I am a baseball fan.

I will always be a baseball fan.

The above two rules being kept in mind, it is only a matter of time before I read any baseball oriented book written by an ex-player. Their inside experience and understanding take me to a place I never had the ability to go to in reality. And thus, my reading of Jose Canseco's book only awaited the library's obtaining it to put on their shelves. The media circus surrounding it only helped to encourage.

The book is actually a fair piece of baseball literature. It addresses the steroid issue from the perspective of an insider and a steroid apologist (Canseco makes it very clear that he is very much in favor of steroids when used properly and under medical supervision). While I have an ambivalent take on the author's position, I wanted to weigh the book on its literary merits.

Canseco does a very good job of giving us the "dirt"; his beginnings in Cuba with a father who lost much of the life he had worked for under the Batista regime to the Castro government and who worked desperately to bring his family from Cuba to the United States; his youth playing alongside future major leaguers Danny Tartabull and Rafael Palmeiro, and the inside scoop on his relationship with Madonna (I ain't givin' NUTTIN' away: read the book). Whether it's honest or not, only the author and God know. But it is largely an interesting read.

The discussion of steroid includes a lot of name dropping; all of the TRUE "bombshells" from the book have already come out in media stories surrounding the book, though. It becomes obvious through reading, though, that many names were referenced so that people would find them listed in the index and buy the book to read a passage that included no details either way regarding steroid abuse (SPOILER: Ken Griffey, Jr. and Randy Johnson, neither of whom played with Canseco, both merit one sentence mentions that do not have anything to do with the topic of steroid abuse). It also contains a few nonanecdotes, such as Canseco's alleged conversation with Seattle Mariner Bret Boone during the latter's career year.

What Canseco's book lacks is more stories that detail a baseball career worth mentioning; how he felt when he saw Kirk Gibson's famous tater in the '88 World Series sail into the cheap seats; how he felt again in '90 when the A's had swept their way into the World Series only to see them swept themselves against a highly underrated Cincinnati Reds team; in short, the kind of "meat" a baseball afficianado appreciates. While I am sure he was under some degree of pressure from his publishers to drop as many names as he could, inclusion of these stories from his career could have made a decent book into a potential baseball classic. Maybe he's saving that for the sequel, though.

One thing is for sure, though: if you eat, sleep, and breathe baseball, this book is worth a second look. It falls somewhere in the middle of the pack of worthy baseball bios.

I give it three steroid needles out of five.