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At the end of May, when Chavez was hitting .190 and the A's were 15 games below .500, he spent at least half an hour talking to reporters, shaking his head a lot, admitting that he was baffled by his performance and distressed that the A's had fallen so far behind that they might not be able to pull themselves into contention.

"We're not this bad,'' he said several times that night.

Within 10 days, his slump had started to subside, and when the A's got swept in a three-game series at Washington, he decided to end the biggest 0- fer of his career. He stood up on the team bus and delivered his first real speech, chiding his teammates for being too comfortable, for making the same youthful mistakes he had made years earlier.

"When I came up, I was just happy to be in the major leagues, and I didn't really think things out,'' he said. "I didn't have much of a plan except getting here.''

Jason Giambi and some of the other veteran A's set him straight. They told him to aim higher, to learn to hate losing even as he reveled in being a major leaguer. Still, Chavez didn't seem to have enough edge to say the same things to the next generation when his time came. He was too easy-going, too quiet.

But when he took his stand on that bus, Chavez had credibility, partly because he had started hitting, mostly because he had not dodged criticism as a professional athlete. Since then, the A's have been the best team in baseball. (Gwen Knapp, San Francisco Chronicle)

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