In defense of steroids: Jose Canseco's surprisingly sensible case for juice.

• Author: Steinberg, Aaron
• Position: Book Review

Juiced: wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big, by Jose Canseco, New York: Regan Books, 304 pages, $25.95

ON MARCH 17, former baseball star Jose Canseco told the House Committee on Government Reform exactly what it wanted to hear. The pressure to win, he said, drives pros to steroids and subsequently pushes steroids on kids. "The time has come," he said, "to send a message to America, especially the youth, that these actions, while attractive at first, may tarnish and harm you later."

That isn't exactly the message he sent with his recent pro-steroid tell-all, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big. And while his new tune may sound more responsible to legislators' ears, it's actually too bad that the former A's slugger turned his back on his own book. Beyond the typical sports memoir material--Lamborghinis, encounters with Madonna, growing up Latino in baseball--Canseco's book makes a rare and sustained argument in favor of steroids (and substances often used in conjunction with steroids, such as human growth hormone). Coming at a time of full-blown moral panic, with grandstanding senators trampling athletes' privacy rights and the media blaming steroids for everything from brain cancer to suicide, Canseco's position was a welcome one. It's a shame he didn't have the guts to stick with it.

Canseco was once a good and popular player, but today most people remember him as an overmuscled knucklehead who didn't take the game seriously, a steroid down who once accidentally fielded a fly ball with his head. (The ball bounced over the fence for a home run, earning a place in the blooper Hall of Fame.) It certainly didn't help his image that he's been in and out of prison since leaving the game and that he has been reported as having money problems.

An ex-ballplayer with a slippery reputation isn't going to get much slack from the press, and for the most part, that's been the case. Much of the media attention Canseco's book has received so far has focused on the questionable veracity of his locker-room revelations or the sheer sleaziness of his literary project. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd zeroed in on the sexist bits, while Publisher's Weekly called it "a portrait of a bitter, disgraced ex-player who so desperately wants respect that he casts his own extraordinary recklessness as perfectly commonplace, a scorched-earth attempt to raise his own legend by bringing the game--and...