Afternoon Baseball

Alright, I figure I need another sports update, because Mike likes to comment on those, and not Loyola events he doesn't understand from back home in CT.

Texas Tech-Kansas on Big Monday: Big-time game that illustrates the problem Texas Tech has, despite the huge upset. They basically led the game for the last 10 minutes of regulation and all of overtime uno, yet allowed Kansas comebacks in the final seconds. But, in something we haven't seen from a Bobby Knight-led team in a long time, they scraped together a win, coming back from 5 down in double-OT and holding Kansas scoreless over the last 2:30+. Fans mobbing the court afterwards and pandemonium.
Although I did get a chuckle noticing how the Texas Tech fan base is even whiter than Loyola.

But it's good to have college ball around in the interim before baseball starts up. Speaking of...

The Jason Giambi "I'm sorry for something" conference and the Canseco book:
Giambi is a broken man. For that, I feel sorry for him. But otherwise, no. He brought it on himself. Although, it does show that his brother Jeremy isn't such a bad player. He's just a player who used more of his natural talent.

Onto the book by the most-overrated player of the late-80s and early-90s. I have no doubt that Canseco will embellish and even make things up to sell out people. It's also obvious that a lot of guys were using stuff. But some of his allegations are puzzling. First the negatives.

McGwire is an obvious candidate, but the guy was a workout fanatic who actually knew what he was doing, unlike someone like Juan Gonzalez, who constantly pulled muscles because he apparently didn't know the Spanish word for "stretch." And McGwire was known for not lifting in 1991, resulting in 22 HR and a .201 BA. Perhaps that spurred him to drugs, perhaps not. But even if it did, Canseco was traded a year or two later. So unless McGwire was using but not lifting in 1991 (which he would have to know makes no sense), his association in the "shooting each other in the ass" club would have been brief. Also, the original medical purpose of steroids was to help healing, and McGwire had a remarkable string of injuries between 1993-96. So it would almost point to him using steroids much later in his career than in the earlier years. Remember, as a skinny rookie in 1987 he had the highest HR total of the decade, and was the first player to open his career with 4 straight 30-HR seasons. So he could pound the ball.

The Rangers? Who cares. They were chokers and me-first players who won nothing. Gonzalez is a possibility, but he seemed much more of a classic bodybuilding build. Of course, most of those guys use steroids. I-Rod? Very possibly, because he's always looked jacked, more so than a catcher should be with all the wear and tear. Benito Santiago only looked that jacked in the past few years (and in his mid-30s), and he's on the list of those who took steroids.

Canseco does have some stuff on his side, too. HGH was just coming out in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially in California. If anyone outside of professional bodybuilding were to have access to it, it would have been players on the Oakland A's (or another West Coast team). Very few people knew about it in the outside world, but athletes would be more likely to know.

There's a great article about big-time bodybuilder Steve Michalik ("The Power and the Gory" by Paul Solotaroff, originally in The Village Voice) in Best American Sports Writing: 1992 that details a lot of this stuff from that perspective. I was a bookish 9-year-old who read that book, and still have it. But it's damn good, good enough to make the Best American Sports Writing of the Century edition. And it shows how unregulated things were at every level, not just baseball or bodybuilding.

So on his specifics, Canseco is probably very hit-and-miss. But his broader picture is probably also something people don't want to acknowledge.