The Jose way - slugger Jose Canseco

He's no longer a butcher, world shaker or headline maker. Just Jose Canseco, slugger. And that;s a boon to Beantown.

Ten summers have passed since Jose Canseco was named The Sporting News' Minor League Player of the Year with 36 mostly legendary homers and 127 RBIs, and in that decade he has invented a 40-40 club, crushed a Mike Flanagan pitch to the fifth deck at SkyDome, led the A's to three consecutive World Series, taken a Fleer rookie card past $100, called Will Clark a three-toed sloth, sparred with Thomas Boswell about steroids, bared his soul on a 1-900 number, headed a ball over the fence, hurt his arm while pitching in relief, been "Madonna's Batboy," driven an exotic (and sometimes pistol-packin') car like Jacques Villeneuve - even once into his exwife's car, on purpose. To us, Canseco was always this kid mesomorph with unlimited potential and unlimited press. He was bound to reach 500 homers - he's just short of 300 now - and he was bound to tell all about it on his Web site.

Jose Canseco was anything but ordinary.

Until now.

Of all the things Canseco has done, good or bad, this may be the most remarkable: Jose Canseco is 31 and as mesmerizing as the average 1995 divisional stretch run. He has the same powerful build and cinematic Latin face, he still puts on a show in batting practice, and in the past month he finally has reminded the Red Sox why they "stole" him from Texas last offseason for 36-year-old out-fielder Otis Nixon and light-hitting third baseman Luis Ortiz. But the old Jose? No way. Until his team's recent make-it-or-break-it West Coast trip - when he homered five times in five games and couldn't resist the temptation to lure Tony La Russa into another war of words - Canseco has been persona non grata in Red Sox notebooks. Indeed, he spent 20 minutes in the dugout with The Sporting News one day this season and said essentially that he didn't have much to say. Maybe Jose just grew up and out of the 1-900 mode, and maybe that's good. In the past year, he has been Santa to refugees at Guantanamo Naval Base in his native Cuba and has tried to set up an agency in south Florida that would, he says, help young Latin players "who can't communicate." He even stood on the picket line with the same umps who never could stand his whining about their strike zone, and on Opening Day he signed balls for strike-frazzled fans on the street (although it later was revealed to be a not-so-innocent, TV-driven P.R. stunt). He says things like, "I'm not a robot; I'm human, just like you."

Canseco will be back in the playoffs for the first time since he disappeared during the A's four-game World Series loss to Cincinnati in 1990. The postseason used to be his showcase, oil for his hype machine. This milder-citizen, speed-limit image will be put to the true test when the media converge on him during the playoffs, especially if it is against Texas, which last season housed him and his current manager, Kevin Kennedy. But what everyone will find is just another good veteran designated hitter, playing for a contract somewhere, almost quiet and unassuming. In short, he has become Paul Molitor. "Hard Copy" can hardly wait.

One of the supreme ironies of Canseco's stay in Boston is that he has somehow managed to be almost inconspicuous in a baseball-crazed, media-intensive city, where writers for six daily newspapers travel regularly, with the club and countless smaller suburban papers and an army of electronic media blanket the tearn at home. The city has a history of consuming its baseball stars, from Ted Williams to Carl Yastrzemski to Wade Boggs to Roger Clemens. When the Red Sox traded for him last December, it was thought that Canseco and Boston might be a volatile mix. But because Canseco has perfected his role as a baseball free-lancer - arrive late, get four at-bats, leave early - he almost has succeeded in disappearing into the mix.

Canseco and Mo Vaughn were supposed to be twin attractions, before anyone knew the Red Sox actually would draw by winning, and so they adorn the cover of the team's annual yearbook. Canseco is pictured in a black tank top, arms folded, biceps bulging. Vaughn is offset in a white tank-top, posed similarly. The result is pure beefcake - and unintentionally hilarious - and it looks less like a team yearbook than. say, the latest issue of Playgirl, or some feature on The 10 Sexiest Pro Athletes. No one then would have thought that it would be just Mo's team, Mo the MVP candidate.

Suddenly, Canseco just "fits in" on a team and not on a cover. just sits on the bench until that next chance to bat. Orioles Manager Phil Regan was one of those who watched Canseco's revival coincide with the Red Sox's runaway in a colossally disappointing American League East. He says it was bound to happen. "You have to have tremendous respect for him and pitch him very carefully, because one swing of the bat (at Fenway Park) can mean three runs," Regan says. "It's particularly important to have a guy like him now, because he can go on a tear and carry a team."

In mid-August, Canseco put a strip of tape with a hand-lettered message across his nameplate above his locker: "I'm sick of hitting fine drives!" On the face of it the declaration made little sense; hitters are forever saying they only want to "hit the ball hard somewhere." But Canseco felt that hitting line drives was counterproductive at Fenway, where the 37-foot high Green Monster was turning rocket shots into long singles. "I'm not sick of line drives," Canseco clarified. "I'm sick of hitting singles. I won't have a job if I keep hitting singles. I'm here to hit home runs and drive in runs. I'm paid to do certain things, and I'm going to do them."

Over his career, Canseco always has fiddled with his stance periodically, but this season, he has been in a seemingly endless adjustment mode. From at-bat to at-bat, from pitcher to pitcher, indeed, sometimes from pitch to pitch, he has tinkered. He shifts his left foot toward the left-field foul line, then aims it, menacingly if awkwardly, at the pitcher's mound. At times, his stance is so open he seems to directly face the pitcher, his bat cocked off to the side.

Whatever alchemy Canseco has been searching for at the plate, he would appear to have found it. By mid-August, he was swatting high, arching fly balls that eventually would nestle into the screen above Fenway's left-field wall. On August 29, Canseco hit a ball so high that he was at second base before it scrraped The Wall on its way down, a few feet short of its intended mark. Canseco kept running gamely - sculpted, overly muscular and a little thick through the middle, he's not the baserunner he was when he stole 40 bases - and reached third for a true Fenway rarity: a fly-ball trip]e to left.

More often than not, Canseco's high blasts have reached their intended destination. By the end of August, his endless fine-tuning finally had gotten Canseco, as Kennedy likes to say, "locked in." In the final 20 games of August, Canseco hit safely in 19, with 9 homers and 20 RBIs. In that 20-game span, he hit .434. On that 11-game trip west, Canseco hit .356 and tied the club record by homering in five consecutive games. Since coming off the disabled list June 20, Canseco has hit .337 with 18 homers and 50 RBIs in 60 games. Over that time, Canseco's average rose from .180 to.316.

"I'm getting the ball up in the air now," Canseco says. "I'm more aggressive, and I feel fike my swing is a lot quicker. Maybe that's why I'm elevating the ball more now."

Canseco had liftoff, and so did the Red Sox While Canseco was on a tear, the Red Sox widened their lead to 15 games, effectively ending the race in the A.L. East. "We missed him in the first half," Kennedy says. "He told me two years ago that he needs every at-bat he can get because he's a slow starter."

With 30 games to go, the Sox's magic number was at 15, and instead of offering a month fraught with anxiety, September represented a mere preparatory course for the postseason. Intriguingly, Boston even might clinch the division this weekend at ... Yankee Stadium.

Typical of his sometimes contradictory nature, Canseco insists he is not satisfied with his output. "I want to do better," he says. "I want to hit the ball farther. I want to see the ball better. I don't think I've peaked yet as a player."

In Kennedy - one of just three managers Canseco has played for in the major leagues - Canseco has found his dugout match. Kennedy allows Canseco to do whatever is necessa to produce four at-bats per night.

Canseco can't resist taking shots at the A's, and in particular, La Russa, with whom he has clashed - from a distance - since being traded to Texas for Ruben Sierra during the 1992 season. During that last trip, it was all Canseco could do not to gloat about his production and about Boston's comfortable standing while the club that gave him his start struggled to reach .500.

"I like it in Boston," Canseco said. "I'm enjoying myself 10 times more than any season I had in Oakland. I'm allowed to be myself in Boston." Canseco added that he may have helped teach some of the younger Red Sox players "how to win." Reporters then scurried from Canseco to La Russa, for the predictable retort.

"He violated the line of leaving us alone," La Russa said. "Taking away from who we are and what we have here irks me." La Russa found the "how to win" statement laughable and ironic, noting that Canseco once complained that "the problem with the A's is all they care about is winning." La Russa fumed: "The Red Sox were playing their butts off when he was not there (injured for 38 games). Now he's enjoying what they've done in the first of the season, and he's teaching them how to win? He's teaching Mo Vaughn how to win? John Valentin? Tim Naehring?"

Indeed, that "how to win" statement probably would be laughable to those players. The Red Sox built their big lead largely without him in the first half - he merely helped them extend it to unreachability. Canseco was nagged by injuries the first half of the season, and his favorite-son treatment by Kennedy - as was the case in Texas - was beginning to wear thin around Boston's clubhouse. With the Rangers, the two often huddled in Kennedy's closed office, as Canseco unburdened himself about his depression, his failed marriage and other aspects of his personal life. Kennedy became a big-brother figure to Canseco but infuriated some Rangers with his kid-glove treatment of his star. Kennedy, a career minor leaguer, also seemed to enjoy his close relationship with one of the game's biggest stars and once bragged that Canseco had let him borrow one of the many expensive sports cars in his stable.

To Kennedy, the two had "formed a bond. I know he trusts me." But to some disgruntled Rangers, the manager had crossed over the line and was fawning over a player he should have been controlling.

"From the first day I met him," Kennedy says, "I tried to let him be himself, let him be Jose Canseco. I think you need to understand him. You have rules as a manager, but everybody has a different personality. Jose doesn't need to be yelled at or screamed at. With superstar players, you better get those guys to perform, however you do it. He wasn't always on the field in spring training with the rest of the team because I knew he was going to mostly be used as D.H. Why waste time? ... He knows what he needs to get ready."

Canseco found at least one kindred soul in the Red Sox clubhouse in Mike Greenwell, a nine-year Boston veteran who occasionally has run afoul of the city's demanding fans with his reckless outfield play and penchant for free-swinging at the plate. Greenwell had heard the horror stories from past teammates, Canseco's comments that the A's were "obsessed with winning" and his sometimes indifferent approach to the game. "Let's put it this way," Greenwell says, smiling. "I'm glad I'm playing with him as a 10-year veteran instead of when he came into the league. He's a better person."

Greenwell - the team's player rep, most vocal spokesman and resident instigator - also appreciates that Canseco happily accepts the playful clubhouse ribbing. When hitting instructor Jim Rice began making loud bird sounds to call attention to one of Caseco's impossibly bright yellow outfits one day, Canseco merely smiled sheepishly. "He wants to be accepted," Greenwell says. "He walks around with this big body, and people think of this big ego. But you know what? He's really a pussycat."

Oh, just for the record, I called the real 1-900-234-JOSE hot fine that so many people once knew and loved. Here's what it says today: "Welcome to Infoservices Entertainment Line. To speak one-on-one with a young lady it's $3.99 - press No. 1. And to listen to a recorded fantasy, it's $2.99 - press No. 2." I hung up. It just wasn't the same, but there's a lot of season left.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Sporting News Publishing Co.
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