Jose Canseco is on the Mets roster and Bret Saberhagen plays for the Yankees. In 1988, the year Canseco became the first Major Leaguer to hit forty home runs and steal forty bases in the same season, he hit his fortieth home run off Saberhagen. It was the only home run he ever hit against Saberhagen in his entire career.

The City of Calabasas lies just outside the borders of the Santa Monica National Recreation Area, home to mountain lions, coyotes, and about fifteen species of rare frogs and salamanders. Ten miles south of the most heavily populated part of the San Fernando Valley, the Santa Monica Mountains are a triangular wedge of semi-arid wilderness bounded by the PCH from Oxnard to Malibu, the 101 Freeway on the North and the 405 on the East.

Almost a hundred years ago a man named Mulholland began blasting tunnels in these mountains to build a system of aqueducts, dams and maintenance roads to enable him to steal the water of the Owens Valley and create the penultimate phase of the infrastructure upon which mid-twentieth century Los Angeles was built, the LA Department of Water and Power, whose annual budget exceeds that of most developing nations. Calabasas High School is located on a hill overlooking Mulholland Highway. Calabasas High has a beautiful new baseball/track-and-field complex, largely due to the tireless efforts of Head Baseball Coach Bret Saberhagen.

Like Canseco, Saberhagen suffered a series of injuries, surgeries and rehabs, which took a huge bite out of a potential Hall of Fame career. After winning the Cy Young Award with Kansas City in 1985 and 1989, he was hurt for major portions of seven seasons. Healthy in 1994, he won 14 and lost 4 with a 2.74 ERA for the Mets, but he spent all of 1996 and most of 1997 on the DL and in rehab. He resurrected his career again in 1998, winning 15 games with Boston. After winning 10 games in 1999, Saberhagen retired with 167 wins and an excellent lifetime ERA of 3.34.

Saberhagen’s career demonstrates this grim fact: anyone who can throw a baseball hard enough, and with enough late vertical or horizontal movement to consistently get Major League hitters out, runs a great risk of injuring his arm sooner or later, usually sooner. That’s why such a small percentage of the most talented Big League pitchers stay healthy long enough to win 200 games, and 300 wins is a sure ticket to the Hall of Fame.

"I can’t imagine what it would be like for Spring to roll without baseball," Saberhagen told his new skipper. Lombardo thinks the world of Bret. "He’ll do whatever I ask of him," Lombardo says. "Once, both of our catchers were called out of town on last-minute work assignments. I didn’t know what to do until Bret said not to worry, he had his gear in the truck. Even with his arm injuries, he threw a clothesline down to second base to nail the only guy who tried to run on him by about ten steps."

Saberhagen joined the Yankees in 2002. He has never pitched in the LA MSBL and doesn’t want to. He likes to play shortstop, he loves to hit and he’s very good at both. At Saberhagen’s request, LA MSBL President Jack Provost has not gone out of his way to seek attention for his League because of Saberhagen’s membership. "He just loves to play ball," Provost said. "He’s not interested in any attention. So far, he hasn’t competed in the MSBL World Series because it has conflicted with the demands placed upon him by the Calabasas coaching job and building project."

When Saberhagen (in photo above, lower right with Yankees teammates) became the coach at Calabasas, the baseball facilities needed a massive upgrade. He threw himself into all aspects of the complex job of turning a ramshackle ball field into a state-of-the art baseball and track-and-field complex: school board politics, county politics, fund-raising, and construction supervision and hands-on-construction work. Saberhagen worked seven days a week for over two years. Never seeking publicity, he managed the project from beginning to end, even contributing some of his own money.

Calabasas High School’s new ballpark is a grassy jewel. With temperatures regularly soaring over a hundred degrees, there is not a spot of brown on the grass. The outfield is flat as a pool table. The infield dirt is firm and moist. The dugouts are sunken well below field level, surrounded and roofed with fine, yet sturdy hi-tech plastic mesh. This simple air conditioning system allows air to circulate inside the dugouts, keeping them much cooler than the ambient air temperature, for which this reporter was truly grateful.

Scott Singleton, a lanky right-hander with a surprising two-seam fastball and a wicked slider, was the winning pitcher. Singleton struck out Canseco in the first on a slider. He allowed two runs in six innings, one on Canseco’s fourth-inning home run.

"That was the softest home run I’ve ever hit," Canseco said. He was using a fairly new DeMarini aluminum alloy bat, which conforms to the specs laid down by the NCAA a few years ago. The new bats have far less "whip" than their titanium alloy predecessors, which had turned the NCAA World Series into a somewhat embarrassing Home Run Derby. Canseco’s home run, which started out looking like a lazy fly ball to medium center, must have hitched a ride on the thermal air currents rising from the sun-baked hillside. It just kept sailing along, effortless as a red-tailed hawk hunting gophers, until it fell to earth a few feet over the center-field fence, about 385 feet from home plate, ruining Singleton’s shutout.

Derek Gray of the Mets made the defensive play of the game, retreating to the eight-foot left-field fence and leaping up to snatch a home run ball out of the air and bring it back over the fence into the field of play. "Major League!" Canseco cried with obvious delight.

This game was the first one that the Mets had ever played at Calabasas High, and many of them had trouble finding it. There were about ten or eleven of them at the field at 2PM, the starting pitcher not among them. Accordingly, the Mets made do with what they had for several innings, while, one by one, the rest of the roster staggered the quarter mile and 150 feet in elevation up the hill from the parking lot.

Canseco pitched the second, third and a bit of the fourth. He clearly enjoyed it, throwing almost nothing but truly hellacious knuckleballs and holding the Yankees in check for the first two innings. Canseco retired Saberhagen, 4-3, on a squibber to the right side to end a rally in the second inning. But he lost control of his knuckler in the fourth, walking three and hitting two in what turned into a three-run rally. He came out, holding his elbow and looking a bit concerned. He is, after all, familiar with how a minor tweak can become a season-ending injury.

Aside from getting fooled by Canseco’s knuckler, Saberhagen had a fine game. He smashed a pair of doubles, one to each gap, and started a lightning-quick 6-4-3 DP, earning a round of applause from both benches.

Saberhagen remains very close to his Mother, who, after all these years, makes a point of attending every one of Bret’s home games. "She’s wonderful lady," said Provost. "She operates that great new electronic scoreboard they’ve got in centerfield."

Eric Orue, the Mets closer, put out the fire in the fourth and worked three strong innings. "He’s throwing at least ninety," Canseco said. "I know what ninety looks like and he’s throwing ninety." Throughout the game, Jose was supportive of his teammates. When he got Saberhagen out, Canseco celebrated with a moon-walk on the infield grass (he was not wearing spikes!). His daughter spent the game in the dugout, playing wonderful little girl hand clapping games with the daughters of two other ballplayers, all of them wearing helmets six sizes too big for them to satisfy regulations. She paid attention to the game only when Jose was hitting or pitching, but, surprising as it may seem, she never got in the way of the players or created a safety hazard. Just to be sure, one of the fathers stood in front of the girls wearing a glove.

Jose seemed to be in his element, where he belonged. He goofed off a little when he was pitching, but otherwise he played hard, and he was totally supportive of his teammates. When I walked up to him for a brief talk, however, his facial expression changed instantly to a defensive frown. He really didn’t want to talk to me!

How could I explain to Canseco that HardBall is not the mainstream press, that I am not interested in any gossip and I don’t care who took steroids and who didn’t? A moment before he had been full of fun, enjoying the game despite the hundred degree heat. But he looked at me with pure distrust, irritation and vulnerability. I smiled, shook his hand and said," I’m glad to see you’re enjoying our League, Jose. I want to welcome you on behalf of President Steve Sigler and all of our members. I want to talk with you, but I don’t like intruding on people who need to be left alone. Call me if you’d like to talk."

In 1986 Jose Canseco was the American League Rookie of the Year. In 1988, the amazing 40 HR/40 SB season, he won the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award. Everyone remembers Kirk Gibson’s miraculous game-winning two-run homer in the first game of the 1988 World Series. Perhaps not so many remember that Canseco hit a 420-foot frozen-rope grand slam to straightaway center in the second inning of that game. Witnesses swear that the ball never rose more than twelve feet above the ground, that it left a dent in the steel housing of the camera in Dodger Stadium’s centerfield scoreboard. For years, everything Canseco did seemed larger than life.

In his autobiography, he admits having abused steroids for years. Whatever the cause, his body began to break down. To look at him now you’d never know it, but from 1992, until his final season in 2001, Canseco was placed on the disabled list nine times.

Many people seem to be unaware that almost every time a professional athlete is "disabled," he undergoes some kind of orthopedic surgery. A brilliant medical repairman slices out the damaged tendon, ligament or cartilage and replaces it with another one, harvested from a cadaver or from a less critical region of the athlete’s body. Sometimes, the surgeon uses a cleverly crafted piece of metal and/or plastic to put his patient back together, almost as good as new.

The athlete then undergoes months, sometimes years of the agony euphemistically known as rehabilitation. This process enables the athlete to strengthen the damaged parts of his body and, just as important, all the muscles, ligaments and tendons which support the repaired or rebuilt parts. Eventually, the team’s medical staff determines that the athlete well enough to perform close to the way he did before he was injured.

With luck, the repaired, rehabilitated athlete may have some more good seasons left. After all, he’s not just older, he’s smarter. What he used to be able to achieve on sheer talent, he may still be able to pull off with experience, wit and trained reflexes. Though continuing to compete may cause the athlete great pain and endless anxiety, quitting is out of the question. In no other way can the athlete earn the millions he’s made as a Major Leaguer. He returns to the game as soon as he thinks he can, often with predictably tragic consequences: new injuries, more surgery, more rehab, steroid abuse, addiction to painkillers.

Say what you will about him, Canseco, until the very end, could still hit: 46 HR and 107 RBI with Toronto in 1998, 34 HR and 95 RBI with Tampa Bay in 1999, and, finally, 15 HR and 50 RBI in less than half a season with Chicago in 2001. He hit 462 home runs and drove in 1400 runs. Numbers like that would give most players a decent shot at the Hall of Fame, but most people look at Joes’s career and wonder what might have been. His autobiography didn’t help his case, but by then he must have known it didn’t matter.

It’s easy to believe Jose when he says that, although he’s not "in baseball shape," he could still be an effective Big League hitter. At 42, he still looks like a world-class athlete: no gut, massive back and shoulders, powerful thighs of hunter-warrior, rope-like veins in his arms. Things being what they are, however, he is unlikely to get the chance to play professional baseball again.

Nowadays, Canseco wears uniform #33 for the Valley Mets of the Los Angeles Men’s Senior Baseball League. The Mets, who won the LA MSBL’s National Division championship in 2005 without Canseco, are managed by Gary Zelman, who owns Revolution Eyewear in Simi Valley. Zelman hires celebrities to promote his business, which is how he met Canseco. They became friendly and Zelman asked Canseco to play and Jose said OK.

The Los Angeles Times ran a feature story about it, mentioning in passing that Eric Davis and other un-named former Big Leaguers had also played in the LA MSBL. In the game covered by the Times, Canseco hit a 480-foot home run in his first at-bat. Later on, he mildly scolded an umpire who rang him up on a pitch that looked low to Jose and the Times reporter. The Mets lost, 11-6.

Among many other things, the MSBL is a refuge, not just for the ex-Major League stars, but for all of us. It’s corny, but I’ve heard too many players say it to discount it: one of the most important things the MSBL provides is a sanctuary, a place where the pressures of life can be forgotten for an afternoon. MSBL teammates often become a close-knit group of like-minded, mutually-supportive friends. Saberhagen and Canseco both bring something special to an MSBL affiliate that operates in the northern half of Los Angeles County. I saw it while I watched them play ball and I hope I’ve given you an idea of what it was. While many of us would love a bit of media attention, Bret and Jose would prefer to be left alone, to be allowed to play the game they love ball in peace. I’ve got no problem with that.

Postscript: On June 30, 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that Jose Canseco had signed a contract with the San Diego Surf Dawgs of the six-team Golden Baseball League, an independent minor league based in California. Managed by former Major League catcher and manager Terry Kennedy, San Diego is currently in last place with nine wins and eighteen losses. Canseco signed for $2500 per month, the maximum allowed by Golden League financial regulations.