Coming Clean and Blowing Smoke

Mark McGwire's PR team got high marks from the New York Times for the way they handled his revelation that he'd used steroids during his heyday as a home run hitter for the St. Louis Cardinals. Ari Fleischer Sports Communications managed to bundle the distribution of the press release and McGwire's key media interviews into one day -- one afternoon, really -- thereby "taking ownership of the story."

This is Crisis Communications 101, and McGwire will probably get kudos from some people for (finally) coming clean about what he did and when he did it. But in the end, will any of this really help his reputation? Will it rehabilitate him in the eyes of baseball fans? Help him get into the Hall of Fame?

I doubt it. The problem McGwire faces is that his steroid use, in the eyes of most fans, renders his historic achievements null and void. It's no use arguing, as McGwire did to Bob Costas in his centerpiece interview, that his native "hand-eye coordination" and "natural bat speed" would have allowed him to hit all of those home runs even without the juice. The millions of fans who wondered about his suddenly massive, muscular physique, aren't buying it.

What McGwire needed to do to salvage his reputation and his self-respect was to publicly renounce his title as the Home Run King and voluntarily erase his name from the record books. By doing that, he would have put consideration of the reputation of his sport ahead of concern for his own reputation. He'd be a hero again, at least for a day. No doubt he'd still be denied a place in Cooperstown, but he would have earned respect for being a "stand up guy."

McGwire's PR team should have told him: you can't come clean and blow smoke.