by Michael Duca

OAKLAND–Former Athletic Mark McGwire missed out on the 1989 A’s reunion as he was coaching the hitting of the Los Angeles Dodgers who lost 3-2 to McGwire’s other former team the St.Louis Cardinals. McGwire’s former A’s Bash Brother Jose Canseco was at the Coliseum on Friday night and said he regretted writing his books about steriods which told of McGwire and other players who were involved in steroid use. The book helped indict some of the players who were at the Congressional hearings.

Canseco has a engaging and charming personality that he might be able to get away with it and he’s like Jim Bouton the former Yankees pitcher who wrote the book Ball Four who talked about his years with the Yankees, Pilots, Braves and Astros. Canseco committed the cardinal sin he told the truth. The book was a marketing fantasy and people were paying a lot of money which is taken away from the everyday world and put into a place where they have modern day gladiators going into this sort of combat and coming out with sort of a victory.

If you go back to the curtain you’ll see that the wizard has worts and thists and if your the wizard that’s real unpopular. So I don’t know how successful Canseco is going to be at getting accepted into the fold. It took Bouton a long, long time. Jose shouldn’t regret writing the book the book told the truth, and there might have been some issues of choice or style that he could have been made in the book that he might regret but the writing of the itself was the tipping point in getting baseball to a place where it decided that it had a real problem.

A’s Josh Donalson launching some gamers: I have had the privledge of being down on the field right behind the backstop when the A’s Josh Donaldson hit his prior game winning shot back in the month of May and it was pretty majestic and your first thought was are they going to be able to rule this fair as it was about ready to go over the foul pole. Major Leauge Baseball has a system that can measure the flight of the ball and in a couple of years they will have the ability to tell how far a ball is hit and how far it took someone to get it.

This technology has the ability to measure some of these balls and Donaldson has hit some balls that have gone 100 feet high that’s just astonishing, Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow’s phrase is it’s trying to leave earth and if you could get a baseball 150 feet up in the air that is almost like being able to start a cloud burst and shows that Donaldson has the ability to hit one deep.

Giants update: The Miami Marlins have two players who must have some the longest names in baseball maybe standing next to the A’s pitcher Jeff Samrdzija, the equipment manager of the Marlins would have to put some work in stitching the names of the Marlins Jarrod Saltalamacchia and Adeiny Hechavarria who are two key players in the Marlins line up. They certainly will take up the equipment manager’s vowel supply.

Hechavarria is going to help the Marlins and he’s a good enough shortstop who is good enough to be the answer to Hanley Ramirez. The Marlins are looking for great things from Hechavarria. In the meantime great things have stopped happening for the Marlins for this series with the Giants, as Buster Posey is hiting the ball well, he awoke from his three week slumber with a grand slam on Sunday against the Diamondbacks at AT&T.

Buster’s shot ended a 2-2 deadlock that ended the first half of the season at the 90th game of the season. Posey picked up right off where he left off and had three big hits on Friday night in Miami and scored two runs and had a couple of RBIs. If Posey heats up look out. His platooning at first base is something that manager Bruce Bochy is doing to keep him rested a game or two but Posey doesn’t want to do anything else but catch.

Michael Duca does A’s and Giants commentary weekly for http://www.sportsradioservice.com