Did Mark McGwire’s public confession represent genuine repentance, teshuvah in the Jewish tradition?

Or was it merely a ploy to help him get back into baseball as a hitting coach for his old team, the St. Louis Cardinals?

These were the thoughts on the mind of Conservative Rabbi Jason Miller of Detroit, Michigan, in a blog he posted on JewishBlogging.com (Jan.14, ‘10) concerning the retired baseball slugger’s admission a few days earlier that he had used performance-enhancing drugs while a player

McGwire said he took steroids for his health, not as a performance enhancer.

He added he never needed muscle-building chemicals to smack a cork-centered, 5-ounce orb wrapped tightly in cowhide out of the ball park.

Rob Rains, in his Mark McGwire: Home Run Hero (1998), found reliable witnesses who attested to young McGwire’s Ruthian clouts when he pitched and played first base at Damien High, an all-boys Catholic school in LaVerne, California.

Big Mac never fails to give thanks to “the man upstairs” for his talent.

His statement, in March 2005, before a congressional committee investigating steroid use in baseball was a public relations disaster for him.

All he would say was, “I’m not here to talk about the past,” and with those words he condemned himself to a life of purgatory on the base paths of earth.

He didn’t succeed in redeeming himself with his January 2010 confession.

Although he delivered a competent, tearful mea culpa  recitation, still lacking were humility, contrition, and a sense of guilt for the fraud he had perpetrated on the nation’s baseball fans — and on baseball’s hallowed record book.

But all-time home run king Hank Aaron went to bat for him: “He has my forgiveness.”

Writer Bud MacFarlane points out, in “How to Start a Real Prayer Life,” written for CatholicCity.com, that the top home run hitters — Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, Bobby Bonds, Mark McGwire, Roger Maris, Sammy Sosa — are Catholic.

Well, following up on that tack, McGwire has made a public confession, but we do not know if he has been inside a confessional, where repentance begins with the sacrament of Penance (also called the sacrament of Reconciliation), the Catholic version of teshuvah.

Repentance is the repudiation of one’s sinfulness and a consequent turning to God for forgiveness. It entails making amends, that is, doing reparation.

Big Mac seeks his redemption. He has made substantial monetary contributions to Donald Hooton’s anti-steroids foundation, the Taylor Hooton Foundation.

Hooton’s 16-year-old son Taylor, a promising athlete, turned to anabolic steroids to bulk up, but developed a not-uncommon side effect, depression, and his life ended in suicide.

McGwire can become a modern-day, anti-drug Johnny Appleseed, explaining the dangers of steroid use to the youth of America as few can.

Whether the Baseball Writers Association of America will one day factor in repentance as a vital statistic to elect McGwire to Cooperstown is an open question.

PostScript: McGwire got the job as batting coach with the Cardinals at the start of the 2010 season, but not before the Missouri Senate had voted to remove his name from a stretch of I-70 in St. Louis in favor of its original name, Mark Twain Highway.

Roy Hanu Hart, M.D.