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Deep in the Glute of TexasHow did A-Rod's Rangers become ground zero for baseball's steroids scandal?

By Mike ShropshirePosted Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2009, at 1:45 PM ET

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Tim Marchman argued that nobody liked Alex Rodriguez before his steroids admission and nobody liked him afterward. William Saletan said that what's unsettling about the A-Rod case is all the doping that it didn't uncover. In 2007, Bryan Curtis thought that Rodriguez was inching toward humanity. In 2003, Mike Shropshire wrote about the evils of baseball's spring training.

But let's leave aside Rodriguez's astounding revelation that he was more obsessed with the numbers on the thermometer than his own batting stats. Otherwise, the heart-rending saga of his Rangers tenure—"I am sorry for my Texas years," he told Gammons—holds up under scrutiny. The Texas Rangers franchise seems to have been fashioned from the template presented by 1961's The Comancheros. That motion picture, like the Arlington baseball club, was set in a desert sanctuary so remote it existed beyond the reach of law and order, the ideal redoubt for bandits, cutthroats, and their ilk.

From its very outset, this asylum of a baseball team stocked its roster with retreads and lovable lunatics, far more notable for their off-the-field exploits than their lamentable status in the American League. Those early Rangers—the Boys of Bummer—shot themselves with handguns, not syringes. They turned themselves into human statues, they lived beneath ocean piers while hiding from the cops during spring training, they beat the living crap out of manager Frank Lucchesi, they resorted to every possible tactic to avoid the boredom of a Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Cooperstown.

So it is not surprising that with the advent of baseball's steroids era, the Rangers' clubhouse seemingly became a haven for players with a flair for experimentation. In other words, success-oriented individuals who wouldn't say no to anything.

While the Dallas Cowboys were monopolizing national headlines thanks to their penchant for recreational drug use, the Rangers—who plied their trade in the baseball equivalent of parts unknown—rose to the top of the standings in the under-the-counter-dope league. Alleged early practitioners included Rubén Sierra, Rafael Palmeiro, Iván Rodríguez, and Juan González, to name only a few—a who's who of chemically fortified all-stars. If nothing else, this team must now be remembered as pioneers of the contemporary era of baseball, when a scouting report on a prospect might read: "Has limited range, but earnest face will make him believable while perjuring himself before a congressional committee."

As you might expect, baseball's steroids prince eventually found his way to Arlington. "I don't know about Typhoid Mary, but I don't think there's any question that when I arrived in Texas [in 1992], the other Rangers saw me as a useful resource," José Canseco explained in his memoir Juiced. "Before long, other players from all around the baseball world saw what was going on with me and my buddies and Texas."

To make this passage even juicier, Canseco implies that George W. Bush—then the Rangers' managing general partner—engineered the trade that brought Jose to Texas because of his prowess in the use of Superman serum. Alas, this point is where Canseco's oft-reliable narrative strays from reality. First of all, the Rangers didn't need José Canseco to tutor them in the finer arts of shooting up. Any North Texas high-school football player worthy of the all-district patch on his letter jacket could have assisted them in that regard. Secondly, having had his fingers burned for approving the Sammy Sosa trade in 1989, Bush had retreated from participating in roster decisions. In the only conversation I ever had with Bush regarding his Rangers days, I came away convinced that he was oblivious to Dr. Frankenstein's presence in the training room. According to Bush, he was much more concerned over the mental state of his pitching, referring to one of his staff aces as "a fucking psycho."

If José Canseco did leave a legacy in the Rangers' clubhouse that extended through the A-Rod years, then it prevailed not only here but throughout the sport. That's one thing that Rodriguez got right on Tuesday. He didn't start taking steroids because the evils of Arlington made a squeaky-clean player go dirty. No, A-Rod got on the juice because, in a single decade, the rest of the baseball world took on the characteristics of its seedy underbelly. We are all Texans now.