MCGWIRE: A HALL OF A DECISION.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

It wasn't supposed to be this hard to mark a ballot for Mark McGwire.

Not when you were with him at the beginning, in the middle and at the end -- before the beginning, in fact.

If you covered him when he was a skinny college first baseman and part-time pitcher, watched in 1983 when he hit four home runs in a three-game series at USC's Dedeaux Field and UCLA's Jackie Robinson Stadium, and later wrote that he already was the player fans ``stopped to watch'' ...

If you predicted his Rookie of the Year season with the Oakland Athletics in 1987 ...

If you saw him hit the homer that gave Oakland its only victory against the Dodgers in the 1988 World Series ...

If you thought he and not Sammy Sosa was the Most Valuable Player in 1998, the year of the Roger Maris chase you called ``the last great drama of the sports century,'' the record duel you put at No. 5 on a list of the 100 greatest rivalries ...

And if, on the day he walked away abruptly in 2001, you called him ``the singular baseball star of his era'' and the leader among the trio of retiring greats who would be ``first-ballot Hall of Famers, deservedly so, no question'' ...

Then you were supposed to be a no-doubt, upper-deck, gone-from- the-crack-of-the-bat Mark McGwire voter for the Hall of Fame.

But now the ballot sits in front of you, McGwire and 31 other names, some big (Cal Ripken Jr., Tony Gwynn) and some small (Bobby Witt?). And the only thing you're sure about is that you'll use every day until the Dec. 31 deadline to decide.

This is my first turn as a Hall of Fame voter, after finally stringing together 10years in a row of Baseball Writers' Association of America membership. It's an honor, it's a privilege, and it's a pleasant headache.

McGwire's 583 career homers, including a then-record 70 in 1998, make him a Hall of Famer. McGwire's suspected abuse of performance-enhancing drugs make him a cheater whose enshrinement, the first so-tainted slugger of the so-called Steroids Era to be honored, would set a terrible example.

Is one of those sentences true? Or both, or neither? If both are true, what then?

Every argument for draws two against, and three for, and four against. And Dec. 31 isn't far enough away.

McGwire doesn't deserve to be in the Hall of Fame, the ultimate individual honor for an athlete. McGwire has to go in the Hall of Fame, the museum of men without whose names the sport's history can't be written.

One true? Both? Neither?

And what of it?

These pages aren't big enough to address all the permutations in this debate.

The voters for whom this is an easy decision are the ones who have chosen to pretend McGwire's great career never happened (on the grounds that he wouldn't have been great without the juice) or that the steroid suspicions don't matter (because they're unproven and, besides, drugs and other forms of cheating have always been part of the game).

The rest of us suffer from too little information, knowing the mysteries of the Steroid Era won't be cleared up by New Year's Eve but hoping for clarity someday.

Every career, every stat, every record has to be viewed in the context of its era and circumstances. Still, it's one thing to weigh the incremental and measurable effects of the color line, expansion and rule changes, factors that applied to everybody in the game. It's something else to wonder about the sometimes career-altering effects of steroids, which might or might not have been used by this player or that.

McGwire's dummy-up appearance before that Capitol Hill committee isn't a reason to keep him out of Cooperstown -- I don't remember ``Quality of Congressional Testimony'' being a consideration the past 70 years. But it was a missed opportunity to shed light on what the Steroids Era did and didn't entail.

I want to vote for McGwire, I want to be persuaded. Most of the arguments for him are smarter than most of the arguments against.

I'm still ambivalent. Normally, that's not the position from which to write a column, but for somebody who enjoyed watching McGwire hit for nearly twodecades, ambivalence says something.

My pen is poised over the names McGwire, Ripken, Gwynn, Bert Blyleven, Andre Dawson, Goose Gossage and Jim Rice. I might vote for them all. I might vote for none of them -- is it fair to suspect McGwire but not others? I might vote for everybody but McGwire -- and isn't this where we start to talk in circles again?

I was with him at the beginning, in the middle and at the end -- before the beginning. I'm not so sure right now.

heymodesti(AT_SIGN)aol.com

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