Baseball writers are debating whether to vote retired slugger Mark McGwire into the Hall of Fame in his debut year on the ballot, despite reports that McGwire used illegal steroids to enhance his performance and Big Mac's refusal to refute these reports. Paleontologist and lifelong baseball fan Stephen Jay Gould would have seen no cause for debate, because he applied little scientific skepticism to the game he loved.

Gould died in May 2002, three years before a trio of events tarnished McGwire's rep: Jose Canseco claimed McGwire used steroids when the two were teammates; McGwire declined to comment to congressional investigators (Washington Post and related Gelf article); and the New York Daily News reported that Mr. McGwire used an "array" of steroids, according to anonymous sources. (A year earlier, Steve Kettmann wrote in Salon, "I covered the Oakland A's for the San Francisco Chronicle in the '90s and can say that people in the A's organization will tell you behind closed doors that Mark McGwire used to stand around in the weight room, making jokes, rather than lifting weights. That's because the injections he was getting in the ass were taking care of all the bulking up he needed.")

But McGwire's bulking-up was evident to any baseball observers; see his rookie card and then see 50% more man in 1998 photos. That's no definitive proof of foul play—and steroids wasn't banned from baseball until after he retired—but it's ample cause for skepticism. Yet Gould idealized McGwire even after the slugger admitted to taking the legal but controversial bodybuilding substance androstenedione in 1998. Here he is in a column in the Wall Street Journal, as McGwire gave chase to Roger Maris's single-season record of 61 homers:

Few other players have been so destined, and no one has ever worked harder and more single-mindedly, to harness and fulfill his gifts of brawn. He is the real item, and this is his year.

… McGwire belongs to this most select company of superhuman achievers. … Mark McGwire has prevailed by creating, in his own person, the ultimate combination of the two great natural forces of luck and effort: the gift of an extraordinary body, with the a steadfast dedication to training and study that can only merit the literal meaning of a wonderful word, enthusiasm, the intake of God.

Gould did address the andro story, if only to dismiss it: "What cruel nonsense to hold McGwire in any way accountable, simply because we fear that kids may ape him as a role model for an issue entirely outside his call, and within the province of baseball's rulemakers." But he failed to consider the possibility that Big Mac got big on other, illegal substances.

Of course, so did most baseball writers at the time, who eagerly joined in on the McGwire hero worship. But Gelf isn't the only one to hold Gould to a higher standard. In the London Review of Books, David Runciman criticized Gould in his 2003 review of Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball:

Among the many things Gould admires about McGwire, who has now retired, is the way he cultivated his natural gifts: above all, 'the gift of an extraordinary body', to which he added 'a steadfast dedication to training'. What Gould does not say is that this training regime included the ingestion of large amounts of steroids. … There is not a whiff of any of this in Gould's book —it would be inconsistent with the mythic status of baseball's heroes.