Authors: Jose Canseco
Jose was the buzz of all of baseball that year. Everyone
in the game was aware of him and what he was doing
at Double-A Huntsville and then later that year at
Triple-A Tacoma, and finally his September call-up.
It was truly one of the most amazing single seasons in
the history of the game, especially considering
he did it at three levels.
-
PEDRO GOMEZ,
ESPN
It's just human nature to feel awkward and afraid when you first experience something, and when I had my first couple shots of steroids, I was so nervous it was just ridiculous. I was so scared of putting this external liquid in my body. I didn't know what it was going to do to me. But after a while it becomes so easy, it's incredible. Steroids become like a friend. You come to understand them and how to benefit from them and how to use them properly and mix them with other chemicals, whether oil-based or water-based. You start seeing the effect that using steroids has on your body with the proper exercise and proper nutrition.
I guess you could say it was kind of ironic. I was doing steroids to live up to the vow I had made to my mother, but my mother would never have understood if she had found out that I was using steroids. She was an old-fashioned mom; I'm sure she never heard of steroids. If I had told her about it, she would have no idea what I was talking about. She would have assumed they were just some sort of supplement.
I gained weight little by little. But I was always sure to be careful. Some people go crazy with steroids, and just bulk up absurdly. But from the beginning, I was trying to use steroids more for strength and stamina than for size. I didn't want to go overboard. I was also careful not to talk about steroids with people, except for a very small circle, mostly Al and my brother. The three of us talked about it a lot. Ozzie was curious, too, but he didn't start using steroids until later. As I mentioned, Al injected me the first few times, and my brother injected me sometimes, too, and later on other baseball players injected me sometimes. I was dating this girl Linda during my rookie year, and sometimes she would inject me.
People always talk about how steroids can't give you hand-eye coordination, and in a sense that's true. If you've got no natural ability, steroids aren't going to give it to you. But if you are naturally athletic, steroids can enhance whatever you have, both in terms of strength and stamina, and also in terms of hand-eye coordination and performance. For example, I noticed that during the season, most athletes get tired. You start out great, but you lose 20 or 30 percent of your strength and bat speed. A player who started out hitting a lot of home runs would taper off toward the end, because he was just physically tired. Since I was new to it all, I didn't know that steroids could help you with that.
One by one, I gained an education into what various steroids could do. I did a lot of experimenting, since that's how I learned things. I started with the light stuff that off-season before the 1985 season, your basic testosterone, liquid form, combined with some Deca Derbol. I lifted weights seriously all the way through to spring training the next February. Coming back from Modesto the previous year, I'd weighed only 180 pounds. A few months of work at the gym-and my new steroid regimen-made all the difference: I arrived at spring training in 1985 twenty-five pounds heavier than the year before, and it was all solid muscle. "Wow, you've been really working hard in the off-season," the general manager, Walt Jocketty, told me. "You've really been working the weights."
"Thank you," I said.
What else was I going to say? I had started transforming my body, and already looked more like a bodybuilder than your typical baseball player. The strength gains were just incredible, and I was really creaming the ball. I had a great spring training, and thought I was going to make the A's Major League roster right then, even though I had only played as high as Modesto in the Class-A California League. I almost did, too. But they decided that I wasn't quite ready, so I was sent to Huntsville, Alabama, which is Double-A.
To be blunt, I disagreed with them about my not being ready. I knew I was, and I didn't feel like wasting any more time in Double-A before I got to the only place where I could prove they had been wrong. That was the Oakland A's. If you look at my stats in Huntsville, they were incredible. I hit .318 with twenty-five homers and eighty RBIs, all in only fifty-eight games. I set so many minor-league records, it was a joke. I bounced up to Triple-A Tacoma, Washington, and just kept hitting. I hit the ball clear out of the stadium in Washington, something no one had ever done before, and nothing gets people talking like long home runs.
The organization pretty much had to call me up to the A's, and I made it there in time for the last twenty-nine games of the season. Between Double-A, Triple-A, and the major leagues that season, I hit forty-odd homers with 140 RBIs, and batted over .300-and that was even though I broke my finger and missed four weeks.
And I can tell you now: Steroids were the key to it all. I was such an improved player, and I think it was because steroids not only give you a lot of physical strength and stamina, they also give you a mental edge. Think of it this way: whenever you drink one of those energy drinks or eat one of those health bars, even before you finish the thing you're feeling better. It could just be sugar water and a candy bar, but mentally, you're feeling like you could run up a wall. It pumps up your confidence like you wouldn't believe, and for any athlete, that's a very potent combination. When your physical ability is there, your strength and stamina are there, and when your confidence level is up as well, the combination can carry you a long way. Wow, I realized, these chemicals work.
Soon I was injecting myself, and getting good at it. You learn to turn your leg at an angle, to give yourself a better target, and you become an ambidextrous injector, because you definitely are going to want to hit both sides of your glute. One week you would hit your right side, the next week you would inject the left side. If you keep hitting the same spot, you're going to regret it, and I mean in a big way. It can get nasty.
There are others muscles that can be used, like the quad or shoulder muscle, but if you're a baseball player you don't want to use the shoulder muscle, because you're constantly catching and throwing. You don't want to use your quad muscle, because you're running around too much. Some athletes have injected themselves in the shoulders, the quads, and the calves, but I don't do that and I don't recommend it. One time, I tried injecting myself in the shoulder, and it was very painful. It gives you a bruise and you end up with lasting pain. You only shoot yourself in the shoulder with water-based steroids, which allow you to use a smaller-gauge needle, as opposed to oil-based steroids with their larger-gauge needles.
As I experimented more, I started trying different categories of steroids. Different types do certain things to the muscles the skin, the hair, the eyes, and your quick-muscle-twitch fibers. Every steroid played a different part. And when you combined them with growth hormones, the effect was just incredible.
It was actually pretty funny that year, 1985, when I was having such a great run at three different levels. Back when I was at Double-A Huntsville, the fans were so excited about what I was doing, the home runs I was hitting, and my whole style of play that they started flashing THE NATURAL-you know, like the Robert Redford movie-up on the scoreboard whenever I would come up to bat. It was ironic, but the name stuck: Later, when the A's put me on the cover of their media guide for 1986, the headline was THE NATURAL.
I was the first to use steroids in baseball in a serious way, and no one in the organization had any idea what was going on at that point.
"I know I never thought: 'Oh, he must be using steroids,'" says Howard Ashlock, the A's minor-league coach who convinced me not to quit when they made me work as a bat boy.
"It never entered my mind. That was 1985. I don't think people started talking about steroids until much later-probably not until 1991, when Lyle Alzado, the former Oakland Raider, died of a brain tumor after speaking out in public about the risks of steroid use. That was when steroids became more of a social issue."
So off to the big leagues I went. Lucky bat, lucky syringe-luck had nothing to do with it. My first big-league homer was off Jeff Russell of the Texas Rangers, who was only twenty-three at the time, just starting out like I was. Back then, before they rebuilt the Oakland Coliseum to make room for the Raiders, it was probably the most difficult ballpark to hit a homer out of. Russell threw me a fastball, and when I connected with that, it nearly landed in the ice plants out in deadcenter field, one of the few balls that ever made it that far back.
I hit .302 for the A's during my September call-up, and had thirteen RBIs to go with five homers, all in only ninety-six at-bats. I was just a twenty-year-old kid, tall and lean, but what I noticed was, I was far stronger than someone my size should have been. My strength and my stamina were just incredible.
I really had the feeling that I could hit a baseball six hundred feet.
Back in Miami, the Cuban-American community got really excited about everything I was doing, and about what I might accomplish in the future. There are a lot of very passionate, very smart baseball fans among the Cubans in Miami. But even in the 1980s, we Cubans felt almost as if we weren't even part of the game, once Tiant and Tony Perez got older. As a young minor-league player, I had been convinced I had no chance of making a mark in baseball as a Latino, let alone making it all the way to the major leagues. But here I was, a big Cuban, and I was doing these things that had people talking.
"If you went into any of the little Cuban coffee shops in Little Havana, that's all anyone was talking about. It was 'Jose this' and 'Jose that,'" Pedro Gomez remembers. "Nobody was talking about Palmeiro or Tartabull."
You can imagine what it was like after the season when I went back to Miami. People would stop me everywhere I went. The way they saw it, everything I was doing was for them. Gloria Estefan was huge at that time as an entertainer, but in the world of sports, I was the biggest thing to come out of Miami. They were so proud, they even invited me to take part in the annual Eighth Street Parade (Calle Ocho), and I stood up there on one of the floats, waving to people.
"You're the best athlete I've ever seen," people would tell me all the time.
One funny thing about that year: I got back to Miami and my father lived up to the promise he had made years before to pay me five dollars for every homer I hit. So that year, I hit forty-one home runs. When I saw my dad after the season, he handed over $205 in cash. He kept doing that for years after that, too. I worked really hard that off-season, lifting weights at least once a day and learning more and more about steroids. I was doing more experimenting with different types of steroids: Winstrol, Equipoise, Anadrone, Anavar, and more. I started realizing that, using the proper combinations of steroids, there was almost no limit to how much I could continue to improve as a baseball player.
I was educating myself on all aspects of steroids-from why they were invented, to their chemical makeup, how to use them properly, what dosages, how to cycle off, how to cycle on, which steroids did what for the body, which one was good for strength, or for quick-muscle-twitch fiber, or for foot speed. I wanted to keep getting better and better every year, and I was seeing that the steroids could help me do that.
It was almost like I was becoming a machine, built for baseball and nothing else. I could never slack off. There was too much to absorb, too much to learn, and too much to do. I learned all about the proper technique to become a better runner. As I got bigger and heavier I actually got faster, because I knew how to run the right way. The weight I put on was pure dense muscle with hardly any fat, and every exercise I did was fast and explosive. I was working out like a sprinter, not a baseball player. I was built like a football player and had incredible strength. I concentrated on putting on weight by doing only exercises that incorporated quick muscle-twitch fibers. I was training the way no other baseball player had ever trained. And the results were starting to show.
5. Rookie of the Year
The A's unquestionably have power. In Canseco, they
feel they have a new Mantle.
-
RON FIMRITE,
Sports Illustrated, April 14, 1986
One of the most important things that happened to me during my rookie year had nothing to do with baseball. That February, just before I flew out to Arizona to start spring training with the Oakland A's, I was at my favorite spot in Miami, the Scandinavian Health Club, doing one of my last workouts of the off-season. I was feeling pretty good, knowing I was in the best shape of my life, and I was looking around the gym during my workout, the way I always do. Steroids aren't the only thing that can boost your testosterone levels, let me tell you. So can seeing a beautiful woman-and believe me, in Miami there were as many stunning women as you will find in any city in the world.
I've always had a thing for women who are fit and strong, and the Scandinavian Health Club offered a smorgasbord of possibilities. Tall women. Short women. Blondes, brunettes, redheads. Latinas, white girls, black girls, Asians. You would see every kind of beautiful woman in there, but I had never seen a woman quite like the one I spotted that February just before spring training. Damn, I get weak in the knees just thinking about it now.
She had green eyes and dirty blonde hair and an incredible body, and she stood out so much from all the others, it was like she was traveling at Mach 4 and they were all at a standstill. She was spectacularly beautiful and had an exotic quality, especially in her eyes. It was only later that I found out that Esther (that was her name) was Lebanese on her father's side and Cuban on her mother's. As shy as I was, I still knew I had to meet her. I kept waiting for an opportunity to walk over and talk to her in between her sets, but the right moment never presented itself.