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Former Athletics slugger Jose Canseco gets brutally honest on ‘Beefcake Book’ he sent Madonna
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- Former Athletics slugger Jose Canseco gets brutally honest on ‘Beefcake Book’ he sent Madonna
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Former Athletics slugger Jose Canseco has again placed the franchise's star-studded past at the center of one of baseball's more unusual celebrity crossovers, revisiting the "Beefcake Book" he says he sent Madonna during the early 1990s.
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The Canseco Beefcake Book story, long treated as part clubhouse lore and part pop-culture curiosity, resurfaced after ESPN's Jeff Passan shared a clip on X, formerly Twitter, in which Canseco described how he worked with longtime team photographer Michael Zagaris after batting practice to create an album for Madonna.
"Madonna wanted to know what Jose Canseco looked like outside of a uniform. So after batting practice one day, Canseco went for an impromptu photo shoot with Michael Zagaris and put together what would be known as his Beefcake Book — an album of glamour shots to send to her."
In the clip, Canseco said Madonna's request prompted him to ask Zagaris, known throughout baseball as "Z," to take photos that showed more than his standard Athletics uniform:
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"Madonna wants to see what I look like with my uniform on, so I spoke with Z about taking some pictures, not nude but pretty close," Canseco said. "Madonna wants a front view, side view, back view, whole combinations, just to see what I really look like, what she was getting herself into."
Canseco's account cast the photoshoot as deliberate and uncomfortable rather than romantic. He said Madonna liked the pictures, but he also claimed he did not feel the same attraction toward her, adding a blunt wrinkle to a story that has followed him for decades.
The anecdote remains tied to the Athletics ' larger-than-life era, when Canseco's fame extended well beyond baseball. With Passan's post drawing renewed attention, the Beefcake Book has returned as a bizarre but memorable piece of 1991 sports-celebrity mythology. The renewed discussion also folds Zagaris' photos back into the wider Madonna-Canseco rumor from 1991.
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