Jose Canseco's Juice is Running Out...

Rob Neyer has a blog entry today about Jose Canseco's new book. Apparently someone named Joe Lavin got a copy from a bookstore a little sooner than anticipated, though it would surprise me if some of the usual book-reviewing types had not already been given a copy.

Of course, River Avenue Blues thinks that the original is a satire anyway, a fake. Looking at the original column, I don't see how it can be anything but a fake. Lavin says that Canseco includes a profane, personal attack/insult to Alex Rodriguez at the end of one chapter, which is something I can't imagine a publisher allowing, or even a ghost writer, as Jose had last time with Steve Kettmann.

I doubt he's so refined his writing skills in the last three years that he no longer needs a ghost writer, and I can't imagine that even the most inexperienced one would let something like that through.

Lavin says that Canseco was upset that he didn't get mentioned more in the Mitchell Report, quoting him as saying, "I was Mitch-slapped!" There is no way on God's green Earth that Jose Canseco is clever enough to have thought of that on his own.

If his ghost writer suggested it, he would have just looked at him quizzically, like your dog looks at you when he can't figure out what you've done with the rest of the cookie you were eating—the one that's now "hidden" in your other hand.

Lavin says that Canseco attests to having taken two lie detector tests and the results are in the book. This is ridiculous. I've seen the movies. I know how these things work. The results of a polygraph test would take pages and pages of space in a book.

You get readings of heart rate, pulse, body temperature, etc., and it all comes out on a running chart with lots of jagged lines, none of which are meaningful unless you know:

A) What questions were being asked when those particular readings were taken,

2) What the readings looked like when he was asked innocuous questions with either true or false answers, and

iii) How much of a difference in those readings is significant.

He could have published the results of a seismograph machine from somewhere under the San Francisco Bay and 99 percent of us would never know the difference.

In other words, you have to be a trained polygraph reader, and even then the experts can disagree, which is one of the reasons these things are not admissible in court. (The other being that all judges are psychic and can tell when you're lying anyway!)

Toward the end, Lavin says that Canseco describes a lengthy conversation with CBS's octogenarian news anchor Mike Wallace about he potential benefits of HGH.

Levin ends his column as follows:

Yes, apparently, Mike Wallace could be juiced. It makes sense. How else to explain how Wallace has stayed on top of his game well into his eighties? No word yet on whether Andy Rooney is juiced too.

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