PODCAST EXAMINES THE WHY BEHIND CANSECO’S TELL-ALL
Larger question is how steroid era would have evolved without bombshell book
When Jose Canseco’s book Juiced came out in 2005, the reaction to its stories of widespread steroid abuse was a baseball-wide eyeroll: you want us to believe this guy?
On one of the ESPN chat shows, back in the early days of the shouty format, this assessment was representative of the wider response: “I am not going to extend my benefit of the doubt to Jose Canseco, who has been a loose cannon at times.” As was this: “What’s the guy’s character about? Look at his track record.”
Those comments are part of the 30 for 30 podcast on Juiced that was released as part of the latest season of the audio series that shares its name with ESPN’s television documentaries. The episode revisits a time in baseball history that seems a whole lot different 13 years later than it did at the time.
“It’s certainly a weird chapter in baseball history, and Jose Canseco’s part in that paragraph is particularly weird,” says Jody Avrigan, the host of the 30 for 30 podcast, who is in Toronto this weekend as part of the Hot Docs Podcast Festival.
“What do you do when you have, sort of, the world’s most imperfect messenger, when the message is right and important?” What you have, it turned out, was a lot of finger pointing, and a lot of people — players, managers, executives and media — rushing to note just how imperfect a messenger Canseco was. It was “Fake News!” many years before the term became a favourite hashtag for a certain U.S. president.
“When the book came out, people attacked him and not what was in the book,” says Avrigan in an interview. “I think there are a lot of lessons in that for now, and I think that helps us rethink the steroid era. As is the case with a lot of big, difficult things, we’re not good at reckoning. We’re good at doing the minimum work to move on, and I think to some extent that’s what baseball did.”
Eventually, there was a lot of fallout. There were Congressional hearings, and Mark McGwire’s “I’m not here to talk about the past” and Rafael Palmeiro’s infamous finger-wagging. There was the Mitchell Report and much tougher punishments for failed steroid tests and the unofficial ban from sending steroid-era sluggers to Cooperstown. Some of that came about as a result of parallel investigations into the BALCO lab linked to Barry Bonds, but Canseco was out ahead of all of it. He said steroids were rampant in baseball and, lo, steroids were rampant in baseball.
What is fascinating about all this in the passage of time is that it’s still not clear why Canseco did what he did. He cites anger at baseball, which treated him like something of a laughing stock by the time his major-league career ended in 2001, but he doesn’t sound like he was out for revenge against former players, even as he was setting fire to their reputations.
Avrigan says that as the podcast was being put together, they realized they needed a part that explained Canseco’s motivations. And then, as they went over his often random, scattered answers to their questions, they determined they weren’t going to get a tidy explanation. “There was not going to be a coherent theory of everything that made us understand this man,” he says.
This can be the problem with revisiting old stories. Sometimes not all the answers are there, whether it is with Canseco, or with other tales that 30 for 30 is examining this season: the 2003 poker boom, Hideo Nomo and associated mania, and the truly curious end of Rickey Henderson’s career. (He was still playing semi-pro ball at 46).
Among the revelations in the Juiced episode of 30 for 30 is that the book almost didn’t make it into print. The publisher wasn’t a sports fan, and only the co-author understood the significance of the bombshells that Canseco was lobbing. Not until he came up with the idea of a chapter on the ballplayer’s sexual exploits, including a supporting role played by the singer Madonna, was the publisher sold on the book having wide enough appeal to make it viable.
All of which leads to an intriguing counterfact. What if Canseco had happily wound down his playing career and become an analyst or a coach? What if he had refused to name names, or had a boring sex life? If Juiced didn’t happen, would baseball’s steroid era have continued? Would there be dozens of players with 60-homer seasons to their credit, instead of five of them? Would Aaron Judge have already had 80 home runs in a season?
“We realized we were never going to get a straight answer on ‘why are you doing this,’ ” Avrigan says of Canseco, the man who changed baseball. “If he had never got pissed off in that way at that time, would he have written this book? Who knows?”
Whatever his reasons, Jose Canseco got mad at his sport, and he got back at it but good. No one believed him, but he was eventually vindicated.
It was the title of his second book.