If you hate the A’s, you’ve got to love Jose Canseco. Cognitive
dissonance? Not at all.
If you hate the A’s, you’ve got to love Jose Canseco. Cognitive dissonance? Not at all.
See, Canseco’s book, “Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, Fat Heads, Ridiculously Long Book Titles and How Baseball Got Squealed On” – or whatever it’s called – really takes the gloss off those late ’80s Oakland teams. And if you’re a Giants fan – particularly if you were one ’round about 1989 when the earth shook and the G-men got swept in the World Series by a ‘roided up Jose and the rest of the villains in green and yellow – that’s a pretty nice thing.
Beyond taking down the Bash Brothers mystique a notch, though, Canseco’s book destroys the whole argument that a tiny minority of doped up players are ruining it for the honest ones. Canseco says up to 80 percent of major leaguers are on steroids, and he names plenty of them.
What’s nice about this is that the story line immediately goes from “Barry Bonds, dirty rotten lone cheater in the book depository” to “Barry Bonds, symptom of a greater trend.”
That is to say, before we pure arbiters of justice start slapping asterisks on Bonds’ records, we better make sure our quivers are fully stocked with the funny little symbols – and a couple dozen ampersands and squiggly marks in case we run out of asterisks – because there are plenty of baseball milestones out there that could use a toxicology screening.
Of course, everything depends on whether you believe Canseco or not. And right now, Major League Baseball is making every effort to will his accusations away and call you a rube if you don’t do the same.
In a full-frontal ad hominem assault, Bud Selig, Tony LaRussa and Co. are gutting the messenger with their PR daggers. Canseco only wrote the book for money. Canseco can’t be trusted. Canseco is a big meanie who’s trying to drag Mark McGwire and others down into his slime pit.
Only, deep down, just about everybody has the feeling that Canseco’s tales out of school have the ring of truth. Exaggerated? Probably. Mistaken on the facts here and there? Undoubtedly.
Here’s the thing. Major suspicions have sprung up about baseball’s steroid problem since the BALCO investigation kicked off in 2003. If anyone who’s followed the saga since then isn’t buying the bulk of what Canseco’s selling, well, they’re willfully blind. From Ken Caminiti’s revelations and death to the grand jury leaks in the BALCO case, we’ve all become increasingly aware that we’re looking at just the tip of a very juiced-up iceberg.
Is Canseco the ideal guy to be breaching baseball’s steroid stonewall? Maybe not so much. Then again, when you consider that the first crusader rabbit on offer was Victor Conte, it kind of removes a greasy layer of film or two off Canseco’s brand of sleaze … which is pretty hard to do.
Will baseball undergo a sea change in its attitude towards performance enhancing drugs as a result of Canseco’s book? Probably not, and MLB’s already taking a step in the right direction with its new drug policy. In that sense, “Juiced” will wind up being a lot of sound and fury signifying little.
What Canseco’s book will mostly do is forcibly expand the gutter enough that few partisans will still have the temerity to say that their guy (McGwire, Sosa, Pudge et. al.) is clearly “clean” while our guy (old Barry Lamar Scapegoat hisself) is a lowdown scoundrel, a traitor and a sneak.
And in this sordid era, that’s a straw worth grasping at.
