Becoming a Believer

March 22, 2005

Becoming a Believer: The Search for Truth in Canseco’s Juiced

By Matt Stroup

I don’t know about you, but ever since I first heard that Jose Canseco was going to come out with a tell-all book on steroid use in baseball, I was curious to read it. But by the same token, there wasn’t the foggiest chance in Alameda County I was going to shell out $25.95 (the cover price) for a copy. When it came down to it, I wasn’t convinced that there was anything this book could tell me that I couldn’t surmise from reading news stories about it (and thereby getting a number of key excerpts handed to me). But then I lucked into a free copy, and in the process of reading it, a funny thing happened: I found out I was wrong. There actually were some interesting revelations in this book – above all else, what I realized was that for all his faults, Jose Canseco is no dummy. And whether you agree with his often ludicrous opinions or not, completely disregarding what he has to say would be a big mistake.

Don’t get me wrong – at its best, Juiced is poorly written and insanely disorganized. It’s more a series of disconnected vignettes than a coherent narrative. But just when you’re ready to completely write Jose off, he says something thought-provoking. You get the sense from reading the book that our friend Jose has something of a raging case of A.D.D. And what makes this book unique (in my experience, at least), is that it rapidly, and sometimes completely unexpectedly flies from light-hearted, often unintentionally comedic moments to thought-provoking opinions from a guy you’d never expect to hear them from. You can almost picture Canseco sitting in front of the typewriter (not that he was actually typing the book), rambling on and on, his mind flying in a million different directions telling his crazy stories from his playing days, and then all of a sudden someone walks in the room and stuffs about 80 milligrams of ritalin down his throat and suddenly he’s focused, and remarkably insightful. In a sense, the book is two different narratives in one, traveling side by side: Jose Canseco the idiot and Jose Canseco the idiot who is actually much more thoughtful and smart than you give him credit for. Honestly, the man has a remarkable ability to make himself sound like a complete buffoon, and just at the moment you’re ready to write him off, he goes and says something completely surprising – and in the tradition of Dumb and Dumber, totally redeems himself.

To try to address Canseco’s two distinct trains of thought together would be doing the book an injustice – the fact is, it just wasn’t written that cohesively. So in the tradition of Juiced’s disjointedness, we’ll dissect the nonsense (in many ways the most entertaining part) first. And once all of the distractions are out of the way, like Jose, we’ll pop the proverbial ritalin and take a closer look at what the man actually has to say. So, without further ado:

Canseco the Idiot

Okay, before I can even get into the text, there’s something I must tell you, because I find it kind of troubling: I’m not sure that anyone actually ever proofread this book. Consider the following passage: “Reporters were always trying to pit Mark [McGwire] and me against each other, to contrast us – Jose Caneco the aggressive latin lover with his fast cars, and Mark McGwire, the all-American boy.”

The first time I read this passage, so preoccupied was I with the “aggressive latin lover” image that I almost missed the egregious typo: Jose Caneco. I know this error really isn’t his fault, but really now. Of all the things to misspell, I’m pretty sure one’s own last name is just about as close to inexcusable as it comes. If you’re not going to proofread anything else, at least look at the author’s name. And that’s not all. One page later, Canseco writes, “Once baseball started becoming more popular again, not just in Oakland but everywhere, the competition among them media became just overwhelming.”

That’s not my typo you read. The book really says, “among them media.” Call me nitpicky if you want, but this devastating 1-2 combo (occurring on back-to-back pages) really sets a bad tone for the book. Regardless of whose fault it is, it reflects poorly on the author and the book when there are blatant and easily correctable mistakes. In all honesty, I really can’t remember ever seeing more than one typo in any book I’ve read in my entire life, and after this sequence (occurring on pages 124 and 125), I was kind of reeling. Why was I reading this crap anyways?

Soon enough, my faith in the book was restored, and it was in part gems like this that brought me back: Describing his feelings in the wake of his stunning blockbuster trade to Texas in 1992, Canseco writes, “I even tried to find some humor in the situation. When one reporter asked me where I had been traded, I said: ‘To Ethiopia. For a box of Fruit Loops and a camel to be named later.’”

Considering that Canseco was clearly setting this up as a can’t-miss joke – after all, he really didn’t need to tell it; he obviously only did so because he apparently to this day remains quite proud of it – it struck me as one of the dumbest things I’d ever read. And for this reason, I absolutely loved it. Seriously, what the hell is Jose talking about here? Where is the humor? Is this meant to make a mockery of Ethiopia, camels, Fruit Loops, or none of the three? What a bizarre thing to say. Fortunately, Canseco was just getting started.

Recalling the birth of his daughter, he writes, “When Josie’s head popped out, she was so dark I couldn’t believe it. You know how, when babies don’t have any oxygen in their bloodstream yet, their heads are kind of purple color? Josie was a very dark purple. ‘Hmmm,’ I was thinking. ‘Why is this baby so dark?’”

It’s obvious what Canseco is saying here – he’s clearly suggesting that at that moment he was wondering if he was actually the baby’s father – but what’s not clear is exactly why he felt the need to include this in the book. It really has no bearing on anything, much like at least half of the nonsense he spouts. Which is obviously what makes it so wonderful.

And while we’re on the subject of Jose as a dad, “The Chemist” (the nickname he gave himself as baseball’s great steroid experimenter) was certainly no Dr. Spock. “As a father, you’ve got to be very careful,” Jose writes, his tone almost professorial in authority. “You don’t want to bounce her too hard, or hold her too tight, out of a fear that she’s going to break. Those first months, she spent so much time with her mother, breast-feeding and what not; then, even when I’d try to hold her, I heard, ‘Be careful!’ or ‘Watch out for her head!’ or ‘You have to keep her neck straight!’”

I don’t know about you, but the image of a roid-crazed Jose Canseco sitting in his living room, veins pulsing – a thin layer of sweat glistening on his brow despite the room being at a very comfortable temperature – trying to hold his baby daughter but very nearly squashing her head is pretty funny. Not that squashing babies’ heads is funny, but just thinking about how terrified his wife must have been makes me laugh. Omm, not that terrified wives who are only trying to protect an innocent and helpless baby from their chemically-altered man beast of a husband are funny…anyhow, you get the point. I also like the “breast-feeding and what not” line, through which Jose seems to be dismissing the whole notion of breast feeding altogether as some alien process he can’t understand or fathom.

Speaking on the subject of the 1994 players’ strike that wiped out the latter part of that season, including the World Series, Canseco writes, “Both sides should be ashamed of themselves for pushing things as far as they did that year…[The owners] don’t understand anything beyond what their lawyers told them. In the end, it came down to the nerds against the athletes, just like it was back in high school – and just like in high school, everyone lost.”

The funny thing about this passage to me is that Canseco is really trying to drop a heavy moment on you, the reader. This line, about everyone losing, is supposed to have a great deal of gravity. The problem is, the analogy is simply horrendous. I don’t know about how things went at your high school, but I certainly wouldn’t characterize the athlete-nerd dynamic by saying that “everyone lost.” As far as I could tell, the athletes pretty much always won, and the nerds got clowned on. It’s possible that Canseco was taking a page out of “Hang Time” or “City Guys” and suggesting that somehow the athletes lost in that situation because picking on people isn’t cool, and a real winner doesn’t need to pick on other kids to feel good about himself. But I think we all know that picking on other kids is in fact cool, because it makes you feel better about yourself. So thanks for the totally lame morality lesson, Jose.

One of my favorite images in the book comes from Canseco’s recollection of a night out on the town with his twin brother in 2001. “Ozzie was out with his fiancée, and I was with a date, a lovely young woman named Amber. It was Halloween, and three of us were dressed up as vampires; Amber was dressed as an Indian squaw.”

I don’t quite know why I think this is so funny; I think in large part because of all the things to put Jose Canseco as out of context as I could possibly conceive, nothing quite does the trick like a vampire costume. Whether it’s an accurate image or not, I picture in this instance that he and Ozzie really went overboard with the costumes – capes, white face paint, fangs, the whole shabang. And in my visualization of it, they’re actually kind of regretting the fact that they got so decked out, which makes the whole thing delightfully awkward. As a side note, why were the three of them dressed as vampires while Amber had donned the wardrobe of an “Indian squaw”? Seems like she was kind of left out. Did Jose for some reason forbid her from being a vampire with the rest of them? Did she have a moral objection to dressing as an undead creature of the night? Also, isn’t “Indian squaw” redundant, like saying “hard concrete” or “annoying stepchild”? Isn’t Indian implied in the term “squaw”? Is it even P.C. to say “squaw” in the first place, or is that term a no-no? Someone please educate me.

As you can see, I have officially been derailed. Analyzing the above passages has clearly made me dumber. So have you seen enough evidence? Are you fully convinced that Jose Canseco is an idiot? Yeah, I was too. Now watch this:

Jose Canseco: Smarter Than You Think

It first started to dawn on me that Canseco might just have a clue what he’s talking about on the subject of steroids when I read a section of the book that discusses Jason Giambi. Canseco writes:

Giambi was a doubles hitter when he first came up. Then, as he got so much bigger,

he started hitting a lot more home runs. But he paid for that transformation. Over

the months and years, you could see that he was overdoing testosterone, which is

a retaining agent. He didn’t seem to realize that a baseball player should only be taking

a low dosage of testosterone, and balance it with a ripping agent, like Winstrol or Deca

or Equipoise. So instead of looking like a baseball player, he looked more like a

professional wrestler.

I have to admit, this passage kind of knocked me to the floor when I first read it. Ripping agents? Retaining agents? Winstrol, Deca and Equipoise? I’d read a fair amount about steroids just from having followed the news stories about them over the years, and I hadn’t ever heard of any of this stuff. Meanwhile, Canseco was firing these terms off like he’d talked about them a thousand times. This is insider talk – and no matter how skeptical you may be, you have to admit that this doesn’t sound like baby’s head squashing, dressing up like a vampire Canseco; this paragraph makes the man sound intelligent. Even if it’s only within the frame of reference of steroids, Canseco is showing himself to be quite knowledgable. Based on observations of what happened to Giambi’s body, Canseco makes a detailed analysis of what chemicals he was using. It was at this moment that I first started to believe that Canseco – absurd as he was – might just be for real.

Sparked by his surprisingly dexterous handling of steroid terminology and discourse, my belief in Jose Canseco’s credibility continued to grow when I read one short, simple line about Sammy Sosa. That line reads, “I don’t know Sammy Sosa personally, so I can’t say for a fact that he ever took steroids.” There’s nothing shocking about what this line says about Sosa, but it represents an important revelation about Canseco. Namely, though you’ve probably heard otherwise, the man isn’t just wildly pointing fingers and selling out every single person he can in this book. In many cases (like Sosa’s), he isn’t sure, so he doesn’t accuse. While he does suggest that it appears as though Sosa used steroids, he is cautious not to make any accusations he can’t support. This restraint makes his specific allegations all the more believable.

Canseco also poses a brain-stimulating theory when discussing Mark McGwire and the famous andrestenedione controversy from 1998. As you probably recall, during McGwire’s groundbreaking 70-homer season in 1998, it came out in the press that he was using a performance-enhancing substance called androstenedione. At the time, “andro,” as it’s commonly known, was not outlawed from baseball, but it still became a big story that McGwire was taking it. When discussing the andro scandal, Canseco suggests something that I’ve never heard anyone else say: In his opinion, McGwire probably wasn’t taking andro at all. Canseco believes that McGwire planted the andro in his locker (where a reporter could easily find it) as a distraction. With so much suspicion that he (McGwire) was using steroids, if he got the media to believe that he was taking this other, non-banned substance, then he would be a lot better off, as it would explain to the public how he was able to hit for so much power and at the same time take some of the heat off of him regarding steroids. There’s no telling whether or not Canseco’s theory is correct, but it certainly goes a long way towards showing that he’s no fool.

While I wasn’t naïve enough to think that Canseco was now an infallible bastion of truth, I was beginning to believe that much of what he said could not be discounted. However, there was something bothering me. Throughout the book, Canseco repeatedly talks about himself as though he were this great benefactor, the guy who changed the game by turning all of pro baseball onto steroids, taking players under his wing and teaching them the ways of juicing. Hearing all of this over and over again (believe me, he mentions it a lot), I found the whole thing kind of strange, all of this unaccounted for generosity. There was no way Jose Canseco could possibly be that genuinely interested in helping others bulk up just because he saw it as a nice thing to do. There had to be another motive. And remarkably, he explains it:

I never minded helping others get bigger and stronger, even though I knew

that someday I might be competing witih some of these same guys for a spot

on a team…You may wonder why I would share my secret weapon so openly.

Looking back, I don’t think it was entirely selfless: The truth is that I never really

had the greatest of self-confidence, and I think I was always trying to help people,

in a quest to win their approval.

Suddenly, it all made sense. Whatever my opinion of Jose Canseco was – quite honestly, it’s still forming – after reading this, I didn’t believe that he was a liar.

Do You Believe?

Perhaps even after all of this, you’re still not a believer. Maybe you still think Jose Canseco is just a guy who’s so desperate to make money on his book that he’ll say absolutely anything. That, my friends, is exactly what the institution of baseball wants. And when I say institution of baseball, I mean everyone inside the game – the players, the coaches, the owners, the executives. They want you to see Jose Canseco as a marginal character, a crazed heretic blindly slinging accusations out of bitterness and greed. And quite honestly, at times it’s easy to listen to what baseball says about Canseco; we’ve heard so many negative things about him over the years that it’s almost second nature to doubt him. But what I’m telling you here is that whatever you think of Jose Canseco, he doesn’t quite fit the mold. He’s not a desperate liar – if he was, why would he show restraint when talking about Sammy Sosa? Why would he specifically accuse only a handful of players as opposed to hundreds?

Ultimately, that’s what makes this book compelling. Though it’s billed as a “tell-all” exposé on baseball’s steroid culture, it really isn’t that. You don’t come away from this book having been told which players are steroid users and which players aren’t. There’s no list of 100 or 200 players Canseco outs as steroid users. For whatever reason, Jose Canseco resists the temptation to directly accuse all of the sport’s biggest names. And that restraint gives rise to a credibility, to something – as absurd as it sounds – strangely resembling dignity. For all his flaws, Canseco’s words still mean something. In an era of baseball when we don’t believe we can trust anyone, maybe trusting Jose Canseco is the first small step towards change.

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