Authors: Jose Canseco
All of a sudden she was gone. When I realized she had walked out into the parking lot, I went after her. She probably thought I was crazy, but mostly she was just doing her best to ignore me. I asked her out, and she didn't say yes, but she didn't say no, either. I had to wait to follow up, though, since I had a long baseball season ahead of me and wouldn't be back in Miami for any length of time until the next October. By then she had been voted Miss Miami, 1986, and I had been voted American League Rookie of the Year.
I remember sitting on the plane taking me out to Arizona, and having a lot of questions about the year ahead. I figured I had a good chance to make the team. I'd shown some talent in my performance the previous September, when I hit over .300 with five home runs, including some of the longest home runs ever hit at the Oakland Coliseum.
The whole Oakland As organization had embraced me, but I wasn't taking anything for granted. That was never the way I thought. To be honest, I was really nervous going into spring training that year. I had these huge doubts about whether I belonged. I also wondered if I was going to be accepted by the other players, especially the veterans.
I find it funny how people think they know just what you're thinking and feeling, even when they are way off. It became a cliche in the media to say that I was conceited and arrogant, but in fact, I was never that type of individual. My whole time in the major leagues, I was never completely convinced that I belonged there. I was never sure that I was good enough to be on the same level as all these amazing athletes I was competing against every day.
I was probably more insecure than every other athlete there, and that was especially true my rookie year. I felt like a kid who had been let out on the field by mistake. I would see these great athletes walking by, as if it was no big deal, and I would just be gawking at them.
"Wow, there's Dave Kingman," I'd say to myself.
Then a minute later I'd be staring again.
"Wow-that's Reggie Jackson."
Sometimes, it was all too much. Look at these guys! I'd be saying to myself. What am I doing here?
I was just a young kid, twenty-one years old that spring, and in a lot of ways, a young twenty-one. I'd been such a late bloomer, it was still a huge shock to me just to be taken seriously as an athlete. I'd watched all these guys on TV. I'd seen all these famous ballparks on TV. I just couldn't help myself; no matter how much I tried to be calm, I was in awe of the stadiums and star struck with the players.
People would laugh if they could hear the kind of pep talk I was always giving myself back then.
"Slow down, Jose!" I'd say.
"Try to control your emotions."
"Your adrenaline is flowing too fast."
"Easy!"
If you let your adrenaline take over, everything seems too fast and too out of control. You have to slow everything down to your pace. When you're hitting and everything seems slow and easy, you're locked in. When you're hitting and everything seems like it's accelerating superfast, beyond your control, then you're in trouble. It took me a long time to understand that, and in my rookie year, I was all over the place. I would hit a huge home run that had everyone talking, and then I would swing so hard at a bad pitch that I would almost injure myself. When you're working with steroids and your muscles are so dense, you're strong enough to swing your shoulders right out of the sockets.
No one really showed me the ropes, either. A lot of times a veteran will kind of take you under his wing and tell you what's what. I never had that kind of relationship with a veteran when I was an A's rookie. I didn't have the nerve to bother any of the veterans with questions, for starters. I was just a quiet kid and kept to myself whenever I could. Nobody really knew anything about me. They might have been surprised to know that I was too scared to ask these players for advice, but that's how I was.
I'd see someone like Dave Kingman, who had been hitting mammoth homers for years, and I'd think about getting his autograph more than asking him about his stance.
Later in my years with the A's, we had a group of guys who had been together for a while and knew each other really well.
You might not like everyone. Someone like Carney Lansford and I were never going to click, for example. But you knew where you stood with everybody, and they knew the same about you. But in 1986 we were in a rebuilding mode, trying to accumulate new players, so it was like musical chairs. The team looked different all the time.
It wasn't like we were all the same age, either. We had a lot of younger guys and a lot of older veterans at the same time. Everybody was just getting to know each other, so you really didn't have that much fun together, or play practical jokes on each other, or anything like that. Usually, you don't play practical jokes on someone you barely know. That stuff comes later.
We were just trying to crawl out of the cellar in our division, and even though I was a very quiet kid, very shy, I was supposed to be like the savior of the organization. They had already built me up so much when I was in the minor leagues, before I ever put on an A's uniform, because they wanted to generate some excitement and bring some fans out to the ballpark. In some ways, I was never fully accepted, but because of the buildup, it was kind of understood that I was a part of the mix. Everyone was like, "Okay, now Canseco is here. Get on with the show."
Fortunately, I got off to a good start that year, and the veterans seemed to be impressed.
"Damn, this guy knows what he's doing," I'd hear them say to each other.
But I was just getting by on my raw ability. It was going to take me a long time to learn how to hit consistently at the major-league level. Much later in my career, I became much more knowledgeable about the game and became a guess hitter who studied pitchers on videotape carefully. I thought long and hard about what a given pitcher was likely to do in a given situation. But that only happened after years of soaking up as much information as I could as a hitter, watching and learning and picking up any extra advantage I could.
Back in my rookie year, it was see ball, hit ball. I was a pure reaction hitter. You hear that term all the time, reaction hitter, but what does it mean? Just that you react to the pitch in flight. You never pick up any signs beforehand. You never really see the rotation of the ball. You never say, "In this situation he's going to throw a breaking ball down and away, so look for it down and away." I was on the edge, winging it, but because I had so much physical ability, and so much strength, I was able to get away with it. Swinging the bat and hitting home runs was fun, but it was also nerve-wracking, trying to prove myself, and then watching how the media tried to figure me out. At that point, I was just trying to figure myself out.
That first year in the major leagues went by fast. Maybe it was because everything was so exciting and new to me. I got off to a great start; I was selected for the All-Star Game, even though I was a rookie. The game was at the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, that year. I walked around trying to take it all in. There I was, an All-Star, and I just couldn't believe it.
Roger Clemens pitched three perfect innings for the American League and ended up as the most valuable player of the game. The manager that year was Dick Howser of the Kansas City Royals. The American League hung on for a 3-2 win, but it was so close, Howser never even put me into the game. It felt weird to make the trip to Houston and never even do anything but sit around and watch. But later it turned out that Howser was really sick, which put it all into perspective.
"I remember the indignation all of Miami had after the 1986 All-Star Game," says Pedro Gomez, my classmate back at Coral Park High in Miami. "A few months later, it was revealed that Dick Howser had a brain tumor and died, and all the old Cubans in Miami pointed to that as the reason Jose did not play-because the guy had no brain."
I was glad to get back to Oakland after the All-Star break and rejoin the As, but I got off to a terrible start. I had one bad game and then another and another and another. The whole thing just snowballed on me. I started the second half going 0-for-40, which if you think about it is pretty hard to do. It was the worst slump of my life, hands down, one of those times when everything went bad all at once.
Every time I hit the ball hard, it went right to someone. It felt automatic, like the whole thing was out of my hands. Let's say there was a guy on first base, and he'd take off to steal, and the second baseman would break to go cover second base, and then I'd hit a line shot that would be a base hit up the middle nine times out of ten, or ninety-nine times out of a hundred, only this time the second baseman would be right in the path of the ball, so he'd catch it and instead of a base hit, it would be a double play.
I was striking out plenty, too, believe me, and finished that season with 175 strikeouts, which ranked third in the league and was far and away the most strikeouts I've had for one season in my whole career. I didn't know how to handle it.
"What's going on here?" I would say to myself. "This is crazy.Does this happen to other players?"
It was also a great learning experience. My stock had gone up so high so fast, and then just like that, it came down again. You can never get too comfortable in baseball or the game will find a way to shrink you back down to size. Slumps are just part of baseball, and all you can do is find a way to work through them.
Fortunately for me, the A's organization believed in me and gave me the chance to stay in the lineup to work my way out of it-which I did.
We went to Detroit for a series against the Tigers. Walt Terrell gave me a good pitch to hit. I took a big swing and hit a home run to center field that ended up in the Tiger Stadium upper deck. They told me afterward that I had already hit a home run in every American League ballpark as a rookie. After that, the slump was behind me.
That September we played the New York Yankees in Oakland, and I had four hits in what ended up being a 9-8 win for us. One of those hits was a home run, which gave me 100 RBIs, making me the first player in baseball with 100 RBIs at that point. I finished with thirty-three home runs, which was fourth best in the league, and 117 RBIs, which was second best.
Back then, hitting thirty homers in a season was like hitting fifty nowadays. But at the time, I didn't think of it as a lot. I knew I still had a lot of work to do. There were so many aspects of my game I had to improve. I couldn't really enjoy my successes as a rookie when I knew I had so many weaknesses that I would have to work on before I could live up to my ability.
Everything about me needed improvement. I needed to get bigger, stronger, smarter, and more patient at the plate. But the thing I was most focused on was speed. Even though I stole fifteen bases as a rookie, and only got thrown out seven times, I knew I had the potential to steal a lot more bases. But I could only do that if I learned how to harness my speed and develop a more explosive first step, which makes all the difference when you're trying to get a good jump down to second base. I was so rough back then, I was focused on everything from cutting down on my strikeouts to psychological strengthening.
People forget, but even for a home-run hitter like me, the mental part of baseball was always important. I was still nervous at times, or overexcited. What you find out as you play more games is that the more knowledgeable you become, the more insight you have into playing in a certain ballpark or facing a certain pitcher, the more it helps you focus and become that much more intensely involved with the game.
That came with time, but it was a hard lesson, believe me. As I said, I never had anyone to train me or show me the way.
That might have helped me a lot, especially since I was so much younger than most of the other players, even though I was expected to help carry the team from my rookie year onward.
I always had the feeling that I was doing everything my own way. I was basically creating my own road as I went. There was no paved road for me to follow-it was like I was down in the Amazon, using a machete to cut my own way through to where I wanted to go. It was a slow process doing it that way.
The more years I had under my belt, the more I learned how to be myself without trying to break rules all the time. My strike zone refined and got smaller. Early on, I would swing at just about anything-high, low, inside, outside, you name it. I remember one time swinging at a pitch way up over my head. I had to reach so far for it that when it ricocheted off my bat, the ball slammed into my helmet. I swung at balls in the dirt all the time, and the funny thing was, I couldn't figure out why. I was so reactive at that time, and often so nervous, I was just a wild swinger. I wasn't concentrating on the right area.
But that was part of what got people excited about watching me. People used to say that watching me swing and miss was more entertaining than watching other hitters swing and hit a home run. I was swinging so hard, like there was no tomorrow, and they knew that if I got all of a ball, it would do things they had never seen a baseball do before.
Probably the funniest example of that was a game in Anaheim early in my career. I still have this play on tape. Mike Witt threw me a slider down and away, and I took a big swing and made good contact, but off the bat it looked like a low liner the shortstop, Dick Schofield. He actually jumped up in the air, thinking he was going to catch it, that's how low to the ground it was. But it sailed over his head, and as it headed toward the out field, it just kept rising. I hit it with such good backspin that it hydroplaned like a golf ball, and just rode the wind all the way out of the ballpark. "There's a line drive over short," A's announcer Bill King said over the radio. "It's in the gap! It's gone!"
It was freakish. I ran hard down to first base, thinking it was a line drive just over the shortstop's head, but all of a sudden I saw it go out. "Did that ball really go out?" I asked someone.
I couldn't believe it. That was probably one of the best technical swings I've ever had in my life, and I guess it proved that you can hit a home run that never gets higher than twenty feet off the ground. As I ran the bases, the other players were all giving me shit about it, saying they couldn't believe it went out. We were all laughing. It just goes to show, you never know what you're going to see any one day at the ballpark. I like to think I made people feel that way a lot of times in my career.