Jose Canseco, Pariah

Buster Olney is really all over the place in his article on the Canseco tell-all. Should his accusations and "revelations" be taken with a few hundred milligrams of salt? Of course, he writes, but "Canseco's broader assertion -- that there were a lot of steroids in baseball, dating far back -- fits perfectly with all the anecdotal evidence and sport-wide assumptions."

Perfectly, huh? No joke? Wouldn't just about any clubhouse needle story from Olney's "steroid era" (he dates it 1987-2004, which itself seems suspect) fit "perfectly" with anecdotes and sport-wide assumptions? Isn't there some obligation for newshounds like Buster to look into whether his very specific accusations are, ya know, true?

I'm especially interested in Canseco's accounts of the Rangers clubhouse, where he claims to have introduced Pudge Rodriguez, Rafael Palmeiro, and Juan Gonzalez to the wonders of anabolic steroids. If you were to pick three guys from that team who people could easily imagine juicing, and people would pay to read about, those would be the three. Palmeiro has already denied it, though we already know he's not above "better living through chemistry." This allegedly took place, of course, during George W. Bush's ownership of the club, but I will leave the painfully obvious cocaine jokes to less dignified commentators.

In short, lots of guys were/are taking drugs to play better. This didn't start in 1987, and didn't end in 2004. Some of Canseco's accusations are probably true, but how can we trust a man who has repeatedly lied before, especially when he sports a tan like this?