Making his point

With his 2nd volume of allegations, no one's scoffing

On Jose Canseco's book

Canseco deserves the benefit of the doubt, the kind he did not get from many people on the first book tour. Until someone proves him wrong about any of what he writes in the new book, he ought to be believed. Nobody has proved him wrong about the first one yet.

More important, nobody has ever seen a big-time athlete's denials of an accusation of doping hold up. Certainly not in baseball. Far more often it's the opposite -- the angry, vehement denial, then the avalanche of evidence against him, then a stricken face in a congressional hearing room. Or, in one celebrated case, a perp walk. At best, you'll get a shamed apology well after the fact.

The gutter-level dishonesty of so many of these so-called idols has badly warped our instinct for trust. It leaves possibly innocent people to be presumed guilty. It also makes us question why we chose to believe or not believe certain individuals. So it is with this, now, Canseco's word versus Rodriguez's.

Canseco, though, has the proven track record.

A few talking heads have already presented Rodriguez as a tragic figure wrongly persecuted by a self-absorbed, jealous publicity hog. Old habits are hard to break.

This, however, also will color many opinions of the Canseco book allegations: Rodriguez represents the game's best hope to erase Barry Bonds and his "tainted" home run record from the books, and no one can afford for the record breaker to be tainted, too.

There's nothing particularly likable about Rodriguez, besides his talent and the ridiculous numbers he puts up -- but there's a lot more riding on his credibility than merely whether he gets booed a lot at Yankee Stadium.

Baseball's credibility and that of its most ardent backers are on the line. They can't afford for Canseco to be right.

Again.

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Listen to David Steele on Wednesdays at 9 a.m. on WNST (1570 AM).