Another log on the fire
If you believe Jose Canseco – and after reading "Juiced," his juicy tell-all book, on Monday I believe him as much as anyone else in baseball – then just about everything that happened in baseball recently is a fraud.
Like Mark McGwire's 70-home-run season. Or Barry Bonds' 73 in one year. Or Sammy Sosa's three 60-something campaigns.
"The challenge," Canseco writes, "is not to find a top player who has used steroids. The challenge is to find a top player who hasn't."
There still are plenty of baseball fans who want to stick their heads in the sand. There still are plenty who will say the players who've been implicated are innocent until proven guilty. There still are plenty who want to pick and choose their villains – Bonds is bad, Big Mac is good.
But, please. The charade is over for everyone else.
The home run boom of the past decade is like the first time you saw Pam Anderson. You wanted to believe it was real, you wanted to think it was possible, but...
All those years of inflated biceps, inflated stats and 500-foot moon shots that seemed inhuman probably were. Fair or not, we're leaning toward the guilty-until-proven innocent concept here.
If the classy Roger Maris got an asterisk for getting eight extra games to break Babe Ruth's single-season home run record, our current boys of summer require a giant black pen to be scribbled out of the history book.
This wasn't one bad apple in baseball. This was a rotten orchard.
Only 17 times has a player hit 56 or more home runs in a single year. Eleven of those seasons came between 1997 and 2001, including all six 63-plus campaigns.
You think that is a statistical anomaly?
Yes, we know, Canseco is anything but the ideal source here. But who does have credibility? Not Tony La Russa, who is out defending McGwire. In 1988, when fans were chanting (correctly) "steroids" at Canseco, La Russa defended him too. Like everyone else in this scandal, he also has a legacy to protect.
"Juiced" is a wild, juvenile and arrogant book, but if you read the entire thing before jumping to conclusions (we know, a novel concept) it comes across as believable on most fronts. Canseco may have embellished some stuff, but it's unlikely he made it all up. If nothing else, "Juiced" is an entertaining and worthy read.
In print, Canseco is (occasionally) self-defacing, even admitting he never closed the deal with Madonna and saying if it weren't for steroids he wouldn't have made the majors.
It basically comes down to this, what rat is clean? Canseco is so bad in this book, he is good.
Not that Canseco should be anyone's definitive piece of evidence. But he is another part of a mounting case against the modern-day cheats. Like Bonds' BALCO ties. Or Jason Giambi and Ken Caminiti's admissions.
Or the fact that, for awhile, the middle of everyone's lineup began looking like linebackers.
Now you wonder what was real and what was fake. Remember the 2001 Sports Illustrated cover when a shirtless Nomar Garciaparra looked more like a future governor of California than a shortstop? Was he juiced? Was he clean?
No one can definitively say anymore.
The sad part is, baseball's ownership and apologists are sticking to the same plan that got the game into this mess in the first place: ignore, deny and, eventually, after Congressional pressure, implement a drug policy so weak Amsterdam blushed.
The problem is, there will be no final judgment day for the steroid era. You can't retest. You can't turn to forensic science. You can't get definitive proof.
Thus, this case will be tried in the court of public opinion, not a court of law. And with each additional allegation, the verdict becomes clearer. In 25 years no one will be able to tell their children or children's children about the great players of the day with a straight face. This will go down as an indefensible era of the sport.
Even Canseco realizes, deep down, that's a shame. He still marvels at McGwire's rookie season, when a not-so Big Mac clubbed 49 homers, presumably drug-free.
"One of the greatest [accomplishments] ever, if you ask me," Canseco writes.
It would have been. It should have been.
But it's all ruined now.
