the whole pete rose conversation is surreal. Canseco might be paranoid but his story makes sense for him. I mean, it takes a real out of control guy to try and preach steroid use inthe league. And it does sort of make sense that this would backfire in the end and that he would be paranoid. The truth is somewhere in this amoeba.

Re: Jose Conseco

Dear Dave & baseball musings nation:

sorry for not logging on in a while, my verizon DSL crashed and I had to replace it with Comcast high speed cable internet, and that took about three computers and three weeks to get all the downloads and connections right.

My reactions to the Conseco story range from absured to serious.

On the one hand, do we really believe that Mark McGwire, Pudge Rodriguez or Jason Giambi, some of the most macho guys we've ever seen, actually walked into men's rooms with Jose Canseco, turned around, dropped their pants, and let Jose inject their butts with who knows what???

First, it sounds really GAY!!! These guys were making $5-10 million a year!!! They could afford a private nurse, with big boobies, who could inject them before the game and give them a sexual reward after the game for every HR they hit, for about $40,000 per annum. They wouldn't be baring their butts to Jose Conseco when they could have their own personal "nurse".

Second, would you trust Jose Conseco with your drug supply???? After all, he's not a brilliant guy. We're talking about one of the dummest players ever to put on a uniform. Are we to believe he suddenly had an amateur MD?

Third, would you trust Jose Conseco with a secret that could blow your whole career? The man is not known for silence or cool or calm under pressure. He's punched out like six girlfriends and totaled three cars. He's in court every offseason. At some point, he might be compelled under oath to reveal who he's injecting.

I could go on with this line of reasoning, but I think I've made the point. Bash Brother, yes, Drug Brother, no.

On a serious note, without specific dates, times and places, Jose's memoirs suffer in comparison to, say, Jim Bouton's or other memoirs which had diary like qualities which rendered them more authentic and therefore more credible. Dates, times and places matter.

Also, if Giambi was the biggest juicer of all, why didn't he break the HR mark???

Why was it McGwire, Sosa and Bonds?

So ability must play a role, not just corked bats and steroids.

Also, home field. When McGwuire played at Oakland, he was a 40 homer man. Going to St. Louis helped him immensely since Oakland was a bad hitters park in the late 80s.

Likewise, Sosa has always benefitted from Wrigley.

Bonds is the greatest of them all, because he has hit so well in Candlestick and in the new Pac Bell Park, neither of them hitters parks, since the 1993 season. Pittsburgh before that was a pretty good hitters park (ask Willie Stargell) but he wasn't a big homer hitter back then, he was a speedy CF with power, speed and average back then, though a great player.

One thing I will say; if Jose Conseco had been given the chance to, and had achieved, the 500 HR milestone, you would never have heard any of this. He's steamed because he feels cheated out of his chair at the Hall of Fame.

The irony is that he might eventually have been voted in by the Veterans Committee for his 467 HRs and MVP in 1988 with the passage of time. But now, he's pretty much guaranteed his marginalization forever.

One issue is why did Ozzie, his twin brother, never make it like Jose. Does Jose ever address whether Ozzie was a juicer? If Ozzie never juiced, that would be an interesting twins study.

--AJK

After reading "Juiced," it seems to me that Jose is not preaching against steroid use, but preaching for it. I bought the book for 14 year old son to read. And after reading it first, I don't think I will let my son near it. It is obvious that Jose credits his baseball accomplishments to steroids, and the only negative thing he has to say about it is that nobody does it as perfect as he does!

i wnat to buy the book but i don't know if its worth the money.

I GAVE HIM THE ROIDS