Tuesday night was the debut of Ken Burns’ highly anticipated “Baseball: The Tenth Inning” and with one “blink and you missed it” quote, we were introduced to what will be blogosphere fodder for the next fews days.
The “Jose Canseco Milkshake”.
Following the July 2009 leak of David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez alledgedly using banned substances in 2003, Jose Canseco came out publicly (shocker) and claimed that there was a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame that had used steroids.
In “Baseball”, Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell said:
There was another player now in the Hall of Fame who literally stood with me and mixed something and I said “What’s that?” and he said “it’s a Jose Canseco milkshake”. And that year that Hall of Famer hit more home runs than ever hit any other year.
And with that, comes the watercooler discussion…who is it?
Larry Granillo over at the wonderful site Wezen Ball broke it all down so you and I don’t have to.
If we take Boswell at his literal word, this is what we need to look for: someone who is already inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and who hit more home runs than he ever had before after Jose Canseco arrived in the league. Canseco won Rookie of the Year in 1986, so we’ll start there even if it makes more sense to use 1988 as the starting point.
The second part of the statement confuses me some. I can’t tell if he’s trying to say that the milkshake story comes from the 1988 season, or if he’s adding the 1988 date as more of a clarifying detail (in effect, saying “Here’s a story of how it was spreading -which it started doing in 1988”). Let’s keep the search as wide as possible, but keep the 1988 year in mind.
With those criteria, we get a short list of eight Hall of Famers (assuming pitchers like Goose Gossage and Nolan Ryan don’t count).
To check out Granillo’s breakdown…click HERE!
***UPDATE*** After doing some more research on both Boswell’s claims and the alledged “Jose Canseco Milkshake” itself…Granillo has posted another wonderful piece over at his site. Check it out.
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