If innocent, McGwire should bash back in court

It's put up or shut up time for baseball's most suspected steroid users: Sue Jose Canseco for libel or stop the denials and evasions of his accusations that they juiced up just as he did.

If they're all so innocent, they ought to join together in a lawsuit -- Baseball Hulks vs. Canseco and his publisher, HarperCollins.

Canseco's Valentine's Day Massacre of his fellow sluggers' reputations, with today's release of his book "Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big," demands more than a few words of outrage from the players he names.

If Canseco published false and malicious statements, saying he injected his former Oakland Athletics Bash Brother, Mark McGwire, with steroids and watched McGwire inject himself, McGwire ought to bash right back in court.

Canseco may have been vague enough in his allegations of steroid use by some players -- Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Miguel Tejada, Bret Boone -- to protect himself from a libel action. But there's not a whole lot of gray area in his description of what McGwire allegedly did.

"After batting practice or right before the game, Mark and I would duck into a stall in the men's room, load up our syringes and inject ourselves" with steroids, starting in 1988, Canseco wrote, according to an excerpt quoted by The New York Times.

McGwire's response so far has been to dance around the issue. He's said he's long denied taking steroids, other than the now-banned androstenedione starting the year before he hit 70 home runs, and is "saddened" that the steroids issue continues to come up.

With his reputation and possibly his Hall of Fame credentials at stake -- "It took a lot of injections to get him past Roger Maris that summer," Canseco wrote -- McGwire ought to be more than saddened. He ought to be suing.

The same goes for Canseco's former teammates on the Texas Rangers -- Juan Gonzalez, Rafael Palmeiro and Ivan Rodriguez.

"Soon I was injecting all three of them," Canseco wrote. "I personally injected each of those three guys, many times."

He either did or he didn't, just as he either did or didn't personally inject Tampa Bay teammates Wilson Alvarez and Dave Martinez, as Canseco claimed.

Canseco surely is not easily trusted. He's lied or exaggerated in the past, been in trouble with the law, has a grudge against baseball and is in need of money. He may be, as one of his biggest targets, Jason Giambi, said, "delusional."

But on the issue of steroids, he may know more about it than anyone else.

"I was the godfather of the steroid revolution in baseball," he writes in a smarmy, self-congratulatory tone, "but McGwire was right there with me as a living, thriving example of what steroids could do to make you a better ballplayer."

If Canseco is lying in this book, these players ought to take him and his publisher to court rather than merely issuing denials, as they have done, or saying that they feel sorry for Canseco.

By holding back, the players may leave the tacit impression in the public's mind that there's more truth to Canseco's story than they would like everyone to believe.

"Just because people don't sue doesn't mean that they don't believe that they were wronged," McGwire's attorney, Bob Cohen, said. "We are in a litigious society, but there are lots of people who don't pursue meritorious causes of action because they just want to get past it. Don't construe that lack thereof as an admission of guilt or of wrongdoing.

"It's easy to say, 'Oh, you should sue,' but for the people involved it's not so easy."

True. But in this case the allegations made by Canseco are so damning to some of the players that they could cost them dearly in endorsements and possibly even Hall of Fame votes.

Canseco doesn't say he watched Clemens take steroids but wrote that they "talked about what steroids could do for you, in which combination, and I've heard him use the phrase 'B-12 shot' with respect to others," according to an excerpt quoted by Newsday.

A "B-12 shot," Canseco claimed, was a code word for steroid injections.

Clemens' surge late in his career, Canseco wrote, is "one of the classic signs of steroid use."

In an e-mailed statement to Newsday, Randy Hendricks, one of Clemens' agents, wrote, "Roger says it is all nonsense. Roger takes vitamin B-12 shots, took them last year, has passed every test, will take them this year, and will pass every test. Roger says the fact that he and Jose talked about something does not mean he ever said he took anything.

"It is just preposterous for Canseco to say/write this ... No legitimate publisher would let something like this get past their editors and lawyers."

Well, HarperCollins just did.

Steve Wilstein is a columnist with The Associated Press.