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ever good enough for him. Later on, I could handle that. But back in high school, it was really tough. I was just happy they let me play baseball at all, because I had so little confidence and the whole time I was out on the field, I was always bracing myself to hear some jab from my father. That was definitely the worst part of playing baseball for me.
    "Don't scream at us!" Ozzie and I would yell back at my father sometimes, and even though we would be crying, it never made any difference. He didn't listen. You know how parents are. To me and Ozzie, it seemed like each of our teammates heard every single thing our father said, and we cringed every time he'd rip us for not doing something or just for doing something different than the way he thought we should. But I guess to some of these other guys, whose dads didn't come to games very often, it seemed like it would have been nice to have a father so involved with what you were doing.
    "Your dad is dedicated," Val Lopez used to tell me. "He's at games, he's at practices-and you always know he's there." Another guy from that high school, Pedro Gomez, ended up as a sportswriter in California, covering the Oakland A's when I was in my heyday there, and now he works as an on-air reporter for ESPN. He says I was kind of a character in high school, which just goes to show that different people have different recollections.
    "You were like the Judd Nelson character in The Breakfast Club," Gomez tells me now. "You know how the assistant principal kept turning the knife into Judd, inside the library, and he would respond by saying things like, 'Does Barry Manilow know you raided his wardrobe?' You just never knew when to turn it off. You were a smart ass." Gomez was kind of a smart ass, too, the way I remember it. And maybe I did like to goof off back then. It was only high school, you're a different person for every class.
    The Oakland A's ended up drafting me in the fifteenth round of the 1982 amateur draft, and that came as a surprise to me. I didn't think I was going to get drafted, and I was amazed even to be picked in the fifteenth round. The scout who drafted me was Camilo Pascual, a star pitcher for the Minnesota Twins in the 1960s, who won twenty games two years in a row.
    Pascual's son Bert was one of my teammates at Coral Park High, so he had seen me swing the bat quite a few times, and thought that I had potential. Pascual thought I should have been picked sooner in the draft, and he actually got into kind of a fight with the A's about signing me. I was only asking for a $10,000 signing bonus, which was not much money at all, compared to what other players were getting, but they didn't even want to pay that much.
    Pascual couldn't believe it. He thought they were crazy, and he let them know just where he stood. He was in a meeting with the A's general manager, Sandy Alderson, and all the scouts, and maybe an owner or two, and he reached into his pocket very dramatically and pulled out his wallet.
    "You don't want to give this kid his bonus?" Pascual asked them. "I'll pay the extra amount from my own pocket. That's how sure I am that Jose is going to make it."
    They decided to sign me, and to be honest, I wasn't that thrilled by the news. People always assume that if you get signed to play professional baseball, you must be unbelievably excited, like it's one of the best moments of your whole life. I didn't feel that way. Probably a lot of ballplayers have the same feeling, but don't talk about it. Basically, I was too scared to be very happy. I had no idea what to expect, and it seemed totally obvious to me that I didn't belong, and soon enough they would realize it had been a mistake to sign me at all. I just had no confidence in my abilities. I was always waiting for bad things to happen.
    So when I talked to people about my future, I tried to play down what baseball meant to me. My attitude was more like, Hey, I have nothing better to do. I figured that once my brief