Juiced (18 page)

If you can incorporate all of that with mass and speed, then you have a winning combination. Despite the lingering fear of steroids, I believe that the era we are now entering, when developments like cloning and gene therapy are becoming a reality, will also see steroids be declassified from the same category as damaging drugs like cocaine.

If you do steroids properly for long enough and know what you're doing, the powers you gain can feel almost superhuman.

Besides the boost to your strength and confidence level, you start running faster. Your hand-eye coordination and muscle-twitch fibers get faster. Your bat speed increases. You feel more powerful, and you can use a heavier bat without sacrificing any bat speed, which is the most important thing.

Bat speed is obviously the key to baseball. You never want to lose bat speed, but you also want to use as big a bat as you can.

As you get stronger, you can use a bat with more ounces, and that's devastating for pitchers, because when you have a larger mass hitting a smaller mass, the larger mass always wins. But the added strength isn't even the most important benefit for a baseball player. No, what makes even more of a difference in terms of performance is the added stamina it gives you all year round. On the last day of the season, you have the same strength and feel as strong as you did the first day of spring training.

That's all-important over the course of the six weeks of spring training and then the long line of regular-season games that follow. Players who aren't using steroids inevitably get tired and lose strength from month to month. It gets harder and harder to maintain your level of performance as the season goes on.

Baseball players have an advantage over a lot of other athletes when it comes to steroids, because they're not trying to get to 300 or 350 pounds, the way some wrestlers or football players do. Most baseball players use steroids the way they are supposed to be used.

It's pretty simple, really. You need more steroids to gain more weight, so you inject more. But before you know it, you need to inject even more steroids to gain more weight. That's how it works. After a while, the effect is nullified. Your receptors can handle only so much testosterone, for instance, over a given period of time. Anything beyond that is wasted, and worse, it can endanger your liver, which needs enough time to filter all these chemicals out of your body.

Think of steroids like alcohol: One or two drinks a day is fine, but if you sit there and knock down twenty drinks a day, your liver's going to turn on you. Your filtration system can only cleanse so many liters of blood within a given period of time. So when you're constantly poisoning your body, your liver loses its ability to function efficiently, and you end up with liver failure.

But that only happens with steroids when you are dealing with unsupervised amounts. Every body is different. If you're going to use steroids, it's critical that you go to a doctor and get a total physical, to find out exactly what physical shape you are in and how your body functions. You must have them analyse your enzymes and your blood to make sure you don't have diabetes, any heart blockage, heart palpitations, or heart murmurs.

If you're in great physical condition to begin with, steroids are going to help you. But if you've got physical problems, you have to be careful. Using steroids could help you, but then again, they could activate some dormant problem in your system and hurt you. I don't believe steroids, or growth hormones, are for everyone. But they can benefit many people if used properly. And, for baseball players, there are very strong economic incentives to getting that kind of a boost for your strength, power, endurance, and ability to come back from injuries. If you can maintain your peak stamina and strength over the course of an entire season, that can easily mean a gain of twenty or thirty home runs-which in turn can mean a $40 million difference in your contract. For that matter, it could mean the difference between having a job and not having a job. It does make a huge difference. How many young players would pass up a chance to make that much more money?

Let's get back to the example of Tejada, my former teammate in Oakland. I can't say for sure whether he went on to do steroids after we talked about it. But in the years that followed he obviously pushed himself to an amazing performance record. And what did he get in return? He signed a huge contract with the Baltimore Orioles before the 2004 season, for something like $72 million over six years. It was the biggest contract in the history of that franchise. Those same economic realities that have changed Miguel Tejada's life are what drive so many other players toward using steroids today. And-testing or no testing-many will continue to use them so long as the financial payoff is so dramatic.

Today, Tejada has turned into one of the best players in the game. But when I played with him, he was as raw as they come.

Keep in mind, this was a kid who might as well have been born on a different planet. His parents lived in a little shantytown called Bani in the Dominican Republic, forty miles outside of the capital of Santo Domingo. Tejada's mother couldn't afford to see a doctor while she was pregnant with him; she couldn't even afford to take a break from her job until just before he was born. He was the eighth kid in his family, and soon enough, like all the others, Tejada was working to help the family survive. He would shine shoes or move concrete blocks or any other odd jobs he could find.

Do you want to tell me that a kid like that, growing up in such a poverty-stricken family, wouldn't jump at a chance to help them all out? For all I know, Miguel Tejada did it in the old fashioned way. But could you blame a guy for taking steroids instead?

Steroids used to be mysterious to most people, but those days have passed. The simple truth is, it's not that hard to tell when someone is using steroids. You just have to trust your eyes. If someone adds a huge amount of muscle and does it quickly, you know he's using steroids. There's just no other way to do it.

This might shock some people, but I have been amazed by some young players who chose not to use steroids. They are the exceptions. Take another young player from that 1997 Oakland A's team: Ben Grieve, son of former Texas Rangers executive Tom Grieve. Let me tell you, Ben Grieve was a kid who needed to take steroids. He had a slow bat, slow feet, and average ability. The A's actually drafted him in the first round in 1994, but that was seen by many of us as a matter of politics, a favor to his father.

Ben always seemed physically weak to me-and you know, when you're a physically weak player competing against a lot of big, strong guys, that has to play havoc with your mind, your confidence, and your performance. Just look at Grieve's stats: He hit .264 in 2001, playing for Tampa Bay. The next season he finished with a batting average of .251. The next year it was .230. And have you seen him play the outfield? He has a slow bat, no hand speed, no power, nothing. He's taking up a roster spot some kid could definitely use.

So I don't believe Ben Grieve had the ability to play at the major league level. But after he was given that opportunity, I could have taken Grieve and turned him into a stud. He would have been the perfect kid to benefit from the combination of steroids and growth hormone. If I'd had the chance to work with him for four months, I could have turned him into a power hitting machine.

You work on the quick muscle-twitch fiber. You work on putting on weight in the right areas. You work on his strength. If I'd gotten to him early, worked on him physically, and put him on the right diet, you would have seen a 50 percent improvement from him.

Tejada always had talent, and he had a good throwing arm from the first time I saw him at spring training in 1997. But his numbers tell a story, too. That first year, when we were teammates, he was only with the A's long enough to play in twenty-six games-which tells you something right there. He hit all of .202 in those ninety-nine at-bats that year. The next year he played in more than 100 games and hit .233. Now look ahead a few years to 2002, the season he ended up as American League MVP. That was the first season he hit better than .275. It took him that long.

Tejada finished with good numbers, batting .308, good power numbers, thirty-four homers, and 131 runs batted in. He wasn't a unanimous pick for MVP, the way I'd been, but it was pretty close. Tejada had to wait out one more year in Oakland where the owner, Steve Schott, came right out and said he was too cheap to pay him enough to keep him with the A's, and then he got his big payday.

It's amazing to me to look at Tejada now, because I remember seeing him when he was a skinny rookie. A few years later, he pumped up like a balloon. I remember one year he came in really big after the off-season and I was almost laughing the first time I got a look at him.

"What the hell is that?" I said.

It looked kind of funny, but when you're already talented, the way he was, why not add to the package? He gained some strength, some more power, and all of a sudden his numbers were way up there. His new pumped-up body helped him move up to become one of the top three shortstops in the major leagues, along with Alex Rodriguez and Nomar Garciaparra, before Alex changed positions when he was traded to the New York Yankees. I don't put Derek Jeter in that top group, but I'm impressed by how he became such a first-rate player without using steroids. And if he'd used steroids he'd be even better.

Tejada set himself up-himself and his family back home in the Dominican Republic. All he had to do was make himself bigger and stronger, and for Tejada that paid off. Some people, like me, have done so by using steroids. That might sound like some kind of pact with the devil. But I'd call that a good business decision, and a good life decision.

17. The Night My Daughter Saved My Life

If anything, I have more of a temper than Jose. He just
walks away from the situation if we're arguing. I think
his first wife knows that and I know that, but
everybody else believes what they want to believe.
-
JESSICA CANSECO,
Sports Illustrated, 1999

Jessica and I had our share of disagreements, as I've said. Like me, she's a strong personality, and when you put two strong personalities together, chances are good that some sparks are going to fly. For that matter, I haven't always handled myself well. Back in November 1997, after I spent that one season back with the A's, Jessica and I started arguing while we were in a friend's car. She was in the passenger seat, I was in the back, and when I couldn't get her attention any other way, I pulled her hair. The whole thing got out of hand from there, and by the time we got back to her place we were having a serious argument.

Just to scare me, Jessica locked the security gates at her house so I couldn't get out, and then called the police. That started a whole legal process. But that was an isolated incident, and I don't think it was fair to label me a wife-beater, the way the media did, because of one incident. I've actually heard people chant that at games: Wife beater! Wife beater! Maybe those fans assumed that because I was a big, muscular guy, I was some kind of robot, but I'm not-and it hurt. The same thing goes for the media, which wrote some pretty awful, and unfair, things about me after that incident with Jessica.

Around that time, we decided to separate. Nothing was ever very clear, but eventually, after talking about it a few times, we said," Yeah, let's try to spend some time apart and see how it goes."

I agreed to it, even though I think we still loved each other, and I was sure we would end up back together.

Throughout that time, though, we still talked a lot. One day I was trying to reach her on the phone, but I couldn't. That seemed odd, so I had a friend of mine who works for one of the airlines look into it for me. He gave me a call at my house in Weston, Florida, and he seemed worried about coming right out and giving me the news.

"Where is she?" I asked him.

"Jose, you're not going to like this." he said.

"Where is she?" I asked again.

"Kansas City," he said.

"Kansas City?!" I said.

"Kansas City," he said.

I knew what that meant. She'd flown to Kansas City to be with Tony Gonzalez, the Kansas City Chiefs' tight end. Tony was a great athlete, and played both football and basketball back in college. I had a lot of respect for him. But I couldn't believe this was happening. This was the first time I'd ever gone through something like this, and it had me in total shock. I couldn't think of anything to do but keep trying to reach Jessica on her cell phone.

Finally, she answered.

"Where are you?" I asked her.

She didn't say anything.

"Jessica, where are you?"

"Well..." she started to say, but then stopped.

"I know where you are," I told her. "I tracked you to Kansas City. I know you're with Tony."

For a while, she didn't seem to know what to say.

"That's right," she said finally. "I am with Tony."

I held the phone in my hand, but I couldn't have formed words if I'd wanted to. Finally, I just put the phone down and started walking toward my closet. I'll never forget that night. It felt like someone had just ripped my heart out. It was such a strange feeling.

You know, when you're in a period of separation, you suspect things. But you can go a long time without ever getting confirmation. Sure, maybe a hint here or there-but not the kind that's sitting there in front of you, staring at you: Yes, it is what it is. Now live with it. Then, when that confirmation finally comes, you feel the worst kind of sinking feeling: You're in love with a woman, and all of a sudden she's with another man. Or, in my case, another athlete.

There's no description for that kind of pain. It hits you all at once and overwhelms you. It feels impossible that one man could endure that much pain. It doesn't help to ask yourself questions, but you do anyway: What happened here? What could explain this? What should I have done differently?