Hoping Danny Partridge destroys Canseco
Posted: Wednesday, October 22, 2008 1:57 PM
Unlike a lot of people, I don’t want to see Jose Canseco go to jail for illegally bringing testosterone-producing drugs into the country. Economic times are tough, and as a taxpayer I don’t want to pay for his room and board in the big house. Force him to get a real job and pay taxes instead.
But I do want to see uber-nerd Danny Bonaduce kick Canseco’s worthless butt in their celebrity boxing match. If that were to happen, I think the enduring shame would be punishment enough. Let him lose to Bonaduce and Canseco goes from being the jerk who tried to destroy baseball to the jerk who tried to destroy baseball and got his ass kicked by Danny Partridge.
Until the other day, I didn’t care one way or another about what happened to Canseco. But since he’s found it necessary to say how sorry he is he wrote the book that blew the lid off baseball’s steroid use, I find I care.
He wrote the book “Juiced” in 2005, naming names and kick-starting a congressional dog-and-pony show and giving impetus to baseball’s Mitchell Report. Not happy with stoking the public’s outrage at ballplayers who used a drug that was totally legal as far as baseball was concerned, Canseco even wrote another book whose name I forget and refuse to look up. If I did, somebody might by a copy and he might get a royalty, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?
So, after writing not one but two books, Canseco suddenly realizes everybody hates him, including the people he pays to tell him he’s a swell fellow, he suddenly has an attack of conscience.
“I should never have written that book,” he said, all weepy-like, on television. “I never realized this was going to blow up and hurt so many people.”
What’s terrible is that the people he turned into lifetime outcasts for having used a drug that wasn’t banned by the game won’t talk to him. That includes teammates like Mark McGwire. He whines that he wishes he could talk to them. Guess he never heard of a telephone.
I’m sure Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and everyone else tarred by Jose Canseco’s vindictive brush feel so much better knowing that Canseco’s really, really sorry about naming all the steroid users he knew or suspected in his first book.
Oh, he’s sorry, all right, but not for the people he hurt. He’s sorry for himself, and that’s why I’m not in a forgiving mood with him.
From his first full year in the majors in 1986, he’s been one of the most self-absorbed athletes I’ve ever encountered. During his entire career, it was always about him. If he had “friends,” they were friends of convenience and shared interests. I doubt he knows what friendship even is.
According to baseball_reference.com, Canseco earned just over $45 million during his career, and he doesn’t have any of it left. He’s blamed divorces for that, but in a divorce, the most he could lose was half his fortune. No matter how many divorces he had, he still had plenty of money to throw away all by himself.
That’s the reason he was mad at baseball when he couldn’t get a job. He was toxic by that time and a lousy ballplayer, incapable of starring even in the minor leagues. Yet he blamed the game for “blackballing” him.
That’s ludicrous. He couldn’t get a job because he couldn’t play the game anymore. It wasn’t baseball’s fault he was broke.
And that’s the real reason he wrote his book: he needed the money. If he had been sitting on a fortune, he wouldn’t have bothered. It wouldn’t have been worth the agita that he knew would follow.
So he told his story, named the names, basked in his moment back in the spotlight, went on all the talk shows to say, “Nyah, nyah, nyah,” to the world that had done him so wrong.
He got his 30 pieces of silver, then went back to the trough for another helping with the second book. And now he’s sorry and wants forgiveness.
He ain’t getting it here.
