(not a photograph of Martin Rev)

I’m not usually in the habit of recommending items from Deadspin, but “A False Spring” author Pat Jordan’s recent account of his repeated attempts to secure an interview with Jose Canseco is one of the funnier hatchet jobs you’ll read this or any other year. Or at least the one with the most graphic, continued references to the condition of Jose’s penis. Anyhow, in a climate in which Canseco has gone from pariah to prophet, now back to pariah, the former slugger is all too aware there are powerful forces out to get him. From the Chicago Tribune’s David Haugh :

A courtesy cup of black coffee was waiting for Jose Canseco on Friday when he arrived at his seat inside a downtown bookstore to sign copies of his second tell-all about steroids and baseball, “Vindicated.”

Before Canseco took out a pen, he sent the beverage back.

“Who made this coffee? If you don’t know who made it, you’ve got to dump it,” Canseco snapped at a store employee. “No way they are going to get me.”

Wearing sunglasses he chose not to remove, Canseco called Major League Baseball a “powerful mafia,” gave a detailed account of how he once injected former White Sox teammate Magglio Ordonez with steroids inside the U.S. Cellular Field clubhouse and flexed an ego that has never needed enhancement.

About half an hour after Canseco refused his coffee in a paranoid snit, another worker returned with a fresh cup she said she had just made herself. “Good”thank you,” Canseco said.

Combative throughout the session, he grew most testy when Bryan Lang of suburban cable-access station psychobabbletv.com asked why he would “sell out his friends” among former MLB players. Lang had already annoyed Canseco by inadvertently sitting in a chair reserved for the author when his entourage arrived, and Canseco regarded the question as he might a fastball under his chin.

“I answered that already … and you’re arrogant by sitting in this seat when I got here and I won’t put up with this [stuff] so you need to get out of here,” Canseco said in a raised voice. “I’m the only one telling the truth here, and I deserve some respect.”

He claims his involvement with Ordonez was more direct, that Ordonez sought his advice on steroids during the ’01 season. He wanted to know how much they might cost per month and whether his testicles would shrink. Canseco described earning Ordonez’s trust enough to inject him “once or twice,” in a hidden area of the Sox clubhouse.

Asked if he injected any other member of the Sox during that season, Canseco mentioned former outfielder Dave Martinez. But his memory is fuzzy because Martinez didn’t play for the Sox in 2001. The two were teammates with Tampa Bay in 1999.