Written by:
Ken Davidoff
April 9, 2008
It figures that Derek Jeter, Major League Baseball's unofficial Guy Who Does Everything Right, draws unconditional praise from even the industry's toughest critic.
"You'd be hard-pressed to find a guy who didn't reach the top, or close to it, without steroids, except for maybe one: Derek Jeter," Jose Canseco writes, in his new tome, "Vindicated." "I believe Jeter was clean."
So count Jeter as the second person to confirm an item in "Vindicated." The first was legendary "60 Minutes" reporter Mike Wallace, who told Newsday last month that he did indeed initiate an off-camera conversation with Canseco about steroids and human growth hormone (although, Wallace asserted, he never took the next step and tried the drugs).
While history has taught us not to trust anyone on the issue of illegal performance-enhancing drugs, I'd place Jeter and Ken Griffey Jr. as co-leaders on my board of least likely cheaters.
For Jeter, such confidence comes with the knowledge that his father, Charles, spent time as a drug and alcohol counselor. Charles Jeter now heads Derek Jeter's Turn 2 Foundation, where the mission statement is to keep young people away from drugs and alcohol.
"I was always taught to stay away from it, the problems that it could cause," Jeter said, referring to drugs of all kinds. "It was never any kind of temptation or anything like that. I was pretty much taught about it from a young age."
Jeter gets a full paragraph's write-up from Canseco, who also wrote: "He is a perfect example of a great player who didn't use the edge to turn himself into a superhuman player, and of the price one pays for doing so. In a culture that expects you to do anything and everything to become the best, the guy who doesn't cave gets left behind by his peers.
"Take a closer look at Jeter; measure him against every other superstar shortstop in his class. Track the stats. Jeter built his own way into the Hall of Fame, without steroids, only to be outdistanced by a number of guys who were probably getting juiced."
We all know there's at least a hint of truth there; Miguel Tejada, for one, leapfrogged over Jeter, and Tejada stars in the Mitchell Report. Not surprisingly, however, Jeter expressed little interest in discussing Canseco's belief.
"That's making the assumption that people are doing it," he said. "You can't just assume that somebody's doing something when you have no proof.
That's impossible to sit around and say what teams were impacted, what teams weren't impacted (by players' illegal PED usage). How many people were doing this, how many people were doing that. There's really no way to figure that out."
It's not easy to surprise Jeter - witness the headlines Hideki Matsui received when he duped the Yankees captain into a "Who will get married first?" wager - but the shortstop did a double-take when Newsday notified him on Saturday (prior to when he sustained the left quad injury that has sidelined him) that he made Canseco's book.
It's easy to forget that the goofy whistleblower Canseco and the role model Jeter served as teammates for a couple of months on the 2000 Yankees club, the last time Jeter won a ring.
"To be honest with you, he didn't really say too much," Jeter said of Canseco. "He was pretty quiet. He came in, and half the time, you didn't know he was here. He didn't play too much, because I think he was put in a situation where there wasn't a spot for him. You really didn't even know he was here, most of the time."
That is accurate from this space's recollection, too. Canseco, rewarded to the Yankees as a waiver claim, had nowhere to play, since Brian Cashman already had imported Glenallen Hill and Luis Polonia to help at designated hitter.
Fittingly, Canseco seemed most comfortable around Roger Clemens, his teammate from the 1995-96 Red Sox and 1998 Blue Jays, and now his partner in trying (unsuccessfully) to discredit Brian McNamee.
