he did and why he did it and how sorry he is. But he’s got to tell the truth. He can do it 30 years hence, or he can do it now.

I say, do it now.

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