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| Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big |
Author: Jose Canseco
Hardcover · February 2005
304 Pages
For years, Jose Canseco was one of the most intimidating hitters in the Major Leagues. The embodiment of speed and power, he was the first player in Major League history to steal forty bases and hit forty home runs in a single season. Off the field, his personal life was just as outrageous, with tales of his out-of-control antics spilling off sports pages and into gossip columns. But Canseco also harbored one of Major League Baseball’s darkest secrets: steroids.
In Juiced, he comes clean about this wild past, sharing the unbelievable truth about baseball’s steroid addiction and how this onetime taboo has spread to every locker room in the big leagues. Entertaining, raucous, and unforgettable, Canseco takes you beneath the veneer of Major League Baseball, demonstrating how big muscles and performance-enhancing drugs have changed the rules of the game forever.
Behind the gaudy stats and the glamour of his public life, Canseco cultivated a secret just about everyone in MLB knew about, one that would alter the game of baseball and the way we view our heroes forever. Canseco made himself a guinea pig of the performance-enhancing drugs that were only just beginning to infiltrate the American underground.
Anabolic steroids, human growth hormones -- Canseco mixed, matched, and experimented to such a degree that he became known throughout the league as
"The Chemist." He passed his knowledge on to trainers and fellow players, and before long, performance-enhancing drugs were running rampant throughout Major League Baseball. Sluggers scooping up pitches at their ankles and blasting them out of the park, pitchers cranking fastballs inning after inning -- Canseco showed the players how to customize their doses to sculpt the bodies they wanted, and baseball as we know it was the result.
Today, this issue has crept out of the closet and burst into the headlines as players balloon to herculean proportions and hundred-year-old records are not only broken, but also demolished. In this shocking memoir, Canseco sheds light on a life of dizzying highs and debilitating lows, provides the answers to questions about steroids that millions of fans are only now beginning to ask -- and suggests that, far from being a passing trend, the steroid revolution is only a taste of things to come.
Who’s juiced? According to Canseco’s authoritative account, more than you think. And baseball will never be the same.
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