Tynan's Anger

Arts & Culture Commentary from a Loving Digital Skeptic

Why Jose Canseco Is The Sen. McCarthy Of Baseball

Posted on | February 12, 2009 | No Comments

Let’s stop calling Jose Canseco a “whistleblower.” The term whistleblower implies someone courageously sacrificed one’s own well-being and risked his or her safety, way of life, and even death to expose a hidden, dark secret. Jeffrey Wigand was a whistleblower, as was “Deep Throat” W. Mark Felt. Canseco did not deny his steroid use, and went on to accuse just about every prominent MLB player of the era of using it too, whether or not he had facts. His motivations were clearly for self-gain: book sales, movie deals, speaking contracts, all of which he shamelessly demanded with conditions and asking prices beyond all reason. In fact, he has been repeatedly accused of extorting players for money to withhold their names.

So let’s see, we have a manipulative self-aggrandizing public figure taking advantage of a witch-hunt like phenomenon where even an accusation of guilt is enough to taint your professional career forever. Does this sound familiar? It should, because it eerily parallels arguably the 20th century’s most shameful act of American thought-policing.

Jose Canseco is to American baseball players from the 1990s and 2000s what Joe McCarthy was to American liberals from the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. If someone had any allegiances to the Communist party, its sympathizers, or its ideology at any point, regardless of what they felt in the 1950s, they were seen as tainted from any job or achievement past, present, or future. And all McCarthy had to do was threaten someone to get people to sell their beliefs or actions short out of fear.

Less players are willing to cave to Canseco, because he’s more interested in their money than anything political. In the case of the recent Alex Rodriguez scandal, it became personal due to his accusation of A-Rod hitting on his wife (from what we know about A-Rod, this is probably true as well). But even before Roger Clemens said it, we all know it’s pretty damn impossible to prove a negative. We know this because that statement was heard widely in the era of blacklisting and McCarthy. But the people who are supposed to be fighting, strong-arming, and bullying — the media — are in fact giving Canseco more respect than anyone, simply because he does the work and says the things that they can’t say without losing respect of the locker room.

There a two major differences between Canseco and McCarthy. The first, which probably has Canseco fare favorably to McCarthy, is that drug use was, in fact, so widespread in the 90s, that he’s going to be right more often than he is wrong. Do we know that Canseco knew definitively that A-Rod used steroids? No. But we wouldn’t have been that surprised if it was revealed, whether or not Canseco told us first. Even if he has no basis for what he’s accusing a player of, he’s more likely to be right about a guy with unnaturally huge muscles using steroids than an avowed leftist in the 1930s being a secret Communist. The second difference, which arguably makes Canseco worse than McCarthy, is that he was a rampant steroid user as well. McCarthy, was never a communist, and he at least somewhere, sometime, maybe early on, sincerely believed that fighting Communism was a good thing.

I’m much more likely to doubt that Jose Canseco has ethics on steroids far beyond how he could exploit it. He was as guilty, in fact much more so, than any athlete who draws the ire of sports columnists. Yet, the media still tentatively supports him. Another thing to note is that in the 1950s, journalists themselves risked facing McCarthy’s wrath if they called him out for witch-hunting. In this age the media would risk nothing by calling out Canseco. What they do risk is a storyline that they themselves find interesting, and talk show radio callers feel interesting, but something virtually no one else is quite as interested in.

Baseball journalists care a lot more about players using steroids than actual fans do, and when they look to fans to express the same level of rage, they get pretty desperate. For instance, whenever fans of opposing teams would have Barry Bonds asterisk balls played on the road, it was all over ESPN. Journalists saw that as signs that they were vindicated in their actions. They seem to be forgetting that fans of one team will make fun of an opposing player in whatever way they can. Fans made fun of Josh Hamilton and Darryl Strawberry for using drugs, David Justice for beating Halle Berry, and A-Rod for for cheating on his wife. That’s not a vindication of anything other than athletes being d-bags and fans being unoriginal.

Of course, McCarthy built his public presence with his finger-pointing, while Canseco built it 20 years before the finger pointing with dingers. Keep in mind that Canseco, who always had a reputation of being a jerk and who baseball writers previously had generally despised, had very little to lose in shooting his mouth off. He wasn’t going to make the Hall of Fame—in fact, even after Congress used him as a major reliable source in pounding McGwire’s testimony, McGwire still got exponentially more votes than Canseco in the Hall of Fame ballot (Canseco was eliminated after getting a grand total of 6 votes in his first year of eligibility).

Without any semblance of a career to maintain, Canseco realized that his only way to stay relevant (translation: cold hard cash) was to shoot his mouth off, as loudly and shamelessly as possible. This was not a difficult thing for Canseco to accomplish. Of course, Canseco may be the prime reason why his former Bash Brother will in all likelihood not make the Hall. Furthermore, after the Mitchell Report and all the other stars found guilty, Canseco would probably get more votes now if he was still eligible; you can almost imagine a twisted scenario where he gets one of those “contributions to the game” Hall of Fame inductions before Buck O’Neill. Originally, Canseco claimed he was getting unfairly targeted solely as a steroid user, as opposed to the fan friendly image of other juicers like McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro. But at this point, there’s no balance to Canseco’s justice: all he can do is further contribute to keeping modern day stars out of the Hall of Fame.

What’s more appalling is when a dangerous, self-aggrandizing, shameless former steroid abuser calls out his former colleagues on a crime he committed, and does it for personal gain more than any sense of morality or regret. Mark McGwire is not going to make the Hall of Fame because he didn’t “name names,” including his own. And he was seen as a coward? Whether or not they pay off Canseco, players have to live in fear of drawing the ire of Canseco, no matter how spurious those accusations may be. The simple answer is “don’t do steroids.” But like McCarthy, players are being called out based on previous behavior. If they ever used steroids, their entire career is tainted, no matter what achievement they accomplished with or without steroids. Their chances of getting a future job, getting into the Hall of Fame, or any of the benefits of being famous for your ability is tainted by a mere whiff of suspicion. That’s not whistleblowing. That’s McCarthyism. Period.

This post was originally published for Blogcritics.

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