Hours before baseball's Hall of Fame voting announcements, Mark McGwire can only hope that early polling is inaccurate. It seems the eighth leading home run hitter will receive nowhere near the 75% necessary to be enshrined in Cooperstown, the New York Times reports. The genial redhead's widely presumed steroid use is believed to have doomed his chances.
In non-steroid-haunted news, Goose Gossage and Jim Rice are considered strong possibilities because they came closest last year to induction, at 71.2% and 63.5% respectively. Gossage says hopes voters look at his multiple-inning-save numbers: "Now it takes three guys to do kind of what I used to do." (More MLB stories.)