I was a mess, using every day, growing increasingly paranoid and defensive, listening to nobody. And yet there I was, at the Devil Rays’ spring training complex in St. Petersburg, trying to hide my addiction and make the ballclub.The second half of that statement is debatable. My first drug suspension was over, but I don’t know how hard I tried to make the club, or even whether it was a possibility. My head wasn’t in it, and my heart followed.The Rays made a big move before the 2003 season, bringing Lou Piniella out of retirement to manage the team. Lou was known as an old-school hardass, the kind of guy who flourished working for George Steinbrenner and the Yankees. He was going to usher in a new era of Rays’ baseball, where guys played hard and were held accountable, and failure would no longer be seen as a by-product of wearing the uniform.To me, it didn’t really matter. Drugs had taken over. They’d gone from a recreational mistake, something I stupidly thought I could control or ignore or deny, to a full-blown personal disaster.
