Like it or not, Jose Canseco has got more to say

Far removed from his Bash Brothers days, Jose Canseco still draws attention to himself. Craig Molenhouse/SI

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Back in July 2006, when Jose Canseco was called to meet with the lead investigator in Sen. George Mitchell's inquisition into the steroids scandal in Major League Baseball, Canseco did what Canseco has become almost infamous for doing. He talked. A lot. For more than 2 ½ hours, he talked.

In that interview in Fullerton, Calif., Canseco offered up several names of players connected with steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. He told dark tales of players injecting each other with all sorts of illicit substances. He let loose with some conjecture. He explained his place in it all.

So when the wildly trumpeted Mitchell Report was finally released last month, and it contained more information from Canseco's searing tell-a-lot book, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits and How Baseball Got Big, than it did his talk with Charles Scheeler, Mitchell's top investigator, Canseco's next move seemed painfully simple to all those around him.

A sequel was born. Vindicated, the newest contribution to Canseco's oeuvre of tattletale memoirs, is coming to a bookstore near you on Opening Day. Exactly why Mitchell didn't incorporate more of the Canseco interview into the report remains a mystery to those around the former slugger, though the renewed opportunity to peddle a new book certainly has been welcomed. "When the Mitchell Report came out," Canseco's business manager, Doug Ames, admits, "it helped us sell [Vindicated] again."

Said Canseco's lawyer, Robert Saunooke, who accompanied Canseco in his interview by Scheeler that July: "Everybody was waiting for the hammer, and all they got was a feather."

Mitchell's people, though, don't see the lack of fresh Canseco material in the report as nearly that mysterious. "During the interview," John J. Clarke, Jr., a spokesman for Mitchell, said in an e-mail, "the only players who Canseco identified as having personal knowledge of their use of performance enhancing substances were players who he had identified before in his 2005 book, Juiced."

Canseco continues to insist that he has plenty to tell and that it will all be contained in his new book. He and those around him are being predictably coy about what might be revealed when Vindicated hits the shelves, though they've primed the pre-sale hoopla by throwing Alex Rodriguez's name under the wheels of the publicity bus.

"Alex is not who he appears to be," Canseco told Dan Patrick on his radio show the day after the release of the Mitchell Report. When Patrick pressed him for more, asking if Rodriguez was a cheater, Canseco simply repeated, "I think that he is not who he appears to be."

That's exactly the kind of talk that makes it easy to dismiss Canseco as nothing more than a disgruntled former employee trying to sell his sleazy tales for a few bucks and a place in the spotlight. Canseco invites it. This is a man, remember, who once sold the opportunity to share an afternoon with him for $2,500, whose baseball highlight reel always includes a ball bouncing off of his head and who practically bragged in Juiced that growth hormone actually increased the size of his slugger. And he wasn't talking about his baseball bat.

Still, if Canseco's first book and the fallout from it proved anything, it's that you ignore him and what he has to say at your own peril. Much of what he related in Juiced was more accurate than anyone in baseball would like to admit. "You can say anything about Jose Canseco you want," says Ames, "but the kid doesn't lie. He doesn't lie."

Juiced, in fact, is cited about eight times in the Mitchell Report. It is mentioned almost as often as Game of Shadows, the acclaimed steroids expose by two San Francisco-based reporters that helped prompt baseball commissioner Bud Selig to launch the Mitchell investigation. Canseco's name appears more than 100 times in the report.

In many circles, Canseco is now recognized as the man who first exposed the true depth and breadth of baseball's Steroid Era. He has become the opposite of what many considered him to be. He is now ... credible.

"I think," Saunooke says, "he's just looking for acknowledgment and honesty."

Will Canseco's new book offer that? Will it reveal new names, fresh accusations, real news? Or will it simply be a re-hash of the same, tired tale?

"[The new book will be] about the aftermath of the first book. About more individuals, agencies, what's happened to me of late," Canseco told Patrick. "Just more or less another continuance of Juiced, but it's going to be a little more informative."

It's clear that Canseco is not finished talking. And we're going to have to listen to him.