Well written, but Jose missed the boat on trying to make a difference. If only he could start the book now, and talk about all the reasons why not to do steriods, instead he spends much of the book promoting the use as a standard, I actually quit reading this book, one of the few I have not finished. Yesterday was interesting as he was called out for flipping his story by a senator, and Jose's answer was "that book was written 2 years ago, my view has changed..." I would have loved a follow up, "You mean it has changed since your last book signing or because you are making this up as you go along?" Anyways, the morning was interesting, the parents that testified about their kids and hero worship, its so true. I used to mimic big mac and jose's batting stance, even did the head bob Jose was famous for....and these kids were told they need to put on 25 pounds of muscle to be drafted, and should look into getting some help...then end up beating up their parents and ultimately committing suicide? This is the norm you want Jose? F you dude.

That was great stuff. Thank you NY Times and jrbh for bringing Mr. Carbon to my attention. (Of course, the one day that I skip past the NY Times editorial section)

Slightly off topic, but I didn't want to start a diary on this, was what I heard on KNBR today. A writer from the Sporting News was on with Rick in the afternoon. He tried to blame steroids on the Clinton administration. I wanted to come through the radio and kick his butt. Where does anybody get off blaming BC for this (Rick just sat there and asked the next question)? He went into the moral feeling of the country in the 1990s and that of today. He also said that people in the `90s did not want their baseball heros thrown under busses. Like we wanted steroids in the first place. Anyway, there is way more but I need to decompress first.  

Just from the title of the article.  Seriously, I am curious to read it but am not registered there.  Anyone wanna cut and paste it here? :)

I am risking sounding like a jackass here but if those kids killed themselves BECAUSE of steriods, they had much bigger issues than that, sorry.  Don't blame a drug that makes muscles larger for your sons death.  Flame me for saying that but c'mon.

I still see think Jose is full of crap on about 75% of his claims, but the people that are die-hard believers won't be swayed and thats ok, different opinions are what makes this the USA.  I loved seeing Schillings reaction and what he said from the parts I watched.  

BEFORE I start arguing that it's muddleheaded, and misses the point, to disparage the greatness of a baseball player for his want of goodness as a man - before I rise to the defense of Jose Canseco - let me begin by offering one example of my own muddleheadedness in this regard.

A big part of what I have always admired about Roberto Clemente as a ballplayer is what a good, strong, thoughtful man he seems to have been - his stoic dignity in the face of ignorance and bigotry, how he died in a crash while flying to help the victims of a Nicaraguan earthquake, and so forth. I choose to view Clemente's grace on the field as reflecting and being reflected by the graceful way in which he conducted his public life (when one has demonstrably nothing to do with the other), and both together as lasting proof of some private gracefulness as a man, when I have no way of ever really knowing what form the true, secret conduct of his life may have taken.

I have no idea what Clemente's feelings would have been about performance enhancers like anabolic steroids, but I would like to think that he would have viewed them with disfavor, and that he was faithful to his wife, temperate in his habits and modest about his accomplishments. Yes, I would like to think that - because, instinctively, I'm just foolish and mistaken enough to think that great baseball players must also be good men.

There is no question that sometimes Jose Canseco was a great baseball player. If you have any doubt about that, you weren't paying attention to Canseco on the days, during the seasons, when he paid attention to the game - and that's hard to imagine since, like Clemente, the man arrested the eye of the spectator, held the attention like a shard of mirror dangling from a wire in the sunshine, even when he was just standing around waiting for something to happen next.

But I'm not going to get into that here. The question of Canseco's greatness or lack thereof can be debated endlessly, with statistics and anecdotes to support both sides, and some of us will never understand why Ron Santo, Gil Hodges and Dick Allen are not in the Baseball Hall of Fame while others, most of whom seem to serve on the Hall's veterans' committee, will always vote, as that committee did once again on March 2, to keep them out.

And God knows I have no intention of claiming that Jose Canseco qualifies as a good man, according to the conventions of my own garden-variety standards of morality: consistent effort, altruism and personal integrity defined as the keeping of one's promises to other people. Canseco's want of goodness on those terms is also arguable, I suppose, though not by me.

But I will go out on a limb and venture that any list of the 100 greatest baseball players who ever lived would conform to the pattern for our species, and therefore contain a sizable number of men who spent most of their lives fumbling with an inherent tendency to slack off, ignore the sufferings of others, tell lies and evade responsibility. Playing baseball well does not make you a better person, any more than writing well does.

The illusion that lures us into the error of confounding Clemente's goodness as a man with his greatness as a ballplayer is that when a man is playing baseball well, as when a man is writing well, he seems to himself, in that moment, to be a better person than he really is. He puts it all together, he has all the tools, in a way that is impossible outside the lines of the ball field or the margins of the page. He shines, and we catch the reflected glint, and extend the shining one a credit for overall luminosity that almost nobody could merit. Clemente, I think, did; he shone with the grace and integrity of his play even when he was not on the field.

Roberto Clemente was a hero, in other words, and Jose Canseco, by this definition, is not. By his own admission, Canseco has slacked off and hurt people and lied and broken a lot of promises, large and small. And used steroids. And therefore, many people seem to feel, he is not to be admired - neither in the past, during his brief heyday, so that we must retroactively rescind our delight in his style and our amazement at his prowess, put an asterisk beside our memory of the pleasure of his company over the course of a few long summers; nor in the present, not even when he steps forward to tell the truth, a big, meaningful, dolorous truth that most of us, measured by our own standards of heroism, would have a hard time bringing ourselves to tell.

1 in 16 High School players have tried steriods. Read that again. Ever seen a HS game? Pretty much says 2 of the players you are watching are on the juice, and most likely their parents don't know it. That is a problem. A serious problem. If you are a parent, do you know the symptoms of steriod abuse in kids? Did you know it last week?

Are these parents that were in front of camera's yesterday bad parents? Or just un-informed? Needs to change. Jose's book promoting this crap does not help matters, and makes him look like a fool.

I hope Congress can send a message and educate some people, MLB's knee jerk, thrown together crap policy is not sending the message down to these kids. Education and strict policies need to be the norm, this shit is illegal, but anyone can get it? They can look at people like Lamar and say, well if it worked for him, it can only help me too....what a world we live in.

There is nothing heroic about Canseco. As Chabon intimates, if Canseco stood out it was always because he was indeed his OWN MAN and never--unlike Clemente--a TEAM MAN. Jose has an ego to match that of Michael Chabon who, if you knew him, has one to rival Mt. Everest.

As noted, Jose--both in his book and recent interviews--said "steroids were the way of the future in sports" and were not necessarily bad for young athletes. Then, in front of Congress while under oath, Canseco does a 180 degree turnabout in following parents who painfully lamented the death of sons who may have perished thanks to steroids.

Canseco didn't write the book to expose anything wrong with baseball. He wrote it purely and simply to expand his diminishing funds. Had he been out to expose the use of steroids in his sport, he would have done so when he was still juicing and playing...

Jose is a lamebrained, chemically enhanced, self-absorbed jock. He is hero solely in his own mind...and that as rationalized by Michael Chabon.  

One of the lines in the NY Times op-ed that exposes the writer isn't very well-informed about his subject matter is the following: "I've never seen a man who seems more comfortable with who he is than Jose Canseco."

Well, how about most other people on the planet. If Jose Canseco is telling the truth about his personal life, he came within moments of killing himself. He said in a TV interview with Sean Hannity that he was about to kill himself when he heard his little daughter crying.

Needless to say, people who come close to commiting suicide are not comfortable with who they are.

and there wasn't anybody who testified all day who was more honestly himself than Canseco. Not in Congress, certainly not among MLB administrators or players, not even among the families of those kids who were victims of steroid abuse.

I'll have to respectfully disagree with SA; people who contemplate suicide aren't any more or less themselves than anyone else. Depression and suicide are part of the human condition. Some people even commit suicide because, in that moment, they are completely themselves.

Jose's willingness to admit that he was suicidal is terrible and honest and there is nothing he said that was more moving and it's one of the things he said that make me believe him.

If Jose came off as "honest" before the Congressional committee, it was purely for personal gain as in the process, he continued to flog his book. Of course, Canseco totally contradicted himself when he testified that he didn't want to see young athletes taking steroids. This is total bullshit when one contrasts that Canseco has opined both in his book and in numerous recent interviews that steriods were the wave of the future for young athletes and that he saw no harm in that. Hence, he lied before Congress on this issue--or in his book, or in his interviews. And he lied all those years as a player when he said on innumerable occasions that he was not juicing...

Then on the other hand, also out of self-interest, the other "testifying" players either refused to answer some questions or deflected them. Thank that ridiculous millionaires' club, the Players' Union, for the years of covering up this garbage. And, of course, Selig and his fellow owners who also profited.

BTW, vacafan, I never intimated Big Mac was innocent. I don't know where you got that...

in an interesting
Salon article  (that links also to the "hero" Chabon piece) --

"...the nation will have to thank the monumentally egotistical, contradictory, defensive, angry and still "utterly endearing Canseco." The whole damn thing has bounced off his head and into America's lap."

one, steroids is not the #2 cause of suicide among teens, there are only a small number of proven links between steroid-withdrawal-caused depression and suicides --  you may be thinking of suicide as the #2 killer of older teens (after accidents, #1).

And I'll have to respectfully disagree with the statement that people are "completely themselves" when they attempt suicide -- that's as dangerous a thing to teach kids as "it's okay to use steroids." Depression and other mood disorders are illnesses, with genetic/environmental causes, and they are treatable.

I agree that people who are depressed and suffering from mood disorders aren't "completely themselves"; I was referring to people who commit acts for which they feel like suicide is an atonement. I guess I was also thinking that there is a certain clarity felt by some people who commit suicide.

It got me to thinking about Sosa, who I thought must have committed perjury, but it turns out that his "denial" left open the possibility that he had taken steroids orally, as prescribed by a Dominican doctor. (This from Bruce Jenkins in the "Chronicle" today.)

It also got me to thinking that I would have really liked to see Bret Boone testify, for two reasons: first, he's obviously one of those who abuse steroids, and second, he comes from a conservative, long-time baseball family. I would have liked to see him try to reconcile those things, and to testify from a position so deep inside baseball tradition.

by saying he wants baseball's new testing system to work.  I'll refrain from general "political" comments about Bush here, per Blez's request, but on this baseball-related issue he is clearly wrong.

If we learned one thing from Thursday's hearings, aside from confirmation that McGwire was a steroid user, it's that baseball's "new" testing policy is a big fat joke.  It's an even worse joke than I thought before (i.e. no testing for human growth hormone), as Jenkins points out.  It's not clear now that a player would even face the risk of public exposure under the alleged reform.  What we need it Congressional action, or the threat of Congressional action, to keep the heat on.

If the baseball owners and players union knows Bush will protect them, what motivation will they have to act?

and frankly, I couldn't care a whole lot less whether records wind up in the great ledger with asterisks by them or not.

But the idea that McGwire is automatically a bad guy for refusing  to answer questions about his behavior to a Congressional committee of dubious worth and questionable motives is ridiculous and much worse.  Nor is it the case that his silence amounts to a confession.  You may believe that he took steroids - many do, and they may well be right.  There are, however, many other reasons not to answer, such as not recognizing the right of the question to be asked in the first place.  If a House Committee called these witnesses to the stand to inquire whether instead of steroids - oh, let's say communism - was a problem in baseball, would McGwire's refusal to answer still be taken as admission?  What if they were asking him if he were homosexual?  

It's hard to imagine that the author of "Kavalier and Clay" doesn't see the parallels between the congressional hearings he wrote about (slightly fictionalized) in that book (Sens. Estes Kefauver and Robert Hendrickson calling the comic book publishers of America to the stand for promoting crime, pedophilia, feminism, and homosexuality) and our current batch of grandstanding-disguised-as-investigation, but it's more disturbing to me that nobody else seems to either.  The idea that you are obliged to answer anything asked of you by a government official and that refusal to do so marks you as (a) guilty and (b) a coward is a tenet of fascism, not of democracy.

Two posts now that i agree with jrbh, and utterly disagree with some other characters.
Street and reztips, i'm going to be real honest, but to like mac and not like conseco at this point for the reasons heretofore given makes no sense. First, i'm not sure Street69 read the article, becuase he certinaly states close to the exact oppisite of what Chabon was going for in his piece.
What I find compelling in Chabon's article is that he notes the fascination with Conseco, and gets to what part of that allure is - his willlingness to tell the truth/get his feet dirty. No doubt conseco is a dbag in many regards, but to think that we have more reason to believe/sympathise with Mac is utterly inane. Who has more to lose, the washed up ballplayer, or the saviour of modern baseball (tactily, which provides more motivation to lie and hide behind others). Whose stories are constantly being supported, day in and day, whether it is the new york papers or the basic physical evidence available to anyone with 80-20 vision or better.
Finally, asadasam, you are WAY OFF THE MARK. did you see any of the hearings? Baseball has a completley undeserved anti-trust pass, which implicitly allows the government to make it thier business about what is going on. The senators flat out showed that baseball cleverly put in clauses that would allow them to conceal steroid results in certain cases, by fining players and keeping those fines privileged information.
McGwire is either stupid or a "bad guy" becuase he says nothing until forced to, and then gets teary eyed and emotional by bringing up child abuse, something completley unrelated (i mean utterly ridiculously unrelated) to gain a sympathy vote and dodge attention andthe fact that he was taking the fifth. You think he is generally worried about harming his peers, or whatever other nonsense he used to vaguely invoke the fifth.
I see a lot of grandstanding, and it is mostly comming from fans who like to hear themselves talk about how hurt and offended they are by the governments actions or their sudden discovery that ballplayers have been roiding...