Jose at the Bat

Like most baseball fans, who watch the game from a distance and don't know any players or have much inside information, I don't know what to think about Jose Canseco. These days when one thinks of Canseco, steroid scandal and "author" come to mind. If you take another few minutes, you might think first 40 homer, 40 steals season, 1986 Rookie of the Year, Simpsons guest star, and producer of maybe the greatest baseball blooper of all time. When I read his first book on the plane ride back from Mexico (a four hour trip, still left lots of time to read the paper), I enjoyed it. What I mean, of course, is that I enjoyed it the way a parent enjoys their kid's first drawing on the fridge: with a cheerfully exaggerated "GOOD FOR YOU!" It's disorganized, simplistic and lacks anything resembling style or elegance. Yet it does satisfy one's voyeuristic indulgence, as any fan living far away from any baseball team will undoubtedly have, and holds nothing back when discussing baseball's steroid use, as names and teams are thrown around with ridiculous abandon. So that's pretty entertaining.

I finished reading a great article on Canseco that further complicated my impression of him. He's a polarizing figure to say the least. A bad writer who wrote, arguably, the most important book in triggering baseball's steroid catharsis. A cheerful, engaging, regular-guy personality but, according to Pat Jordan's article, regularly failed to show at charity events. In his own book, Canseco re-tells a number of well-publicized events in his personal life, always blaming someone else, portraying events as wrongly presented or exaggerated in the media, or just dismissing them as irrelevant. Jordan's article creates a figure who is lazy, foolish, irresponsible, lacks foresight, and is constantly in need of structure imposed upon him. He thinks he's misunderstood, Jordan implies he isn't. I don't know what to think.

As a player, Canseco was pretty much everything you watch sports for. Big, fast, powerful, everything he did was done with excess and spectacle. No short home runs that scraped the back of the outfield fence. In his prime, he was the best combination of power and speed in the game, the first 40-40 player of course, but also a player who could give fans those Bo Jackson kinds of visuals. The upper-deck home run at the Skydome, flexing his biceps at Red Sox fans chanting "steroids," the bodybuilder physique, the dalliances with Madonna and bloopers, like the one above, that simply could not have been done by anyone else. I liked Canseco in 1998 with Toronto, he had a really good year with 46 homers and 107 RBI's but of course was overshadowed by McGwire and Sosa chasing the home run record. He hit some very, very long homers, stole 29 bases (BUT that's in 46 attempts, a 63% success rate which = ew) and arguably had his best season since 1991. After 1998 he was injured, which was a common theme for most of his career, why he only played an average of 99 games from 1992-1997, and why he was basically finished as an impact player after 1999.

Injuries help contribute to any player's legend, whether Bo Jackson, Sandy Koufax, Bobby Orr or Bill Walton. With Canseco, the injuries seem to have hurt his legacy since they were attributed to his steroid use, a debatable contention. I think that's unfortunate and shows a bias against Canseco, since he certainly is not receiving the same proportional adulation ascribed to his fellow Tragically Injured. Last year he only received 6 Hall of Fame votes, or 1.1%, and less than the 5% necessary to remain on the ballot for another year. This for a player with careers numbers of 462 HRs (31st all-time, more than HOFers Carl Yastrzemski, Duke Snider and Al Kaline), 1407 RBI's (63rd all-time, more than HOFers Robin Yount and Joe Medwick), AVG/OBP/SLG of .266/.353/.515. This isn't an essay to get Jose Canseco into the Hall of Fame, his career wasn't that good, just a point that he was swept away pretty quickly for a high-impact player. Clearly, his career numbers were overshadowed by his cartoony persona and current steroid association. Maybe his NHL comparable would be Eric Lindros, just not impactful (not a real word, but a sports word) long enough. That would be an interesting stat analysis for another day...

These are the endless circles you run around in when you talk about Jose Canseco. I don't think he should be in the Hall of Fame but do think he should have generated more debate. His career is rightly degraded because of his admitted continuous steroid use, yet with no rules against steroids at the time it's hard to hold him as accountable as an athlete caught today. His terribly bad book ratted out former teammates and friends for the sake of making money and raising his own profile, yet he was the only person to bravely (I guess) speak out and draw attention to the extent of the problem. You can't dismiss him as a loony toon, even though he is, because of how important he's become to baseball in the last few years. You also can't give him any credit because it seems like he did it accidental, that highlighting baseball's culture of PED's was a bemusing side note while he made a few bucks. I guess what you can do is write blog entries and throw up your hands.