Authors: Jose Canseco
And as bad as the Chronicles story seemed, there were others that were a whole lot worse. By the time you were done reading them, you'd think I'd been waving the gun around, shooting at kids or something. (When reporters talked to Esther when she came to the sixth floor of the county jail, she just told them the truth: "This is all bullshit.")
One bad story like that, and you're set for life. The whole rest of my career, people always mentioned that gun arrest, as if I was running around campus waving a gun in the air. Now I hate to think what would have happened if Cal Ripken Jr. had landed in the same position; "Excuse me, Mr. Ripken, sir. We're so sorry, but we got a call about a gun in your car, and we just have to check it out. Strictly a formality, we're sure. Oh, what's that? You say you've got it taken care of and there's no problem? Okay, fine. Go get 'em, slugger."
Even the simplest stereotypes can be revealing. I remember when I was playing for Double-A Huntsville and I heard a reporter in the background asking one of the coaches, "Can he speak English?" I almost broke down laughing, it was so ridiculous. Just because my name is Canseco and I'm Latino, it automatically means I can't speak English? Yeah, right. Try that on Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But I shouldn't give the minor-league reporters too much trouble. In general, I found that they were a lot different from major league reporters; they're more interested in what happened during the game itself-in keeping it on the field. Major league reporters are far more interested in your private life, in trying to dig up what you do off the field-at least if you're not on the off-limits list.
I was always, from day one, the evil guy of baseball. Reporters were always trying to pit Mark and me against each other, to contrast us-Jose Canseco the aggressive, Latin lover with his fast cars, and Mark McGwire, the all-American boy. In general, I was able to handle the media pretty well early in my career. I was still shy, but interviews were no big deal.
The real problems started when I came up in 1985 from Triple-A Tacoma to Oakland. The team was struggling. No fans were coming out. The organization wasn't even on the map. So at that point the organization decided to try to sell me as the future of the A's. I was the new power hitter, the new young stud who was going to save the team. That's how they portrayed me, and the media picked up on it, too. Once I came up, the organization started restructuring, adding other players like McGwire and Walt Weiss. Little by little, the team started winning. But I'd been the one who was supposed to be the team savior-to carry the whole burden on my back-and when it didn't quite work out that way, the media never let me forget it.
I'm not saying reporters always have it easy. Once baseball started becoming more popular again, not just in Oakland but everywhere, the competition among them media became just overwhelming. There were so many media personnel covering the teams that each of them had to struggle to scrape up a different story to stand out from the crowd and draw attention (and readers) to themselves.
So what happened? I became the guy who was always the butt of the joke, the easy target for controversy. Each new reporter tried to dissect my personal life and my marriages, everything they could find about my background. From 1987 on, I was attacked all the time by the media. Every little thing that would happen to me-right down to getting tinted windows in my car-was national media. It was just crazy.
It was only during the last two or three years of my career that I felt the press beginning to treat me differently, after I'd learned to socialize with them a little more and I was less shy. Until then, I spent years being made fun of, lied about, exaggerated about-you name it. And I couldn't help but notice that every negative story that came out about me was by a white reporter. Never once in my entire career do I remember seeing a negative article from a minority paper or minority writer or minority producer.
Of course, I didn't take all this mistreatment quietly. I spoke out against the double standards I saw, and sometimes made an issue of it when I saw that black athletes weren't being treated fairly and getting the right contracts. For example, when contract renewal time came around, Will Clark had the same service time as Kevin Mitchell, and Kevin Mitchell had performed better. All of a sudden, Will Clark was getting a four-year contract for a good amount of money-and Kevin Mitchell wasn't.
I spoke out about that. And the media hammered me for it - the white media, that is. But I had no qualms about speaking out against the injustice. Why? Because a lot of us minority players felt like we got the cold shoulder from Will Clark. Clark was a country boy, and from the way he acted and the comments he would make, we had reason to believe he had no respect for us.
But who was going to complain? He was white, he was Will Clark, and he was protected by the system.
After I made some comments to the press about Mitchell and Clark, in every ballpark I'd go to, the minority athletes would greet me with a thumbs-up and a high five. They knew I had the power to challenge the double standard, and they loved watching me use it.
In the end, of course-though I didn't realize it until after I retired from baseball-all those controversies worked against me. If I hadn't been political, and spoken out and fought for what was right, maybe the owners would have wanted me around in baseball a little longer.
The public has to realize that the good guys in baseball aren't as perfect as the media says they are-and the bad guys aren't as bad, either. The truth is always somewhere in between. Yes, the media can portray you as an angel even though you're a devil, and vice versa. They can completely control what is brought to the public. It's just like political propaganda, only on a smaller scale. No one knows what goes on in the political world unless the media covers it and carries it accurately back to the public.
But what if the media is really deceiving the public? That kind of thing has happened before, it's happening now in certain areas, and it will continue to happen. It's left to the public to make a choice about what to believe.
As I've asked myself for years: If you can't trust a sports reporter to tell the truth, who can you trust?
11. Texas-Sized Sluggers
There are trades in sports, and there are TRADES in
sports, and this was definitely the latter. Out of the
blue, the biggest celebrity in baseball had been sent
flying from the Oakland A's. This was the kind of
deal-the bolt-of-lightning trade-that just wasn't
supposed to happen anymore.
-
LEIGH MONTVILLE,
Sports Illustrated, September 14, 1992
he biggest surprise I ever had in my seventeen seasons playing in the big leagues came on August 31, 1992. We were playing a home game at the Oakland Coliseum against the Baltimore Orioles, and at the time we had a good lead in the American League West, seven and a half games. I played right field in the top of the first inning, and then came in ready to bat in the bottom of the inning. But just as I was stepping into the on-deck circle, one of the coaches told me that the manager, Tony LaRussa, wanted to talk to me.
I figured Tony wanted to tell me something he'd noticed about the pitcher. You're always trying to identify clues about what the pitcher is going to do-a glove movement, a hand movement, anything that can help you pick up what type of pitch he's going to throw. But Tony didn't want to talk about the pitcher. When I reached him, he just stood there for a moment while I waited for him to speak.
"Jose, you've been traded," he finally told me. It didn't register. I thought it must be some kind of bad joke, like on April Fool's Day.
So Tony repeated himself. "You've been traded."
I was in shock.
"Go upstairs and see Sandy Alderson. He'll give you the details," Tony told me.
So I put my bat and helmet down and started walking up through the tunnel. Just imagine what it was like: We were right in the middle of the game, only an hour or two before the deadline. I was in complete shock. None of the players said anything to me; they were too busy with the game.
Upstairs, the A's general manager, Sandy Alderson, explained that I had been traded to the Texas Rangers, in exchange for three players: Ruben Sierra, Jeff Russell, and Bobby Witt. He said I should go take a shower; there'd be a press conference afterward. That was basically it. The days and weeks that followed remain a real blur for me. It didn't really sink in, for a while, just what had happened or why. I'd been with the A's my whole career; I'd come up through the minors, and played in Oakland for eight seasons. And now this.
"I haven't even looked at myself in the mirror," I told the reporters who showed up for a press conference I gave at Yankee Stadium before my first game, for the Rangers. "I feel like I'm playing in an All-Star Game, where you wear the uniform for a day and go home. Only this time you don't go home. I still can't believe all of this happened. I can't believe it happened this way. Maybe I'll never know the reason why I was traded."
I even tried to find some humor in the situation. When one reporter asked me where I had been traded, I said: "To Ethiopia For a box of Froot Loops and a camel to be named later."
But inside I was just dumbstruck-and it seems like the whole Bay Area was as well. "Sandy Alderson never has been afraid to pull the trigger on a big trade that would help his team," Frank Blackman wrote in the San Francisco Examiner the next day. "But Monday night, when the A's general manager announced he had traded Jose Canseco to Texas for three players and cash, he dropped a nuclear device."
It was a weird feeling, getting on the plane to New York to leave the West Coast and join the Rangers. Pedro Gomez sat next to me on that flight, and I told him how confusing it was to hear so many people complaining now about the trade. All I could think was, Where were all these supporters when I came to bat at the Coliseum? This outpouring of support was nice, but I could have used it to drown out all those boos in Oakland.
I couldn't help grousing to Pedro about it all. "I've always heard, 'Why can't he reach his potential?'" I told him as we sat up in first class, heading east. "Maybe thirty-five home runs and 100 RBIs is my potential. It's not a bad potential to reach.
I don't think I've ever gotten credit for the things I've done. It's always been what I haven't done or what I should have done. It's not fair to me. But I guess that's one of the prices you pay for superstardom. I wouldn't change a thing if I could. I'd still go into baseball."
It wasn't only in the Bay Area that people were amazed by that trade. People all over the country were having a hard time suddenly imagining me taking the field in something other than my familiar Oakland A's uniform.
"The uniform looked so strange on him, the word TEXAS spelled across the gray shirt in blue letters," Leigh Montville wrote that week in Sports Illustrated. "Jose Canseco was a Texas Ranger? This could not be. Up was down, down was up and the tidy baseball universe had been altered. McDonald's sells hamburgers near Lenin's Tomb, fine. A member of the British royal family rubs suntan lotion on the bald head of an American businessman, O.K. But Jose a Ranger?"
It was true I wasn't having my best season for the A's that year. Injuries had been nagging at me for months. I had twenty-two home runs at the time of the trade, and 72 RBIs, but I was only batting .246, which was a big drop from the .307 I hit in 1988 my forty-forty year.
Still, I was only twenty-eight years old, and it was clear that I had many, many more good seasons ahead of me. When the A's traded me, that represented a huge change of course for them. I knew they needed pitching, especially after Bob Welch went down with an injury in the weeks before the trade, but they were basically pulling the plug on the powerhouse team they had built. The A's were looking for ways to cut salary and go into a kind of rebuilding mode. No one would have predicted they would do that at that time, and basically give up on being a contender, even though they still had so much talent.
As shocked as everyone was, including me, the transition turned out to be pretty easy. After a week or so with the Rangers, I felt pretty well settled in. I had known Rafael Palmeiro since we were kids growing up in Miami, and of course I was glad to be playing with another Cuban. And there were other Latino stars on the team, like Ivan "Pudge" Rodriguez and Juan Gonzalez.
They made a real effort to make me feel welcome after that trade, and Raffy and I even started bashing our forearms, the way we all did out in Oakland. Eventually, I realized that this change of scenery was probably good for me.
And the whole episode did give me a little perspective on what was really going on during the time I'd spent in Oakland.
Maybe I'd worn out my welcome there. Maybe I'd fallen into a trap. The shoes people put out there for me would have been very difficult for anyone to fill. And when I did manage to fill them, the shoes just kept getting bigger. It was sad, but I don't think I ever could have fulfilled the expectations people had for me out there.
I also wondered about what role the steroid issue might have played in the trade. No one in the A's organization ever came right out and said it, but by then there were a lot of rumors about me using steroids, and to this day 1 believe that might have been a factor in the A's decision to trade me. But that would have been just pure ignorance on their part. Using steroids made me a better ball player-and, as everyone soon found out, my expertise on steroids could make other players around me a lot better, too. But the Texas Rangers apparently weren't worried about that.
The managing general partner at that time was George W. Bush, before he was elected governor of Texas. At that time, he was very visible in the role of team owner; he used to sit right behind home plate for a lot of the games. Sometimes he'd come down to talk to the great pitcher Nolan Ryan, who had the next locker over from mine when I first joined the Rangers.