TO JERRY Goldman, steroid use was inevitable. Goldman was the A’s team physician during the team’s late-’80s renaissance, and as the 1990s progressed he became deeply concerned that the weightlifting culture the A’s had embraced, and the rest of baseball had followed, contained devastating unintended consequences. As powerlifting became a normal part of baseball, it was only a matter of time, Goldman believed, before players would come to realize that there existed powerful substances that would allow them to extend beyond their normal workouts. Some were legal, others illegal, but virtually all of them lacked reliable information about their long-term effects on the body.
Drugs were part of the weightlifting world, a vain culture in which the goal was always more: more muscle, more definition, the ability to lift more weight and do more reps. Gyms across America provided the conduits to information about which substances worked best and where illegal drugs could be obtained. Among bodybuilders, a kind of open communication existed whereby lifters would share their experiences and reactions to different types of steroids and other muscle builders. “I was working out one day at the gym,” said a member of a major league training staff, “and another guy comes over and asked me what I was using to maintain my size. I told him I didn’t use anything, and he started congratulating me, telling me that nothing worked for him. Then, he starts volunteering all the drugs he used to try and get bigger. I couldn’t believe it. Here I am, a total stranger, and he’s discussing with me all the illegal shit he’s taking. I could have been anybody, DEA, undercover cop. He - wouldn’t have known the difference.”
For Goldman, the primary issue was health. Steroids were controversial, but anabolic steroids were clearly dangerous and unpredictable with regard to their long-term effects on the body. There was a reason, Goldman thought, that Congress had outlawed steroids in 1990. Goldman was terrified of the fact that baseball players played under their own code, which meant players might often share drugs unaware of their individual effects. Yet he and his colleagues were aware of another truth that would be hard to reconcile and even harder to conceal: Steroids worked. In an industry as competitive and pressurized as baseball, in which the pay-offs could be so lucrative, the first players to discover the power of these anabolic substances, Goldman believed, would be ushering into baseball a dangerous era from which it would be virtually impossible to return. The toothpaste could not be put back into the tube.
The reason, Goldman believed, was pressure. Earning a spot on a big league roster wasn’t enough. It was, in fact, just the beginning. A player had to prove he belonged. If visiting players were astounded by the amount of weight a given A’s player could bench, young Oakland players who lacked the strength of Dave Parker or Mark McGwire, sensing their professional mortality, might be inclined to compensate for their deficiencies by using drugs. In addition to being able to compete with the great talent they would face nightly, young players also had to prove that they could contend with a lifestyle for which there was no equivalent. The travel was brutal, and such a lifestyle did not take pity on a player. Beginning with California baseball in the late 1950s, and the expansion of the early 1960s, the pressure to perform mounted as conditions worsened. Previously, every team was located within just two time zones, and train travel was easier than flying. Amphetamines became a given part of the baseball life. “Greenies” were, for some players, the only way to cope with a game that asked too much.
To Jerry Goldman, the potential domino effect was frightening.
AT THE center of the Oakland glory was Jose Canseco. Canseco epitomized the Oakland swagger. He was young, attractive, and at the plate, utterly fearsome. For a time, Canseco was Sandy Alderson’s favorite player. Alderson enjoyed a certain kinship with Canseco, even though they were very different people. Monte Poole, who covered Canseco as a columnist for the Oakland Tribune, recalled his early years in Oakland as something of a paradox. Poole thought much of his bravado was nothing more than a shield against the larger responsibilities of celebrity. “He wanted to be the center of attention, but didn’t want to be the one everybody looked at,” Poole recalled. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but sometimes Jose didn’t make sense.”
Canseco relished his role as the biggest threat on the baddest team in baseball, yet at the same time suffered from obvious insecurities. Those in the A’s organization thought he was terribly defensive about racial issues. Born in Cuba in July 1964, Canseco came with his parents to the United States just months later. It was said that he would always find some sort of slight against Latinos in any given situation and seemed to overcompensate by trying to speak without much of a Latin American accent. Canseco, Poole remembered, was also constantly defensive about his intellect. “It was almost like he dreaded the stereotype of being a dumb jock, even when he did dumb things. He would go out of his way to remind you that he was intelligent. Physically, there was no trace of insecurity, but he was definitely mentally insecure.” Part of the reason for Canseco’s insecurity, Poole decided, stemmed from his upbringing. His father, who was a college instructor, rode him unsparingly, telling Jose he would never amount to anything. Canseco often talked about his childhood in Miami and how, even during Little League games, his father would not offer words of encouragement but cut to young Jose’s insecurities.
In 1983, Canseco’s second year of professional baseball, at Class-A level in Madison, Wisconsin, Walt Jocketty, then the A’s assistant farm director, made a scouting trip to Madison and left without Canseco being on his radar as a prospect with a big future. Canseco’s manager, Bob Drew, supported the A’s decision to demote Canseco to Medford, Oregon, as, after thirty-four games, he was hitting a mere .159 with 3 home runs, 10 RBIs, 2 stolen bases, and 36 strikeouts. At the time, Drew recalled, the nineteen-year-old Canseco was a scrawny six-foot-three and 185 pounds.
It was then that Jose Canseco turned to steroids. He first began using after his demotion to Medford, and his career took off. The next year he was assigned to Class-A Modesto, where the organizational reports said Canseco had bulked up considerably thanks to a rigorous strength-training program. In 1985, Canseco put on another twenty-five pounds, checked in at six-four, 230 pounds, and became a different player. In Double-A Huntsville, he hit .318 with 25 homers and 80 RBIs in 58 games. When he was promoted to Triple-A Tacoma, Canseco hit .348. By the end of the 1985 season, Canseco was a September call-up to the big club where he hit .302. Less than two years earlier, Canseco had been demoted to Class-A Medford. Now he was heading for big league stardom. Bob Drew watched Canseco’s rise through the minors with amazement, as he was convinced that Canseco was not much of a player. “I guess that’s why I wound up making golf clubs for a living,” Drew said years later.
In 1986, Canseco won the AL Rookie of the Year award and seemed to be the future of baseball. He could do everything. He was enormous, but could run like a center fielder. He could hit for power and owned a powerful throwing arm. In 1988, Canseco hit .307 with 42 homers, 124 RBIs, and 40 stolen bases and was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. Before long, he was the highest-paid player in baseball. Some of the old-timers blanched when Canseco became the first player ever to hit 40 homers and steal 40 bases in the same season, viewing it as more indicative of a generation consumed by statistics than a legitimate record. “If I knew 40-40 was going to be such a big deal,” Willie Mays once said. “I would have done it thirty years ago.” Yet no player in the history of the league had ever displayed such a combination of size and speed and power. Mays and Mantle were fast and strong, but both were under six feet tall. Ruth was six-two, but couldn’t have dreamed of Canseco’s speed.
The steroids worked for Canseco. He was convinced they had been responsible for both his ascension to the major leagues and his ability to excel once he got there. He seemed to understand immediately how steroids could take a player’s physical gifts and enhance them to a great degree. They fueled his baseball self-confidence. When he spoke of the potential to be a 40-40 player before th
e 1988 season, Canseco was met with a chuckle. Yet he knew that anabolic steroids helped him burst better toward second. He knew they gave him the kind of power a hitter needed to be a 40-homer player. He was a true believer in what steroids - could do for a player. Almost single-handedly, Canseco turned the scout’s logic on its head. Here was a player who lifted weights daily, before and after games, yet still owned one of the quickest bats in the game. Canseco was emblematic of an emerging era of unusually muscular yet athletic stars. Largely based on the success of Canseco, every team in baseball before long had hired a strength coach, and had its players pumping iron.
Canseco was a big star and had used his influence during his rookie season to convince the A’s to sign his twin brother, Ozzie, who was immediately sent to Bob Drew in Madison. Unlike his brother, Ozzie Canseco did not have the natural ability to play baseball. He, too, turned to steroid use, failing a drug test under the A’s minor league testing policy, but the drugs did not help, because Ozzie did not possess basic skills for the drugs to improve.
Nonetheless, Jose Canseco became something of a steroid evangelist. He talked about steroids all the time, about what they could do and about how they helped him. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Canseco put the A’s in a difficult position. The question of his steroid use and the possible use by another teammate, a budding superstar named Mark McGwire, grew to be an open suspicion.
Deeply compromised was Tony LaRussa. Canseco often spoke un-apologetically about steroids, yet LaRussa did nothing about it. In the years following the cocaine trials of the 1980s, baseball had adopted a “probable cause” testing program, which meant the league could test a player for a host of illegal drugs, including steroids, but only with just cause. LaRussa knew Canseco was using steroids because Canseco had told him so. Under the spirit of baseball’s rules, LaRussa could have contacted his boss, Sandy Alderson, who in turn would have told the commissioner’s office. That’s how the chain of command was supposed to work, but Canseco was a superstar player, an MVP, and the cornerstone of the Oakland revival. Turning him in would have produced a high-profile disaster. LaRussa, knowing his best player was a steroid user, did nothing.
In fact, LaRussa did more than nothing. He not only did not talk to Alderson, but actively came to Canseco’s defense. There was a famous moment during the 1988 playoffs against Boston when the Fenway Park crowd chanted “Steroids!” at Canseco. Ever the showman, Canseco responded by flexing his muscles for the fans. During that same time - Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post accused Canseco of using steroids, an allegation that Canseco denied (not because it wasn’t true, but because he was in the process of negotiating a $1-million endorsement deal with Pepsi). LaRussa protected his player, berating Boswell the next day. The A’s were the first team to live with the secret of steroid use.
Off the field, Canseco exuded an awesome physicality. Mickey Morabito, the A’s traveling secretary, likened the A’s of the late 1980s to a rock group. Everybody wanted a piece of them. The groupies were everywhere, from the girls to the autograph hounds. The insanity was never more heightened than when the team was in New York. The club stayed at the Grand Hyatt on Forty-second Street at Lexington Avenue and the Oakland bus would always be mobbed, Morabito recalled.
Canseco, at the height of his power, was perfect for Manhattan, what with its tabloid culture and undying thirst for celebrity. He was the best player in baseball, but he was also sexy, given to outrageous statements in the press, and more than a little erratic, cultivating a bad-boy image. On one New York trip in 1991, the New York Post caught Canseco leaving the apartment of pop music megastar Madonna in the haze of morning. Canseco was all over the tabloids. When he arrived at Yankee Stadium wearing the same clothes as a day earlier and regaling his teammates with stories of the trapeze Madonna hung in her bedroom, Morabito was convinced the A’s were targets of the paparazzi, a charge that did not come without some degree of titillation.
In 1990, Canseco signed the richest contract in the history of baseball, one that called for him to earn $4.7 million per season, but there were signs that troubled the Oakland organization. In 1989, coming off of his MVP season, he was arrested twice, once for driving in excess of 125 miles per hour and once for carrying a loaded handgun onto a college campus. The latter incident was much less sensational than it sounded: He had arrived at the campus to take a physical and an A’s groupie looked into Canseco’s convertible and noticed the gun near the floor of the passenger seat, but it made for great headlines. It also infuriated the Haas family, who owned the team. It didn’t help matters when in February 1992 he was arrested for ramming his wife Esther’s car repeatedly with his own.
On the night of August 31, 1992, Canseco stood in the on-deck circle, preparing to face Baltimore’s Mike Mussina. Before his at-bat, Tony LaRussa pulled Canseco from the game. That night, he was traded to Texas for two pitchers, Jeff Russell and Bobby Witt, and all-star outfielder Ruben Sierra. It was a blockbuster deal and a stunning blow. Canseco was the star of a budding dynasty, the embodiment of the A’s crushing style, and now he was gone.
When Oakland made the trade, Canseco believed his steroid use was a factor. By 1992, even Alderson thought that Canseco was a steroid user. Still, Oakland officials believed differently. Where it all disintegrated for Canseco, they believed, was with the Haas family. For years, the family had been attempting to forge a positive relationship between the A’s and the community at large. When the school year ended, the A’s offered tickets, hot dogs, and sodas for a dollar apiece at each Wednesday afternoon game. The A’s sponsored school and youth programs throughout the Bay Area and wanted to be that rare organization that didn’t just throw money at charitable causes, but actually embodied the values they funded. Having a ballplayer who seemed to be careening out of control, fighting publicly and violently with his wife, armed, no less, Sandy Alderson thought, had pushed the Haas family to its breaking point. They - could no longer brook Canseco’s increasingly erratic public behavior. A change had to be made.
To Monte Poole, the trade was the defining moment of Jose Canseco’s professional career. “That was huge. It was a huge blow to his ego. Here’s a guy who you could legitimately make the argument was the best player in baseball and he was traded during a game. From that point forward, I believe he questioned his skills. I think it made him insecure about a lot of things. I think part of him searched for an explanation for that. He took a second look at himself and wondered how much he meant as a ballplayer. Before that, I think he thought he was worth more than anybody.”
Canseco was never the same player. During five of his first six seasons (he missed most of 1989 with an injury and played in just sixty-five games) Canseco had hit 187 home runs and driven in 577 runs, an average of more than 115 RBIs per season. By contrast, in the ten seasons following the trade, Canseco would drive in 100 runs just once. With the Rangers, Canseco took on the role of a buffoon. In 1993, he misplayed a ball in right field and it bounced off his head and over the fence for a home run. Two days later, in a blowout loss to Boston at Fenway Park, Canseco entered the game as a pitcher and blew out his shoulder. Canseco was never a defensive genius, but he had never before embarrassed himself on the field. Now he was a sideshow.
Nick Cafardo always enjoyed Canseco. To Cafardo, then the Red Sox beat writer for the Boston Globe, Canseco still carried the air of a big star when he arrived in Boston as a free agent in 1995, in part because he was given free rein of the Sox clubhouse by manager Kevin Kennedy, who had been his manager in Texas and allowed him to pitch in the game that destroyed his shoulder two years earlier. Cafardo especially enjoyed Canseco’s bigness and his candor. Despite the nonsense in Texas, Canseco was still a name, and names sold papers. Canseco recognized this, and always spoke with the bombast of old. Back in Oakland, he had always bragged that if he ever played in Boston, he’d hit 70 home runs. Now paired with Mo Vaughn, he was once more part of a lethal home run combination, as he had been in Oakland with Mark
McGwire and Dave Parker, something Canseco relished. Yet despite the brashness, it was clear to Cafardo that Canseco’s skills had seriously declined. The vaunted power was still apparent, but his speed, once so terrifying for a man of his size, had totally evaporated, and he was a complete liability in the field.
If his skills had eroded, his behavior was no less bizarre. Cafardo recalled meeting Canseco to do a lengthy feature immediately following his signing. The interview was to take place at Canseco’s expansive new house near Miami. Upon arriving, Cafardo immediately noticed that the landscaping was not complete. The pool, in particular, was not yet fenced. Cafardo had heard rumors that Canseco had purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of wild animals, and was amused to see a handful of giant land turtles creeping across the backyard. After talking for about three hours, Canseco agreed to let Cafardo come back the next day to complete the interview.
When Cafardo returned the following morning, he witnessed a scene of total mayhem. Fire trucks, among an odd assortment of emergency vehicles, blocked the driveway. When Cafardo found Canseco, he was in a state of near panic. It seemed Canseco’s six land turtles, one by one, had crawled into the pool, each drowning almost instantly. Canseco apparently did not know that land turtles could not breathe underwater. He had paid $8,000 for each turtle.
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