Pulp Nonfiction

Canseco Tells All in Juiced

By Ben Mercer

Juiced takes the ballplayer heroes of my youth and recasts them in the lurid blue strobe lights of sleazy nightclubs, creating an irresistible cocktail of nostalgia, gossip, and several kinds of moral bankruptcy that goes down smoother than a testosterone-laced protein shake. Good thing I've found new heroes since I was six.

Though the prose is flaccid, Jose Canseco's predictions have resonance-Juiced isn't about decades past, but decades to come. For Canseco, the future of sport is the future of mankind, and steroids are the gateway to a happier, healthier life. Juiced is retired slugger Canseco's love letter to himself and the hormones that helped him hit 462 career home runs, and atrophy his testicles. More than a month after its release, the book is still perched near the top of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction chart.

Though many still question Canseco's motives and faithfulness to the truth, the groundswell of political interest, policy changes, and belated fan skepticism means people can't help but listen. This week, the issue has reached its height, and Canseco remains front and center. Steroids may shrink your testicles, but they certainly do not diminish the size of your subpoenas. Congress summoned a seemingly random assortment of active players (sluggers Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa, Frank Thomas, Jason Giambi, and pitcher Curt Schilling) and retired "Bash Brothers" Mark McGwire and Canseco to a hearing set for Thursday morning. While Major League Baseball brass will no doubt do its best to ensure these players never have to hunch their hulking muscles over government microphones, it's become clear that Canseco, and his publisher Regan Books, unleashed Juiced at just the right time on a country actually ready to treat it seriously. Steroids can also make you a marketing genius.

Injections Without Injunctions

Since first ballot Hall of Famer Roland Barthes pronounced the author dead 37 years ago, it does not matter that a sports journalist named Steve Kettmann actually ghostwrote this book. This is probably the most poorly written book I have ever read (and I wonder what the usually eloquent Kettmann actually ghostwrote). That said, I believe just about everything Canseco is saying. Call him an opportunist, call him a sleazebag, call him a womanizer, but it'd be hard to call him a liar. Though his reasoning might be wrong, his arguments are carefully laid out, and in hindsight his accusations of widespread steroid use make complete sense. The before-and-after photographs have always been incriminating.

Though former Rangers teammates Palmeiro and Pudge Rodriguez have (not very forcefully) denied Canseco's claims, most people inside baseball have begun to quietly recognize the presence of steroids. From their spring training site in Arizona, San Francisco Giant manager Felipe Alou told the press, "I mean, if you're good, you're good. It doesn't matter whether it's the era of the steroids or the cigars or the hot dogs or the beer or the amphetamines or the red juice. Some guys used to drink whiskey hoping it would make them better. Not only that, it hasn't been proven that Barry did anything, really."

Though the respective epochs of the beer and the amphetamines have passed, and the era of the cigars unfortunately never came, Alou makes two things startlingly clear through all the intended denial: 1) Where there's professional sport, there's substance, and 2) It's really hard to prove. Alou suggests a substance-centered chronology of Major League Baseball, something Canseco pursues as well: the 1970s were the era of "greenies," then came the white stuff with the hard-partying 1986 Mets championship team and its self-proclaimed "scum bunch" of rabblerousers, but it seems that with steroids in the late 1980s, baseball had finally stumbled upon its perfect substance, its ideal external font of strength.

Canseco's matter-of-fact sentences, unlike Alou's, demand no further consideration. They have the stilted, repetitive rhythm of batting practice cuts, devoid of any life-save for the few passages with blatant homoerotic subtext. Though his accusations are far-reaching, he implicates former teammates McGwire and Giambi most memorably: "Sometimes, the three of us would go into the bathrooms stalls together to shoot up steroids or growth hormone. I would inject myself, and Giambi and McGwire would be one stall over, injecting each other. Other times, I preferred to inject myself at home, but those two always did it at the ballpark, because it was easier that way and they knew they had nothing to worry about. Plus, they were having all kinds of fun injecting." The McGwire-Giambi relationship may be one ass injection shy of entering the more-than-just-friends stage, but Canseco makes sure, in the midst of all the homoeroticism, everyone knows that "the women I was involved with were always drop-dead gorgeous; you just couldn't turn them down." He's the lone wolf who injects himself, the "educator," the virile center of the baseball universe, the man who manages to turn down Madonna.

But, luckily his ego doesn't keep him from giving the juice about more of his teammates and baseball acquaintances. Canseco says Roger Clemens is "one of the very few baseball players I know who never cheated on his wife." The revelation that seemingly venerable former Cubs and Diamondbacks first baseman Mark Grace had sex with obese women to break his slumps is most startling: "Grace defined a slump-buster as the 'fattest, gnarliest chick you can uncover, and you lay the wood to her.'" Canseco lavishes praise on fellow media pariah Rickey Henderson, goes hot and cold on A-Rod, and finds beauty in closer Dennis Eckersley's windswept mane of hair: "To me, Dennis Eckersley was one of the pretty boys of baseball. He could go out there and pitch in a three-piece suit, and he'd be fine." Of course, Canseco sees himself as one of these "entertainers" as well.

Play Crystal Ball

Aside from all the gossip and some surprisingly salient points about race and the media (in which the native Cuban unfortunately neglects to mention the fact that everyone thinks he's white anyway), Canseco's main thesis is that, in the coming decades, people will embrace steroids. This will drastically slow the aging process, build confidence, and improve smaller physical aspects like reflex and speed. More than just a nice guy, he fancies himself a misunderstood prophet: "People who see the future earlier than others are always feared and misunderstood." He believes so deeply in the benefits of steroids that he links his combustible temper, long thought to be a possible steroid side effect, to his ethnicity, the kind of stereotype he spends the rest of the book blasting the media for making.

Chemical manipulation is small ethical beans compared to genetic engineering; we're merely talking unlocking human potential here. Perhaps this is why Canseco's future seems more realistic and immediate than, say, the one in Gattaca. His is full of widespread growth hormone injecting virtually free of ethical quagmires, and full of chemically enhanced smiles. Though a somewhat jarring assertion at first, I can't find any reason not to believe it when he says that steroids, monitored by a doctor and blood tests, can make you stronger, happier, and increase your life span by up to 20 years. It would no doubt help if I wasn't biologically and chemically ignorant. Nevertheless, Canseco says that at 40 he still feels like he's 20, and it seems to me that a simple indictment of steroids would have been easier to write, probably even easier to sell.

And as fans, how much have we already subconsciously conceded to the value of steroids? For the most part, we are implicated in this thing, too. We love steroids, or at least what they can do; we are as complicit as the players and owners. We love huge home runs and huge biceps and the preposterously wide, bloated necks of jacked-up power hitters. In a perverse way, we are even driven to turn on the TV or fork over that extra $100 to spend a Sunday afternoon in the outfield bleachers to see if we can perceive Sammy Sosa's head getting bigger in front of our very eyes, the way that you can see the minute hand moving if you stare at the clock for long enough. On top of that, the steroid makers will always be one step ahead of the testers anyway. Why not just accept steroids as part of the game, and part of our lives? Canseco's prophecy might not be all that far-fetched after all. Only John McCain and his witch-hunting subcommittee stand in our way.

Ben Mercer B'07 wants to thank allergy shots, which acclimated him to needles as a small child

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