Juiced (5 page)

So much has changed since then: Now there are so many huge Latino stars in the game, it's totally common to have several Latino players on your team, or a lot more than that. But I remember as a Cuban kid in the A's farm system at that time, I was very aware that baseball was closed to a young Latino like me. That was only twenty-three years ago, but for baseball it was a completely different era.

There were no Cuban players at the major-league level at that time. Previously, there had been some great Cubans, like Luis Tiant, who actually pitched in six games for the California Angels that year, before finally retiring at age forty-two. That same year, another great Cuban, Tony Perez, turned forty-and was still playing, too. Perez had made his name with the Cincinnati Reds, but he had become more of a part-time player by the end, and bounced around from team to team. Still, he could always hit and actually batted .328 in 1985, not bad for a forty-three-year-old.

But they were the exceptions that proved the rule. Many talented young athletes were playing street baseball in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and many other Latin American countries, but the barriers to breaking into the major leagues were almost impossible for most to get around. Later, it made me mad that there was such a pervasive double standard for Latinos, especially compared with an all-American boy like Mark McGwire. But back when I was eighteen, I just figured it was the way it was. If there were no Cubans in baseball, there must be a reason. Who was I to think that I was going to make it to Major League Baseball?

My second year in the minor leagues, 1983,1 was still a long way from making any kind of mark in baseball. I was kind of sleepwalking through games at that point. I played in almost sixty games for Class-A Medford in Oregon that summer, and I had almost two hundred at-bats-but I still only hit eleven home runs, and my batting average was less than .270. True, I was considered the most powerful hitter in the Northwest League, and I did make the All-Star team, but I was a long way from looking like a major leaguer. I also played some games that year in Madison, Wisconsin, which was also Class A, and I had three homers in thirty-four games, and my batting average was .159. How's that for impressive?

Even during that off-season, I was still in a fog when it came to baseball. If you had asked me at the time what I was doing, I wouldn't have known what to tell you. But looking back, I can see I was just going through the motions. The next season, 1984, they sent me to Class-A Modesto, the next step up. And I got off to a pretty good start there-until a call from my sister brought that period of my life to an abrupt end.

My mom had been sick for years, going back to a bad blood transfusion in Cuba in 1964 that infected her with hepatitis. She had to take medicine for the hepatitis, and that was bad for her diabetes. My whole life, she was sick with hepatitis and diabetes.

A lot of times she was really weak and had to stay in bed. But in 1984 I got a call from my sister, Teresa, and I knew that this time it was different.

"Come home," she said. "Mom is sick."

"What's wrong?" I asked her.

But that was all she would say. I knew it was really bad. My mother had been suffering so much, just getting weaker and weaker. She had a blood clot in her back, and it had somehow worked its way to her head. They admitted her to Miami's Cancer Research Center that weekend, but the terrible headaches she was having only got worse. I flew back to Miami to see her and went right to the hospital, but by then she was in a coma. She had never seen one of my minor-league games, and when I got there, the doctor told me she never would. "The brain is dead," the doctor told us. "That's it."

We stayed with her in the hospital, but there was absolutely nothing we could do. Once the brain dies, that's it. Her body was being kept alive artificially with some machines, and we had to make the decision to disconnect her from life support. I went into shock and cried for hours. I just couldn't believe that my mom was dead. Out of nowhere, overnight, she was suddenly taken away from me, and I would never be able to talk to her again. She had protected me and my brother all those years, and gave us so much love and support and encouragement-but she would never see me play professional baseball. I was a wreck. I was just devastated, and all my family members knew it.

We went through the whole process of burying my mom, remembering her, honoring her, and mourning her loss together as a family. I needed a few weeks afterward before I could even think about playing baseball again. By the time I got back on a plane to fly west and rejoin the Modesto club, I had gone through a complete transformation.

I'd had some time alone with my mother, there in the hospital, and even though I knew she was already gone, that was my mother lying there, and I sat close to her and looked at her and had one last heart-to-heart talk with her.

"I'm going to be the best athlete in the world, no matter what it takes," I told her, and I choked up and had to fight back tears.

"I promise you, Mom, that I will be the best."

The doctors can say what they want about her brain being dead, but still, I know she heard me make that promise, wherever she was, and I have always taken that promise every bit as seriously as if she had responded, "Yes, Jose, I know you will."

So from that moment on, I dedicated my life to living up to that vow, and I didn't care what it took. No matter what the price, it didn't matter, I was going to turn myself into the best athlete in the world.

Up until that time, I'll be the first to admit I didn't always work very hard. People thought it was because I was lazy, but actually, it was really just a question of me not seeing a future in baseball. I like to think things through, and baseball looked like it would lead to nothing but disappointment, like almost any Latino could expect to experience. But after that promise, I stopped thinking like that. I just willed myself to put everything I had into improving.

I finished out that season with Modesto, playing decent but not great ball, with fifteen homers and an improved batting average. Then I was invited to instructional league. That was when I really got down to business. I started an extensive weight-lifting program, and that was the beginning of a whole new approach for me. I just ate, drank, and slept baseball.

That was it for me, nothing else. There were no girls. There was no going out. There was nothing. The only thing that went through my mind every single day was constantly thinking: How can I become better? How can I become faster and stronger? How can I gain more knowledge of the game? How can I learn more about my body and its potential and what I can do to unlock that potential?

I was hitting the weights hard at the 24-Hour Nautilus Gym, which was five miles away from where I was living. Every day after practice I would walk the five miles, lift weights until I couldn't lift my arms in the air, and then I would walk another five miles back home, every day. That was hard, but soon it didn't feel like enough of a challenge, and then I actually started jogging it, both ways, to get faster and stronger.

At that time, I hardly had any money and couldn't even afford to buy myself a car. Maybe that was good in a way, because all that jogging back and forth helped me get into great shape, but I remember how every time I would jog one way or the other, I would pass this particular Chevrolet dealership. I'd look at all those shiny new cars, lined up in rows, and that gave me one more reason to work hard and get bigger and stronger. As I went by, I would say to myself: One day I'm going to buy myself a Corvette.

And later I did-I actually got two Corvettes at once, and all just for doing a TV commercial for a dealership in California.

To give you an idea of how insignificant I was to the organization back then, one time during instructional league that year I had a first-hand look at the way racism and the double standard worked in baseball, at least at that time. I was a nobody to the As, a fifteenth-round pick and a Latino. There was a huge contrast between how they saw me and how they saw their golden boys, like Rob Nelson, a big, left-handed power-hitter who was a dumpy-looking six-four, with 220 pounds of soft muscle. You could tell he had never worked out, never lifted weights, but the As picked him in the first round of the 1983 draft.

I remember one day we were working on a drill where the pitchers would make a move over to first base and throw the ball, trying to pick you off, and we were supposed to get our leads and then dive back to the base ahead of the throw. I took my lead, and when it came time to dive, I did, but this guy Rob Nelson caught the ball and slammed his mitt down, hitting my elbow. I couldn't believe that he would make a big, awkward tag like that, even if it meant hurting a teammate. He struck me so hard on the elbow that it started swelling up right there.

"What was that?" I asked him. "Look what you did to my elbow. It's swelling up."

Nelson didn't like me calling him on it like that, and he and I got into it, talking back and forth. But that didn't last long.

"What the hell are you doing?" one of the coaches yelled at me, and gave me a real strange look.

"That's our No. 1 draft choice," he told me. "Who are you to talk to him that way?"

He seriously said that to me. I wasn't allowed to tell someone he shouldn't act like a thug, that's how little the organization cared about me. They decided to show me how ticked off they were with me, too. They weren't content just to yell at me a little. They wanted to make sure I got the message that I wasn't good enough to speak to this big, dumpy- looking, inconsiderate guy. So they got together, talked it over, and cooked up what they thought was a really clever scheme.

Then came the humiliation. They decided that for a couple of days, I would have to be a bat boy. For a couple of days, I didn't play at all, just fetched bats. I was the first one they had ever tried to ridicule like that, making me run around to pick up after them. They all taunted me the whole time, like I was some kind of animal. "Wow, you really make a good bat boy, Jose," someone would say. "You missed one, Jose," another would add. "Come on, right here, come on, right here, boy, hurry up."

Nothing could explain treating a person that way. I remember even some of the head guys laughing at me, telling me I should consider making a career out of being a bat boy.

If my father had taught me anything, it was pride, and they were trampling on that. I did my best to ignore what they were saying, trying not to let it bother me. Somehow I got through the first day as a bat boy, hoping they would relent and one day would be enough. But I came back the next day and found out they were serious about making me be a bat boy again for another day. "Hurry up and pick up that bat," one of them said.

And finally, it was too much. I didn't say anything to anybody. I just walked off the field, went straight into the clubhouse, sat there by myself, and started to cry. I decided then and there that I was going to quit baseball. I couldn't believe they were doing this to me. It felt as if I had no choice but to quit. It seems short-sighted now, but at the time, it felt like they wanted me gone and I didn't want to be there. I'd just have to find some other way to live up to the promise I had made to my mother.

Then I heard something that made me stop crying. I was in the clubhouse all alone and I heard someone coming. I had wanted some time to myself, and I didn't want to talk to anyone.

But it turned out to be Howard Ashlock, a minor-league pitching coach in the As organization at that time and one of the few people who really took an interest in me.

"Listen, Jose, they're just testing you," he told me. Ashlock had been paying close attention. He'd been watching them pushing me, trying to see how much I could take. "It's ridiculous," he said. "They know you're an emotional, volatile kid, and they want to make an example of you."

I was packing my stuff as he talked to me. I was going to leave and never look back. I'd made a vow to my mother to be the best athlete on the planet, but it was my mother who taught me that if someone is treating you like dirt, you have to stick up for yourself and protect your dignity. I was sure she would have wanted me to walk away rather than take any more of that. But Ashlock helped me think it through; he helped me realize that if I walked away, those jerks came out the winners.

"Don't quit the game," he told me. "You have a lot of talent and ability. Go back out there and don't let them get to you."

I went back out and finished the day as a bat boy. Then I went home and tried to put it behind me. The next day, I was playing again. We had a game at HoHoKam Park against the Cubs and my first at-bat I hit a shot to dead center, 500 feet over the center-field wall. My next at-bat, I hit another home run over the center-field wall. That was a real turning point for me and my future in baseball. From that day on, the Oakland A's treated me as a serious talent. They had seen what I could do. They even named me the No. 1 prospect in the A's farm system. I was also rated as one of the top two or three prospects in all of baseball at that time. I had come a long way in instructional league.

"By 1984 Jose's name was already buzzing throughout the organization," says Pedro Gomez of ESPN. "The only prospect everyone was talking about was this Cuban kid from Miami."

But what happened that day at HoHoKam was no accident. It was the result of a lot of hard work and dedication. I was really focused, and I was determined to show everyone in the A's organization what I could do. I wanted to make it clear to them what kind of ability I had. That was my way of living up to the promise I had made in that hospital in Miami.

I wasn't going to stop there. I wanted to become faster, stronger, better, more powerful than any other athlete. I did it all for my mother, and the promise I made her, but hitting home runs never made me feel any better about losing my mom. I'd trade it all away in a second if it could bring my mother back. Even now, not a day goes by when I don't think about her.

4. “The Natural”