COMMENTARY

Manny Ramirez returned to the majors this weekend, to the delight of Dodgers fans, following a 50-game suspension. Yet, when the news broke in early May that the Dodgers’ star outfielder would be punished for violating Major League Baseball’s drug policy, it was another slugger who called a news conference.

Jose Canseco, best-selling author and baseball’s steroidal sage, rented a big ballroom at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills and waited for the reporters and television crews to show up. But the news media already knew what Canseco was going to say, which was, essentially, “I told you so.”

Only one reporter and four camera crews arrived.

Canseco would have been better off if no one had come at all, because, suddenly, the pathetic turnout and empty seats became the story. Those four news cameras shot from the back of the room to better emphasize Canseco’s isolation. The lonely Associated Press reporter started his story this way: “Jose Canseco has spoken, but is anyone listening anymore?” And a wiseguy headline writer at Yahoo.com zinged the big man with a headline that read “Jose Canseco only has to picture one person in underwear.”

It’s not easy being the man who saved baseball.

He’s not The Natural. The Un-Natural is more like it. But in his own clumsy, hormonally imbalanced way, Canseco has done more than any player of his time to help baseball overcome the errors of its recent ways. The worst of the Steroid Era appears to be over, and Canseco deserves a fair chunk of the credit.

Canseco produced what may be the greatest baseball blooper. In 1993, in a game against the Cleveland Indians, he allowed a fly ball to boing off his head and over the fence for a home run. Much of his career since that moment has seemed to go the same way. Canseco has put himself in the wrong place at the right time. His 2005 book, “Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big,” called attention to the abuse of steroids. He confessed in the book to using steroids and named other suspected users when no one else was doing so.

His testimony before Congress that same year was forthright and straightforward, when others around him ducked and lied. Steroids, he told lawmakers, were as prevalent in baseball in the late 1980s and 1990s “as a cup of coffee.”

Yet despite his attempts at honesty and his accurate assessment of the way steroids permeated the game in the late 1990s and the early part of this decade, Canseco keeps taking his lumps, many of them self-inflicted.

He’s tried reality TV. He’s tried promoting himself as a martial-arts movie star. He’s tried celebrity boxing (and failed to score a knockout against former “Partridge Family” child star Danny Bonaduce). According to one news report, he even tried blackmailing ballplayers to keep their names out of his follow-up book, which he optimistically titled “Vindicated.” And now he says he’s planning to sue Major League Baseball for lost wages and defamation of character, saying he was blackballed from the game for his whistleblowing. It’s a ridiculous claim. When Canseco finished his career in 2001, he was washed up. And his book wasn’t published until four years later.

Canseco did not return my phone calls requesting an interview, despite the fact that his lawyer insisted to me that Canseco wants nothing more than to be understood.

“I have regrets,” Canseco said in a recent public appearance. “The way people look at my career was compromised by using [steroids]. Then the whole thing fell apart. . . . I was cut off.”

Canseco calls himself the “godfather” of steroids in baseball. He is no doubt responsible in part for the proliferation of performance-enhancing drugs. Throughout his playing career, by his own admission, he helped players around the league get on the juice. If there were a steroid wing in the Hall of Fame, Canseco would be in the first class.

“The challenge is not to find a top player who has used steroids,” he boasted in “Juiced.” “The challenge is to find a top player who hasn’t.”

One by one, he has named names. Alex Rodriguez. Manny Ramirez. Miguel Tejada. Rafael Palmeiro. And, over time, one by one, those names have been linked to steroid use.

“I don’t see how anybody gets around the idea that Jose was a significant part of exposing the era,” said Mark Fainaru-Wada, who also played a significant part in the process, with his co-author, Lance Williams, by writing the book “Game of Shadows,” which exposed San Francisco Giants star Barry Bonds’ and other alleged steroid users’ connections to a nutritional supplement company called BALCO. “I don’t think those hearings happen . . . without his book. . . . And without the hearings, baseball doesn’t change its policies.”

It’s a sweet irony, of course, that baseball’s most infamous steroid pusher has turned out to be the game’s savior. He embarrassed baseball officials and forced them to address a problem they seemed determined to ignore. In 2006, Commissioner Bud Selig appointed former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell to investigate. Mitchell’s report, released on Dec. 13, 2007, linked 90 former and current players to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. It was Canseco’s first “I told you so” moment.

Did the Mitchell report name all the guilty parties? Hardly. Did it solve baseball’s steroid problem? Not by a long shot. But did it help? Absolutely. Some players continued to issue denials, but others apologized. The apologies were a vital first step toward repairing the game’s image.

Canseco’s literary effort also helped push the House Committee on Government Reform to hold all-day hearings on steroids in 2005. The stars called to testify -- including Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire and Palmeiro -- were for the most part those Canseco had named as suspected users. They sat apart from Canseco at the hearings, as if he were too filthy to be approached.

The others hemmed and hawed and denied everything. Palmeiro wagged his finger and said, “I have never used steroids, period.” He later tested positive.

Canseco, meanwhile, told it straight. He joked at one point that he must have been mistaken; he must have been the only one using drugs. No one was laughing.

Mike Gimbel, director of Powered by Me, a Towson, Md., nonprofit that teaches about the dangers of steroids, says Canseco did a great service not only to baseball but to everyone who loves sports.

“I’m a recovering addict, and I’ve been in the substance-abuse field for 30 years,” Gimbel said, “and I’m a big proponent of being honest and telling the people around you who and what you are. That’s what Canseco did.”

Still, Canseco is “a jerk,” Gimbel said. And it’s hard to argue. He didn’t set out to reform the game. He set out to make a buck and to punish the baseball establishment for perceived slights. But sometimes it takes a jerk to change the world.

“Whether he did it for self-serving purposes or not, “ Gimbel said, “he did athletes a big favor by beginning to break the cycle.”

And it does appear that the cycle has been broken. Baseball, at last, has instituted a fairly rigorous drug-testing regimen. Back when Sosa, McGwire and Bonds were packing on muscle as if it were sculptor’s clay and hitting preposterous home runs, officials didn’t want to know the truth. Now they realize they have a vested interest in keeping the game clean and punishing those who break the rules. It’s what the fans want.

And the game’s power numbers are returning to normal levels too. Between 1998 and 2001, individual players hit more than 61 homers in one season six times. Since then, no one has done it. In 2000, ballplayers hit an average of 2.34 home runs per game. Last year, they hit 2.01.

Baseball’s popularity has not suffered for the reduction in power. Last season, for instance, paid attendance at major league ballparks reached about 79 million, compared with 71 million in 2000.

Which brings to mind one Canseco prognostication that has turned out to be mistaken. “By the time my eight-year-old daughter, Josie, has graduated from high school, a majority of all professional athletes will be taking steroids,” he wrote in “Juiced.”

Athletes might soon come up with a sneakier way to artificially enhance their performance. There’s too much money at stake to believe that honesty and good sportsmanship are sure to triumph in the long run. But for now, at least, steroid use seems to be declining.

Thanks to the jerk.

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Jonathan Eig, author of “Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig,” wrote this for the Washington Post.