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| Wednesday, May 22 Updated: May 23, 1:23 PM ET Canseco's book no chance to be another 'Ball Four' By Jim Caple ESPN.com |
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Jim Bouton, author of the most famous inside-the-clubhouse book in baseball history, has three words of advice for Jose Canseco regarding his threat to write a scorched-earth, salt-the-land, tell-all book: "No way, Jose.'' For one thing, Canseco may have had a relationship with Madonna and his own 1-888 phone line, but his career misses one crucial, Dickensian plot element Bouton had going for him in "Ball Four." And that is: "Jose lacks Joe Schultz,'' Bouton said, referring to the late Seattle Pilots manager and noted Budweiser connoisseur. "And if you haven't got Joe Schultz, you haven't got a book.''
Secondly, Bouton questions whether there is anything left that will shock modern fans. "What's he going to say? There are athletes who use steroids? We know that. He'll have to do better than that. He'll have to say players are reclaiming body parts.'' Further, Bouton doubts whether Canseco could write an accurate tell-all book if he wasn't keeping contemporaneous notes throughout his career, as Bouton did while writing "Ball Four'' during the 1969 season. "What, is he the Amazing Kreskin?" Bouton asked. "I would take notes during the day and talk them into a tape recorder at night. I realized that if I didn't write the quotes down the first day, I couldn't remember them.'' But mostly, Bouton questions Canseco's motive. From much of what Canseco has said so far, his main motivation for writing the book seems to be getting back at people he thinks wronged him in recent years. From the sounds of it, Bouton says, Canseco isn't writing a book so much as "publishing an indictment.'' Revenge was not Bouton's motivation in writing "Ball Four.'' It simply was to tell what it really was like to play major-league baseball in as entertaining a way he could. "I wanted people to see the funny, strange lifestyle of a ballplayer. And in the process, I didn't want to b.s. people about what it was like,'' he said. "But I also left out the racist stuff. I left out the anti-Semitic stuff. The sex stories were all anonymous. Everyone calls it a tell-all book, but it wasn't a tell-all book. It was a tell-something book. "It sounds like Jose will write the book I was accused of writing.'' "Ball Four'' is famous for its stories of drunk, sex-crazed ballplayers but that's not why the New York Public Library picked it as one of the 100 most important books of the century. What makes "Ball Four'' so compelling, so readable and so important is that Bouton wrote about so much more. He captured an era of baseball -- and America -- as no historian could. Sure, he wrote about beaver-shooting, but he also wrote about the many changes in the game, the coming of the players union, the changing role of sports in our culture and the social revolution of the era. Without including such things, Bouton says, "You just have an itemized list of bad things people do.'' I always found Canseco to be a funny, sharp, likeable guy who was wildly entertaining in the way only the fabulously rich, immensely talented and incredibly self-absorbed can be. That Jose could write a terrifically readable biography -- "Weekends With Jose'' -- that would ride the bestseller lists so long you would think it was a sensitive novel of women's empowerment on Oprah's Book Club. But Canseco hasn't sounded much like the old Jose during his round of talk shows while hyping this book. Instead, he sounds like a bitter, paranoid man about to give us "Teammate Dearest.'' I told you: NO WIRE HANGERS IN THE CLUBHOUSE -- EVER!!!! There would be real value to Canseco revealing the "truth'' behind steroid use in baseball -- it likely is the most significant change in the way the game is played over the past two decades -- but as Bouton says, that's only enough for a magazine article. For his entire book to be worth reading beyond the steroid excerpts, for it to stand out from the usual suspects that make up player biographies ("Kansas City Monarch -- the Tony Muser Story"), he must tell it from the old Jose's perspective instead of the new Jose's agenda. And it also will help if Joe Schultz was somehow in Madonna's apartment that night in New York, too.
Box score line of the week But this week's winner is the symmetrical gem Barry Bonds produced Saturday when he homered twice into McCovey Cove, giving him 15 home runs for the season and 582 for his career, one behind Mark McGwire and four behind Frank Robinson. Barry's line: 3 AB, 3 R, 3 H, 3 RBI By next month Bonds will have passed all but three players on the home run list. And he's closing in on some other impressive marks, according to the Ironic Times. "Barry Bonds Threatening Fictional Records,'' the website headline read last week. "On present pace, Giants slugger could break marks held by Roy Hobbs, Mighty Casey, Bugs Bunny.''
Lies, damn lies and statistics
From left field The triple crowns in baseball and horse racing are about equally rare. Since Sir Barton won the first racing triple crown in 1919 (baseball had two winners prior to that), each sport has had 11 triple crown winners. The last horse to do it was Affirmed in 1978 and the last player to do it was Yaz in 1967. The only year that produced a triple crown in each sport was 1937 when War Admiral and Joe Medwick each won. After winning the Preakness last weekend, War Emblem has two legs of the crown, but that doesn't mean all that much -- it happens about every other year on average, with 13 horses winning at least two legs of the triple crown since Affirmed. Meanwhile, there have been 33 players to win at least two legs of baseball's crown since Yaz. Only three (Joe Torre, Todd Helton and Al Oliver) were able to pair the most difficult leg, the batting title, with the RBI or home run title (home runs and RBI tend to go hand in hand). The horses/ballplayers who won two legs of the triple crowns since Affirmed won all three:
Win Blake Stein's Money Question: At last glance, Barry Bonds led the league in home runs and batting but wasn't in the top 10 in RBI. Who was the last player to lead his league in batting and home runs without winning the triple crown?
Off Base Power Rankings
Answer: Ted Williams in 1941, when he hit .406 with a league-leading 37 home runs while finishing fourth in RBI with 120, five behind Joe DiMaggio.
Infield chatter
Jim Caple is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at cuffscaple@hotmail.com |
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