Mindful that newly hired hitting coach Mark McGwire can’t possible say he doesn’t want to talk about the past every day between Spring Training and the end of the 2010 season, Cardinals GM John Mozeliak sounds genuinely uptight when discussing the subject with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Joe Strauss.
œThere is going to be a wide range of what people are hoping to hear. For me personally, we™re not there yet as far as what it™s going to look like, Mozeliak said about an eventual press conference. Hopefully in the next week or so we can work through that.”
McGwire did not attend a Busch Stadium press conference to announce La Russa™s one-year contract extension and his own hiring. McGwire™s phone number is also omitted from a winter phone list distributed to club personnel.
Mozeliak has not approached McGwire about himself available to media but hopes to with La Russa™s cooperation. There is a desire among some in the organization to make McGwire available before the holidays in order to defuse an otherwise persistent issue.
œI think it does matter that McGwire make himself available, Mozeliak said. I just don™t want to paint myself in the corner today on this topic. There are still some things I™m trying to learn and to understand.
Mozeliak’s comments come a couple of days after the Columbia Daily Tribune’s John Clark eviscerated McGwire, not only calling the Bunyanesque Fraud 1B an inadequate Hall Of Fame candidate, but also suggesting Big Mac is equally unfit to be a hitting coach (“in 16 years, a batting average of .263, including three years at .235 or below, (.201 in 1991 in 154 games, and only once breaking .300”).