Jose Canseco

The son of a former oil executive, Jose Canseco was born in Havana; his family immigrated to Miami when he was an infant. Canseco joined the Oakland Athletics at twenty-one; within three years he had won the American League’s Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player Awards. He later admitted, more than a decade after becoming the first Major League Baseball player to hit forty home runs and steal forty bases in a single season, to using steroids. “Do I have any regrets or qualms about relying on chemicals to help me hit a baseball so far? To be honest, no, I don’t,” Canseco writes in his memoir, Juiced. “Maybe it bothers some people to think of our bodies as just a collection of those elements, but I find it comforting.”