Phil Taylor of Sports Illustrated published an opinion piece on Jose Canseco and his need to drop the pen and stop publishing books. I think he should have dropped it for this column...

Just to make one thing clear; while I won't go out of my way to read his columns, I can enjoy some of his work.  However, this time I think he's wrong and I just want to state an opinion on what he wrote.

Mainly, Taylor asks that Canseco stops putting out books:

He's back again, like a bad rash, having dredged up -- or made up -- a whole new set of sordid stories about his baseball brethren to share with us. Even if Canseco's tales are true, all he's really doing is repeating what he's already told us, that some big-name ballplayers used performance-enhancing drugs. This is not exactly a news bulletin. Do we really need a Harry Potter-style series on the subject?

In the first book, Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro were among the stars about whom he dished dirt, and subsequent events indicated there was a great deal of truth to his accusations. This time around Canseco has gone after the biggest baseball name that hasn't yet been linked to steroids, Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez. (He also levels steroid accusations at former teammates Magglio Ordonez of the Detroit Tigers and, in news that's so old it's actually moldy, pitcher Roger Clemens.) Canseco says that he introduced A-Rod to a steroids supplier at Rodriguez's request, although he never saw the Yankee star actually use any drugs. For good measure, he throws in an accusation that A-Rod, who was single at the time, chased after Canseco's wife essentially right under Jose's nose.

That's the kind of trashy stuff you're likely to get more of in the new book, which is scheduled to go on sale Monday, and if you go for that sort of thing, enjoy. But in taking a baseball bat to the reputations of some of his former colleagues, Canseco has done more damage to himself.

My problem is, his rhetoric is changing as the months go by.  Here are two examples.

The day the Mitchell Report was made public, he wrote this: 

As for you, maybe you don't know what to feel. You can say you don't care, but you do. You can say you're tired of the whole steroid issue, that it doesn't matter to you who was on the juice and who wasn't, that you just like to see hitters send homers into the stratosphere and pitchers throw fastballs that could dent brick walls. But you do care, or you wouldn't have examined that list of names so closely.

It's not so much that you want to know the extent of the problem, because anyone who has paid any attention realizes that performance-enhancing drugs have been all over the sport for more than a decade. It's that you want to attach some faces to the lies. You want to know who's been harboring the dirty little secret all these years. This isn't about baseball anymore so much as it's about honesty and integrity. Who are the players who were running around in the shadows with vials and syringes, knowing that they were part of the very problem that baseball was agonizing over? And, you wonder, what must it be like to be one of the players who duped the fans and media all those years, to know that you were one of the culprits in baseball's great mystery?

Now you know, and that's what hits you in the gut about the Mitchell Report. It paints a picture of the matter-of-fact way in which players went about their cheating. It's one thing to know you were duped and quite another to have that duplicity laid out in detail before you, as Clemens' trainer Brian McNamee did when he told Mitchell's investigators how Clemens approached him about using steroids in 1998, when Clemens pitched for Toronto...

...You also know that there were hundreds of similar scenes played out all over baseball for more than a decade, and you know that even all the names in the Mitchell Report are just the tip of the iceberg. Much of the information, for example, was obtained from Kirk Radomski, a former Mets clubhouse attendant who became a steroid conduit. Who knows how many other Kirk Radomskis were -- or are -- out there, whom Mitchell's investigators didn't find? How much more deceit went on that the investigation didn't uncover?

He even states that nobody should ignore the truth in this column he wrote about the 'scandals and scoundrels' in the world of sports.

Who can we believe in these scenarios? Who knows? It wouldn't be surprising if all of them were shading truth to some extent to suit their agendas. It's difficult to look at just the past few days and not come to the conclusion that our sports are full of scoundrels -- duplicitous men who evade, manipulate or even ignore the truth.

The way I see it, Taylor has a problem with Canseco as a man, but forgets that he's the only one who had (and still has) the guts.

I'm not a fan of the man either, but to take away his right to tell what nobody else seems willing to say, that'd be a sad state of affairs.  Where would the Rafael Palmeiro and Mark McGwire affair be if he didn't at least come forward with first-hand (no pun intended) accounts?

He put everyone on notice and everybody ridiculed him.  Now that we know he told the truth, we want him to shut up?  No way, man.

With all due respect, you were wrong on that one Mr. Taylor.


Note

Second Book Leaked: Spoilers