The Personal Financial Problems of Jose Canseco: By Michael McArdle

           Last week I was watching a new documentary on A&E called “Jose Canseco: Last Shot” and it became apparent how bad this infamous major leaguer of the steroid era had fallen.  The entire hour felt like a ploy for the viewer to be sorry for him and I felt dirty even watching it, but it was very hard to turn away from the TV.  I’m writing about this documentary in this blog because a very large part of the storyline revolved around Canseco’s personal financial demise.  An enduring image that was left in my mind was a scene in which the 1988 MLB MVP broke through a fence and then glared through a window at his possessions in his vacant home that he had just foreclosed on.  Once the highest paid player in major league baseball, Canseco said he is now living check to check without a steady source of income.  He walked around his house complaining about how much work he had put into it, but I was saying to myself, “Why didn’t you use the money for house payments instead of putting them into your new pool?”  It was revealed that he’d lost money over the past 20 years on several failed investments along with 2 crippling divorces that cost him 8 million dollars each.  I’ve always felt that star athletes were immune from financial problems, but this documentary proved to me that anyone can lose their money.  To add to all of his problems, Canseco was served with legal documents in the stands of a baseball game for not honoring his contract with the Long Beach Armada minor league baseball team.  Although Canseco said that he wrote the book Juiced because he was mad at major league baseball and apologized to the players that he outed for steroids, all of these financial blunders lead me to believe that the book was 99.9% for the money (which is also strengthened by the fact that he wrote a sequel).

            I was cringing the entire time through this documentary because I felt Canseco was putting on a huge act to evoke sympathy.  But if you want to watch it, it will probably air again on the A&E network.  Here’s a link to an ESPN article about the documentary:  http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3655031