Jose Canseco is the T.S. Eliot of Twitter. But how does this washed-up baseball star and confessed steroid user manage to churn out an endless stream of brilliantly twisted tweets? Maybe he has help.

Jose Canseco's Twitter feed really is a precious diamond bobbing in Twitter's whirlpool of bullshit. His latest masterpiece:

Every day is an adventure for Canseco; following Canseco is the closest we'll come to following Odysseus on his journey home. He will inexplicably kill Al Gore, offer to hang out with a follower for $1,000 or announce that "the fbi will be at my house in 20 minutes kind of scared…" Right now he's having a meltdown after he was caught twitter-flirting with a fan. These antics have earned him more than 446,000 followers whose frenzy is matched only by fans of the equally strange @Horse_ebooks.

But is it really all Canseco? Some of Canseco's tweets come so close to perfect jokes that I've often wondered if a team of comedy writers isn't painstakingly crafting the Twitter character of "Jose Canseco," like Eastbound and Down's writers do his onscreen equivalent, Kenny Powers. If you've ever seen a boring Canseco interview, it's hard to believe that cubical brain is solely responsible for this incredible Twitter presence. And in fact Canseco had a ghost writer until January 16, 2010, when he announced that "I finally took over my twitter account, and you will get direct info from me here on out daily."

A recent interview with Canseco on the fairly obscure comedy podcast "The Champs"offers tantalizing clues to a Jose Canseco ghostwriting conspiracy. (It's the first where he talks about his Twitter fame, as far as I can tell.) In the interview, Canseco talks to the comedian Moshe Kasher about a tweet he'd made the previous day announcing, for some reason, that Al Gore was dead. (He wasn't dead.)

Which sparked this exchange about another (misspelled) tweet:

Kasher: Then you said today, 'What did you clowns learn yesterday except that Gore is not deed.'

[laughter]

Canseco: I can't claim that one.

What did Canseco mean by "I can't claim that one?" Who wrote the tweet, Canseco?

Even if Canseco isn't employing ghostwriters, he's clearly self-aware about the unhinged character he presents on Twitter. Throughout the interview he laughs loudest at his own tweets as they're read by his interviewers, and he apologizes for his many typos.

"Look I got big fingers. Sometimes things are really small so it fucks it up," he said.

At the end of the podcast, when asked if he had a message for listeners, Canseco said: "Slap a liar. Know a liar? Slap him across the face." So, he must write some of those tweets.

In any case, you should listen to the entire, very entertaining podcast here.

Update: Here is a completely baseless Twitter rumor from a copywriter in Vancouver. Just something to think about: