Mark McGwire finished his career with 583 home runs.

Sports Illustrated has many great articles in its online SI Vault, featuring work by some of the greatest nonfiction writers of the past 65 years. You should check it out. A less-than-great article is one I found by Tom Verducci, who breathlessly brushed aside talk of McGwire’s PED use in the August 16, 1999 issue. This isn’t a knock on Verducci, who is a talented guy and hardly the only one who rushed to believe McGwire’s lies instead of common sense; it’s more a portrait of that time. An excerpt:

“The home run count of Mark McGwire clicks away incessantly, like the spinning numbers on a speeding car’s odometer. Baseball had never seen a 500 like this. Daytona, maybe, but baseball? Not even close. It wasn’t just that McGwire blew away the old record pace of Babe Ruth—after belting No. 499 on Aug. 4, he could have gone 0 for 312 and still hit 500 home runs in fewer at bats than the Bambino—but it was also that McGwire hit the last hundred quicker than the hundred before that, which came quicker than the hundred before that, and so on and so on. Zero to 500 in 5,487 at bats of pure acceleration.

The celebration of 500 seemed all the more joyous because just before hitting it, McGwire revealed that four months ago he stopped taking androstenedione, a substance that the body converts to an anabolic steroid, out of concern that kids were following his lead. ‘This shows that andro is irrelevant,’ he said.”