As he is dragged in screaming apoplexy from the courtroom in the underrated 1997 film, "Liar Liar," the reformed lawyer played so riotously by Jim Carrey implores the bailiffs not to jail him for contempt because he has just arranged to play baseball with his neglected young son.

"No, don't, no, I'm Jose Canseco!" Carrey screams. "I'm Jose Cansecoooooo!"

Today, of course, when adults pretend to be Jose Canseco, they must first memorize the names of a few dozen illegal pharmaceuticals, which isn't a lot of fun unless your idea of a good time is torturing the life out of Major League Baseball.

The real Jose Canseco, therefore, continues to have a real, real good time.

This week, the muscular has-been carnival act and former Bash Brother surfaced with an unaffiliated minor-league baseball team called the San Diego Surf Dawgs, then yesterday asked to be traded to the Long Beach Armada, the better to suit his daughter's custody arrangements. How that would impact Jose Canseco bobblehead night with either organization wasn't immediately clear, but the impact of Canseco barking like a Sea Dawg in any public forum, in what baseball only hopes is the post-steroids era, is still remarkably significant.

Any time Jose talks anymore, baseball is forced to respond, which says a lot about which party is more credible on the issue.

"Complete nonsense," went baseball's official response this time, which was generally a safe evaluation of Jose's public discourse for most of his career, but no more.

Ever since "Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big," Canseco's 2005 autobiographical screed, baseball and its commissioner and its complicit players union have been playing catchup with the truth about cheating in the game. In chapter after chapter that led directly to the Congressional hearings that finally embarrassed the game into adopting at least the framework of an effective drug policy, Canseco took readers right into the Oakland shower stalls where he injected Mark McGwire's backside with illegal anabolics.

Canseco named McGwire and former Rangers teammate Rafael Palmeiro as habitual and even gleeful steroid stackers, and both ultimately were disgraced. No one who first joined in the outcry and the predictable trashing of Canseco's credibility has persisted, just as no one who threatened to sue Canseco has done so, probably because the damage done by what Canseco wrote isn't half the devastation that would likely result from the discovery phase of a high-profile trial.

The up-to-the-minute box score line for suits-filed, libel actions, formal slander accusations and reputations wrongly defamed still reads 0-0-0-0.

It's little less than astounding, when you read "Juiced," that baseball can be backed into a rhetorical corner by a cheating low brow like Canseco, whose idea of blowing off steam is to take an assault weapon known as a street sweeper and fire it at sharks when he went deep-sea fishing, who would hold impromptu "beauty contests" in his hotel room with the winner gaining the "honor" of accompanying him in public that night, and who, prior to Congressional intervention, rhapsodized rather than condemned steroids.

"Steroids, used correctly," Canseco writes in "Juiced," "will not only make you stronger and sexier, they will also make you healthier. Steroids will give you a better quality of life and also drastically slow down the aging process."

Really?

Phone messages left for Ken Caminiti for comment on how steroids slow the aging process were not returned. Probably because he's dead. Common side effects of steroids -- coronary artery disease and an enlarged heart -- killed him not two years ago at the age of 41.

Caminiti, who admitted to using steroids to help himself to the National League's MVP award in 1996, estimated to Sports Illustrated a few years later that half of the players in baseball were steroid users. Canseco, in "Juiced," put the number at 80 to 85 percent and proudly admitted to proselytizing for the Church of Dianabol.

And to that point, baseball's official response was effectively, "huh?"

"They're mafia, point blank, they're mafia," Canseco said, accusing baseball of cutting a deal with Palmeiro to discredit him, then making public Palmeiro's failed drug test for fear that Congress would find out. "I don't think Major League Baseball is enthused about finding out the truth. There needs to be a major cleanup in Major League Baseball."

In other words, Jose Canseco is saying that it's up to baseball to keep baseball safe from people like Jose Canseco.

A movie about all of this Canseco already has promised. Too bad it won't be as funny as "Liar Liar."