Jose Canseco

1964-

Cuban baseball player

Sportswriters once chronicled Jose Canseco's exploits both on and off the baseball diamond with a mix of reverence and disbelief. The Oakland Athletics (A's) outfielder hit impressive home runs, helped take his team to three American League pennants and a World Series win, and was the first baseball player in history to achieve the "40-40" record: 40 home runs and 40 bases stolen in a season. Canseco attained a certain notoriety off the field as well, running into trouble with the law over fast cars and guns, and was accused of using steroids. Canseco denied this last charge vehemently, but after his career ended, he made headlines once again by claiming that a large percentage of players, perhaps as high as 85 percent, used the illicit substances to improve their performance.

Cuban-Born

Canseco and his fraternal twin Oswaldo were born in Havana, Cuba, on July 2, 1964, to Jose and Barbara Canseco. In December of 1965, the family, which included an older sister, left Cuba and settled in Opa-Locka, Florida. At Coral Park High School, Canseco was a talented, if somewhat slight of frame ball player who did not make the varsity team until his senior year. A scout for the Oakland A's, a fellow Cuban, discovered him, and he was a 15th-round draft pick in 1982. He first played for the Rookie League or farm teams in several states before making his major-league debut in September of 1985 in an A's game against Baltimore.

By 1986, Canseco's impressive hitting power had earned him the American League (AL) Rookie of the

Year title. Two years later, he declared his intention to set a baseball first, the 40-40, and did it on September 23, 1988, in an A's game against the Milwaukee Brewers. He was named the AL's Most Valuable Player (MVP) that season, and often earned comparisons to Reggie Jackson , who praised his talents. Canseco was famous for his at-bat twitches, but the quirk only seemed a warm-up to the real stunt: soaring home runs. At Game 4 of the American League Championships in Toronto in 1989, Canseco hit the ball into the fifth deck of the vast new Toronto Sky Dome that estimates pegged as a 540-foot hit.

Starred on Star Team

The A's won that Series against Toronto, and took the World Series title that year against Bay Area rivals the San Francisco Giants. Canseco ended the season with a.269 average. He was signed to a record-setting five-year, $23.5 million contract, but injuries hampered his 1990 season. Though the A's made it into the next World Series, they lost to the Cincinnati Reds. In 1991, the A's failed to make the playoffs.

At the height of his career, Canseco was inarguably baseball's biggest celebrity. He was swarmed by fans everywhere he went, and was once even spotted leaving the apartment of sexy pop-singer Madonna. Several runins with authorities added to his cultivated bad-boy image: he racked up speeding tickets in the Porsches and Lamborghinis he collected, kept a pet cougar at his Miami home, and was once arrested for carrying a loaded semiautomatic pistol. Promoters of a baseball-card show sued him for being a no-show, and Canseco even had a "1-900-234-JOSE" hotline, which cost fans $2 during the first minute and $1 minute thereafter. Through it all Canseco had a problematic relationship with sports journalists, who were awed by his innate talents but put off by his ego. "Canseco is a baseball virtuoso, an athletic flower that blooms once a century," wrote Rick Reilly in Sports Illustrated. "We know this because he mentioned it the other day."

Surprise Trade

Canseco, who had bulked up considerably since his high-school days, was also rumored to be a steroid user. He categorically denied the charges. "No. 1, I take it as a personal attack on me and my race," Canseco fumed about the matter in a 1995 interview with Barry M. Bloom in Sport. Between the 1991 and 1992 seasons, Canseco seemed to lose his edge. At the time, his marriage to Esther Haddad, Miss Miami 1986, was disintegrating, and in February of 1992 he was arrested after chasing and hitting Haddad's car on the highway with his Porsche. He avoided jail by agreeing to court-ordered psychiatric treatment, and later said that the therapy had helped him immensely in dealing with some of the issues in his life.

At the time, however, Canseco also had a troubled relationship with A's manager Tony LaRussa that was often hinted at in veiled comments each made to the press. On August 31, 1992, after a dismal summer, Canseco was traded two hours before the season trading deadline. He was actually in the on-deck circle at the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum, about to go to bat, when he was called in and told the news. To be traded in itself was a shocking way to end his career with the A's, but its suddenness seemed designed to humiliate Canseco. A's general manager Sandy Alderson discussed the matter with Bloom, in the Sport article, a few years later. "Jose had lost his desire to be a player," Alderson asserted. "He had adopted a wish to be an entertainer in a broader sense without regard to being a baseball player. That didn't work anymore."

Years after A's management had made the infamous Canseco trade, emotions still ran high over LaRussa's role in it. Neither had spoken to one another since, though LaRussa did tell Barry M. Bloom in Sport that he still believed Canseco was "the most talented player I have ever managed." He also reflected back on comments Canseco had made at the time, specifically those in which the athlete asserted that the A's would have never traded a player like Cal Ripken, Jr. or Kirby Puckett so ignominiously. "If Jose would have taken care of his business like Puckett and Ripken, which is be there every day and care about teammates and the outcome of the game and personal performance, we would have never traded Jose either," LaRussa told Bloom. "He stopped caring. We couldn't get him back on track."

Career Statistics

Traded for three players to the Texas Rangers, Canseco had another bad season in 1992 and an even worse year the next, when he was mocked by fans after a fly ball bounced off his head and over the fence. After two seasons with the Rangers, he was traded to the Boston Red Sox before the start of the 1995 baseball year, and went back to Oakland in 1997 for a season. He performed well for the Toronto Blue Jays in 1998, enjoying his best season in several years, but the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were the only team to bid for him at the close of the year. The Anaheim Angels signed him in late 2000, but released him from his contract before the season began. He was the Yankees' designated hitter for a time, but did not play in the pennant race that brought the famed post-season "Subway Series" against the New York Mets.

Canseco still told sportswriters that he hoped to hit 500 career home runs, which he believed would be the ticket to a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. He spent what would be his final season with the Chicago White Sox, where his uneven hitting of the past few seasons continued (at one point in the season, he struck out 15 times in just nine games). What would become his last career home run, No. 462, came on October 3, 2001, in a Sox-Yankees game in New York. His future was uncertain, but he vowed never to retire. "One thing is I'm not a quitter. I never have been and never will be," Canseco told Chicago Tribune sportswriter Paul Sullivan, even as news hit that the Sox's Frank Thomas would return for the team's final outing against Minnesota, making Canseco "expendable," as Sullivan wrote. Yet Canseco remained optimistic. "It's going to take a lot more than that to get me out of the game."

Announced Retirement

On May 13, 2002, Canseco announced his retirement. His agent, Alan Nero, issued a statement that explained Canseco was quitting the Charlotte Knights, a farm team in the Chicago White Sox organization, for personal reasons, including a desire to spend more time with his five-year-old daughter, Josie, from his second marriage in 1996. (The union with Jessica Seikaly, a former waitress at a Hooters restaurant, had also ended in divorce.)

Canseco's 462 home-run total stood, 38 short of his oft-stated career goal. In an ESPN Radio interview, he claimed to have been blackballed by the major-league team owners, and hinted that he would expose baseball's seamier side in a tell-all autobiography. A Miami Herald writer, Greg Herald, asserted that Canseco should exit the game more gracefully. "Get out with a little class," Herald urged. "Retire right. Instead, inadvertently, Canseco is giving a public seminar on how not to make that ego-defying leap from star to ex/former/used-to-be."

Few sports pundits believed that Canseco would, in the end, be admitted to the Hall of Fame, despite his impressive 40-40 first. Gary Peterson, summarizing Canseco's early promise and tragic decline in a Contra Costa Times article published by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, recalled that Canseco "arrived in the major leagues at the speed of sound.… He wasn't the architect of the A's revival, but he did a lot of the heavy lifting." Peterson noted that it was at the start of the 1990s that the gifted player, who "seemed to have an intuitive feel for the game," began to lose his focus. "Ten years ago Canseco seemed on the fast track to Cooperstown," Peterson wrote. "Five years ago you could incite a spirited debate by questioning his candidacy for the Hall of Fame. Now? It's not even a discussion."

Made Claims of Steroid Use

Within a week of retiring, Canseco was back in the news after declaring in a Fox Sports Net interview that steroid use, contrary to his past assertions, was rampant in major-league baseball. "Steroids completely changed baseball," Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service writer Skip Bayless quoted him as saying. "That's why guys are hitting 50, 60, 75 home runs." When pressured for more specifics, Canseco declared that his forthcoming book would provide details about his own steroid use and that of other players. Bayless also wrote that Canseco had often asserted that he "could have hit 600 if I could have stayed healthy," and theorized that because of steroid abuse, the player "got too big and strong for his frame. His joints and connective tissue couldn't bear up under his rippled bulk and the unnatural power it could unleash. So one reason Canseco was able to hit 462 homers was also a reason he couldn't stay healthy enough to hit 600."

Chronology

A similar charge regarding the widespread steroid use was made by former National League MVP Ken Caminiti just days later in the press. Caminiti claimed that as many as 50 percent of all players used performance-enhancing drugs, thought to cause testicular cancer, heart disease, infertility, and the mood swings known as "'roid rage," while Canseco's claims pegged the number at 85 percent. An onslaught of stories in the media centering on the ethics of steroid use followed. Many sportswriters noted that while a drug-testing policy was sometimes called for in professional baseball, it was thought that the powerful players' union would categorically reject any such changes.

Arrested for Nightclub Brawl

On Halloween of 2001, Canseco and his brother Ozzie were involved in a Miami nightclub brawl and were arrested. They later rejected plea agreements on the felony charges and the cases were slated to go to trial in November of 2002. If convicted, Canseco could receive a maximum sentence of 31 years. The charges seemed to further doom his goal of entering the Baseball Hall of Fame.

When Canseco retired, he was one of just nine major-league players who had hit 400 home runs and stolen 200 bases or more as well. Seven of the other eight had been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame already, and though Canseco was the first to ever make the 40-40 mark, many sportswriters noted that his contributions to baseball were overshadowed by the controversies he instigated. As Herald wrote, "Everybody discounts his chances to be voted into the Hall of Fame because nobody seems able to stay focused on the talent that otherwise would make Cooperstown a logical destination.… The injuries, the speeding tickets, the steroid rumors, the divorces (and Madonna!), that fly caroming off his cap, the dark paranoia-all that static obscuring all that skill."

Awards and Accomplishments

CONTACT INFORMATION

Address: Jose Canseco, c/o Major League Baseball, 75 Ninth Ave., New York, NY 10011. Fax: (212) 485-3456. Phone: (212) 485-3182.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Periodicals

"Analysis: Media Watch - Baseball's steroid scandal has media crying foul on players." PR Week (June 24, 2002): 12.

"Back to b(A's)sics." Sports Illustrated 86 (February 10, 1997): 14.

"Baseball: No plea agreement for Cansecos." Sports Network (August 23, 2002).

Bayless, Skip. "Jose Canseco, simply, may be waxing outrageous." Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (May 17, 2002).

Bloom, Barry M. "Monster basher." Sport 86 (June 1995): 87.

Fimrite, Ron. "Kiss that one goodbye." Sports Illustrated 65 (July 7, 1986): 28.

Gammons, Peter. "The summer of his discontent." Sports Illustrated 71 (October 2, 1989): 72.

Hagen, Paul. "Jose Canseco had it all, then lost it, and other notes." Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (May 17, 2002).

Herald, Greg. "Canseco needs to exit with class." Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (May 14, 2002).

Heredia, Christopher. "Steroids play games with vital hormones." San Francisco Chronicle (June 10, 2002): A6.

"Jose Canseco Retires." New York Times (May 14, 2002): D6.

Kroichick, Ron. "Jose Canseco." Sport 83 (April 1992): 20.

Kurkjian, Tim. "Broken string (Struggles of the Oakland A's)." Sports Illustrated 75 (September 30, 1991): 60.

——. "By the numbers." Sports Illustrated 77 (August 17, 1992): 98.

——. "Home run derby." Sports Illustrated 75 (August 19, 1991): 52.

Montville, Leigh. "Texas-sized trade." Sports Illustrated 77 (September 14, 1992): 36.

Olson, Stan. "Jose Canseco delivers in Knights' win." Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (April 26, 2002).

Peterson, Gary. "Canseco allowed his star to burn out." Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (May 13, 2002).

Price, S.L. "Life Is Beautiful." Sports Illustrated 90 (March 22, 1999): 64.

Reilly, Rick. "Whaddya say, Jose?" Sports Illustrated 73 (August 20, 1990): 42.

Roderick, Joe. "Canseco's comments bother Bonds." Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (May 21, 2002).

Rodriguez, Juan C. "Canseco retires 38 homers short of 500." Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (May 13, 2002).

Rogers, Phil. "Like him or not, Jose Canseco creates excitement." Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (May 18, 2002).

Scher, Jon. "Bashed." Sports Illustrated 76 (February 24, 1992): 89.

Sherrington, Kevin. "Canseco book would shed light on steroids." Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (May 26, 2002).

Sorci, Rick. "Jose Canseco 1988 A.L. MVP (Interview)." Baseball Digest 61 (June 2002): 61.

Sullivan, Paul. "Canseco performs a Ruthian feat." Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (August 1, 2001).

——. "Canseco remains puzzled by release from Angels." Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (August 7, 2001).

——. "Was this Canseco's last clout?" Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (October 3, 2001).

Whitley, David. "Canseco ready to bash again with the truth." Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (May 22, 2002).

Sketch by Carol Brennan