Juiced (15 page)

Nothing compares to the feeling of being a father. Very often, I'd be looking at Josie and I'd turn to look at Jessica. "We created her!" I'd say, "Look at her, a beautiful little girl, blonde hair, green eyes, tons of personality. We created this."

The first couple of months, it seemed like we spent every waking moment just looking at her. All a baby does is sleep, poop, and eat; that's basically it for a few months. As a father, you've got to be very careful. You don't want to bounce her too hard, or hold her too tight, out of a fear that she's going to break. Those first months, she spent so much time with her mother, breast-feeding and what not; then, even when I'd try to hold her, I heard, "Be careful?' or "Watch out for her head!" or "You have to keep her neck straight!" so often that more than once I felt like giving up and letting the professional-her mom-do the holding.

Josie was a quiet baby. She didn't cry much. After a little time passed, though, her personality started showing itself, and her features started coming out. The life of a baseball player can take a lot out of you, with all the travel and 162 games per season in the regular season alone. But in the off-season you get to do whatever you want-and what I wanted to do was stay home and sit there watching Josie. I didn't even care what she was doing, I just loved keeping an eye on my little girl.

It took me a while to admit it, but you start to look at your life differently when you have someone dependent on you. I always had this bad-boy public image, but most of the trouble I got into was just because I was goofing off. Back when I was a kid, my dad was so serious all the time, and put so much pressure on Ozzie and me, that we never had much of a chance to feel like carefree kids. Looking back, I guess once I got into baseball I was just making up for a lot of lost time.

But after Josie was born, I developed a new sense of responsibility. I thought more about the consequences of my actions. I started thinking things through carefully and calmly before I acted. My earlier reckless days started to feel like a very distant chapter of my life. So did my free-spending ways of years before.

I definitely started being more careful with my money. I put together a complete portfolio of stocks and bonds, and educated myself about how to make the most of my investments. I knew I wouldn't be earning a big-league salary forever. I had to plan for the future, not only for myself, but also for Josie.

That was another kind of education for me-an education in assuming responsibility. That was a set of lessons I was overdue in learning. And I'm grateful to my family for teaching me.

13. The Strike

This year the players and owners have managed to do
what an earthquake, two world wars, a missile crisis
and a depression could not do, and that was cancel the
World Series.
-
LIANE HANSEN,
Weekend Edition, National Public Radio

One thing the 1994 baseball season convinced me was that the Major League Baseball Players Association, led by Donald Fehr, always had one goal and one goal only: Becoming the mightiest union in the world. The union wanted power, and apparently the one way they felt they could amass that power was to make as much money for the players as possible-no matter what the long-term ramifications were for the players or the game itself. That was the way the union handled the steroid issue, too.

The Players Association was as complicit as the owners in the explosion of steroids in the game. They knew as much about it as anyone, because they dealt with the players all the time. To those of us on the inside, there was no mystery over why the union took such a hard line against steroid testing, for example.

Their concern was always making money for the players, and if the players were remaking their bodies using steroids to do so, the MBPA never lifted a finger to stop it.

I believe that plenty of people within the Players Association must have known exactly which players were on steroids. And they did not care. If all you care about is jacking up players' salaries, why would you try to stop the steroid groundswell? Don't rock the boat.

Think about it this way: If Don Fehr really believed that his players weren't doing steroids, wouldn't he have said: Okay, let a true drug-testing program begin? Nothing like the joke we had during the 2004 season, for example.

But Fehr had to know the truth. He must have foreseen-Oh my god!-that if he let a real drug-testing program be implemented, too many of his top players would get c a u g h t . . . and everything Fehr had built would be at risk. So instead he just stalled, and it worked.

I'll say one thing for Donald Fehr, though. It took a strong leader to pull off what he did. You've got to give him that. He's quite a character; he's highly intelligent, has a real presence, and knows how to work the system to get the players behind him 100 percent. I think he actually attained his goal of becoming one of the most powerful union leaders ever, by developing this extremely powerful players' organization.

But the result was the strike of 1994, which was just crazy, if you ask me. You've got to be kidding: Grown men involved in a billion-dollar industry couldn't solve their own issues internally? Both sides should be ashamed of themselves for pushing things as far as they did that year. Not only was there a strike-the whole World Series was cancelled. Some of the owners may be perfectly smart people, but nobody involved in that could have had a whit of practical intelligence. They don't understand anything beyond what their lawyers told them. In the end, it came down to the nerds against the athletes, just like it was back in high school-and just like in high school, everyone lost.

That strike never should have happened, and it never would have happened if the owners had approached things intelligently. All they needed to do was find half a dozen influential players without guaranteed contracts who were willing to distance themselves from the stance of the Players Association. Those players each could have brought other players along to their way of thinking. These players would have collectively recruited more players, and more players, and so on, until the union was really in trouble. If the owners had approached me in the right way, I could have done it for them myself.

The owners could have broken the union that way, but they were never smart enough to think it through. They were always inclined to think in terms of brute force, to force our will. But negotiation doesn't work that way. You have to be shrewd and look for weaknesses in your opponent-and, in the case of the Players Association, there was plenty of that to go around. The Association had pissed off a lot of players, especially minority players; they were always thinking more about the whole than the individual, always thinking about profits, not the well-being of the players.

So why didn't they try something like that? For one thing, they didn't know who to go to. They had no player on the inside.

When it comes right down to it, baseball owners aren't the smartest people in the world, either. People think that rich guys are always smart, or they wouldn't be able to make so much money, but often intelligence has nothing to do with it. The owners never approached it the right way, so we struck and they cancelled the World Series.

That was a dark period for baseball. Suddenly America had a new national pastime-asking: Can baseball survive this? Will it ever be the same again? Are football and basketball going to take over now that baseball has ruined everything?

One of the amazing things about the strike was how much you heard about it hurting the economy. The entire network of concessionaires, parking facilities, and other businesses located around stadiums, which relied on the income they generated during the baseball season, was affected. It was a real demonstration of how economically strong baseball was, that it affected so many people and so many smaller institutions.

On a personal level, it was incredible for me to realize that what I did for a living touched so many people, directly or indirectly.

The timing of the strike was bad for me personally, too. I'd really been enjoying playing that season, and I was putting up good numbers. Back in Oakland, I hadn't always seen eye to eye with Tony LaRussa, who tried to play too many mind games for my taste. But in Texas I was playing for Kevin Kennedy, who was easily my favorite manager.

What made him stand out so much? Simple: He always showed me trust and respect. Kevin approached me first of all as a person, instead of treating me as just a ballplayer or a cog in the wheel. It may not sound like much, but to me it was important that Kevin treated me like a human being, with a family and emotions, ups and downs. Because of that, I trusted him completely.

And in return, I believe, he got the best out of me. I was at the ballpark on time every day, busting my ass for him day in and day out. If you look at the stats I put up for him when I was healthy, they were incredible. Kevin just made it very easy to play for him. All he asked was that you show up on time, play hard, and hang in there for nine innings. He had the good sense to keep it simple: He knew you were a grown man, and he trusted you to be a professional.

Kevin was definitely a players' manager. He made the Rangers a happy, cohesive atmosphere, and helped us to maintain good chemistry at the ballpark. If you had a problem, he wanted you to go to him, and he believed that any problem could be fixed in private. He didn't want to involve the media, because he knew the media tended to blow things out of proportion, which always had a way of turning into a huge distraction for the organization. He took good care of his team, and if you look back you'll see that he got the best years out of a lot of his players.

So it turned out that the trade from Oakland to Texas was a good thing for me. It gave me the motivation to work hard and get back to where I'd been a few seasons earlier, before my injuries started to get in the way. In my first three seasons with the A's, I'd had six hundred at-bats or more every year, and I finished all three of those seasons with at least thirty home runs and at least 110 RBIs. But after that, I had several seasons where I missed a lot of games because of injuries. I had worked really hard to get going again in 1994, and that work paid off for me.

I finished that season with thirty-one homers and 90 RBIs; that may not sound like much, but it was enough to lead the team in both categories. Juan Gonzalez had 85 RBIs, making him second on the team, but no one else on the team even hit twenty homers that year, let alone thirty. If the season hadn't been cut short, I might have had one of the best years of my career.

As it turned out, though, the Rangers played only 114 games that season, forty-eight short of the normal total of 162. If you do the math, I was on pace to finish the year with forty-four home runs-which would have tied my career high at that point-and 127 RBIs, which would have been the best total of my career. Also, even with a 52-62 record, the Rangers were in first place in the American League West at the time of the strike. We'd finished fourth during my first season in Texas, and second in 1993, and I would have liked to see what that 1994 Rangers team could have done in the postseason.

We had a lot of fun together on that team. Less than two weeks before the strike, for example, left-hander Kenny Rogers was pitching a great game against the California Angels at home. During the game, a couple of the other players, Chris James and Gary Redus, decided they had to perform a special ceremony to help bring Kenny good luck. Based on the way he was throwing, we all knew he might be on his way to a memorable performance.

All season long, I'd been getting flak about my shoes. They were scuffed up pretty bad, and the guys kept complaining that they smelled. So James and Redus got an idea, and they swiped them from me. Then in the fifth inning, after I had hit home runs my first two times up in the game, those two guys soaked my shoes in alcohol and put a match to them, right there in the dugout. It was meant as an offering to the baseball gods; and some of the guys even danced around the little fire, as if it was a bonfire or something.

They must have been on to something, too: Kenny Rogers never made a mistake, that whole game, and he finished with the first perfect game in baseball in four years, and only the fourteenth perfect game ever thrown. Too bad they couldn't have come up with some kind of crazy ceremony to try to save baseball that year.

The fans had to wait for fourteen months to see another World Series.

14. The Men in Black

Umps have a tough job to do, and you don't mess with
them. In this league, you respect the umps or you don't
stay around.
-
FORMER OAKLAND A'S MANAGER TONY LARUSSA

John Hirschbeck was always one of my favorite umpires.

He and his brother Mark were approachable, open guys who were popular with players. John and I had a good relationship. John had to face a personal tragedy in 1993 when his eight-year-old son, John Drew, died from a rare degenerative nerve disease known as adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD). After that, both brothers put a lot of work into the John Drew Hirschbeck Foundation, a charity that raised money to fight the disease. John asked me to sign baseballs and make appearances for that foundation, and I was glad to take part in his fund-raisers, because I knew it was for a good cause and John and I had a good rapport.

"John, if I can help out, just let me know," I told him.

After I left the Texas Rangers, he took me up on that in an unusual way. In 1995, I was at spring training in Fort Myers, Florida, before a game against the Rangers. We were all just sitting around when one of the clubhouse attendants brought me a note.

"Jose, we're picketing outside of the stadium today, and we'd like you to come join us."