A week ago I was in Hot Springs at the documentary film festival for the world premiere of Jose Canseco: The Truth Hurts and a post-movie discussion with Canseco and the film’s director, Bill McAdams Jr., who can be heard questioning Canseco in the film.
Before I left for the screening, I got an email from a friend and former colleague who suggested I should ask Canseco “if he was going to quit lying about everything.”
My friend was joking-I think. But I understand what he was getting at. Canseco is the probably the most notorious user of so-called performance-enhancing drugs in the history of Major League Baseball. Canseco found himself out of a job after the 2001 season despite a 17-year career in which he made six All-Star teams and hit 462 home runs (which puts him in 34th place for all time).
Canseco had performed serviceably for the White Sox (he hit 16 home runs and drove in 49 runs in half a season) and wanted to keep playing (one supposes he wanted to reach 500 home runs, a mark that at the time seemed to assure election into baseball’s Hall of Fame, an honor that could have meant a million dollars or more in future income) but no club would touch him. He claimed several players including Alex Rodriguez (who has his own troubles) approached him to warn him he was being “blackballed” by owners.
In response to this, Canseco wrote Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ’Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big, an angry tell-all memoir about his days in baseball that recounted his own use of chemicals and named the names of former teammates. So Canseco was not only a juicer but a snitch. And even worse, he floated the unthinkable heresy that performance-enhancing drugs were actually good for baseball, other sports and human beings in general:
“All these people crying about steroids in baseball will now look as foolish in a few years as the people who said J.F.K. was crazy to say the United States would put a man on the moon,” Canseco wrote. And he admitted he “would never have been a major-league player without steroids …”
My friend is a Cardinal fan. Maybe he’s still smarting over Mark McGwire. But as I was preparing to moderate the session with Canseco and McAdams, I didn’t particularly care for Canseco either. I didn’t see him as a villain, but thought of him as an opportunist and something of a narcissist. Not that any of that mattered.
I get asked to do this sort of thing regularly, and what I try to do is set the stage and get out of the way of the audience. While I’m not shy about expressing it, my opinion isn’t particular germane in these situations-I’m not serving as a critic, I’m just trying to keep the show moving for the festival. Audiences invariably come up with interesting questions and the picayune ones (someone asked Canseco how to spell his name) are dealt with quickly. I figure I’ll have time enough later on to review a film if I want to.
So it took me by surprise when, during our inevitable post-scrum onstage handshake, McAdams asked me if I liked his film. Maybe I should have expected this-if I’d been in the director’s position I certainly would have worried a critic’s response-but it caught me off-guard. I told him I liked it, but he didn’t seem entirely convinced.
But I did like it in the moment, and I like it more now that I’ve had a few days to think about it. I think it is important to see the movie for what it is, as Canseco’s brief, his apologia, rather than as an attempt at balanced journalism. Canseco is one of the film’s executive producers, and McAdams doesn’t put on witnesses who might contradict Canseco’s version of events. It is a piece of advocacy, but it is not without nuance-at times McAdams lets his camera linger as Canseco works out a difficult calculus in his mind. The movie lets him talk, and McAdams’ camera reveals a man who seems more conflicted than his plain words might suggest.
On a couple of occasions that evening, McAdams had referred to Canseco’s inability “to lie” as a factor that impelled him to make this movie. A few hours earlier I would have found that statement ludicrous. But after watching the film and spending 30 minutes or so with Canseco onstage, I not only see what McAdams means, but I agree with him. Canseco is not a man without regrets, and he tends to frame situations dramatically, but I believe he believes what he is saying.
And what he is saying coincides with a lot of what I’ve been saying these past 15 years or so. Canseco says 85 percent of the players in Major League Baseball used PEDs in the era he played in, and while that may be hyperbolic, the truth is I have no idea. I do know that I remember a moment in 1995 when I saw a newspaper photograph of a New York Yankees utility infielder, a formerly slight guy whose body had changed so much I concluded he’d been using steroids. (That player, never a star but one of my personal favorites, was later named in the report prepared by former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell after a 21-month investigation into PED use in baseball.)
So I suspected as early as 1995 that some baseball players were using steroids. And I wasn’t shocked or outraged. I didn’t really think much about it. It made a kind of sense. I knew a little bit about steroids; everyone who worked out at the YMCA in downtown Baton Rouge in the late ’70s and early ’80s knew the guy who sold them out of the trunk of his car. For a time, Pete Rose had a roommate who was a steroids dealer. Jose Canseco did not invent steroids; I’m sure he wasn’t the first baseball player to use them.
I don’t even think he was the first baseball player that we cared was using steroids-as good as he was at his peak (and Canseco was very good for a few years), he didn’t break sacred records. Had Barry Bonds not come along and been so much better than anyone before or since, I don’t think any of us would care very much about PEDs in baseball. We might still pretend to innocence.
Everyone with eyes and a little common sense could have looked at McGwire and Sammy Sosa and seen what they were doing. Baseball-and baseball writers and fans-suborned the use of steroids. At least so long as the narrative could support the right kind of heroes. Bonds was unpleasant, a smug and haughty jerk.His outsized success is what turned public opinion against PEDs.
I’m not arguing, just stating facts. I don’t like what the game became in the late ’90s and early aughts-one of the things that appealed to me about baseball was that it was a game that could be played at its highest level by guys who weren’t physical specimens. Hank Aaron looked like an accountant is street clothes; Stan Musial could have been a truck driver. You didn’t have to be a pneumatic freak like Canseco to play baseball. You could have a nickname like Pee Wee and play baseball. You could be Freddie Patek or Vic Davalillo.
Jose Canseco didn’t ruin baseball-and he didn’t save it either. But we dismiss his testimony at our own peril. He’s been right too often.
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Perspective, Pages 79 on 10/27/2013