WHY I DON'T BELIEVE CANSECO

Admit it: When Jose Canseco first came out with his allegations in Juiced, you didn't know whether to believe him or not.

But then came the Palmeiro test results, the existential testimony of Mark McGwire ("I'm not here to talk about the past," he told a Congressional committee probing the past), and the general sleaziness that has surrounded the Mitchell Report and the Roger Clemens "did-he-or-didn't-he" and "did-she-or-didn't-she" farce.

And then Canseco, the steriods decrier turned acknowledged steroids user, somehow gained instant credibility.


The star witness.

So credible is he that reasonably smart baseball people are now wondering whether we should take his second book, Vindicated, seriously.

Do you believe the lug-head prose of Canseco in his latest potboiler? Canseco is the 43-year-old lounge act who is scarily comfortable in his skin as a smarmy opportunist while outing his old syringe buddies' dark secrets, this time in Vindicated. A-Rod is his current target.
"He's not who he portrays himself to be," Canseco said in a recent phone interview with SI. "He's a phony.... He's a talented individual -- and I'll say he's the best player in baseball -- but did he use steroids? Yes, I believe he did."
Do you buy the artful A-Rod's boilerplate no-comment reply to Canseco last week? ...
Is there anyone who can tell honesty from hyperbole? Is there an angel of mercy who can save baseball from the kind of joyless epic of innuendo that accompanied Barry Bonds on his way to Hank Aaron's record and threatens to do the same along A-Rod's path to trump Bonds?

Now, I am one of those fuddy-duddies who believes it actually does matter if a player uses steroids, that it is a form of cheating that should be banned from the game.

But let's take this from a common sense perspective. Jose Canseco has incriminating steroids information about Rafael Palmeiro, an aging player past his prime, and Alex Rodriguez, one of the biggest starts in the game about to enter the high point of his career. So in his first book, certainly only that there will be a first book, Canseco names Palmeiro and decides to leave the A-Rod stuff out?

Nobody's saying that Canseco has an MBA, but even Bear Stearns has better business sense than that. The sequel always sucks; you put the good stuff in the first book.

The first book's credibility is, in my mind, weak on the particulars but strong on the basics. McGwire and Palmeiro did, in all probability, use steroids in front of Canseco.

But the second book smacks of opportunism and a sick craving for the spotlight. Let's wait for more proof before believing that a man whose moral compass is severely flawed is now an oracle.