This is the way the ratings work: if you want people to listen to you, you had better do something interesting — and local. And so, to celebrate Mark McGwire’s coming out party on Monday, one local sports talk show asked its listeners to decide who had hurt their sport more: Mark “the needle” McGwire? Or Washington basketball semi-great Gilbert “Wyatt Earp” Arenas. The calls flooded in, though Sports Talk Radio afficianados are nothing if not predictable. If you don’t like baseball then Mark McGwire is “fatal to the game” (as one caller would have it) and if you don’t like basketball (“Let’s get ready to Gam-blllllllle“) then Arenas is a talisman of “a league of thugs.” There’s a better answer: if Mark McGwire had brought a gun into the Cardinals locker room he would have been immediately suspended for half-a-season – and right now he’d be in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

McGwire’s sin, or so it seems to us (and here we are — after a long hiatus), is not so much that he used steroids (didn’t we already know that), but that he took so long in admitting it. Oh, and in admitting it . . . well, he didn’t really admit it: he didn’t avow that somehow it had increased his power (which is what steroids do) and he refused to acknowledge that without them he might not have hit the 70 home runs that made the ’98 season so memorable. That is to say, twenty-four hours after coming clean, McGwire is now being castigated for not really “coming clean.”

The most outspoken McGwire critics appeared on the MLB Network in the backwash of McGwire’s interview with Bob Costas. “The fact is, it is a form of cheating. And the question in my mind is can you award a guy with the highest award in baseball [election to the Hall of Fame] if he cheated? And my answer is no,” Peter Gammons said. Gammons took a surprising view: he said he had voted for McGwire’s entry before admitting to taking steroids, but that he would not do so now — and he predicted that it would be “a couple of tough years” for McGwire. That is to say: there’s no reward for coming clean, at least in Gammons’ mind, and it might have been better for him if he kept his mouth shut. “He wanted to be in uniform [as the new St. Louis Cardinals hitting coach] more than he wanted to be in the Hall,” Gammons reflected. There’s something to that: our guess here at CFG is that Cardinals’ owner Bill DeWitt probably insisted that McGwire clean up the past — if for no other reason than to keep the press from hounding him through all of Spring Training and beyond. But that meant a public admission and an apology. McGwire agreed.

MLB Networker commenter Joe Magrane added his own voice, wondering whether McGwire’s admission was really an admission — McGwire admitted to taking steroids to “heal faster,” Magrane noted, but without explicitly admitting that he used them. “I just don’t buy it,” Magrane said. MLB Cardinals’ reporter Matthew Leach had it the other way: “If there was anything that surprised me about the whole deal, it’s that he was a little more explicit than I thought he would be.” Leach then added a classic zinger: McGwire apologized, but without really saying what he was apologizing for.

Yeah, I buy that — but let’s get serious. McGwire could come absolutely clean (“I put the needle right here, Bob , because I knew it would help me break the Maris record) but such an admission, while fueling America’s twisted obsession with public and tearful repentence, wouldn’t make any of us actually feel any better. We still wouldn’t know what to do with all those records and (for those of us who watched every minute of the ’98 season) we still wouldn’t know how to think about that day when Mark and Sammy made baseball history. (All I can say is, thank God Sammy didn’t take ‘em!) And that kind of admission (an I-did-it-just-to-hit-home-runs admission) might actually make us feel worse. Then too — lest we forget —  Bud and a gaggle of owners and senior baseball executives were all arrayed in the box seats at Busch watching when Mark and Sammy put on their show. And while Bud ”Claude Rains” Selig has appointed every kind of commission possible to investigate the problem, he stood and cheered just like the rest of us when Big Mac put one over the McDonald’s sign to break the record: ”Steroids? Steroids? I’m shocked to learn there were steroids in baseball.”

McGwire apologized and wants to coach St. Louis hitters. Let’s leave him alone. And let’s hope, for the sake of the Nats, that he does a lousy job.

As tradition would have it, 1997 was a fairly typical year for the Chicago Cubs. The Also-Rans boasted a power-packed line-up of potential Hall of Famers (Ryne Sandberg and Sammy Sosa), a handful of on-base guys (Mark Grace and Shawon Dunston) and a few young faces with great potential — like starting pitcher Geremi Gonzalez and outfielder Doug Glanville. Which is why the season caught so many Cubs fans by surprise: the team started losing in late April and didn’t stop until September. Their final numbers reflected their futility: they were dead last in the NL with only 68 wins, which tied them with the even more hapless Phillies. If the arc of the Cubs’ ’97 season was ever downward, then the arc of Cubs manager Jim Riggleman was upwards — a reflection of his increased irritation and angry outbursts. By the end of September, the Chicago baseball press were following Riggleman around like a pack of hounds. He was “good copy” — questioning the team’s attitude and criticizing unnamed players for being “selfish.”

The 1997 season is emblamatic of Riggleman’s style: he’s not above criticizing players, speaking his mind, or making tough decisions. In the middle of the ’97 season, in an effort to provide some spark to the Cubs’ line-up (and to signal that no one was above being called out for not producing) he benched Ryne Sandberg, then defended his decision in public as lynch mobs formed on Michigan Avenue. Riggleman then confronted outfielder Sammy Sosa in the Cubs clubhouse, when the outfielder insisted on playing loud Latin music on his boombox, even after a Cubs loss. Sosa regularly ran through Riggleman’s signs and seemed so intent on hitting thirty homers that he remained unphased by the Cubs’ play. By July, the Cubs were two teams: a Latin team clustered around Sosa and an increasingly disaffected core of veterans who were tired of losing.

The betting for the ’98 season was that if it came to a choice between Sosa or Riggleman, the Cubs skipper would be gone. Which makes the ’98 season that much more of a surprise: not only did Riggleman stay on, he patched up relations with Sosa, united the Cubs’ clubhouse, and re-jiggered the Cubs line-up, batting Sosa ahead of on-base hitting machine Mark Grace. The result was a Cubs’ revival that surprised even the most die-hard Cubs fans, earning the team a spot in the National League playoffs. “I treat players the way I want to be treated,” Riggleman said in the middle of the season, an admission, perhaps, that his ’97 irritability was misplaced, but also a signal that his policy of discipline had not been forgotten. In ’98, Sammy Sosa began to take instruction, turned down his boombox and yielded to Riggleman’s signs. Riggleman even had a bounce in his step when he went to the mound. At one point, he admitted that team losses fed his irritability. ”It know it eats at me daily,” he said.

Riggleman’s reputation as an outspoken disciplinarian followed him to Seattle, where he took over as the Mariners’ interim-manager in 1998. It didn’t take him long to become the darling of the Seattle media, who learned that he was as good a copy for the Post-Intelligencer as he had once been for the Chicago Tribune. Coincidentally — or perhaps not — the kinds of divisions that had plagued him in Chicago were present in the Mariners’ clubhouse. When some of Seattle’s players (including some of the team’s more medicre pitchers) criticized Ichiro Suzuki, Riggleman (an Ichiro defender) lit into them. Why were players criticizing Ichiro? His answer was blunt to the point of being painful: “Pettiness, seventh-grade mentality, just pettiness of whatever jealousy, pointing fingers, deflecting responsibility, lack of accountability, just a lack of a character. These things happen when you’re losing; you’re not seeing that happen with winning teams now. But those winning teams go out and lose a couple games and you’ll see it.”

A tiger doesn’t change its stripes and Jim Riggleman will remain Jim Riggleman — he’s an outspoken disciplinarian with a good baseball mind, but he cultivates controversy and isn’t above leveling criticisms not only at players, but also at owners, scouts and general managers. If he is given a poor product he’ll say so, as he did in Seattle (“the deficiencies start at the top,” he said), where his off-the-cuff remarks made him fanatical supporters among Mariners’ fans, but few friends in the front office. Which is why Don Wakamatsu is now in Seattle and Jim Riggleman is in Washington. He will “tighten the ship,” impose discipline and shake things up. If being bad-tempered will make the Nats hit, field, pitch and run better, he’ll be a hero. But if that doesn’t work, don’t be surprised if “Gentleman Jim” trains his sights on Mike Rizzo and Stan Kasten. When he does, they’ll wish they were somewhere else — or they’ll wish he was.