Craig Calcaterra of Hardball Talk recently checked up on Jose Canseco‘s ridiculous Twitter antics and had a bit of fun with it in an article.

“Why?”

That’s the only thing that ran through my head when I read the title of the article in my RSS feed.

Now it’s not my intent to pick on Craig, as he’s only one of the many who write about Canseco’s antics, but isn’t it about time we stop giving Canseco all this attention?

I do recognize the irony in writing an article about a person and imploring people to stop giving that person attention, but there’s a reason I unfollowed him, stopped reading articles about him, and just stopped caring about him.

God knows I understand why he appeals to people, as everybody loves a train wreck and so do I, but recently it has gotten to the point where it’s just this constant stream of crazy from Canseco.

In my opinion, there are two reasons for this:

1) He’s legitimately mentally ill and needs help.

2) He’s trolling for attention and will do anything to get it.

If it’s the first scenario, then constantly poking and prodding at somebody who needs mental help isn’t going to do them any favors. In a Twitterverse that is constantly about being morally holier than thou, I’m surprised people continue to mess with him just for the sake of messing with him even though just about everybody thinks he’s lost his marbles.

If it’s the second scenario, then his antics become far less entertaining, don’t they? Assuming he’s being genuine, his tweets are funny because they’re so unbelievable. But as a contrived pseudo-comedy account? Not all that amusing. If he’s just doing it for the attention now, then we’re the ones being trolled, aren’t we?

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Personally, I think that at some point he realized people loved it when he went on crazy rants, and now he’s just trying to play up to everybody’s expectation to get a constant flow of attention. Sad, but he wouldn’t be the first person to do it and he won’t be the last.

Either way, I honestly don’t get why people insist on continuing to feed him. Whether he’s mentally ill or trolling for attention or both, keeping him in the spotlight isn’t doing anybody any good.

Just stop.