The Goon Line 050: The length of Jose Canseco's Wikipedia page

Well, I’m back on the number of Friday’s Goon Line being divisible by five. HAPPY GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY! Please drop off your cards and gifts in Party Room 11 down the hall. Today I’d like to talk about a baseball player at the top of everyone’s minds and the middle of everyone’s hearts, Jose Canseco.¹

I don’t know baseball, but I do know my way around both pop culture and the internet. So despite my having zero knowledge of this man’s presence as it exists alongside America’s Pastime, my pastime is going deep on stupid shit that exists online, and Dr. Canseco is a real treasure trove there.

We’re going to begin, as the title suggests, with the fact that his Wikipedia page is really goddamned long — 9,553 words, to be exact. I did some “benchmarking,” if that’s what people who have a left brain hemisphere call it, to see how this page’s length compares to those of some Canseco contemporaries.

Mark McGwire: 4.180 words
Andre Agassi: 9,596 words²
Pete Sampras: 6,881 words
Andy Van Slyke: 1,099 words³
Wade Boggs: 2,755 words
Cal Ripken, Jr: 9,390 words
William “Refrigerator” Perry: 1,532 words

(“Contemporaries” in this case just means “other sports guy names I remembered from my childhood, I can’t be bothered to look this shit up.”)

I don’t even know how I ever got to Jose Canseco’s Wikipedia page in the first place, or when. I have a tic (yes, definitely just the one) where I become completely consumed by needing to look up the weirdest shit that pops into my head, so maybe that? I was probably telling my spouse I’d be Nomo and he could be Jose Canseco 38 times in a row and annoying the marital love right out of him in real time, so needed to take it online.

Another thing about Jose Canseco is that he has one of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time. He seems to have buttoned it up as of late, but perhaps, like, pre-El*n he was alllllways tweeting shit about, like, how strong he was, or misspelling his own name. I like his commitment to the bit about whoever this One Guy is, and I guess it’s Alex Rodriguez, but AGAIN, I AM NOT LOOKING IT UP AT THIS TIME OR EVER. Also, as someone who identifies as a Job Searcher, I am so hopeful this role is still open because I WILL be applying.

It is the second-best sports account, real or fake, on Twitter, bested only by Fake Michael Jordan. I was at a work event circa 2013, sitting on the floor of a hotel conference room with a bunch of other hung over corporate miscreants, laughing so hard at these tweets that I thought I was going to have to go to the hospital.

That kind of laughter brings me to the third and final piece of Canseco content I need to share with you, and that’s The Lonely Island’s 2019 visual poem, The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience.

I was on a plane from Chicago to Austin shortly after this was released and watched it three times in a row in the air while more than one person asked me if I was okay, because I was laughing so hard it looked like I was crying. I did not even know about the “Bash Brothers” until that day, but unapologetically consume everything The Lonely Island issues, and I still apologize to my rowmates for the Canseco-related HIJINKS I was pulling midair that day.

Anyway, Jose Canseco’s Wikipedia page is really long. HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!

1  I say this at least once a week, along with “BASEBALL STUFF!” and “GREAT GIFT, DAD!” The “Great gift, Dad” goof goes so deep that 20+ years ago, when my friends and I met an adult man who probably looked nothing like Cary Elwes whatsoever, we nicknamed him “Great gift, Dad” and forgot his actual name. I have always respected my elders.

2  Please pause your deep dive on Jose Canseco’s Wikipedia page to deal with this Twitter thread about Andre Agassi’s memoir. My husband read this book and said it is even more insane than this synopsis suggests. It is somewhere in a moving box in a storage unit, and I cannot wait to unpack it and dive in for myself, despite knowing as much about tennis as I do about baseball. Hey, it didn’t stop me from enjoying Challengers!

3  Van Slyke might not be a true Canseco peer, but he sure was some real hot shit among most third graders in Sewickley, Pennsylvania in 1989.