The dog's name is Slugger, and Slugger is a powerful dog. He is 4 years old, Australian shepherd by birth, accurately described by his owner as "full-figured." He is not what you would call a show dog. He's about as wide as he is tall, with an unfortunate patch on his nose caused by lupus. He takes regular doses of prednisone, which adds an epic quality to his roundness. He does not, however, derive his strength from his form. Like all the truly great ones, Slugger is oblivious to his power, or a bit foggy, or maybe just above it all. Whatever the case, he walks through the Oakland Athletics' spring training clubhouse in Phoenix, dutifully staying three paces behind his owner, destroying an image with every step he takes.

The image is nothing more than a masquerade, and Slugger's owner—smiling behind your back—knows you will be tempted to believe what you see. You will look at the tattoos and the canta loupe biceps and the shaggy, Shemplike 'do and maybe you will buy into the concept of Slugger's owner being one tough dude. There is a chance you will shy away from him, or be put off, or leap to conclusions. Fight this urge. Look into Slugger's languid eyes and feel the truth:

Jason Giambi is not a badass.

Slugger knows the truth. Slugger is the truth.

We ask you, would a self-respecting badass go to court to fight for custody of this full-figured dog? And would that same badass then bring that dog—lupus nose and all—to work every day? And if he did, what kind of badass would he be? Giambi fought for, and won, joint custody of Slugger as part of a divorce settlement two years ago. This, then, is a man who went to court over a sweet, loyal dog. "That was our big fight," Giambi says. "I wasn't going to give him up. I love him to death." Slugger is now torn between two worlds—staying with Jason during the winter and spring training before being shipped off to Southern California to live with Giambi's ex-wife during the season. For now, with Opening Day quickly approaching, they need their time.

Giambi knows the power of Slugger, and he knows the facts cause the image to shatter like a window in a firestorm. He knows people rooting around in his life ask a few questions, talk to a few teammates and ultimately come back to him with some variation of a line that starts with, "Hey, wait a second ... " And when he is faced with being exposed in a national publication for not being what his image would suggest, Giambi smiles and responds with his favorite all-purpose line: "Ah, just trickin' 'em."

This is the way he describes what he does to American League pitchers, too, and it is equally untrue in that context. He is not trickin' 'em, any more than he is tricking you. Because when you chip through the layers of personal geology, you discover The Beast is really The Lamb. "I'm too busy having fun to be mean or nasty," he says. The nastiness, if it were there, would be contrived. This is a 30-year-old man with an MVP trophy, who plays on the most interesting team in baseball, whose dog lies reverently at his feet, whose brother/best friend dresses a few lockers to the right. How perfect is that? "Dude, it's like a dream," he says. So, you see these photographs? The ones with the arms exposed and the eyes gloomy and the jaw set like concrete? They tell their own story, a separate story—and a story that conflicts with the stories on record.

Stories like this one: Giambi met his fiancée, Kristian, at her grandmother's 90th birthday party at a Bay Area restaurant. Giambi was having dinner with friends when Kristian's mother approached his table, apologized, then said her mother is a huge A's fan and it would mean so much to her if he would say hello, this being her 90th and all. When Jason got to the table, Kristian's grandmother expressed her delight and then (as 90-year-old grandmothers are entitled to do) she played matchmaker by introducing Giambi to her granddaughter.

Or this one: He was asked, with trepidation, to give a speech at a ceremony for Garth Brooks' Touch 'em All Foundation. The scheduled speaker, another player, was a no-show, and Giambi is part of the foundation, and he's the AL MVP, so they figured they'd give it a try. First, because it was a lunch-time event, they made sure he would be out of bed—and dressed—in time. He said he would. And when he got up before the group, his hair drooping forward like a starlet's and his facial hair being what it is and ... well, Garth wasn't too sure any of this was a good idea. Friends in low places? In a recording studio, maybe, but not when corporate funding is at stake. But then Jason started talking, and Garth's sweat started drying. "Garth came up to me afterward and said I had him worried," Giambi says, smiling like a guy who has seen it all before. "He said he saw my hair and knew about my tattoos and all that, and he was a little nervous. Then he said, 'And then I started hearing all these wonderful things coming out of your mouth.' I looked at him and said, 'Well, Garth, I guess you can polish a turd.'"

Or this one: Bob Alejo is Oakland's strength and conditioning coach and Giambi's near-constant companion. He has a friend in the Bay Area whose son was having a hard time with his Little League coach. He told Jason, who picked up the phone one day last season and called the kid. He didn't tell him to get tougher or play through it or anything trite like that. He gave him one kernel of advice: Don't let anybody ruin your fun.

Giambi is a strict fundamentalist when it comes to fun. It is his most resolute article of faith. He is determined to practice what he preaches.

***

They carried him off the field. That's what he remembers about it. You're talking about fun? Start right there, at the end, on the last day of the season, after the A's had clinched the AL West by beating the Texas Rangers. The players celebrated on the field and finished by carrying their first baseman on their shoulders. When you think about it, there was a certain balance to the scene. He had carried them for the better part of the year—and especially the final 30 days—so it was only right that they do a little carrying of their own. "In the big leagues, guys don't carry someone off the field," he says. "I mean, come on."

Giambi earned the MVP award in September, putting up comic-book numbers (.400, 13 homers, 32 RBI) as the A's won 22 of their last 29 to take the AL West on the last day. Two days before the clincher, the Rangers' Kenny Rogers had a 2-0 lead into the fourth when Giambi led off with the 42nd of his 43 homers. "When he hit that ball, it was like, whew! We could breathe again," says manager Art Howe. "That's what Jason did: He breathed life into us every day."

Giambi is the undisputed leader of this team, which tells you as much about the team as it does about Giambi. "I think the way he presents himself to the other players in the clubhouse is strong," says newcomer Johnny Damon, one of the reasons the A's have gone from chic pick to intelligent pick in the American League. "Jason's attitude is, hey, this is my team and we're going to win, just follow my lead and relax. We'll make it." Jason, of course, also says things like this: "I'm an adrenaline junkie—cars, bikes, bungee-jumping, whatever you've got. What I'd really love is a fast boat. I'd love to have a Scarab or a Cigarette, so I can light my hair on fire and drive it 100 miles an hour, making margaritas. That might be the best." The bungee-jumping was actually a one-time thing, and not something he has done since he became more prominent. He did, however, initially refuse to sign his current contract until a clause prohibiting him from motorcycle riding was excised.

He kisses his bat before he gets to the plate each time and shaves his body—chest, legs, arms, everything but the head and face—to feel more aerodynamic. (As for the hair he keeps, he says he compensates by slicking it back during the season.) His clubhouse wardrobe is Early Wrestling—T-shirts with no sleeves and an abbreviated midsection. "I'm on a Cal Ripken streak with the sleeves," he says. "No sleeves, ever."

He'll make $4 million this year, but he and brother Jeremy still spend a good chunk of the winter living with their parents in Claremont, Calif. He owns a house in Las Vegas—actually, he and Jeremy own the house, but Jason says Jeremy is "on scholarship, a full ride"—but when he is in Vegas he stays in a hotel/casino. "I know people there, and I like to hang out there," he says. Alejo, with no humorous intent, says, "They clean up after you in a hotel."

One of his first calls after learning of his MVP award was to good friend and mentor Mark McGwire. "Hey, Big Sack," Giambi said. "How do I handle this?" McGwire gave him a synopsis of the demands he would face, but he knew the truth: Jason would never say no. "He doesn't like hurting people's feelings," Jeremy says. "Jason has to have stronger people around him to say no."

Things weren't always as easy as deciding which honors to accept in person and which to graciously accept through a letter or phone call. There is a little Behind the Music in Jason's past. He has no kids and he was married less than two years. But his divorce, which began in late '98, sent him into a personal funk. "We were like, 'Come on, snap out of it,'" Jeremy says. "I guess when you're so successful at something like baseball, you don't think you can fail. He felt like, 'If I can hit a baseball like this, how can I not be successful in a marriage?' It's kind of like an ego thing: 'How come I can't make this work? I can do all these other things.' He hates failing and he was asking himself, 'Why did this fail?'"

Giambi eventually sought answers from spiritual adviser Azra Shafi-Scagliarini, who includes Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and Sarah Ferguson among her clientele. Giambi was introduced to Azra by McGwire, who was introduced to her by former A's pitcher Ron Darling, who once described her to the San Francisco Chronicle as "Nostradamus with a better body." Azra gained renown among the A's when she phoned the clubhouse in Toronto one night in 1999 and said she had a bad feeling about Tony Phillips. She suggested, rather strongly, he not play that night. Phillips laughed it off, got a couple of hits early and broke his leg late in the game. Giambi spoke with Azra, sometimes as part of a conference call with Fergie and others, at least once a day.

Jason recently stopped the sessions because, he says, "nobody wants to be in therapy their whole life." Still, he credits Azra for helping him see the world outside baseball. "Sometimes it's hard for people to imagine things on a different level," he says. "She always had positive things to say at a time when I needed positive things. I think if you act the right way, good things come back to you. I guess my karma's good, because things are going great. People ask me, 'What would you be doing without baseball?' I don't know—supersizing fries? Checking under your hood? Maybe a bartender? Bouncer at a strip club? Hey, there never was a backup plan."

***

You know that ache in your sports psyche, the one created by exorbitant salaries and ungrateful players and the growing chasm between professional athlete and fan? There's a good chance the A's could heal that. Why? Because this spring, while the plaintive, high-decibel whine of high-priced ballplayers is being heard throughout the land, the complaints ranging from money to respect to location and then back to money again, here in the A's clubhouse there is a fat dog and a smiling man. Here, there is a locker filled with double-ripped T-shirts, containing neither sleeves nor stomach. Here, there is happiness, banter, hope. It looks like audition day for a boy band, or the set of a Muscle & Fitness photo shoot, with all the primping and preening and the hair—oh, the hair. Bleached hair and frosted hair and one head of hair, belonging to eccentric lefty Barry Zito, that looks like it was soaked in redwood deck stain. The Anglo guys are butchering Spanish and the Latin guys are butchering English, and they're all laughing. Baseball is a game, a fun game. Remember that part? These guys remember, or maybe they're too young to have forgotten in the first place. They're playing ball. For a living. Can you beat that? "This is a high-priced fraternity without the homework," says GM Billy Beane. "Look at us," says 24-year-old third baseman Eric Chavez. "Everyone can be who they are, or who they think they are. It has a lot to do with Jason. You don't have to earn anything with him. Put on a uniform, and you're part of the family."

As the game inches toward yet another collective bargaining Armageddon, ask yourself this: Does Bud Selig root for the A's? The A's present a problem. If they can win on a paltry payroll in a second-tier city with a third-tier building with fourth-tier attendance, then what's wrong with everybody else? "Sometimes I look out there and think, I had bigger crowds in Pony League," Giambi says of the atmosphere in Oakland. "Honestly, if we can't draw this year, we need to get out of Oakland. There's no reason people shouldn't come out and watch the A's this year."

Giambi is in the final year of his contract, and his future is the constant white noise accompanying the team. The A's made a six-year, $91 million offer that Giambi turned down because as much as $15 million would be deferred with no interest. He has expressed his desire to stay, and to take less money to remain with a team that he believes could be baseball's next dynasty. He has also kept quiet about his current contract, which will pay him that un-MVP-like but still livable 4 mil. "Everybody says Jason hasn't said a word about his contract," Beane says. "They're wrong. Jason did say something about it. He said, 'Thank you.'"

Says Giambi, "I love it here. I want to stay. We've got great talent, my brother's on the team, I love playing for the manager. We're the same as we were when we were losing 97 games in '97. We had the most fun in baseball losing that year. Last year we had the most fun winning."

Trickin' 'em? The A's are just like their leader: past the point of trickery and surprisingly easy to read—as long as you know what to believe and what to discard. When the topic returns to the photographs, Giambi laughs and says, "Hey, smut sells." As he leaves the clubhouse, rubbing a hand across the two-day stubble on his forearm, Slugger trails, three paces back, taking spring training at his own unhurried pace. He's the silent killer, each drop of the paw more destructive than the last.

This article appears in the April 2, 2001, issue of ESPN The Magazine.