Juiced by Jose Canseco Read Free Book Online Page A

if it could bring my mother back. Even now, not a day goes by when I don't think about her.
     
     

4. “The Natural”
    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