It's just so easy to turn down Buffoon Avenue when searching for Jose Canseco. Shoot, the man drew up the map himself: Left on Outrageous St., straight through the stop sign (don't even think about slowing down), right at Wasted Talent Drive, and pretty soon you're there.

	Cut by the Expos in the spring, Jose Canseco played for Triple-A Charlotte before retiring this week.

Packing heat, if at all possible.

Canseco made it that simple; over time, he became the punch line to most of his own favorite stories. He went from speeding tickets to Madonna to steroid rumors to baseballs bouncin' off his noggin with equal parts panache and clown routine. Half the time, you waited for the fright wig and red rubber nose to appear in the locker stall.

But you know the thing about all that? It's actually too easy. It becomes the most convenient dodge to consign Canseco to the Coulda Bin, because it is so much simpler than actually taking the time to reckon with his career in baseball.

That reckoning takes a few minutes. Because before he was a lounge act, Jose Canseco was a genuinely huge figure in baseball.

What you'll hear around the coffee press this week is Canseco's name being lumped in there with Dave Kingman's, the suggestion being that had Canseco managed to hang around at the major-league level a while longer, he might ultimately have been able to hit 500 home runs while still having no shot at the Hall of Fame.

It's the predictable comparison -- and it's a total insult to Canseco's body of work. It shouldn't be necessary to love Canseco as a guy (or even particularly like him) in order to appreciate the truth that, at a certain point in his career, he was as well-rounded a player as anyone in baseball.

Don't take my word for it; take Tony LaRussa's. LaRussa had Canseco in Oakland, beginning in the mid-1980s, and describes him as the most complete athlete he ever managed. Said LaRussa, "This guy really could run, and, when he was concentrating, play defense. And he loved to take the tough at-bat. Injuries just took the important part of his career from him."

It doesn't mean Canseco joins baseball's pantheon of immortals; it means Canseco was pretty amazingly good long before he was pretty amazingly obnoxious. Nine players in history have hit 400 home runs and stolen 200 bases; Canseco is one of them. He finishes with 462 home runs, 1,407 RBI and the 200 steals. You can't make up those statistics in the actual major leagues; you have to earn them.

Canseco was a pure showman, but even that obscures the point of his talent. He was a prodigious swinger at the plate -- prone to awe-inspiring whiffs and 450-foot homers, usually in the same game -- but controlled enough to have batted over .300 twice and to finish at a non-miserable .266 over 7,000-plus at-bats.

More than that, though, Canseco was, for quite a long time, the guy who made people lean forward in their seats every time he came to the plate. Barry Bonds is in that category now; Mark McGwire, Canseco's old Bash Brother, certainly held the distinction. There are others, no question. But Canseco was right there.

For more than a while, he was considered McGwire's superior, and it was a genuine distinction. Canseco was good enough to draw the compliment. And in the end, he and McGwire shared at least one commonality: Both players are classic What-Ifs in the baseball conversation, because so much of their career primes were lost to injury.

McGwire ultimately seemed twice as serious about finding the highest use of his talent; Canseco's game deteriorated under the blanket suspicion that he just didn't care enough to get better. Closer to the truth was that Canseco was in only his fourth full season, in 1989, when he first suffered significant injury. A year later, his back began to betray him, and there ensued a decade of on-again, off-again work, of schlepping his act from one destination to another.

No point in feeling sorry for the man; it is what it is. Canseco brought the substantial sum of baseball's ridicule on himself, and he never apologized for it, so you have to assume that he did things the way he decided he wanted to, for better and for worse. Now he says he'll write a tell-all book that names names (let's see him slip a steroid rumor past a publishing-house lawyer), and that'll pretty much cement Canseco's reputation as a vaudevillian rather than an athlete.

If there's any shame here at all, that's probably the one. Over time, Jose Canseco created exactly enough nuttiness and foolishness around him to throw a gauzy haze permanently over his baseball career. Lost in the cover-up is the notion that, once upon a time, the man really could play.

Mark Kreidler of the Sacramento Bee is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.