We might hate the man, for what he did to himself and what he did to besmirch the (relative) cleanliness of the game, but give Jose Canseco his due. He was right about about a lot of things, including players who used.
Jonathan Eig, author of a biography of Lou Gehrig — the anti-Canseco — published this op-ed piece in the July 5 edition of The Washington Post:
He’s not The Natural. The Un-Natural is more like it. But in his own clumsy, hormonally imbalanced way, Canseco has done more than any player of his time to help baseball overcome the errors of its recent ways. The worst of the Steroid Era appears to be over, and Canseco deserves a fair chunk of the credit.
and
His 2005 book, “ Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big,” called attention to the abuse of steroids. He confessed in the book to using steroids and named other suspected users when no one else was doing so.
His testimony before Congress that same year was forthright and straightforward, when others around him ducked and lied. Steroids, he told lawmakers, were as prevalent in baseball in the late 1980s and 1990s “as a cup of coffee.”
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