Are You Surprised?

About Mark McGwire?

Me neither.

So now what? He finally 'fessed up. He's like the little kid who eventually tells his parents what they already knew, because his fingerprints were all over the cookie jar and he had chocolate-chip smears all around his mouth.

There will be much handwringing about how he needs to publicly disown his home run titles, and how he's only coming clean now because he's back in baseball as a Cardinals coach, and how he wants to endear himself to Hall of Fame voters, and on and on.

So what? We all knew what was going on. With McGwire. Sosa. Bonds. If we didn't know it for sure at the time, we sure as hell suspected, and by now, with everything we do know, there's so little drama left in the McGwire mea culpa.

I didn't notice anyone staying away from the ballpark when McGwire was smacking all those improbable homers. That's you and me, folks. Blame the players if you want. Blame the money-grubbing Lords of Baseball, too. But save a little for yourself. The circus came to town, and nobody was in a hurry to see it leave.

Hey, we could have listened to people like the late Ken Caminiti, who blew the whistle on this crap a long time ago. But we didn't. We kept packing the ballparks and oohing and aahing at the spectacle.

We got what we deserved, and if Mark McGwire's finally telling the whole story, it only spoils our own little fiction.