Juiced (23 page)

DENNIS ECKERSLEY

To me, Dennis Eckersley was one of the pretty boys of baseball He could go out there and pitch in a three-piece suit, and he'd be fine. With his long hair, and trimmed-up mustache, he was one of the entertainers of the game. With his long hair flapping in the wind, he always looked good. He had always been out tanning, and he was manicured, too.

Dennis was one of those finicky athletes, though. He wasn't a guy who was going to overpower you. He was more about finesse and putting some movement on the ball. Plus, he was from the old school. He got up for every outing. Dennis did a good job for us on those A's teams, but I have to say that later on, when we weren't on the same team anymore, I never minded batting against him. Todd Stottlemyre and Dennis Eckersley: Among all the pitchers I ever faced in my major league career, they were the two I was always happy to see.

BRET SABERHAGEN

The one pitcher I truly hated to face, on the other hand, would have to be Bret Saberhagen. Some pitchers just throw so well you can't hit them, and that's how it was with Saberhagen, more than any other pitcher from my era. Everything he threw moved, and with extreme velocity.

Our major-league careers ran parallel in a lot of ways; for a while we even had the same agent, Dennis Gilbert. Saberhagen's first season in the big leagues was 1984, the year before I made my move up to the A's; his best seasons were in the late 1980s, when he was having all those great years for the Kansas City Royals. Later, in 1998, we were both up for American League Comeback Player of the Year, along with Eric Davis. As Sports Illustrated put it, I deserved credit for "resurrecting" myself "from the cartoon-superhero junk heap."

The only other pitcher I remember really giving me a lot of trouble was Duane Ward, the Toronto Blue Jays' big setup man and then closer, starting in the early 1990s. Ward was a big guy, six foot four, and an All-Star in 1993-and, with that heavy sinker he had, and that slider from hell, I hated batting against him.

Then again, I'm not sure any of those pitchers really liked seeing me coming, either.

22. Nice Guys Finish Last

Many people are not aware of Jose's activities in
charity work. He was active in Make-a-Wish
Foundation. He was involved in many charity golf
tournaments. He was involved in his own foundation.
He was involved in distributing thousands of dollars in
gifts at Guantanamo Bay and visited refugees there.
– JOSE CANSECO SR.

People believe what they want to believe. If you have a reputation as the bad boy of baseball, you must be a bad guy, right? Most people just don't spend much time thinking much harder than that about it-at least most people in the media. I was never into politicking for myself or putting across some bogus image, and because I didn't play the PR game, they made sure I would pay. If I did something contrary to the image of the reckless, dangerous star, they just ignored it, or treated it like some strange curiosity that proved all their assumptions anyway.

In October 1994, the year of the strike, I flew back to Cuba for the first time since my parents put Ozzie, my sister Teresa, and me on a plane in Varadero when I was just a small boy.

While I was there, I made sure to pay a visit to the refugees at the Guantanamo Bay military base, renting a plane with Alex Rodriguez and dropping off food and toys for the kids there. I didn't ask for anyone to pat me on the back for that visit to Guantanamo, and I'm not asking for that now, either. But just in case anyone reading this is interested in more than a two dimensional picture of me, maybe a glimpse of my charity work might help shed some light on the little bit of good I've tried to do in the world.

I'm just a man, with all the insecurities and weaknesses of any other man, but I'm not a cartoon character and I've always done my best to treat people right, whether it's signing autographs even when I'm tired and have already signed fifty, or smiling at someone and posing for a picture. Even long after I stopped playing baseball, people still approach me wherever I go, just wanting to talk to me for a minute, and I try not to be fake with them. I try to treat them normally, like people, and to meet their requests whenever I can.

That was my approach going down to Guantanamo, too, trying to bring a little happiness to the kids down there and all the other refugees. I've donated millions of dollars to charity in my lifetime, and I'm sure I'll donate millions more. I don't like to publicize the charities, because then it makes it look like it's all for show, and the important part isn't writing out the check, it's giving a part of yourself.

We used to talk a lot, Alex and I. "I love Jose," he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "Jose is a great friend of mine. He has taught me an awful lot about life and about baseball. People don't realize what a great person he is and what a big heart he has. People ask how can you learn from someone who has made so many mistakes. Sometimes those are the best guys to learn from. They're able to teach you through their wisdom and their experiences."

The scene down at Guantanamo was pretty grim, I have to tell you. We had done a lot of work to make that visit a success, and before I flew down there we collected ten tons of toys with a telethon in Miami, so we could hand them out to the kids at Camp Romeo. As a Latino, I was raised believing that men aren't supposed to cry, especially not in public, but seeing all those kids gathering around me and singing for me, that almost busted me up. I remember one girl in particular. I gave her a stuffed animal that was a long way from new, but to her it couldn't have looked better.

"Look how pretty!" she said, holding it to her chest and smiling.

That visit was so sad, but in a way it gave me hope, too. This was during the Clinton presidency, and that August the president had thrown a real curve at the balseros who had left Cuba hoping to make a new life in the United States of America, changing the rules and closing the door on the refugees. The new rules only allowed you to gain entry to the United States if you first returned to Cuba, so you actually had people swimming two miles from the tip of the peninsula where Guantanamo sits, across the bay itself, so they could be back on Cuban territory and be eligible under the new rules. It was a farce.

On that visit I also had a chance to meet with about twenty hunger strikers, who were hoping to force the Clinton administration to change its policy. They gathered at Camp Juliet under a tree they decided to call the "Tree of Hope."

"Maintain your strength," I told them in Spanish. "You'll get out of here. Everyone in Miami is thinking of you." They cheered wildly.

"We're here making our statement!" one yelled back at me. "But we thank you. Having you here means everything."

At Camp Kilo, they worked through the night picking the rocks from a field to set up a crude baseball diamond. I held a bat in my hand for the first time since the strike two months earlier, and they threw me softballs. I hit some line drives into the makeshift tents they called home, and then launched a couple of long ones over the concertina wire separating the camp from the next one over. The men went crazy. They hoisted me up on their shoulders, all two hundred and forty pounds of me, and they all joined together to chant loudly. "Libertad! Libertad!" they chanted. And that turned into "Canseco! Canseco!"

That was one of the most intense moments in my life. Compared to what I heard that day, the emotion that comes from sports fans can seem hollow and superficial. This was reality.

This was life.

"They're ripping their hearts out for him," Alex said that day.

"And he's doing it for them, too."

I hadn't been in Cuba since 1965, when Ozzie and I were babies, but Cuba is a big part of who I am. I have always told everyone that I'm Cuban. I'm very proud of that, and always will be.

"Cubans love Canseco because he has not forgotten us," one refugee at Camp Kilo told the Dallas Morning News that day. "We all want to be like Canseco. Not to be a baseball player, but to get out of here and get to the USA and start a better life."

"Cubans are known in the United States because of baseball," said another man at Camp Kilo. "Today is the happiest day we've had since we've been here. It's almost like we had a taste of freedom."

One of the people I met that day was another player, named Euclides Rojas. Cuba's all-time leader in saves, Rojas was known as the Cuban Dennis Eckersley, even though he was a left-hander. But eventually he had enough; tired of living in a country that was not free, he decided to take a huge chance and take his wife Marta and his little son, Euclides Jr., and join some other people trying to escape from Cuba on a little raft.

I liked Rojas right away. He's a very smart man, with a calm dignity about him, and that day at Guantanamo, even in his flip-flops-the only shoes he had-he had a presence that made him stand out even among the other proud men at Camp Tango. He told me about how he had been floating at sea for days, and how his group had run out of drinking water. It looked like they might die out there. But then they ran into another boat full of people trying to escape from Castro, and traded food for water. Then the U.S. Coast Guard picked them up and brought them to Guantanamo.

Rojas hoped one day to pitch in the major leagues, but he had no way of knowing if he would ever be allowed to go to America, much less pitch.

"It's impossible to think of that when I am here," Rojas said that day. "These are very bad conditions."

All I kept thinking, talking to Euky, was, "That could have been me."

He and I are almost the same age. It's all just a matter of timing. If the Cuban government had not decided to let my father leave the country in 1965, we might never have been able to leave. If things had been different it could have been me in that camp, rather than Euclides Rojas.

I kept thinking, "I'm very lucky."

I didn't hear about Rojas again for a while, but he and his family finally made it to the United States after six months at Guantanamo, and the next season, he pitched for Palm Springs in the independent Western League. The Florida Marlins drafted him in the thirtieth round of that year's amateur draft, and he worked his way up to Triple-A Charlotte, but he'd ruined his elbow pitching too many innings for the Cuban National Team.

That injury finally ended his career.

Instead, he turned to coaching. On the very same day his playing career ended, he started working as a pitching coach in the Marlins' system and impressed them so much, he even filled in for the Marlins as bullpen coach for two weeks during the 1999 season. Later, he worked in the Pirates' organization. Then before the 2003 season, the Boston Red Sox hired him as bullpen coach.

You've probably never heard the name, but if you watched the Red Sox in the playoffs or the World Series, you probably saw him out there, exerting a calming influence on that bullpen. So you know the rest of the story: Euclides Rojas, the same proud, brave man who I met as a refugee at Guantanamo, wearing flipflops, now has a World Series ring, and will always be part of baseball history for helping the Red Sox win the World Series for the first time since 1918. They'll always remember that in Cuba, too, and especially in Miami. I guarantee it.

23. An Education Money Can't Buy

If you're a baseball purist like me, you know
the season doesn't really begin until Jose Canseco
gets arrested.
-
DAVID LETTERMAN

The low point of my life was definitely the three months I spent in jail in the summer of 2003. And it was all for nothing.

I was arrested in June of that year for supposedly failing a drug test while on probation. To me, it was obvious that someone had switched the urine sample I gave; I know for a fact that I'd stopped taking steroids prior to the start of to my probation, so there was no other way the test could have come up positive. We later acquired a detailed breakdown of the urine sample they tested, and from that it was obvious that sample could never have come from me.

I'll never forget the feeling of stepping into the small jail cell in Florida, knowing I could end up spending five years in there. Anyone who goes through that experience knows how terrible it is. I remember the nights I spent trying to sleep on the little bed they give you, dreaming of seeing my daughter, Josie, or just being outside, feeling my freedom. Then I would wake up and be back in jail. It was devastating to realize where I was.

But to understand how I got there, you need to reach way back in my life, to the place where all my legal troubles started-on a Florida highway in the early 1990s, and a stupid argument between two young people in love.

It was late, around three in the morning, and Esther and I were having an argument, which I guess is nothing unusual for a married couple. What was unusual was the setting: I was in a 930 Porsche, she was in a white BMW, and we were driving side-by-side on the road in Florida, screaming at each other. Somewhere along the way, the cars accidentally collided. No surprise; it's hard to watch what you're doing when you're driving and fighting at the same time. But it wasn't intentional.Someone at a gas station saw us go by and called the police.

We pulled over a little later and started talking more calmly, but then the police arrived and arrested me. And, right there on the spot, they decided to cite me for domestic violence.

I couldn't believe it-and Esther couldn't either.

"What are you doing?" she asked the cops.

When you hear the phrase domestic violence, you think of a husband beating his wife. But this was just a total accident, and yet there I was, already tarred with the domestic violence brush.

A lot of issues extended from those original domestic-violence charges filed against me by the state of Florida. One of the prosecutors wanted Esther to testify against me, even though Esther didn't want to do that-to say I'd struck Esther's car on purpose, that I was trying to hurt her or even to kill her with the car. Esther was afraid that if she wouldn't testify against me, she might be arrested. She didn't, but in the end I went to jail anyway.