Organ

BEFORE I start arguing that it's muddleheaded, and misses the point, to disparage the greatness of a baseball player for his want of goodness as a man -- before I rise to the defense of Jose Canseco -- let me begin by offering one example of my own muddleheadedness in this regard.

A big part of what I have always admired about Roberto Clemente as a ballplayer is what a good, strong, thoughtful man he seems to have been -- his stoic dignity in the face of ignorance and bigotry, how he died in a crash while flying to help the victims of a Nicaraguan earthquake, and so forth. I choose to view Clemente's grace on the field as reflecting and being reflected by the graceful way in which he conducted his public life (when one has demonstrably nothing to do with the other), and both together as lasting proof of some private gracefulness as a man, when I have no way of ever really knowing what form the true, secret conduct of his life may have taken.

I have no idea what Clemente's feelings would have been about performance enhancers like anabolic steroids, but I would like to think that he would have viewed them with disfavor, and that he was faithful to his wife, temperate in his habits and modest about his accomplishments. Yes, I would like to think that -- because, instinctively, I'm just foolish and mistaken enough to think that great baseball players must also be good men.

There is no question that sometimes Jose Canseco was a great baseball player. If you have any doubt about that, you weren't paying attention to Canseco on the days, during the seasons, when he paid attention to the game -- and that's hard to imagine since, like Clemente, the man arrested the eye of the spectator, held the attention like a shard of mirror dangling from a wire in the sunshine, even when he was just standing around waiting for something to happen next.

But I'm not going to get into that here. The question of Canseco's greatness or lack thereof can be debated endlessly, with statistics and anecdotes to support both sides, and some of us will never understand why Ron Santo, Gil Hodges and Dick Allen are not in the Baseball Hall of Fame while others, most of whom seem to serve on the Hall's veterans' committee, will always vote, as that committee did once again on March 2, to keep them out.

And God knows I have no intention of claiming that Jose Canseco qualifies as a good man, according to the conventions of my own garden-variety standards of morality: consistent effort, altruism and personal integrity defined as the keeping of one's promises to other people. Canseco's want of goodness on those terms is also arguable, I suppose, though not by me.

But I will go out on a limb and venture that any list of the 100 greatest baseball players who ever lived would conform to the pattern for our species, and therefore contain a sizable number of men who spent most of their lives fumbling with an inherent tendency to slack off, ignore the sufferings of others, tell lies and evade responsibility. Playing baseball well does not make you a better person, any more than writing well does.

The illusion that lures us into the error of confounding Clemente's goodness as a man with his greatness as a ballplayer is that when a man is playing baseball well, as when a man is writing well, he seems to himself, in that moment, to be a better person than he really is. He puts it all together, he has all the tools, in a way that is impossible outside the lines of the ball field or the margins of the page. He shines, and we catch the reflected glint, and extend the shining one a credit for overall luminosity that almost nobody could merit. Clemente, I think, did; he shone with the grace and integrity of his play even when he was not on the field.

Roberto Clemente was a hero, in other words, and Jose Canseco, by this definition, is not. By his own admission, Canseco has slacked off and hurt people and lied and broken a lot of promises, large and small. And used steroids. And therefore, many people seem to feel, he is not to be admired -- neither in the past, during his brief heyday, so that we must retroactively rescind our delight in his style and our amazement at his prowess, put an asterisk beside our memory of the pleasure of his company over the course of a few long summers; nor in the present, not even when he steps forward to tell the truth, a big, meaningful, dolorous truth that most of us, measured by our own standards of heroism, would have a hard time bringing ourselves to tell.

Jose Canseco can't possibly be a hero to anyone -- he laid down that burden many years and arrests and screw-ups ago -- and furthermore (goes the rap) there is nothing remotely admirable about Canseco's allegation of widespread, inveterate use of steroids, by himself and by other ballplayers, like Mark McGwire, who have a readier claim on our admiration, and shoulder more naturally its weight.

Canseco, we are informed by sportswriters, by commentators, and by his former teammates, opponents and coaches, is only looking to turn a buck. His claims ''should be seen for what they are: an attempt to make money at the expense of others,'' as the Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling testified yesterday before Congress. If lying would have paid better than telling the truth, then Canseco would have lied (and, indeed, some have suggested that he is). Canseco is greedy, faithless, selfish, embittered, scornful and everlastingly a showboat. He is a bad man, and that makes him, retrospectively (except among those who claim always to have felt this way) a bad ballplayer. Not to mention a bad writer.

THE question that concerns me in all this is not one of the obvious ones, like what to tell my children, or what to do about the problem of steroids, or how to think about the records that may have been broken by cheaters, or how to protect against perfidy, avarice, taint and scandal the dear old national game. Like all obvious questions, none of them can really be answered.

All human endeavor is subject to cracking. It's the hard, Tex Avery truth of the universe: put your finger over one leak and another one pops up, just beyond your reach. Violence, gambling and game fixing, pestilential racism, overexpansion, competitive imbalance, labor strife, mind-boggling cupidity, and cheating of every variety and school: for most of its history the game of baseball has, like everything we build, been riddled with holes, some cavernous, some of them irreparable.

I don't know what is to be done about this latest debacle, and neither do you. No, what I want to know about Jose Canseco is, how come I still like the guy so much?

No, I'll go even further: I admire him. Not in the way I admire Clemente -- not even remotely, which says something about what an ambiguous thing admiration can be. Like all showboats, Canseco courts the simpler kind of admiration, starting in the mirror each morning. He is slick, he drives too fast, he is nine feet tall and four feet wide and walks with a roosterish swagger. But there has always been something about him, about his style of play, his sense of self-mocking humor, his way of looking at you looking at him, that goes beyond vanity and self-aggrandizement, or being a world-class jerk.

Canseco has been described as a charmer, and a clown, but in fact he is a rogue, a genuine one, and genuine rogues are rare, inside baseball and out. To be a rogue, it's not enough to flout the law, break promises, shirk responsibilities, cheat. You must also, at least some of the time, and with the same abandon, do your best, play by the rules, keep faith with your creditors and dependents, obey orders, throw out the runner at home plate with a dead strike from deep right field.

Above all you must do these things, just as you other times neglect to do them, for no particular reason, because you feel like it or do not, because nothing matters, and everything's a joke, and nobody knows anything, and most of all, as Rhett Butler once codified it for rogues everywhere, because you don't give a damn. One day you make that breathtaking play at the plate from deep right. On another day you decide, for no good reason, to take the mound during the late innings of a laugher and pitch, retiring the side (despite allowing three earned runs on three walks and a pair of singles) -- and ruining, forever, that cannon of an arm.

I've never seen a man who seems more comfortable with who he is than Jose Canseco. Not with who we think he is, like our current president, or with his best idea of himself, like our president's predecessor, but with himself: charmer and snake, clown and thoroughbred.

As for claims that the man is lying: give me a break. He doesn't need to lie. What would be the point? He doesn't care what you think of him; if anything, he derives a hair more pleasure from your scorn and contumely than he does from your useless admiration. It's not that Canseco has nothing to lose, as some of his critics have claimed, by coming forward now to peel back the nasty bandage on baseball's wound. A man like Canseco never has anything to lose, or to gain, but his life and the pleasure he takes from it.

That's true for each of us, I guess. But it's a thought that makes no impression on me, in my daily intercourse with all of the things I give a damn about, and it probably makes none on you. We aren't wired to see things that way, and we could never be blockade runners or Casablanca casino owners or fatally gifted ballplayers who sometimes, as Canseco once did, permit a baseball to bounce off the top of our heads before its departure from the ballpark. We have no style, you and I; only people who don't give a damn have style.

There was a time, though, when men like Jose Canseco, without taking anything from the luster of men like Roberto Clemente, could also be accounted as heroes. They were the ones, the Ulysseses and Sinbads and Raleighs, who sailed to places we couldn't imagine and returned, after a career of wonder and calamity and chagrin, not one whit better as men than they were when they left. And no better, surely, than we -- possibly worse. And yet, in the end, they were the only ones fit to make the voyage, and when they came back they were laden with a truth that no one else would be clown enough, and rogue enough, and hero enough, to speak.