Mark McGwire, instead of squirming, should have said, "Yeah, I used steroids. Wouldn't you? Look, they wanted us to, or there'd have been rules against it." He could have mentioned pitchers in their late 30s and early 40s who maintained the velocity of their 20s. In this Hitters vs. Pitchers scenario, a Mad magazine reader thinks of the "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon, in which everybody is out to get everybody by whatever means necessary.

Yes, baseball's statistical history has been distorted by steroids. Is that reason enough to keep Cooperstown's doors shut against players who dominated their era? The numbers are skewed up, and no one will ever mistake Rafael Palmeiro for Henry Aaron or Willie Mays. The numbers also appear to be steroided up: At age 25, Palmeiro hit a home run every 42.7 at-bats; at 37, a home run every 12.7 at-bats. In 1990, he led the league in singles. In 1993, his first full season with Jose Canseco as a teammate, Palmeiro jumped from 22 home runs to 37. He hit 95 home runs in his first seven seasons; after Canseco's arrival, Palmeiro hit 99 in three seasons.

It is yet true — if sadly true — that Palmeiro played under the prevailing rules. Think of Ty Cobb. Under his day's rules, he had 4,189 hits. What if he had played his entire career with a live ball? Would he have had 5,000? Maybe 3,000? Just as McGwire and Barry Bonds did stuff in their time that thousands of other big leaguers failed to do, so did Palmeiro rise above the crowd.

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Maybe Canseco's claim that 80 percent of players used steroids was hyperbole. But it's naive to think that only a few players did it. Palmeiro's body wasn't cartooned up. But who said it needed to be? A singles hitter doesn't need to be a weight-lifting Paul Bunyan to add the 25 feet that makes him a home run hitter. And the well-documented health risks mean little to the obsessed competitors at the game's highest level. The old pitcher Jim Bouton recently told the Boston Globe, "If there was a pill that guaranteed a pitcher 20 wins but took five years off his life, we would take it."

Incentives of victory, celebrity and wealth cause people to do strange things.

They might even cause some people to lie to Congress.

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