Former Major League Baseball star Jose Canseco is choosing to pursue a career in professional wrestling. Canseco, 54, has signed a contract with the World Class Revolution promotion, based in Ardmore, Oklahoma. The company was formerly the Imperial Wrestling Revolution when it was founded by Jerry Bostic, before changing its name to World Class Revolution later that year.

"We couldn't be happier to welcome Jose into our family that represents equality, diversity, family, and love," Bostic wrote on Facebook. "Jose is without a doubt one of the greatest athletes professional baseball has ever seen being the first ever 40 home run/40 stolen base athlete in history. He was AL MVP, 6-time All Star, 2-time World Series Champion, and hit an amazing 462 home runs in his career.

"Professional wrestling and our other avenues of business have enabled us to start becoming a multimedia company which has always been our goal. We're starting to effectively combine pop culture with our wrestling product and we're seeing great results thus far and we're just getting started. I would like to personally thank both Jose and his agent Morgan for this opportunity to do business together."

Canseco played in the MLB from 1985-2001, which most of his time was spent with the Oakland A's. In 2005, Canseco revealed that he used performance enhancing drugs while playing for the MLB, and that 85% of players used them as well. Following this admission, Canseco wrote a series of books and conducted several interviews on the matter. Canseco has spent most of his career post-2005 playing for independent baseball promotions. He also took a chance at MMA in 2009, but it was a losing effort.

Currently, World Class Revolution features several former WWE talent, including Jim Ross, Rey Mysterio, MVP, Scott Steiner, Ryback, Tatanka, Jack Swagger, Chavo Guerrero, John Morrison, Billy Gunn, Carlito, Alberto El Patron, among others. The WCR Champion is MVP, and the tag team champions are Marshall and Ross Von Erich, sons of legendary World Class Championship Wrestling star Kevin Von Erich.

Source: Sports Illustrated