José Canseco: 1964—: Baseball Player

Suffering from a fractured left hand, Canseco played a reduced schedule in 1989. He nevertheless signed a five-year contract with the A's, set to begin in 1991, worth an estimated $23.5 million, which made him the highest-paid baseball player in the league at that time. The A's returned to the World Series again in 1989, this time facing their regional rivals, the San Francisco Giants. The A's took the title with Canseco posting a .357 batting average during the series. The team returned for a third consecutive appearance in the World Series in 1990, when the A's lost to the Cincinnati Reds.

Although he recovered from his hand injury, Canseco suffered from back problems in the 1990 season and was continually plagued by health problems for the remainder of his career. More troubling were the headlines Canseco garnered with his life off the field. In 1992 Canseco was arrested after he plowed his car into a car driven by his wife, Esther Canseco, in Miami. As part of a plea agreement to avoid conviction on the charge of aggravated assault, Canseco underwent counseling and fulfilled a community-service requirement. The couple subsequently divorced, and Canseco married a second time, to Jessica Sekely. The marriage proved equally turbulent, with Canseco arrested in Miami in 1997 after striking his wife while they were having an argument in a friend's car. Canseco again reached a plea agreement in January of 1998 and avoided jail time by agreeing to undergo counseling. The Cansecos had a daughter, Josie, who lived with her mother after the couple divorced in 1999.

Near the end of the 1992 season, the A's traded Canseco to the Texas Rangers, where he completed the season with a .233 batting average. In 1993 Canseco made his major-league debut as a pitcher with the Rangers, but an injury to his elbow, which later required surgery, cut the endeavor short. Canseco remained with the Rangers through the end of the 1994 season, when he was traded to the Boston Red Sox. He almost tied his career-high batting average with a .306 mark in the 1995 season, but injuries again limited his play the following season. Returning to Oakland as a free agent for the 1997 season, Canseco joined the Toronto Blue Jays in 1998 with a one-year contract worth over $2 million. Although he had a fairly good season with the team and hit a career-high forty-six home runs, Canseco was disappointed when the Blue Jays declined to re-sign him. "I just didn't think I was in their plans," he told Baseball Digest in August of 1999. "I think it was obvious last year at the All-Star break when I had twenty-four home runs and twenty-four stolen bases and they didn't re-sign me by then. Especially when I had approached them a couple of times."