Steve Kettmann, the ghostwriter for Jose Canseco’s autobiographical memoir that exposed the use of anabolic steroid in Major League Baseball, reviews the Manhattan Theatre Club production of playwright Itamar Moses’ dramedy about the steroids in baseball scandal. The off-broadway play “Back Back Back” is a fictionalized portrayal of the relationship between Bash Brothers Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, and the use of anabolic steroids during their baseball careers (”New play examines relationship between Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire,” November 15).

Steve Kettmann’s over-familiarity with the source material gives him a unique perspective on the relationship between Canseco and McGwire. Kettmann covered the Oakland Athletics baseball team for the San Francisco Chronicle between 1994 and 1998 and was on friendly terms with the Bash Brothers Canseco and McGwire. Kettmann’s relationship with Mark McGwire became much less friendly when he asserted that McGwire used anabolic steroids in a New York Times editorial entitled “Baseball Must Come Clean on Its Darkest Secret.” But Kettmann stayed in Canseco’s good graces eventually hanging out with him extensively to ghostwrite the explosive steroid expose “Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ’Roids, Smash Hits and How Baseball Got Big” which featured descriptions of Canseco injecting McGwire with steroids.

So when Itamar Moses reflects upon the reasons the Jose Canseco proxy “Raul” wrote the book that destroyed the hall of fame chances teammate Mark McGwire proxy Kent, Kettman finds the discussion “deeply fascinating and irresistible.”

So when our stage version of Canseco dismisses the different theories on why he turned rat and ended the Era of Denial in the Summer Game, from financial need to naked jealousy of McGwire’s success in the golden summer of ‘98, Raul/Canseco finally says, “I don’t know.”

As the guy who actually hung out with Canseco, who actually talked all this stuff through with him, who asked him pointed questions and tried like hell to see if he would change his story when confronted at different times in different ways, it has long been my own theory that he didn’t know why he was doing this.

Oh, it’s clear that his motivation was in part financial (although he was living in a big, garish California mansion at the time we held our talks for the book), in part revenge against the game that he thought had blackballed him, and in part a contempt for the patsies who would let themselves be conned so thoroughly, meaning by the entire game of baseball. But if anyone thinks Canseco really had a clear idea of it all, of why he was doing any of it, of which parts were more important and which less so, I’d say they’re just plain wrong – and no, I’m not much interested to hear what Canseco has to say now about the “writing” of “Juiced” or his alleged regrets about doing the book in the first place.

The consensus is that the play fails as a morality tale about steroids, but succeeds as an exploration of the motivations of helping a friend use anabolic steroids only to destroy him later because of it in a tell-all book.