SLUGGER'S SILENCE SPEAKS VOLUMES
When Mark McGwire's voice shook and he seemed close to tears during his testimony yesterday, I thought at first he was moved by the story of a 17-year-old athlete who committed suicide after using steroids. But as McGwire refused to answer question after question, I realized that Big Mac was weeping inside over his own reputational suicide.

Never again will any halfway intelligent sports fan take seriously his mark of 70 home runs in 1998. Take the asterisk off Roger Maris' record of 61; hang it on McGwire's, and let the footnote say, "Believed to be on steroids."

In fact, take all the records for most home runs in a season from 1998 to 2001 -- records set by McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds -- and put them in a category called "The Steroids Era."

McGwire looks like he has lost a couple of shirt sizes since his glory days. Sosa answered the committee's questions with carefully worded responses that left open all sorts of pharmaceutical possibilities. Bonds, who was not summoned, is up to his neck in the Balco scandal.

There are baseball devotees who wish that the House Government Reform Committee had never heard of steroids. George Will dismissed the hearing as a publicity stunt. What will George say now that some of the biggest names in the sport have been left lying in the dust? Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post was reduced to muttering in print that baseball fans will talk about the hearing for years. Duhhh. Only the willfully blind can fail to see that juice, not exercise and clean living, gave these guys the muscle needed to break records that had stood since 1927 and 1961 -- and do it six times in four years.

Speaking of the willfully blind -- the so-called commissioner of baseball, Bud Selig, actually claimed the problem has been blown out of proportion: "Do we have a major problem? No," he said.

Hopefully that is true in the limited sense that the long balls aren't flying the way they were in 1998-2001. Bonds holds the record with 73. Scared straight, he slumped. His batting average has actually improved since 2001, but his home runs dropped to 45 or 46, which is what he was hitting ten years before.

Bonds' amazing season in 2001 attracted attention to his bulked-up physique, which was due partly to a rigorous workout regimen and partly to substances provided by Victor Conte of the now-notorious Balco Laboratories. As one muscle magazine reported in an admiring article: "Conte precisely measures the nutrient levels in the outfielder's blood, and then prescribes specific supplemental regimens to correct imbalances. Like the managers of every National League team, Bonds has noticed the difference. 'I'm just shocked by what they've been able to do for me,' he says."

Yeah, right. Shocked . . . shocked!