How much do we believe Canseco?

Mike Celizic

When you get on “60 Minutes,” you know you’ve struck a nerve. So it must have been very satisfying for Jose Canseco to sit down with Mike Wallace and tell the nation about steroids and baseball.

Unfortunately, it’s hardly satisfying for baseball fans, who are now stuck with trying to balance their conviction that Canseco has done every bad thing he says he has and probably more with their desire to believe that Mark McGwire wouldn’t take an aspirin without a note from his doctor.

Of course, we know that McGwire wasn’t that squeaky-clean.

He was taking andro and creatine, steroid precursors disguised as supplements, which he admitted to only because the stuff was in plain view in his locker. To assume he also did steroids at one time or another on the way from the skinny kid he was as a rookie to the monster he was when he broke Roger Maris’ record isn’t a big jump. Considering what others have admitted to doing, it’s not even a hop.

I’m not saying you have to believe everything Canseco says, but I am saying you better believe he didn’t make it all up. He admits that he was doing steroids from his rookie season. He said on “60 Minutes” that if he hadn’t taken steroids, he wouldn’t have done any of the great things he did on the baseball field.

Remember, he was one of the first to do things no one had done before as the charter member of the 40-40 Club. He says he spread the word and the juice around the game, and, sure enough, other people started putting up prodigious numbers that had never been seen before.

If you think it’s a coincidence, I’ve got some prime farm land for you in Death Valley.

So it’s not about what anyone did anymore. It’s about how history will judge the accomplishments of ballplayers during the past 15 years or so.

From NBC's 'Today' show Read excerpt from 'Juiced' 'I was known as the godfather of steroids in baseball,' former major-league star Jose Canseco writes in his new book.

When McGwire is eligible for the Hall of Fame in two years, we'll begin to know the truth. If he goes in on the first ballot, it won’t mean much of anything other than that we have an infinite ability to believe whatever we want about people we like.

We already know from leaked grand jury testimony that Jason Giambi did steroids and human growth hormones, just as Canseco says he did. We don’t know, and never will know for sure, if McGwire, Rafael Palmiero, Ivan Rodriguez and Juan Gonzalez also took them.

All we know is that Canseco said they did and they said they didn’t. There being no way to test their blood six years ago; it’s a classic case of he said-he said. And if you’re McGwire, even if you were doing more juice than SunKist, you’re going to keep insisting you didn’t. No one can prove you wrong.

So to you the fan, it comes down to who are you going to believe, the guy who says the baseball equivalent of “I never had sexual relations with that woman,” or the Linda Tripp who says, “Oh, yes, you did.”?

It comes down to who you want to believe, and who you like. If you like someone, you believe them. If you don’t like them, you don’t. We can’t help it. We’re programmed to behave that way. Otherwise, society couldn’t function.

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