Would you believe Jose Canseco is still playing professional baseball?
Well, he is, kind of. According to this fascinating story in the Valley Morning Star, he turned up in the Texas Winter League in Harlingen, Texas and went 3 for 20 in six games.
You should know that the Texas Winter League is not a serious baseball league, at least not in the way you're used to thinking about baseball leagues. When Canseco arrived he didn't even know who he was going to be playing for. There were other guys well into their 40s out there as well.
One of them even rode up on a bicycle.
As it turned out Canseco, 48, played for the Brownsville All-Stars and the Rio Grande Valley WhiteWings. About 100 people were there to watch, plus Valley Star writer Adam Lawson who spent the day with Canseco gathering the former slugger's thoughts on all the stuff you'd expect Jose Canseco to have thoughts about.
"They're talking about taking players' complete careers away from them," Canseco said of the Hall of Fame. "That's ridiculous, that's so stupid. That's ignorance. People who have a vote for the Hall of Fame are making big mistakes because there are already players in the Hall of Fame that used chemicals."
Also:
"If you told me you have to use one of the three: you have to smoke cigarettes, drink or use steroids, I definitely would use steroids because I know the other two will kill you for sure," Canseco said.
And so on and so forth.
Canseco says he is working on a reality show called "I Quit," in which he helps people get fired from jobs they don't like. He wasn't sure whether or not it was in production.
"I think I shot a pilot for that," he said.
Canseco was a six-time All-Star between 1985 and 2001 and a two-time World Series champion (Oakland in 1989, New York Yankees in 2000). He finished his career with 462 home runs.
His last MLB appearance was in 2001 for the Chicago White Sox. Since then he has seemingly been on a constant search for attention, turning up in several reality shows, dabbling in celebrity boxing and mixed martial arts, maintaining a strange Twitter account and generally just rooting out a camera however he can.
In his book "Juiced," which came out in 2005, he said 85 percent of MLB players, including himself, were using steroids.
