Baseball v. Canseco

Vindicated, Big Names, Big Liars and the Battle to Save Baseball by Jose Canseco; 259 pages; 2008; $25.95;Simon Spotlight Entertainment, New York, NY; 978-1-4165-9187-0; Checked out from Multnomah County Library, Albina; 4/30/10-5/1/30
Years ago I read Juiced by Jose Canseco in which he said that 80% of major leaguers were using steroids to make them better ballplayers. Jose was all but strung up by Major League Baseball and the beat writers who were supposedly writing about the teams. MLB said “huh” and the writers said, “Nah it that were so we would know since we cover the teams every day.” Well we know now with the release of the Mitchell report, the McAmee v. Clemens lawsuits, and the release of the supposed confidential test results we now know that Jose was right and that MLB is still operating on the three monkeys system.
Jose writes about what happened to him after he published Juiced and the reaction by those still associated with baseball. He goes even further and names two more names of people that he has personal knowledge of their use of ‘roids, Maggs and A-Rod. He is very upfront with what he thinks of Stray-Rod and why he was left out of Juiced. There are many people who need to apologize to Jose, although some of them don’t want to talk about the past. This was another interesting read on the backstage side of the game. Jose repeated a few things too many times and there were a few things that felt extraneous to the book. Grade-B