Rafael Palmeiro to Become the Rangers' Hitting Coach

Not.

Just wanted to get your attention.

How is it that Mark McGwire can come back to Major League Baseball and Pete Rose cannot become eligible for the Hall of Fame? Why is there no pushback from the Commissioner's office on McGwire? Why should he be allowed back?

The simple answer is that while he all but lied during his Congressional testimony he wasn't found guilty of anything, wasn't (really) the subject of MLB's investigation and most certainly wasn't suspended by Major League Baseball. In contrast, Rose committed a host of transgressions for which he wasn't fully remorseful or apologetic, at least for a long while.

McGwire benefits, in part, from the "everyone else did it" defense, one which, under most circumstances, prosecutors would have their mouths watering. The reason? Because if everyone did it, there are more people to prosecute. Instead, baseball prefers to want to have its performance-enhancing-drugs era vanish as quickly as it can, almost as though the Commissioner's office wishes it could place a Harry Potter-like memory charm on the entire population of baseball fans to make them forget -- forever -- that some of the stats and results were as pumped full of crap as the players themselves were. So, the logic must be, pay attention to McGwire and make a stink out of his hiring, and then baseball (whose attendance was down about 7% this season) opens up the entire can of worms again -- steroids, HGH, who are among the 204 or so players who tested positive but weren't named -- and all of that.

At a time when attenance is down, baseball thinks it's cleared that mess, and that there are lingering concerns that without a salary cap teams like Pittsburgh and Kansas City are forever doomed to be at the bottom looking up. While there is a saying that any publicity -- good or bad -- is good publicity, naturally the Lords of Baseball do not think so.

But the amusing part of this is that the writers -- who themselves whiffed on the story for years -- won't forgive McGwire and won't vote him into the Hall of Fame. Or so many say. So, on the one hand, they won't anoint him, but, on the other hand, they're not pressing MLB for the reason why it's giving McGwire a pass.

Gambling, we all should surmise, is worse than performance-enhancing drugs.