Book Alert / Vindicated

Vindicated -- Big Names, Big Liars, and the Battle to Save Baseball by Jose' Canseco. Simon Spotlight Entertainment '08, $25.95, 259 pages, ISBN #1416591877. Appendix.

Without a doubt, Jose' Canseco is the Rodney Dangerfield of baseball. In 2005, he pointed fingers and named names in his memoir Juiced, which sought to expose the widespread use of steroids in Major League baseball. Unlike most whistle-blowing screeds, in which the narrator is supposedly pure as the driven snow, Canseco admitted from the git-go that he was a major perp.

"Liar, liar," shouted the accused stars in reaction to Jose's allegations. And the press laughed at him. The Miami Herald dismissed Canseco's allegations as "the ravings of a vindictive, attention-starved, has-been 'roidhead.'" How good it must have felt for him to write Vindicated, in the wake of the (former Sen. George) Mitchell Report, unmasking some of the same superstars implicated by Canseco as steroid users. Yet still, no one seems to give him the respect he's due.

One reason baseball hated his book, of course, was that steroids were a dirty little secret that was best hidden. Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa engendered such awe during their competition for the home run crown a decade ago because they were seen to be pushing normal human bodies to the limit and going where no one had gone before. Had it been known then that they were taking steroids, the duo would simply have been seen as racecars, with one gaining an advantage over the other because of an artificial enhancement. It would have made them machines, not outsized humans.

But Canseco has a vision. Sure, he knew that steroids were illegal, but to him, fans want to be entertained. If he could find a drug that would let a player grow a third arm to hit more homers, he'd do it. His viewpoint seems right in line with the blurring of the line between animation and reality in entertainment today.

Canseco's book isn't great literature; it feels like you're sitting across from him in a bar, downing a couple of brewskis while he stares intensely into your eyes, willing you to believe him. His train does go off the track in one respect, however.

Through the book, Canseco hints darkly that superstar pitcher Roger Clemens had the juice (oops, wrong choice of words) to strongarm TV and print media from implicating him in the steroid scandal, even though Sen. Mitchell named him explicitly in his 2007 report. He is particularly insensed that his own publisher pulled references to alleged Clemens's drug use.

The media blackout isn't hard to understand. While Canseco's implication of many others results from having been the first to give them "a needle in the ass," he never did so with Clemens and  can only say he strongly suspects, without hard evidence, that Clemens used steroids. Network lawyers would refuse to run such allegations in a New York minute; that would be one less slander lawsuit they'd have to defend.