DUHSVILLE, MO — Mark McGwire admitted today that he did, in fact, use steroids during the era when his arms were as big as watermelons and his testicles the size of the seeds (presumably).

Response across all of baseball fandom was shock and horror. Residents of St. Louis were heard to say, in unison, “If we can’t believe in the purity of the Big Mac, what CAN we believe in??”

In related news, we have also discovered that grass is green, water is wet, and snow falls in the winter.

For a change, my “So have the Reds done anything yet” question to the CTS was answered with something other than “nope, not yet.” From Reds.com:

In a stunning move, the Reds have landed prized Cuban defector Aroldis Chapman, outbidding several other Major League clubs that were in the running for the left-handed pitcher.

Major League sources told MLB.com that Chapman’s deal is likely to be worth $25 million over five years, with an option for a sixth year that could push the value of the contract to $30 million. Payment would likely be spread out over several years to minimize the financial hit.

Don’t get too excited yet. Even if the new pitching coach the Reds were so freaking anxious to put on payroll can handle Chapman’s 100 mph fastball, it’s still an “if” whether he’ll even sniff the majors in 2010.

Still, it’s nice to have something to talk about, and it’s nice to see the team investing in some young blood rather than signing another old dude to a couple years of mediocrity.

You know that the Hall of Fame votes for a player tend to go up as the years of eligibility pass. But, as Chad pointed out, it’s not exactly like these players are putting up good numbers to improve their hallworthiness. They’re retired for cripes sake.

So, what causes Hall of Fame vote inflation? I’ve got a few theories:

Theory 1: Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder
You know that friend who only comes into town a couple times a year? You look forward to hanging out, but then he gets get seriously annoying after a few hours. So you bail, maybe a little disappointed that the evening didn’t live up to your expectations, but a couple weeks later you’ve forgotten how he can’t stop talking about high school politics or Nintendo DS games and you’re remembering the fun times fondly again.

Maybe retired players are like that. Maybe the more time that goes on the more sports writers forget how players were injury prone or clubhouse cancers or just a-holes to have to interview.

Theory 2: I Like Old Coke Better than New Coke because It’s Old…Like Me
It’s only natural that people identify with people that are like them. Newspaper sports writers aren’t exactly renowned for being young and hip, ergo, maybe they’re more compelled to vote for players who are also not young and hip…the not younger and the fewer hips the better.

Theory 3: Misty Water Colored Memories
If you aren’t actually old enough to remember the blizzard of 1978, you’ve probably heard a story about it. Over and over again. And each time you hear that story, the amount of snow dumped on the midwest may well go up and up and up, until entire houses were covered with only the tippy-top of the chimney poking out of the banks through which the inhabitants could breathe and there was no bread within a 500-mile radius. This is why, to this day, all of the bread will be gone from your local grocer if so much a three inches of snow are forecast. A lack of bread is truly a traumatizing event, especially when your deprivation grows year-over-year in your memory.

If this phenomenon carries on to baseball, maybe writers’ impressions of how awesome players were in the past just keeps growing and growing. Players hit harder, ran faster, jumped higher, and made humanly impossible circus catches to completely change the fate of the whole team–no, the whole league–and the game would never be the same.

Of course, this would never happen if they gave the vote to the bloggers. Why, I remember one young go-getter–Jose Guillen–who never had a bad thing to say about anyone. Back in those days, players were classy. Not like today.

I was enjoying a beer at our favorite local pub when ESPN let me in on Tony LaRussa’s latest crazy-go-nuts idea: if the Cards are in the playoff hunt in 2010, they’ll add their new hitting coach, Mark McGwire, to the roster so that he’ll be available to pinch hit.

And presumably backup first. Boy, I’d love to see the look on Pujols’ face.

He went on to say that Big Mac will not be the leaning-on-the-fence-chatting kind of hitting coach, but will be “working his butt off” in the cages along with the guys half his age.

And…

wait for it…

he’ll be at spring training.

It’s the most I’ve ever wanted to see the Cardinals in the post-season hunt. What a friggin’ spectacle that would be. But they could still do one better: they know that Barry Bonds never retired, right?

In all honesty, I think we all would have been kind of surprised if Barry Larkin had been voted into the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. Would have been nice to have been surprised.

Even so, Larkin was no slouch. He pulled in 51.6% of the ballots, nowhere close to the 75% that he needed, but an indication of great things to come. From the MLB.com story:

Larkin’s chances for the Hall look even better compared to other great shortstops who have been snubbed by voters. His contemporary, former Tigers shortstop Alan Trammell, received only 22.7 percent of the vote on his seventh attempt.

The one guy who was elected in, Andre Dawson, had a similar percentage his first year on the ballot, and he lingered around 50% of the vote for four years. Then, he spent two years around 65% till finally pulling in 78% of the vote this year. It’s nice to see that nice guys like Andre can benefit from inflation.