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program, and that was the beginning of a whole new approach for me. I just ate, drank, and slept baseball.
    That was it for me, nothing else. There were no girls. There was no going out. There was nothing. The only thing that went through my mind every single day was constantly thinking: How can I become better? How can I become faster and stronger? How can I gain more knowledge of the game? How can I learn more about my body and its potential and what I can do to unlock that potential?
    I was hitting the weights hard at the 24-Hour Nautilus Gym, which was five miles away from where I was living. Every day after practice I would walk the five miles, lift weights until I couldn't lift my arms in the air, and then I would walk another five miles back home, every day. That was hard, but soon it didn't feel like enough of a challenge, and then I actually started jogging it, both ways, to get faster and stronger.
    At that time, I hardly had any money and couldn't even afford to buy myself a car. Maybe that was good in a way, because all that jogging back and forth helped me get into great shape, but I remember how every time I would jog one way or the other, I would pass this particular Chevrolet dealership. I'd look at all those shiny new cars, lined up in rows, and that gave me one more reason to work hard and get bigger and stronger. As I went by, I would say to myself: One day I'm going to buy myself a Corvette.
    And later I did-I actually got two Corvettes at once, and all just for doing a TV commercial for a dealership in California.
    To give you an idea of how insignificant I was to the organization back then, one time during instructional league that year I had a first-hand look at the way racism and the double standard worked in baseball, at least at that time. I was a nobody to the As, a fifteenth-round pick and a Latino. There was a huge contrast between how they saw me and how they saw their golden boys, like Rob Nelson, a big, left-handed power-hitter who was a dumpy-looking six-four, with 220 pounds of soft muscle. You could tell he had never worked out, never lifted weights, but the As picked him in the first round of the 1983 draft.
    I remember one day we were working on a drill where the pitchers would make a move over to first base and throw the ball, trying to pick you off, and we were supposed to get our leads and then dive back to the base ahead of the throw. I took my lead, and when it came time to dive, I did, but this guy Rob Nelson caught the ball and slammed his mitt down, hitting my elbow. I couldn't believe that he would make a big, awkward tag like that, even if it meant hurting a teammate. He struck me so hard on the elbow that it started swelling up right there.
    "What was that?" I asked him. "Look what you did to my elbow. It's swelling up."
    Nelson didn't like me calling him on it like that, and he and I got into it, talking back and forth. But that didn't last long.
    "What the hell are you doing?" one of the coaches yelled at me, and gave me a real strange look.
    "That's our No. 1 draft choice," he told me. "Who are you to talk to him that way?"
    He seriously said that to me. I wasn't allowed to tell someone he shouldn't act like a thug, that's how little the organization cared about me. They decided to show me how ticked off they were with me, too. They weren't content just to yell at me a little. They wanted to make sure I got the message that I wasn't good enough to speak to this big, dumpy- looking, inconsiderate guy. So they got together, talked it over, and cooked up what they thought was a really clever scheme.
    Then came the humiliation. They decided that for a couple of days, I would have to be a bat boy. For a couple of days, I didn't play at all, just fetched bats. I was the first one they had ever tried to ridicule like that, making me run around to pick up after them. They all taunted me the whole time, like I was some kind of animal. "Wow, you really make a good bat boy, Jose,"