Juiced (4 page)

Coach Dunn remembers that I got in more than one fight at school. But he also remembers how reserved I was. "You were usually laid back," he says. "If four guys started a fight, you would be right in there, kicking butt, but you would never be the aggressor. That was never your style. You never went and picked fights." He coached me in a lot of ways. "You're a smart person, Jose,"

he would tell me. "You could be a tremendous student if you just applied yourself, but you really don't care about school." I'd just nod my head and try to get out of the spotlight.

He was right, though. I didn't care about school because I never felt like I was a part of things. I'm not going to say it was because of my father, and the way he was always so hard on Ozzie and me, but let's just say I was used to having the feeling that I was always doing something wrong. I always felt a little out of it, like I never quite felt the same way about things as the people around me.

I always liked sports, though. I remember sometimes we would have three-on-three basketball games, the coaches against whichever students wanted to challenge them. Sometimes Ozzie and I would play together in those games. Since our father wasn't around, it was just us, so I could relax and have a little more fun. I was still a runt, five foot eleven and 155 pounds, and I wasn't much of a basketball player, either. Coach Dunn told me I was a good natural athlete, but I thought he was just trying to be nice. The one sport I was excited about playing was football, but my parents forbid me from doing that because on my size.

"They'll kill you out there," my dad told me. "There's no way we're going to let you play football." So I stuck to baseball, even though I was too small to be very good at that, either. I didn't even make the varsity team until my senior year of high school. How many future major leaguers can you say that about? If you're going to be skinny, like I was, you needed to be quick, and I wasn't especially quick, either. It was hard to find a good position to play.

"You're too skinny to play third base," my father would tell me.

The one thing I started doing pretty well was hitting the baseball. I guess I just had good hand-eye coordination or something. Even with that skinny, lanky body of mine, I showed some talent for hitting some baseballs pretty far. That's what people remember who knew me back then.

One time, we had a practice game where half our team was going against the other half. A guy named Val Lopez was on the opposing team, and he was a friend of ours. A lot of times, he would pick us up and give us a ride to practice or to games. He was a pitcher, and that day he threw me a fastball up and in, and I hit that ball as hard as I'd hit a ball up to that time. "You crushed it!" Val told me.

He couldn't believe it. You almost never saw someone hit a ball on that field that made it to Twelfth Street, which marked the edge of the school. The houses beyond the street were considered untouchable.

"You hit it so far, it nearly hit a house in the air," Val said.

Back then, Ozzie was more outgoing than I was, and we were together so much, it made it easy for me to hang back and let him do the talking. Val, who is now a CPA in Miami, says he remembers me having some kind of presence.

"You always had charisma," he tells me. "When you would enter the game, even at the age of fifteen or sixteen, we knew you were there."

It was true that by then I could drive the ball, and pitchers worried when I would come up. But I was a limited baseball player. I really had no foot speed, and my throwing arm was only decent to average. I never knew where baseball was going to take me. To me, it was psychologically out of my reach to consider playing at the major league level.

Even so, I guess they were impressed by my home runs, because they named me most valuable player of the junior varsity team during my junior year. That, and the fact that the varsity team had lost a bunch of guys to graduation, meant the varsity coaches had no choice but to put me on the team my senior year. I had a good year in varsity, and was named MVP again. I still had a long way to go as a baseball player, but at least I had improved enough to where my father couldn't find as many things to criticize.

He was there at all the games, screaming at us the same way he had been doing ever since we were little boys. If you did something wrong, you always knew you would hear from him. I had a lot more positive games than negative games in high school, and he didn't scream at me quite as much. But even many years later, after I made it all the way to the big leagues and did things no one had ever done in the history of the game, it was never enough for my father.

Think I'm kidding? Let me give you an example: In June 1994,1 had a monster game for the Texas Rangers, hitting three homers and finishing with five hits and eight runs batted in. We crushed the Seattle Mariners that day, 17-9. So I talked to my dad after that game, and what do you think he said?

"How'd you do on your other at-bats?" he asked me.

I was dumbstruck. I felt like saying, "Gee, I don't know, I was probably still out of breath from my three home runs!"

I don't think I was ever good enough for him. Later on, I could handle that. But back in high school, it was really tough. I was just happy they let me play baseball at all, because I had so little confidence and the whole time I was out on the field, I was always bracing myself to hear some jab from my father. That was definitely the worst part of playing baseball for me.

"Don't scream at us!" Ozzie and I would yell back at my father sometimes, and even though we would be crying, it never made any difference. He didn't listen. You know how parents are. To me and Ozzie, it seemed like each of our teammates heard every single thing our father said, and we cringed every time he'd rip us for not doing something or just for doing something different than the way he thought we should. But I guess to some of these other guys, whose dads didn't come to games very often, it seemed like it would have been nice to have a father so involved with what you were doing.

"Your dad is dedicated," Val Lopez used to tell me. "He's at games, he's at practices-and you always know he's there." Another guy from that high school, Pedro Gomez, ended up as a sportswriter in California, covering the Oakland A's when I was in my heyday there, and now he works as an on-air reporter for ESPN. He says I was kind of a character in high school, which just goes to show that different people have different recollections.

"You were like the Judd Nelson character in The Breakfast Club," Gomez tells me now. "You know how the assistant principal kept turning the knife into Judd, inside the library, and he would respond by saying things like, 'Does Barry Manilow know you raided his wardrobe?' You just never knew when to turn it off. You were a smart ass." Gomez was kind of a smart ass, too, the way I remember it. And maybe I did like to goof off back then. It was only high school, you're a different person for every class.

The Oakland A's ended up drafting me in the fifteenth round of the 1982 amateur draft, and that came as a surprise to me. I didn't think I was going to get drafted, and I was amazed even to be picked in the fifteenth round. The scout who drafted me was Camilo Pascual, a star pitcher for the Minnesota Twins in the 1960s, who won twenty games two years in a row.

Pascual's son Bert was one of my teammates at Coral Park High, so he had seen me swing the bat quite a few times, and thought that I had potential. Pascual thought I should have been picked sooner in the draft, and he actually got into kind of a fight with the A's about signing me. I was only asking for a $10,000 signing bonus, which was not much money at all, compared to what other players were getting, but they didn't even want to pay that much.

Pascual couldn't believe it. He thought they were crazy, and he let them know just where he stood. He was in a meeting with the A's general manager, Sandy Alderson, and all the scouts, and maybe an owner or two, and he reached into his pocket very dramatically and pulled out his wallet.

"You don't want to give this kid his bonus?" Pascual asked them. "I'll pay the extra amount from my own pocket. That's how sure I am that Jose is going to make it."

They decided to sign me, and to be honest, I wasn't that thrilled by the news. People always assume that if you get signed to play professional baseball, you must be unbelievably excited, like it's one of the best moments of your whole life. I didn't feel that way. Probably a lot of ballplayers have the same feeling, but don't talk about it. Basically, I was too scared to be very happy. I had no idea what to expect, and it seemed totally obvious to me that I didn't belong, and soon enough they would realize it had been a mistake to sign me at all. I just had no confidence in my abilities. I was always waiting for bad things to happen.

So when I talked to people about my future, I tried to play down what baseball meant to me. My attitude was more like, Hey, I have nothing better to do. I figured that once my brief experiment in professional baseball ran its course, and I had shown the whole world that I didn't have what it took, I could go to college and figure out what kind of work I wanted to do for the next forty or fifty years. My plan was just to give baseball a shot for a few years to make sure I wouldn't have any regrets later.

I played in Idaho Falls in the Pioneer League that first season as an eighteen-year-old, and that was a big change. A predominantly Mormon community, Idaho Falls was a long, long way from South Florida. We hardly had any money, so seven or eight of us all lived together in a place that was almost condemned, it was such a dump. It had no heater, no nothing, and if you wanted to use the bathroom, you would have to wait until you went to the ballpark.

A lot of us slept on the floor there, and we took to calling that place the "Animal House." I was making six hundred bucks a month. I'd send some of that back home to my dad, because I had hardly any expenses. I had two pairs of jeans I wore all the time, when I wasn't in uniform, and only paid thirty bucks a month in rent. People in town felt sorry for us, because we were living on so little, and they would give us coupons so we could eat two breakfasts for the price of one and stuff like that.

You could say I was the mascot in the Animal House. I was a scrawny young kid, so a lot of times the other players would pick on me, telling me I was stupid, that I sucked as a baseball player.

That was an old tradition, the older guys hazing the younger guys, picking on them and running them down. You expected it as the natural order of things, but still, as a skinny eighteen-year-old kid, I got picked on more than anyone. They would just throw me around from one to the other and ridicule me all the time. "What are you thinking?" they would all yell at me. "You're never going to make it to the major leagues!"

We had some fun times there. One player I knew there, a heavy-set guy named Greg Robles, was probably the funniest person I've ever met. He never made it to the major leagues, but a couple years later he did hit three home runs in one game, playing minor-league ball in Madison, Wisconsin. He was definitely the funniest guy in baseball. He had these dumb magic tricks that he would do, and those always busted everyone up. You have to see it for yourself, but to give you an idea, we would be having a family party, with kids and everything, and Robles would set up a whole gag involving a slice of pizza.

"I'm going to eat a slice of pizza now," he would tell everyone.

He would eat it, and then drop his pants and bend over-and a slice of pizza would fall out of his ass. It would hit the floor-whap!-and no one could believe their eyes. He'd set it up before-hand, of course, wedging it between his ass cheeks, but even if you knew that, it was still funny. I know it's pretty revolting, but I've got to admit, it still makes me laugh, thinking about that crazy guy.

Idaho Falls made a big impression on me, and not because of anything having to do with baseball, either. That was the first time I ever drank liquor. Back home in Miami, I had tried beer and wine, but I was not a big drinker at all. I'd never touched the hard stuff. So one night at the Animal House, there was a bunch of guys and girls drinking and they invited me to take part and join them. I didn't realize until later that the reason they had invited me was so they could get me drunk and laugh about it when I made a fool out of myself. I was young and innocent. It sounds funny now, but it's true.

Like any kid, inexperienced and shy, I was just trying to be part of the crowd, so I started drinking and trying to keep up with them. The thing was, they gave me this bottle that was just nasty.

I think it was something like 120 proof. At the time, I had no idea what I was drinking. I just drank-and then I noticed that everyone around me couldn't stop laughing. "Come on, drink another!" one of them would say. So I drank one or two.

"Come on! One more!' someone else would cry out, and so I drank one or two more.

That didn't last very long, as you can guess. Pretty soon I was in really bad shape. I almost died of alcohol poisoning. I was sick the next three days, and on the fourth day I was still recovering. That's how bad it was. It traumatized me so much; it gave me a lasting distaste for liquor.

To this day, I don't really drink much, especially not hard liquor. Maybe it was good that I had that traumatic experience because it really shook me up; I never forgot it.

As for baseball, I didn't make much of a mark playing in Idaho Falls. I played in twenty-eight games in the Pioneer League, and only hit two homers. I think I barely hit .260 there, and I could not have been less impressive. I still didn't have any meat on my bones; I'm sure I looked like just another kid who wasn't going anywhere.

Things turned out a little differently.

3. A Vow to My Dying Mother

One year later... Canseco and I would cross paths again . . . and
I was stunned to find that "the Idaho skinny guy" had somehow
grown up to become a freaking Macy's balloon. Brand-new biceps
ripped out from under his uniform sleeves. Thick slabs of beef
padded his formerly bony frame. A pair of tree trunks now
connected to his ankles. Seven innings and two 450-foot moon
shots later, I still had no idea what to make of this new improved
mutant. Was this kind of super-size growth spurt even possible?
What the hell was this monster eating?
-
DAVID WELLS,
Perfect I'm Not