From the Windup: Jose Canseco, Steroid Era Hero or Slimy Opportunist?

From the Windup is an extended look at a particular portion of America's pastime.

Baseball's steroid era has created some strange bedfellows. Five years ago, Jose Canseco was a lone, crazy voice insisting that baseball's steroid problem was much worse than people thought. He wrote his first book, named names, and in the end most of the names he named the first time were implicated in steroid use. After the release of the Mitchell Report, Canseco came back into the news declaring that he was shocked to see Alex Rodriguez not named.

Sure enough, Rodriguez has been all over the news this week with the revelation that he failed a steroid test in 2003. Canseco, meanwhile, is asking that baseball apologize for ... I'm not sure what. Treating him like a leper, I guess. And from what I can tell, a lot of fans thinks he deserves some kind of apology.

Honestly, I'm not so sure. It's very hard to know exactly what to make of Canseco. On one hand, he's constantly trying to get as much attention as he possibly can, whether it's by writing tell-all books, appearing on reality TV shows or boxing anyone that will get into a ring with him, but on the other hand, the names he names sure do seem to appear connected to steroid usage in other places.

It's really not that simple, though. Canseco's stories so far have had the names right, but the stories that he's told don't necessarily match up with the other stories that we're hearing. Canseco claims to have injected Mark McGwire with steroids during the '80s, but McGwire's own brother claims that he introduced Mark to the drugs in the early '90s. Canseco claims to have introduced A-Rod to steroids, but A-Rod says that he and his cousin were experimenting with the drugs on their own.

We're not dealing with any reliable sources here and so, as fans, we've been left to fill in the blanks ourselves. I do think it's important to note, though, that just because Jose Canseco got some names right doesn't necessarily mean he's been telling the truth. One part of A-Rod's press conference that I found incredibly implausible was his assertion that he didn't know what other players were doing. If one player gets big and starts hitting a lot of home runs, of course other players are going to ask about it. Of course that player is going to tell his friends what he's doing. I assume that a locker room is a lot more like a high school cafeteria than it's some silent mausoleum. The players aren't keeping it all to themselves and I think that's one of the reasons that this steroid problem has gotten so out of control.


To put it another way, just think about two scenarios and ask yourself which is more likely to be true. The first option is that Jose Canseco is a beacon of truth in the dishonest world of baseball and he's slowly uncovering the true sins of the steroid era. The second is that Canseco either knew or strongly suspected a bunch of big-name guys were juicing and he made up sensationalist stories about those players and their steroid use, knowing that the players would never fight him over it because a lawsuit could expose their steroid use to the public.

It's possible that I'm off base here, but I think the characterization of Canseco as some kind of angel of truth is misguided. He saw that a book full of the names would be profitable, so he wrote it. When it became clear that much of what he wrote would be publicly corroborated and that playing the role of whistleblower would be lucrative, Canseco shifted gears towards that role instead. It amuses me that we're so quick to condemn large parts of A-Rod's story as lies, but we're willing to believe that Jose Canseco is the only person to tell the truth about the Steroid Era thus far.

Of course, like any other good ol' moral quandary, there are more layers to this story than that. Canseco's books may or may not be completely representative of things that happened while he was in baseball, but even if all he's doing is cashing in on things that most anyone with access to a major league clubhouse knew, there's still a big lingering question. Does Canseco deserve credit for being the one guy willing to talk about this while every player and ex-player remained silent? Or is he just a guy after a cheap buck that threw his old teammates and others under a bus?

There's really no right or wrong answer here. Any situation in which you're even contemplating Jose Canseco as a good guy is a complicated one. As much as he'd like his apology, though, he's benefited from the steroid fallout far too much and there are too many lingering questions for me to think that he's turned into baseball's steroid crusader for any reason other than personal gain.