Now Entering: The Steroid Wing

Mark McGwire's steroid admission was about as surprising as finding out Mariah Carey was liquored up before babbling through her acceptance speech at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. I would've been more surprised if you told me Ryan Seacrest was gay or that Mo'Nique didn't use a fat suit for her role in "Precious".

The truth is, anybody with common sense had to have their suspicions that McGwire was getting help from something other than a treadmill. The man's body grew like a Chia Pet from when he first entered the league in 1986 to when he shattered the single season home run record in 1998. McGwire backers through the years had been quick to point to McGwire's first full season, in which he belted 49 homers and earned Rookie of the Year honors, as proof that McGwire always had the God-given talent to hit the long ball. That very well maybe true. The problem is, like many great steroid-addled hitters of the last two decades, we'll never know just how great of a career these guys would have had if they never would have touched the juice.

I appreciate McGwire for coming clean. Lord knows he could have pulled a Pete Rose and just sat in denial for decades until he finally saw enough personal gain to admit to his mistakes. Instead, McGwire knew that his return to baseball as the Cardinals' hitting coach would have led to a daily grilling from reporters about his infamous unwillingness to talk about the past to Congress and whether that was an indication that he was a cheater. It's funny that the same people who profited from McGwire's PED-infused exploits in '98 are the same people who couldn't wait to thunder away at Big Mac after he clammed up on Capitol Hill. Everyone is willing to keep McGwire out of the Hall of Fame, but somehow, authors like Mike Lupica aren't willing to give back royalty money from the books they wrote about the summer of '98. Fans aren't demanding their money back for the tickets they bought to watch McGwire knock 'em out of the park. TV networks never cursed the big ratings that came from McGwire's pursuit of Roger Maris' 61. All of a sudden, with a simple non-committal, Mark McGwire was the baseball version of John Dillinger.

So what happens now, you ask? One word: Cooperstown. Slow down, people, I'm not endorsing McGwire's induction into the Hall of Fame. After all, even with all his towering homers, McGwire's still only a lifetime .263 hitter whose crowning achievement was breaking the record of a guy who is not even in the Hall of Fame himself. However, with the admissions of guys like McGwire and A-Rod and other juicers of note(and you have to think Barry Bonds can't be too far behind with his own confessions), it brings up an interesting question about just how we will choose to remember the last two decades of baseball. If the Hall of Fame is truly a museum of the sport's history, how can we just delete nearly twenty years of baseball? Who are we going to have stand as the symbols of our generation? Derek Jeter? Randy Johnson? Greg Maddux? Please. Those guys only tell half the story. Steroids in baseball is too prominent a factor in the sport's history to just go ignored.

That's why I propose Cooperstown opens up "The Steroid Wing". A shrine for all the great players of the last two decades whose achievements will be picked apart like Britney Murphy's autopsy and whose records will be slapped mercifully with asterisks. It's the perfect compromise of remembering baseball's great cheaters, while not angering the purists by mixing them in with the Lou Gehrigs and the Hank Aarons of the world. It allows baseball to put faces on one of the darkest eras in the sport's existence and gives guys with remarkable, albeit tainted, careers their moment to shine. Otherwise, sports reporters will be spending the next decade debating the Hall of Fame candidacy of Dennis Martinez and Andres Galarraga.

Trust me. It will be much easier to walk through Cooperstown with our grandchildren and point at the busts of guys like Manny Ramirez in "The Steroid Wing" and wonder what could have been than to pretend as if they never existed.