For the first time in five years, I'll be checking out of town boxscores a little more closely.
But, it won't be National or American League boxscores. In fact, I bet the boxes from the league I want will be tough to find them outside of your friend and mine, the internet.
It's the Golden Baseball League! I was seriously fired up when I heard that Jose Canseco had signed with the San Diego Surf Dawgs. He apparently has been playing some "semi-pro" (read: not really semi-pro, unless you define semi pro as someone who was once paid. I highly doubt anyone in the league he was playing in was actually paid. Semi-pro is a term thrown around way too loosely, if you ask me. But now I'm way off topic) and hitting some huge home runs. Of course, only after doing some digging do we find out the league uses aluminum bats. But all that doesn't matter. Jose is playing pro ball again!
Immediately, I purchased not one, but both of the brand spanking new San Diego Surf Dawgs t-shirts with "Canseco 33" on the back. They will be shipped on Friday or shortly thereafter.
Of course, by the time I type this, he's already demanded (and received) a trade--to the Long Beach Armada. I wonder if the shirts will magically change?
Still, this doesn't matter. I was a high school baseball player in the late 1980s, and my idol was Jose Canseco. I collected his cards, his posters, his t-shirts--everything Jose. I even tried to mock his batting stance and mannerisms. I developed a nervous twitch. Okay, not really. But I would move my head back and forth to "crack my neck" between pitches every once in a while. I loved watching "Baseball Tonight" or whatever "Sportscenter" was on to watch the latest titanic blast from #33's bat. I remember being positively crushed when I found out he was traded. I know exactly where I was when I heard it--probably like folks know where they were when JFK was shot.
Then the down years came. I stood by Jose, continuing my fandom. I was irked when he wasn't given a shot out of Spring Training in, I believe, 2002. I truly believed he had been blacklisted. But then the steriods issue came full boil. People mocked Jose for his pronouncements of all these players using. He threatened to write a book--people laughed more (one writer penned an admittedly funny line by saying you should be required to READ a book first before writing one). I was in O'Hare last winter, awaiting a flight with Shelley to the ProBowl in Hawaii, when I spotted his book at the airport. It wasn't supposed to come out until the following week, but there it was. I bought it and read it on the flight. While there are some idiocies in the book (like we all should be using steriods because they are "healthy"), the main point of the book was that it dropped names. Even then, there was a lot of people doubting Jose. I thought he was a hero again. Even moreso when Congress stepped in. Now, there are those that say it would have happened anyway--but would it have? Maybe, but perhaps Jose saved some lives by speeding up the process.
I have probably 2,500 total and 1,500 different Canseco cards in my collection. The t-shirts were sewn together to form one of the coolest quilts you could ever see. The posters, well, I did grow up a little bit and they are still rolled up. Except for one which has him and several other juicers, I mean, ballplayers of the era that is tacked up in the weight room.
Jose is back. Now, I wonder how those Surf Dawgs shirts would look as pillows...
