I have an embarrassing admission to make: I enjoyed Jose Canseco’s book.

“Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big” (Regan Books, 288 pages, $25.95) is an entertaining read, well worth the half-hour or so of your time it will absorb. Whether going on about “what biochemistry and biotechnology can do to change our lives” or making sinister insinuations about Alex Rodriguez, Canseco is more entertaining, provocative, and insightful than a hundred pious sportswriters decrying the degradation of the game of Ty Cobb, Joe Jackson, and Pete Rose.

While he clearly could have used a good fact-checker – his claim that he was the game’s only Latin star in the late-1980s would no doubt raise objections by Pedro Guerrero, Tony Fernandez, and Andres Galarraga, among others – the main points he makes in the book are unobjectionable and clearly accurate in their general thrust (aside from the business about how we should all fetch some hGH so as to live healthier, happier lives.)

It’s actually something of a shame that of all the topics addressed in the book, only the steroids issue has been widely noted, because Canseco says nothing really surprising or interesting about drugs. One would have to be either oblivious or willfully blind for ideological reasons not to have noticed that most of the big stars of the last decade and a half were juiced out of their minds; the only shock in Canseco’s naming of names is that he named so few.

As USA Today’s Bob Nightengale wrote, in a hilarious bit of read-between-the-lines journalism, “Are we mad now at Canseco for squealing on his friends? Are we upset he chose to protect others, wondering why he never publicly mentioned Alex Rodriguez, who used to stay at his Miami home?”

No, the better material has to do with racism and the press.

“White athletes like Mark McGwire, Cal Ripken Jr., and Brady Anderson were protected and coddled in a way that an outspoken Latino like me never would be,” Canseco writes. “The light-eyed and white skinned were declared household names. Canseco the Cuban was left out in the cold, where racism and double standards rule.”

He’s right.

Don’t believe him? Why exactly, then, was Canseco widely accused of juicing nearly from the moment he stepped in the majors while his equally grotesque teammate Mark McGwire was fawned over as the second coming of Jimmie Foxx, an All-American hero for a cynical age?

Or look to the reigning World Series champions, the Boston Red Sox. Pedro Martinez, who had the greatest run of any pitcher in the history of that team, was practically run out of town amid accusations that he is a jerk and a prima donna. The equally flamboyant and obnoxious Curt Schilling, who hasn’t done a 10th of what Pedro did for the Sox, is held up as a folk hero and icon. Why might that be? It’s good to see a ballplayer address these issues.

“Sometimes,” Canseco writes, “players need to maintain their intensity on the field by being intense off the field. But white guys who are that way get called gritty and tough and a real competitor. If it’s a black guy or a Latino, then the white media reports on the player’s difficult side as if it’s proof positive that he’s a bad person.”

One could come up with counterexamples, but anyone who reads much about baseball will have to admit Canseco has a point. If notorious good ol’ boy Will Clark had a dime for every time he was called “gritty” in print, he’d have doubled his salary; compare that to the way his peer Frank Thomas, an equally tough competitor who’s proved somewhat injury prone over the second half of his career, has been called names like “The Big Skirt” in print for years.

Not so important, but more entertaining, is Canseco’s blunt talk regarding two famous shortstops who have more in common than just their skill:

“I can just throw up watching the total phonies go to work, guys like Cal Ripken or Alex Rodriguez; everything out of their mouths sounds like it was tested by some kind of focus group beforehand. Alex, in particular, leaves most corporate spokesmen looking unpolished and overly sincere … As a player, he has no entertainment value.”

His point here – aside from saying the obvious about two players who must hold the career records for setting eyes rolling with their “Aw, gee” shtick – is that players are often judged by how well they deal with the press. There’s a reason that Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter sound like robots; it’s that if a ballplayer says anything the least bit interesting, it just becomes a bit of rope by which people try to hang him.

I’m glad Canseco never sounded like a robot, just as I’m glad Gary Sheffield was recently quoted as saying, “I’m not like Jason Giambi. I’m not going to sit here and cry.” The game needs more honesty and it needs more color, just as it needs less racism. It’s hard not to give Jose Canseco credit for pointing all that out, and it’s not surprising that no one seems to want to talk about the fact that he’s done so.