Jose Canseco Pleads Guilty in Federal Court

By BRETT POLLAKOFF

Updated 12:15 PM PST, Tue, Nov 4, 2008

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Former baseball superstar and self-proclaimed steroid user Jose Canseco appeared in a San Diego court room today, looking very thin in a suit that seemed cut for the barrel-chested slugger he once was. Canseco pleaded guilty in to a misdemeanor offense of trying to bring a fertility drug across the border from Mexico.The court appearance was for a preliminary hearing related to a smuggling violation that Canseco may have been involved with at the San Ysidro crossing of the Mexican border a few weeks ago.

Going into the hearing, Canseco was not charged with a crime. But he was detained for almost 10 hours because when authorities searched his vehicle, they found something called human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG), which has been known to be taken by men who have abnormally low testosterone levels as a result of using steroids.

Somewhat ironically, Canseco recently went on the record as saying he was "sorry" for outing his fellow baseball players in his book Juiced , which at the time he said he did because he was blackballed by the sport at the end of his career.

He appeared on an A&E network special a couple of weeks ago, and said that he shouldn't have written the book, and went on to say that he "regrets mentioning players (as steroid users). I never realized this was going to blow up and hurt so many people." As Michael Hiestand of USA Today wrote, that really didn't seem too tough to predict.