Authors: Jose Canseco
That was the first I'd heard about the umpires picketing, but since I liked John and I was all for helping the umpires get a settlement, I figured, "Why not?" So I walked out there and joined the umpires picketing in front of the surprised Florida fans; I even hung a sign around my neck.
Before I got out there, no one was paying much attention to the picket line. But soon there were a lot of people-and some reporters, too. The picketers had signs saying things like SCABS GO HOME and MAJOR LEAGUE UMPIRES LOCKED OUT.
We handed out informational materials to anyone who wanted them, explaining how much umpires love the game of baseball.
"You saw what the game was like without the real players," I told the reporters that day. "It's going to be the same thing without the real umpires."
I think John appreciated what I did, backing him up that day. He and I continued to have a good relationship until the next year, when Hirschbeck became a lot more famous than he ever wanted to be. He was having a tough time, losing one son and finding out that another son was sick with the same disease. He and Roberto Alomar had a notorious confrontation at home plate after John made a call that Robby didn't like. They had words, and Robby spit in his face. That generated a huge controversy; all around the country, people were sounding off about it all. I'll just say this: There was a lot more to that confrontation than people know.
But after that September, John was totally different. He must have been so traumatized by the incident with Robby that I think he started going a little berserk during games; from then on, he took it out on all position players, myself included. He was constantly irate with us all, and there was nothing you could do to calm him down. It became a running joke among us players that if you were batting when John was behind the plate, you were going to strike out. He was capable of calling strikes on pitches a foot outside, or eight inches high, or eight inches low.
You just walked back to the dugout shaking your head. That was all you could do. Up until that time, Hirschbeck was one of the better-liked umpires around, but things happen and people change. That's just the way it is.
There are all kinds of examples of umpires being on power trips. One time, during my rookie year, Steve Palermo was the home plate umpire and he missed a call. The pitch was down and away, but he called it a strike, and I gave him an earful, because it wasn't even close. Later in that same series, when Palermo was at second base, he told our second baseman, Mike Gallego, that I'd made a big mistake talking back to him like that.
Gallego told me that Palermo was furious. "Who the hell does this rookie think he is?" he asked Gallego. I knew from that moment that he was going to have it in for me for the rest of my career.
I still have a videotape of the time I was with the A's and Ted Hendry called a strike on a ball that was a foot outside and level to the ground. I just let him have it. You'd have to bleep out most of what I said. The next time I was up, I stood there in the on deck circle and screamed at him some more.
"I can't believe you made that call!" I yelled. "It was terrible!"
I threw in a few cuss words, but he still wouldn't throw me out, so I went up to the plate and just kept shouting till he finally tossed me. He was one of the nicest umpires around. I always got along with him great, but in this case, it seemed obvious he was making that bad call because a week or two earlier I had questioned a call of Richie Garcia's. That's how it works-even though Garcia was in a completely separate crew, there's still a code among umpires that they will back each other up and make sure you pay.
Garcia was one weird dude. He was Latino, but it was well known in baseball that he was especially hard on Latinos. How messed up is that? I have no idea what was going on with Garcia.
Sometimes a guy just doesn't like the way you look, or the way you come across in the media. I think a lot of these umpires take it personally if you get to be a big star. Garcia had a serious attitude problem, and we players felt the brunt of it.
One of the things fans always wonder about is what players and umpires talk about during a game. I can see why; sometimes, when I catch a few minutes of a game on TV and I see a player jawing with an umpire, I try to read their lips to see what they're saying. Often it's easy to tell, but sometimes the players get a little more creative. It's a kind of art form, knowing how far to push an umpire without sending him over the edge. Some managers are really good at saying just enough, and doing it casually. Sometimes they'll even come out to the mound to talk with a pitcher, just so they can call something out to the umpire on their way back to the dugout. My own approach was to keep it simple, unless I was really losing my temper-because when that happened, forget about it.
I remember one time in the late 1980s when I was with the A's and we were facing the Detroit Tigers. Frank Tanana was pitching. He'd already been in the league fifteen years or so; he was on his way to two hundred career wins, and had the respect of everyone. You knew he was going to get a lot of calls, but he had that big old curve ball, and if they were giving him a few extra inches, you were going to have a really tough time.
So Drew Coble was behind the plate that day, and Tanana let loose with one of those big sweeping breaking balls, and it went completely around the plate. Never touched it. But Coble called it a strike! I couldn't believe it.
"Drew, wasn't that pitch outside?" I asked him. He paused a minute and looked at me like I should have known better than to ask.
"Son," he said. "That's a Hall of Fame pitch. A Hall of Fame pitch."
In other words, he was telling me that Frank Tanana was going to the Hall of Fame, and he was going to get calls like that every time, no matter how obvious it was that I was right. When Coble said that, I just laughed. He was a funny guy-maybe not the best umpire in the league, but he tried his best, which was all you could ask, and he was a great communicator. He was always making jokes, and some of them really busted you up. That made it a lot easier to take when he made calls that drove you crazy.
Every player has been on the wrong end of an umpire's revenge. They're a tight-knit group; they demand respect, and they can make or break you on the field, the same way the media can with the public. Generally I've gotten along with the umpires, but there were definitely times in my career when they had it out for me.
Moises Alou got so frustrated during the 2004 season that he broke one of the cardinal rules of baseball and complained in public that the umpires were out to get him. Everyone ripped him for that, and talked about how stupid it was for him to vent his frustration. But it's not like he was just being paranoid. I'm sure they were out to get him. I've seen it happen too many times.
Believe me, umpires are the most vengeful people you'll ever meet, and if you ever make the mistake of getting on their bad side, they will make your life miserable. I have no doubt that Moises had a legitimate complaint, but I'm also sure that he'll never live this down with the umpires. Whenever any umpire anywhere gets a chance to make a call against him, he will. He could be playing in the Northern League or Single-A and they'll still stick it to him on general principle. That's how umpires think.
t's really the same in all sports, and people should expect no less. The owners collude with each other in every sport, including baseball, and the umpires or referees collude with each other in their own way. This is nothing surprising. It's just basic human nature that if you have power, the temptation will be strong to abuse that power.
Fans would be amazed just how far some players-especially pitchers, even the best of them-will go to try to stay on the good side of umpires. Roger Clemens, who's a lock for the Hall of Fame, was always very conscientious about taking care of umpiring crews. One thing he would do was use his pull to get them on the best golf courses. I know, because Roger and I used to play golf together a lot of the time when we were teammates with the Red Sox, so I was out there with him. He always made sure the umps got a good starting time at courses like Blue Hill Country Club in Canton, Massachusetts.
I'm sure that if you look at these pitchers who consistently get wide strike zones, you'd see that they're generally the same guys who take care of the umpires off the field. They're the ones who do them little favors-get them into exclusive golf courses, reservations at the best restaurants. Some players are constantly signing bats and balls for them, taking pictures with their kids-even sending them Christmas gifts, like sporting equipment ordered directly from whichever company they have an endorsement deal with.
None of that is supposed to be done, but to those of us on the inside it's obvious when players are angling for favorable treatment. I remember one umpire who used to have these charity events where a lot of players would come and sign for free. People found he was pocketing a lot of the money, but what could you do? Believe me, if as an athlete, you don't do charity events for umpires, they start opening up the strike zone on you as a hitter. So the more favors you can do for them, the more breaks you'll get.
I remember one time in Texas I had a big run-in with Joe Brinkman, who was one of the toughest, most unfair umpires out there. He was always mad, just bristling with anger, and you couldn't approach him at all. He had to be the biggest hardass I've ever met in my life, and finally in this one game we got into a huge fracas and he just ripped into me, attacking me personally.
"Nobody out here likes you anyway," he screamed at me.
Then after the game-that very same game-he asked me to sign some autographs for his family. Incredible. I signed a couple baseballs and a picture or two for him, and chalked it up to experience.
The nicest, and most widely respected, umpire I ever met was Dave Phillips. Dave was present at some of baseball's biggest controversies over the years-he was there for Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park, and Gaylord Perry's ejection for throwing a spitball, and the whole pine tar thing with George Brett-but he was always level-headed and professional and called a very good game. Of all the umpires, he was the one I thought most highly of, and I think most players felt the same. He understood that baseball was a very emotional game and players were going to make mistakes every once in a while and question a call in the heat of passion. But he never let emotion get in the way of his calls, and he never held it against the players.
If I were going to offer umpires any advice, the first thing I'd mention would be: The most important factor to understand is the pressure players are under. Anything can happen in the heat of a moment, and whatever you say, umpires need to know that you probably don't mean it. Still, if you say something to the media about an umpire, they're going to remember it for a long, long time. I wish we could all try to leave grudges out of it. You can't intentionally make a bad call against a player because you don't like his race or you don't like him, but believe me, that happens every day during the baseball season.
On this front, I think the major leagues could take a lesson from the minors. I never had one problem with an umpire in the minor leagues. Those umps were very consistent. Why was that? Simple: They were trying to do the best job they could, because they all wanted to advance to the major leagues. If you're inconsistent in the minor leagues, you won't move up, so they try to do the best job possible. Once an ump's promoted to the big leagues, on the other hand, there's nowhere else to go; he loses the incentive to be the best he can, and starts doing whatever he wants. Thanks to the umpires union, an ump has a job until he dies, no matter how bad he might be.
No player gets that kind of security; why should an umpire?
So through the years, when it's been the right thing to do, I've stood with the umpires. But now that there's an effort emerging to reevaluate major-league umpires, I support that, too. You can't just let them run amok. There's got to be a way to keep things honest.
15. Giambi, The Most Obvious Juicer in the Game
Steroid use is a topic of conversation daily among
players. A lot of guys who don't do it are frustrated.
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CURT SCHILLING,
June 2002
If not for the strike, I'm sure that the 1994 Texas Rangers would have finished strong, and with me as their offensive leader, they would have come back in 1995 ready to take one more step toward trying to win a World Series. Instead, after that chance was ripped out of our hands in 1994, the Rangers decided to go in another direction and traded me to Boston, where I had a couple of good seasons-which would have been a lot better if not for a series of annoying injuries. Over those two seasons, I played in fewer than 200 games; the fifty-two homers and 163 RBIs I clocked were good for the number of at- bats I had, but far from satisfying to me.
By that stage of my career, all the sportswriters thought they had me figured as a classic example of a player who would have been great if not for all the steroids I'd taken, and the injuries that they believed the steroids caused. In fact, they had it exactly backward. I would never have been a major-league calibre player without the steroids. I wouldn't have been capable of playing Softball in a beer league-not with my health being what it was. Over the years I've been diagnosed by my doctors with arthritis, scoliosis, degenerative disc disease, you name it. I truly believe I would be in a wheelchair today if steroids hadn't been available to me. I needed steroids and growth hormone just to live. The only reason I was able to play baseball for so many years was that the steroids and growth hormone allowed me to build the right muscle structure to hold up my frame, and to recuperate fast enough after my injuries. I knew all along that it was about more than just gaining weight and being big- ger, stronger, faster. It was about building a more potent body.