Excerpt: 'Vindicated: Big Names, Big Liars, and the Battle to Save Baseball'

— -- The following excerpt of Jose Canseco's new book was provided to ABC News by the publisher, Simon Spotlight (a division of Simon and Schuster). The book will be published on April 1.

When someone gets around to writing the real history of baseball, I'm going to be remembered as the guy who did more to change the game than any other player. And I did it twice. I fundamentally changed the way the sport is played. The first time was when I introduced my fellow players to steroids, launching the Steroid Era, a decade that saw superhuman athletes breaking all of baseball's storied records. And the second time was when I saw that things were getting out of control, and that I had to tell the truth about what was going on.

Unfortunately, nobody wanted to hear the truth. I was excoriated by the press, booed by fans, and called a liar and a snitch by people who professed to care about the game. But here's the irony: nobody cared about the game as much as I did. And I have cared about it my whole life.

I was born in Cuba, and my parents moved to Florida when me and my twin brother, Ozzie, were just kids. I liked baseball from very early on, thanks to my father, who would take us out on weekend to teach us how to play. Or try, anyway. He seemed to enjoy telling us how terrible we were. But despite the insults, I refused to give up — maybe because I didn't want to be terrible, which I guess was his whole point.

We didn't have much money, but we did okay. And maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. As Joe DiMaggio once said, "A ball player's got to be kept hungry to become a big-leaguer. That's why no boy from a rich family ever made the big leagues."

When I was about eleven or twelve, I joined a local Little League, and my very first team was the Cincinnati Reds. I loved the uniform so much that I used to wear it to school under my regular clothes. The other kids made fun of me, but I didn't care. Baseball was already in my heart, my main interest in life.

In high school, I was kind of a runt — five eleven, 165 pounds — but I was already seriously into baseball, and everything I did, every minute of every day, was designed to make me a better player. It was a struggle. I had pretty good hand-eye coordination, and I had a good swing, but things didn't quite click, and I didn't make the varsity team until senior year.

On Saturdays, I'd always watch This Week in Baseball, a television show. My favorite player was Reggie Jackson, but not because I aspired to be like him. He was such a god that to even fantasize about hitting like that seemed almost sinful. It was enough to just sit quietly, in awe, and watch.

In 1982, I was drafted by the Oakland Athletics, and I got off to a slow but steady start. Before long, however, I had really improved my swing, and on good days I was knocking 400-foot homers out of the park. The fans loved it. I noticed early on that fans reacted more to home runs than to anything else that happened on the field. As I began to hit more and more home runs, I became more of a crowd favorite. Every time I was up at bat, they'd cheer like crazy. They were looking to be entertained, and I was looking to be entertaining.

In 1984, my mother finally succumbed to a long illness. Toward the very end, I went home to say good-bye to her. I sat next to her, on her bed. She had slipped into a coma, but I took her hand in both of mine and promised her that someday I would become the best baseball player in the world. I'm sure she heard me. I imagined her smiling on the inside and saying, "I know you will, hijo. I never doubted you. I'll be watching from up there."

A week after the funeral, still in Miami, still grieving, I went off to the gym, to try to sweat out some of the pain. I ended up running into a friend of mine, a guy from high school, a weight lifter, and he could see I was an emotional wreck. We got to talking. I told him about my mother, and about the promise I'd made, and he could see I was determined to reach my goal. Well, as they say, one thing led to another, and before I knew it, he was injecting steroids into my gluteus maximus. And that's how it started. It was that simple. I'm a kid in a gym, lost and weepy, and a friend offers me a way out. Or what I thought might be a way out.

Right after he shot me up, I half-expected to feel this huge rush, and that maybe I'd run into the street and flip cars over just for fun. After all, as a wrestler once put it, when you take steroids, you can just lie in bed and feel yourself grow. But that didn't happen. Nothing happened. I waited for that initial rush, and as I waited, I began to freak out a little. I wondered if I was going to develop a third eye, smack-dab in the middle of my forehead. Or if one of my arms was going to blow up like a balloon and pop. Or maybe I'd go home and look in the mirror and find a complete stranger staring back at me. None of that happened, of course. Nothing happened. At least at first. I finally noticed something about three weeks in, and even then the change was gradual. One day, I was doing my regular workout, but it somehow felt much more efficient than what I was accustomed to. I felt like I had more energy, more of a pump. Within a month, I started gaining weight and seeing some real definition, and as the weeks went by, I felt myself getting stronger and stronger. I felt good about myself, too, confident, and that gave me a genuine psychological edge. I began to think, Man, this stuff is really working!

At that point, I honestly came to believe that steroids were going to help me keep my promise to my dying mother — nothing would stop me from getting better at baseball, nothing would stop me from being the best — and that's when the game really took over my life. It was the only thing that mattered. I didn't do drugs, and a beer or two was about all I could handle. And sure, I found women wonderfully distracting. But at the end of the day, it was all about baseball. That's all that mattered. I loved the game. I lived and breathed and dreamed the game.

And I kept at it, stayed focused on the goal. Everything I did was designed to make me a better player.In 1986, I was named the American League's Rookie of the Year, and it began to look like I was on my way. But it wasn't happening by accident. After regular practice, while all the other players went off to the bars, I'd go to the gym and work out. On days off, I'd take more batting practice and hit the gym. I was going to turn myself into a baseball machine, for my mother, and I would do anything I had to do to get there. I read everything I could get my hands on about vitamins and supplements — even in body-building magazines! — and I scoured other publications for new studies on steroids, growth hormones, and other performance-enhancing drugs.

The industry was still in its infancy back then, but I found that exciting, and I experimented with different products, becoming my own guinea pig. I tried every combination you can imagine. I was testing it on myself, and retesting, and mixing and matching every product on the market, trying things no one had ever imagined, and I was doing it to turn myself into a super athlete. I even kept notes! I had a journal where I would keep track of every detail, how much of this or that, when, how I felt twelve hours later, a day later, and at the end of the week. I figured out how to eat to maximize the effectiveness of the steroids, how to train while taking them, and the best time of day to stick myself with the needle, during the season and in the off season. Before long, I was tipping the scales at 240 pounds, most of it muscle, so obviously I was doing something right.