The New York Daily News
14 February 2005
You watched Jose Canseco laugh and boast of his misadventures last night on "60 Minutes," not squirm a bit inside his open white shirt collar, and the thing you took away from it more than anything is that this shameless clown now must be taken seriously.
It's true. Canseco is suddenly some kind of public Deep Throat, an expert spy. He has been empowered by all the naughty Big Boys of Baseball, by the BALCO hearings and by the muscled jocks who treated hypodermics as if they were some kind of acupuncture treatment.
"The national pastime is juiced," he reiterated last night. Canseco wrote the book, "Juiced," and he says he personally stuck a couple of needles right there in Mark McGwire's gluteus maximus (Mike Wallace never asked which cheek).
Canseco says he did that in a bathroom stall after batting practice and before games, and that he used anabolic steroids with Ivan Rodriguez, Rafael Palmeiro and Juan Gonzalez. He says he also advised Jason Giambi on the matter of this cheating.
"Common ground," Canseco called it. It was a way to interact comfortably with teammates who were not always cozy buddies. This was a new form of clubhouse water cooler banter. Kind of like, "Inject me, and I'll inject you."
Canseco's details on this matter may be as suspect as his own personal history. But laugh at him now at your own risk. Wallace never did last night, because times have changed so much and plausible deniability among our oversized heroes is at an all-time low. Whenever they showed an old picture of Popeye McGwire last night on CBS, you had to wince and wonder at those forearms all over again.
The terrain has changed, and with it the media's outrage at informants has noticeably diminished. The stoolies are treated with wariness now, not dismissed as common horseflies.
Back in 1989, there was a guy named Darrell Robinson who went on the "Today" show, charging that he'd sold human growth hormones to sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner. Robinson had his own share of legal problems, much like Canseco, and the host Bryant Gumbel attacked Robinson as if he were the biggest jerk in the world. Then Griffith Joyner came on the show and called Robinson "a compulsive, crazy, lying lunatic."
And that was about the last you heard about Robinson and his charges, until the day Griffith Joyner died at the age of 38 from uncertain causes.
Now, though, it is tougher to reject the tell-all guys, even if they are as screwed up as Canseco. McGwire says it's all nonsense and Tony LaRussa says it's all nonsense and all the old Texas Rangers say that whatever Canseco says is nonsense.
But then you remember that Giambi once said the steroid reports were all nonsense, too. He was last seen apologizing in the Bronx, and if the leaked grand jury testimony is true then Giambi joins Gary Sheffield and Canseco as the third Yankee or former Yankee to admit using performance-enhancing drugs.
These days, there are two burners going full blast in the hot stove league, heating baseball's long winters. Over one fire, there are the free agent rumors and signings, the congratulatory quotes and back page headlines. The Mets, the Yankees, the Red Sox, they will all be champions. That is the old promise of spring this sport has always offered, a piece of October in February.
But right behind that, over full flame, come the steroid leaks and reports. They are now as big part of offseason baseball as the signings. Players are outed for steroids, the way they might once have been traded to Detroit. When the season starts, the rush of events will disguise the problem again for some time. Not for long, though. Never again.
It would be nice to at least believe that Canseco has learned something from all this, but of course then he would not be Canseco. He still seems to believe that steroids are more helpful than harmful, even after all of this.
"I don't recommend steroids for everyone and I don't recommend growth hormones for everyone," he said last night. "But for certain individuals, I truly believe, because I've experimented with it for so many years, that it can make an average athlete a super athlete. It can make a super athlete - incredible. Just legendary."
Canseco is a blithering idiot. Dismiss him at your own risk.
Originally published on February 14, 2005
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