AMERICA AT LARGE: Their careers would so severely dovetail that an entire generation of baseball fans has grown up only vaguely aware that Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire were team-mates at all, but as they led the Oakland As into the 1988 World Series the duo formed a two-headed monster known as The Bash Brothers.
And while you'd have a hard time convincing anyone who saw them a decade later, Canseco was actually the better player. In that '88 season he batted .307, hit 42 homers, drove in 124 runs and, for good measure, stole 40 bases.
McGwire was no slouch, but his statistics - a .266 average, 32 home runs and 99 RBIs - clearly marked him as the junior Bash Brother, and provided no hint that it would be he and not Canseco who would a decade later be the man to shatter the home run records of Roger Maris and Babe Ruth.
It remains unclear exactly when Canseco's career came off the rails, but he rapidly descended into self-caricature. He wound up playing for eight different teams (including two stints with Oakland) without great distinction, unless you count the time he lost a fly ball in the sun, only to have the ball bounce off the top of his skull and into the stands for a home run. His off-seasons were marked by frequent encounters with the constabulary, usually involving some combination of guns, fast cars and his former wife, Esther.
McGwire, in the meantime, transformed himself into a beloved American icon.
The humour and good grace with which he conducted his 1998 assault on baseball's immortals brought back legions of fans who had been alienated by the sport's eight-month lockout four years earlier. Poised on the threshold of immortality, he flew Maris' widow and sons to St Louis to bear witness to his record-breaking feat. He had his eight-year-old son appointed a Cardinals bat-boy so that the lad could be waiting there in uniform to congratulate his dad when he crossed home plate.
Big Mac's charisma was so encompassing that most Americans were willing to look the other way even after it was established that his quest had been aided by a steroid-producing substance known as androstenedione, which was not banned by baseball regulations at the time, although it was proscribed by virtually every other governing body in sport.
Even at a time when baseball was only vaguely aware of steroids, Canseco seemed to be a walking advertisement for better living through chemistry. I can recall an afternoon more than a decade ago when Canseco visited Boston as a member of the Texas Rangers. As he took his place in the outfield, the faithful in the bleachers began to serenade him with chants of "Ster-oids! Ster-oids! " Jose laughed, turned to face his detractors and defiantly flexed his bicep.
Tony LaRussa, who managed both players in Oakland and McGwire in St Louis, recently recalled that while most players became indignant when questioned about using performance-enhancing substances, Canseco's response was simply to grin and go on about his business.
After his retirement a few years ago, Jose owned up to drug use and even suggested that as many as 80 per cent of his fellow major leaguers had also bulked up artificially. That figure seemed so preposterously high not many took him seriously.
Now, coming just a month after Major League Baseball introduced its new steroid-testing programme, Canseco has re-emerged with a new book that threatens not only the sport, but several iconic figures, McGwire among them, and even suggests that the President of the United States was complicit in the steroidization of the national pastime.
Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits and How Baseball Got Big won't even be available in bookstores until Monday, but based on back-orders alone it has already climbed into the top 20 best-sellers on both Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble's lists.
Canseco reveals that he and McGwire would squeeze into stalls in the men's room of the Oakland clubhouse to jab one another in the buttocks with needles dripping with steroids.
Given that Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield have already been self-tarnished by their testimony in the BALCO scandal, and that McGwire's friendly rival in the 1998 home run chase, Sammy Sosa, had been similarly damned by a growing body of circumstantial evidence, the revelations about Big Mac should hardly be shocking. But McGwire's seemingly sacrosanct status has left many, LaRussa included, attacking the messenger by attempting to diminish Canseco's credibility.
In this regard, Jose is a pretty slow-moving target, so it's not terribly difficult to dismiss his claims. But this doesn't seem the sort of stuff somebody would just make up to sell books. If anything, it would seem to confirm what most of us who viewed McGwire's preternatural transformation with scepticism had suspected all along.
"I could never say Josie is a liar," pitcher Dave Stewart, an Oakland team-mate of Canseco and McGwire, told the San Francisco Chronicle this week. "If all this is made up, he'll suffer some serious damage, but if you're an admitted steroids user, believe me, you'll know who uses them."
In detailing how he introduced new team-mates to the drug at each stop along his peripatetic major league career, Canseco would appear to confirm the charge, made by a baseball agent several years ago, that "Jose Canseco is the Typhoid Mary of steroids".
In excerpts previewing Canseco's book published by the New York Daily News, Canseco not only has himself and McGwire running to the jacks to stick needles in one another's asses, but has other likely future Hall of Famers doing the same thing. And, moreover, he fingers the then-president of the Texas Rangers, one George W Bush, deliberately turning a blind eye to the drug rage on his team.
Canseco, that we know of, offers no evidence for this charge, but he suggests that Bush "must have known" what was going on in his own clubhouse.
Juiced won't even hit the stands for a week, but a White House spokesman has already issued a denial on behalf of the President.
And Bush wouldn't lie to us, would he?
