Canseco Reaches a Fork in the Road

When we last left Jose Canseco and the World Series, he had nailed Tim Belcher and the Dodgers for a Game 1 grand slam, then spun into a dizzying zero-for-18 slump.

That was followed by a winter when he missed a few appearances, stiffed a few friends and learned a lot about the court system. Spring training brought more brushes with the law and a hand injury that benched him for half the 1989 season.

He did not go quietly. He was caught with an unregistered handgun while attending a therapy session, and, yes, there were a couple more traffic violations. He sold one sports car, a red Jaguar, and got another, a silver Porsche convertible. That red car, he said, was bad luck.

He hinted it may be better to low-key this traveling life, better to fade away than burn out. Along the way, he was rude to a few teammates, more than a few reporters and went into a three-day pout when the A’s didn’t want him to play in the 1989 All-Star Game -- Canseco wanted to play despite not having played in a single regular season game.

He didn’t play in the All-Star Game, but two days later did return to the A’s and homered in his first game. He established his own 900-Ask-Jose phone line because inquiring minds apparently want to know.

He still complains about a sore wrist and shoulder, but after six or seven months when his mind must have been on a few things besides baseball he came back to give the Oakland Athletics a nearly awesome 65 games.

Despite not once putting on the uniform in the first half, he had 17 home runs and 57 RBI in 65 games after the all-star break. Despite all his troubles, he actually took last season’s 42-homer, 124-RBI most valuable player numbers and improved on them: His homers went from one every 14.5 at-bats to one every 13.4 at-bats, his RBI from one every 4.9 at-bats to one every 3.98 at-bats.

The playoffs? He hit a fifth-deck home run in the SkyDome that was conservatively estimated at 480 feet.

He can be arrogant and childish and selfish. The A’s know all of this. He also has a chance to roll up some numbers the summer game never has seen before.

One San Francisco columnist summed up the plusses and minuses of both World Series teams today and came to the conclusion that, Will Clark and Kevin Mitchell notwithstanding, “If you (Canseco) play up to your capabilities, this Series is over.”

“Is he special?” A’s Manager Tony La Russa asked. “Just on sheer ability, he has a chance to do some things that have never been done before. If he takes care of business, who knows?”

Ah, taking care of business.

That old rub again, those Hollywood nights in those Oakland hills.

The A’s love him. The A’s hate him. The A’s adore him. The A’s privately can’t decide if he’ll have the greatest career or the quickest flameout in history.

On the eve of Canseco’s second World Series in as many years, many of his teammates and employers choose to see the glass as half full.

“Yes, I think he’s growing up,” General Manager Sandy Alderson said.

Alderson, a Harvard Law School grad and a Vietnam veteran is not much given to fools and chooses his words carefully.

“He’s growing up in small and sometimes imperceptible ways,” he said. “He’ll be interesting to watch the next few months. I don’t know what he’ll do with his idle time, but it’s pretty clear he didn’t make very productive use of it last winter.”

Some see the glass as half empty. They see the fast cars and the fast lifestyle.

“He hasn’t changed one bit,” pitcher Dave Stewart said. “What I’d just say to him is that if you conduct your life in a way that holds you up to ridicule, you have to stand up and take what goes along with it. Don’t make excuses.”

Stewart is asked if he doesn’t want to take Canseco aside and talk to him.

“No,” he said. “He doesn’t pay any attention to anybody. I wouldn’t have any advice he would think was valuable.”

Is he headed for a fall?

“I’ve never known anyone who could live as he has lived and continue to have all the graces that go with it,” Stewart said.

Has he phoned 900-Ask-Jose?

“Are you kidding?” Stewart said. “I have no intention of adding to his pocket. That’s ridiculous. What does he say anyway, that he got up, took a shower and brushed his teeth? Does he really have that much going on in his life?”

Told that the messages weren’t changing every day, as had been originally advertised, Stewart smiled.

“Well he may not be dedicated to that either,” he said.

Later Stewart worried that he had been too hard on his teammate. He reminded a reporter that Canseco is, after all, only 25, that his problems may stem from immaturity and a devil-may-care attitude, that he is not evil or dangerous, except to himself.

Canseco is making $1.6 million annually, and after growing up in a tough Miami background, has become very famous very fast.

“I don’t want to make it sound like people hate him,” Stewart said. “It takes all kinds of people to make up a team, and it’s what you do between the white lines that counts. People here have mixed emotions about Jose. Some don’t like him, some like him and some can take him or leave him. Personally, I like him, but there are times he’ll do something to tick me off. That’s just the way he is.”

If Canseco weren’t the most recognizable player on the best team in baseball, if he didn’t pack a hard 230 pounds of biceps and chest on a 6-foot-3 frame, his headlines would be much smaller.

He’s certainly not the game’s first bad boy. Dave Parker, Jeffrey Leonard and Bert Blyleven were accused of some of the same things when they were younger. All now are respected veteran players, but what they had in common a decade ago was that they were forced to do some of their growing up under the hot lamp of public scrutiny.

If he never changes, he won’t be in an empty classroom. Thurman Munson and Ty Cobb played their entire careers without being particularly loved by a lot of people, and some people can take players such as Roger Clemens and Jim Rice only in small doses.

“Is Jose a bad guy?” Parker asked. “No way. He’s 25 years old and has a lot of money for the first time. He’s living his life out in the sports pages. Every time he makes a mistake, it’s jumped on.”

A recent call to Canseco’s hot line found him willing to talk on a variety of subjects, including his trouble with the law, what he did that day and his hopes for the playoffs.

In person he is more reserved, mostly polite. He says tales of his excesses have been blown “way out of proportion.”

He sounds a lot like Jimmy Connors at 19 or 20 when he says, “I’ve aged 10 years in six months. ... There have been so many things written and said about me.”

He emphasizes again that his left hand is not healed. “It’s sore and my shoulder hurts too,” he said. “With my ability I can play through it. But I’m still only 85 or 90 percent. You have to play hurt.”

He says he has been burned so much by the media that he is reluctant to get involved in interviews that extend much past the standard pre-World Series fare. Even then, he can be testy.

“Do I know the Giants?” he asked. “I don’t watch much baseball at home. I don’t leave MTV to watch them. I saw them in spring training enough that I think we know them and they know us.”