Read Juiced for Free Online

So I drank one or two.
    "Come on! One more!' someone else would cry out, and so I drank one or two more.
    That didn't last very long, as you can guess. Pretty soon I was in really bad shape. I almost died of alcohol poisoning. I was sick the next three days, and on the fourth day I was still recovering. That's how bad it was. It traumatized me so much; it gave me a lasting distaste for liquor.
    To this day, I don't really drink much, especially not hard liquor. Maybe it was good that I had that traumatic experience because it really shook me up; I never forgot it.
    As for baseball, I didn't make much of a mark playing in Idaho Falls. I played in twenty-eight games in the Pioneer League, and only hit two homers. I think I barely hit .260 there, and I could not have been less impressive. I still didn't have any meat on my bones; I'm sure I looked like just another kid who wasn't going anywhere.
    Things turned out a little differently.
     
     

3. A Vow to My Dying Mother
    One year later... Canseco and I would cross paths again . . . and I was stunned to find that "the Idaho skinny guy" had somehow grown up to become a freaking Macy's balloon. Brand-new biceps ripped out from under his uniform sleeves. Thick slabs of beef padded his formerly bony frame. A pair of tree trunks now connected to his ankles. Seven innings and two 450-foot moon shots later, I still had no idea what to make of this new improved mutant. Was this kind of super-size growth spurt even possible? What the hell was this monster eating? - DAVID WELLS, Perfect I'm Not
    So much has changed since then: Now there are so many huge Latino stars in the game, it's totally common to have several Latino players on your team, or a lot more than that. But I remember as a Cuban kid in the A's farm system at that time, I was very aware that baseball was closed to a young Latino like me. That was only twenty-three years ago, but for baseball it was a completely different era.
    There were no Cuban players at the major-league level at that time. Previously, there had been some great Cubans, like Luis Tiant, who actually pitched in six games for the California Angels that year, before finally retiring at age forty-two. That same year, another great Cuban, Tony Perez, turned forty-and was still playing, too. Perez had made his name with the Cincinnati Reds, but he had become more of a part-time player by the end, and bounced around from team to team. Still, he could always hit and actually batted .328 in 1985, not bad for a forty-three-year-old.
    But they were the exceptions that proved the rule. Many talented young athletes were playing street baseball in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and many other Latin American countries, but the barriers to breaking into the major leagues were almost impossible for most to get around. Later, it made me mad that there was such a pervasive double standard for Latinos, especially compared with an all-American boy like Mark McGwire. But back when I was eighteen, I just figured it was the way it was. If there were no Cubans in baseball, there must be a reason. Who was I to think that I was going to make it to Major League Baseball?
    My second year in the minor leagues, 1983,1 was still a long way from making any kind of mark in baseball. I was kind of sleepwalking through games at that point. I played in almost sixty games for Class-A Medford in Oregon that summer, and I had almost two hundred at-bats-but I still only hit eleven home runs, and my batting average was less than .270. True, I was considered the most powerful hitter in the Northwest League, and I did make the All-Star team, but I was a long way from looking like a major leaguer. I also played some games that year in Madison, Wisconsin, which was also Class A, and I had three homers in thirty-four games, and my batting average was .159. How's that for impressive?
    Even during that off-season, I was still in a fog when it came to baseball. If you had asked me at the time