Long Shot

by Mike Piazza

  During his last couple of weeks of basic training for Korea, my dad picked up a bad infection in his foot. While he was in the infirmary, his company was shipped out. The upshot was that he had to go through training a second time, after which his orders sent him to Germany, where he served in artillery and drove a heavy piece of equipment that pulled a twenty-ton howitzer. He says his ears still ring from when they would fire that monster off. His superiors wanted him to go to Officer Candidate School, but then they found out he’d only completed the ninth grade.

  He was discharged in 1954 with $325 of mustering-out pay. After a year as a merchant seaman in the coast guard, he applied for a job at Superior Tube in Collegeville. The guy who interviewed him said, “Piazza? You Italian? . . . We don’t hire Italians.” Then he heard they were looking for people at B. F. Goodrich, and it was true. He worked the night shift, pulling tires off the mold in about 120-degree heat, and stayed until they laid him off after seven years. He hadn’t figured on sticking around for the long haul, anyway. Dad had plans, and he’d already gotten started on them.

  His first used-car lot operated out of a one-car garage at his sister’s house on Egypt Road in Audubon, between Norristown and Phoenixville. It was a rented house, but the owner didn’t mind him being there; and neither did his sister, since he helped out a little bit with the rent. The lot was effectively a junkyard. When he left Goodrich in the morning, he’d catch a few hours of sleep, then snoop around town trying to find a junker to buy from a dealer. Some of them he could fix, paint, and sell. Others he’d park behind the garage, out of sight, and strip off the parts he could put into another vehicle or somebody’s hands. He bought an old truck for hauling the scrap to the salvage yard, to be crushed for twenty-five or thirty bucks a load. Around five o’clock, he’d head home for the rest of his sleep, and by midnight he was back on the tire line, popping salt pills to keep from passing out. At eight, he’d punch out of the plant and do it all over again. To this day, there’s a junkyard at my dad’s first lot on Egypt Road.

  He remained there for about a year after he was laid off from Goodrich, then moved to a better location in Jeffersonville and took on a partner named Bill Garber, who happened to have been a pretty good ballplayer and was a close friend of Lasorda. Tommy had reluctantly retired as a minor leaguer in 1960 and was scouting for the Dodgers, which left him plenty of time to hang out at Garber-Piazza Auto Sales. After my dad bought out Garber a couple of years later and moved across the street under the name of Gateway Motors, Tommy kept coming around when he could—by then, he had been named a manager in the Dodgers’ minor-league system—for lunch and laughs.

  Tommy was not, however, the most important person in my father’s social life. Not after Dad went to a mixer and met Veronica (Roni) Horenci, a pretty young nurse and former high school prom queen who thought he was dapper, danced well, and looked like Tony Curtis. She might also have been impressed that he drove big, fancy cars, and she may or may not have known that they were actually inventory on consignment. Dad liked her well enough that, to spend an evening with her, he was willing to subject himself to ethnic slurs and physical challenges—which he welcomed, of course—at the Slovak Club, where her father bartended and her mother waited tables. Roni intended to become a stewardess, like several of her friends, but my dad, who was a little older, objected, at which point she said something like, “Well, then we should think about getting married.” That was 1966, when, around Phoenixville and Norristown, it was still pretty scandalous for a Slovak to marry an Italian. No matter.

  They were eager to start a family—Vince and I were born over the next two years—and to get ready for it, my father put everything he had into the business, including, now and then, the rent money. My mom would call him, all upset, to tell him that a sheriff’s-sale sign had been posted on their apartment door. You weren’t allowed to take it down. The deal was, if you didn’t pay the rent, they’d carry away your furniture. Dad would end up borrowing from a friend to cover it, then pay him back the next time he sold a car. He also maintained a line of credit at the bank. The first time he failed to make a payment, a bank official told him they were going to take possession of his inventory.

  With my dad sitting across the desk, the banker called a dealer in Coatesville to see if he’d put in an offer. The dealer, Jim Nelms, knew my dad and asked to talk to him, then told the bank official not to touch the cars because he’d take care of it. So my father and Nelms became partners. About a year and a half later, Dad bought out Nelms and applied for a new Datsun franchise, which was going cheap in those days, before Datsun became Nissan. Business picked up when Datsun came out with the 240Z. Then he bought a Honda dealership, which a lot of people thought was a screwy idea. It didn’t seem so screwy when the energy crisis hit in the mid-seventies.

  Before long he had thirty dealerships around Philadelphia. A lot of the domestics were forced to close because of the gas prices, and Dad bought up their properties. The dealership holdings led him into the real estate business, and then into dealerships in other states. He expanded into Acura—specializing mostly in the high-end line—and Acura and Honda have been his mainstays ever since. He also did well as an investor in the computer repair business. Under Piazza Management, meanwhile, he bought or built who knows how many commercial properties, including the Westover Country Club in Jeffersonville, the Bellewood Golf Club in Pottstown, and an entire historic mining town called St. Peter’s Village.

  All that success put my father in better cars (a Ferrari and a Lincoln Mark VI), better clothes (white shoes and leisure suits, although not the crazy guy-from-WKRP kind), and better seats for Phillies games, which he could now attend without hitchhiking to the ballpark and sneaking in (which he did as a kid, when the Phillies played at Connie Mack Stadium). As it turned out, he went big-league around the same time Tommy did.

  That’s when they became inseparable, as long as the Dodgers were in town. After a game at the Vet, my dad and Tommy would meet back up—along with a couple of cars full of Tommy’s players and coaches—at the Marchwood Tavern, the Italian restaurant and bar that the Lasorda brothers opened up in Exton. For whatever reason, my father just couldn’t get enough baseball—never could—and Tommy was his connection to it, the only guy he could truly and completely share his passion with.

  Until I came along.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Little League was available when a kid turned eight, and to get me good and ready for it, my dad set up a mattress against the basement wall so I could fire baseballs at it from my knees. He also requisitioned a few highway cones for me to use as batting tees. I’d take a mighty rip and smack the ball into the mattress.

  But that was just the opening act. The batting cage went up piece by piece, in the corner of the backyard, beginning when I was eleven.

  First, it was merely a home plate underneath some netting draped around poles that my dad set in concrete. He was the pitcher. But he worked long hours and wasn’t the least bit comfortable with the thought of me not hitting all that time, so he bought a JUGS machine with an automatic feeder. (Ironically, I would later do endorsements for JUGS.) Of course, the machine needed protection from the weather, so he installed a little shed over it. Then a roof over the whole shebang, like a carport. Then metal sheeting on the sides. After a while, the batting cage had morphed into a monstrosity so big and unsightly that a zoning inspector came by and asked my father what the hell that thing was. Dad said, “It’s my son’s ticket to the big leagues.”

  He even hooked up lights, and I’d be out there still hitting late at night. It’s amazing that the neighbors never complained. They probably noticed that I took a lot of pride in the groundskeeping. I had a little rotor mower and tried to stripe the grass between the pitching machine and the plate, like the big leagues. I’d rake in sand around the plate. In the winter, I shoveled the snow out of there. The batting area would still be all messy and slimy, so we covered it with plywood. Other than that, the cold was
not a problem. We wrapped my bat—an aluminum Bombat, made in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania—with insulation tape so it wouldn’t sting my hands. (I always wore gloves, anyway, after reading that Ted Williams used to hit until his hands bled.) In the morning, I’d set the baseballs next to the stove in our rec room, and later on my mom would light the fire in time to have them all warmed up when I got home from school. Eventually we put a little portable heater out by the cage. It was crazy.

  After school, I’d have some apple Fig Newtons—then they came out with strawberry—and a glass of milk, watch Inspector Gadget or Gilligan’s Island reruns, then go hit for a few hours. Vince would be on his Stingray, delivering the Evening Phoenix, and I’d just whale away in my own little world. I rigged the feeder so that the pitches came out every six seconds. Mainly, I hit fastballs, but now and then one would act like a little bit of a knuckleball. One time I got hit in the nose. Never knew what happened. It fucking hurt.

  Home plate was only a few feet from the dirt road that separated a cornfield from our lot on South Spring Lane. Invariably, an older guy named Blaine Huey would walk past on his way to Pickering Creek Reservoir (“the Res”), where everybody else hung out—there were docks, rafts, rope swings, bonfires, the whole bit—while I was whacking eighty-mile-an-hour fastballs into a net. Blaine would glance over at me, shake his head, and mutter something like “Look at this guy. Thinks he’s gonna be a big baseball star.”

  Thunk. Dink. Thunk. Dink. Thunk. Dink. You could hear it all the way down the street. He was out there a lot. Too much. I pretty much thought he was nuts. What I always said about Mike was, “Do you think he’s gonna make it, really?” But I wasn’t the only one who said that, because, who makes it, really?

  —Blaine Huey, Phoenixville, Pennsylvania

  The results of all that hitting were pretty obvious. Every spring, I’d notice that I was driving the ball a little harder, which only drove me a little harder. It became an addiction—not just hitting, but power hitting. From the very beginning, the major leaguers I took after were always the big, strong guys. Andre Dawson. Dave Parker. Bob Horner.

  And of course, Michael Jack Schmidt, the greatest player in the history of the Philadelphia Phillies.

  It happened that Schmidt hit two home runs in the first game I ever attended, sitting in the upper deck of Veterans Stadium in 1975. The next year is when my dad got season tickets on the third-base line, next to the Herr’s potato chips people (who, to my delight, treated us frequently to the latest flavors, like sour cream), and I had my picture taken with number twenty himself—this was when he had his big, poofy seventies perm—on Fan Appreciation Day.

  We were good Phillies fans. My dad would stomp his feet and I’d keep my eyes trained on Schmidt, checking out his mannerisms, his facial expressions—which seldom changed—and his solemn, efficient approach to the game. Years later, when I was with the Mets, one of our coaches, John Stearns, said to me, “You know, Schmidt always had the worst body language. He always looked like he just ate a lemon.” There was a distinct impression that he wasn’t having much fun out there. It’s hard to say why that appealed to me, but it did.

  For some mysterious reason, though, Schmidt had a deeply contentious relationship with the fans of Philadelphia. This was in spite of the fact that he was the best all-around third baseman the game has ever seen. To the malcontents at the Vet, it apparently didn’t matter much that he won a Gold Glove just about every year, ten in all, the most of any third baseman in National League history; or that he led the league in home runs a record eight times (and from 1974 to 1986, virtually the entire period I regularly attended Phillies games, topped all of baseball by nearly a hundred); or that he picked up three Most Valuable Player awards; or that he carried the Phillies to the first world championship (MVP in both the regular season and World Series) in all their ninety-eight years. I couldn’t begin to tell you what the people wanted from the guy. They absolutely booed the hell out of him; practically crucified him if he happened to strike out. I thought the fans were dead wrong, and their behavior provided a basis for my point of view on the player-fan relationship. For a long time—most of my career, I’d have to say—I carried a chip on Schmidt’s behalf.

  I tried, again and again, to get my dad to explain to me, if he could, why Philadelphians were so hard on Schmitty—much harder than they were on Larry Bowa, Greg Luzinski, or anybody else—but there was no acceptable explanation. Maybe the body language had something to do with it. Maybe the fans resented the fact that he somehow made the game look easy, as so many great players do. They called him Captain Cool, and it wasn’t really meant as a compliment. Schmidt was simply the city’s whipping boy, and it made me admire him all the more. I respected the fact that he wasn’t another rah-rah, goody-goody kind of guy; that he’d take all the shit, convert it to energy, and shut everybody up with a three-run homer. In fact, I loved that. And I loved Michael Jack. I idolized him. I liked his game, his swagger, and especially his controlled aggression. I even liked his gold chains and open-necked shirts. They reminded me of my dad.

  If you watched him as closely as I did, you could sense that there was a lot of pent-up tension inside Schmitty, a lot of pressure that he was dealing with, all of which seemed to come gushing out when he broke down at the start of his retirement speech. Later, in an interview on Tim McCarver’s television show, he said, poignantly I thought, that, “[l]ooking back, I probably would have given up some of my accomplishments to have been more appreciated by the fans in Philadelphia . . . . I would have given anything to be the hero to the fans in Philadelphia, and they had no idea how hard I was working to be that guy.”

  Somehow, though, I think I had an idea. I felt like I understood Mike Schmidt.

  • • •

  In the car, on the way to a Phillies game, we’d snack on Tastykakes, and when the box was empty, my father would roll it up like a carpet, hand it to me, and say, “Here, squeeze this for a while.” It was to strengthen my hands and wrists. For hitting.

  When I was ready to take it up a notch, he bought me a cheap set of hand grippers at a local store. I couldn’t put them down. Every night, when the light in my room went off, my mom would hear the incessant squeak, squeak, squeak coming from the bed. I’d squeeze those grippers literally a thousand times before I went to sleep. I squeezed them watching TV. I squeezed them in the car. I squeezed them when I was supposed to be doing homework. I was an OCD guy—obsessive-compulsive disorder—and I suppose that was a prime example.

  After I wore out the store-bought grippers, I saw some advertised in a muscle magazine—probably MuscleMag or Joe Weider’s Muscle & Fitness magazine, which I looked at on a regular basis—and sent off for the real McCoys from IronMind Enterprises. The “Captains of Crush,” they were called. There were four levels, and only a handful of guys in the world had ever squeezed the number-one level. It was like a tire spring. I was one of the few around who could close even the number-three. On the number-twos, I’d put a coin in between the handles and hold it there as long as I could. After a while, I could move the number-one an inch or two. I was religious about those things. They don’t do you much good unless you are.

  Meanwhile, my dad had read in Life magazine about Ted Williams devising an exercise for his hands and forearms by attaching the head of a sledgehammer—or any weight, for that matter—to the end of a short rope, which was fastened to a stick, and raising and lowering it by rolling the stick in his hands. So I did that. Then, in one of my muscle magazines, I noticed an article about a guy with a handlebar mustache who did various other drills with a sledgehammer. I started out with a ten-pound sledgehammer and then moved up to a twelve-pounder. Eventually I could hold the sledgehammer straight out in front of me, then cock my wrists to raise the head and bring it down to my face in an arc. For a gag, I’d kiss it, then take it back the other way to the horizontal position. I’d do the same thing with two sledgehammers, one in each hand, dropping them slowly to the tip of my nose. And o
f course, a couple hundred times a day, I’d swing one like a bat.

  There weren’t many progressive ideas that my father was reluctant to try out. That was just his style. Dad, for instance, was into nutrition and eating healthy stuff long before it all became the fashion. He would have been the first guy in line at Whole Foods. Even now, he still eats wheatgrass—mixes it and freezes it in a plastic bag. His thing was always “If you want to be strong like a horse, you gotta eat like a horse.” Oats, whole wheat, wheat kernels, grains; he’s really a maniac about that sort of thing. Mom wasn’t allowed to buy us Cap’n Crunch. The most sugary cereal we could have was raisin bran. And forget about candy. If we were caught with candy, it was grounds for a beating.

  My brothers seemed to miss the sweets and junk food more than I did, though. They tried their best to resist the regimen that Dad imposed. None of them would eat oatmeal; but I did. Pepperidge Farm was the only whole-wheat bread back then, and I hated it because it was like chewing an oven mitt; but I ate it. I was with the program all the way.

  • • •

  My first team in the Phoenixville Little League was the A’s, and my first official coach a local legend named Abdul Ford-Bey. He was a good baseball guy, but definitely from a different era.

  I’m not sure that Abdul’s drill-sergeant techniques would be politically acceptable today. There was a night game, for instance, in which we didn’t play very well, and afterward he made us run six or eight laps around the whole minor-league field at Vic Marosek Park (named for one of Vince’s coaches). Another time, he made us circle the bases for so long that I passed out. I can still picture the stars in my eyes before I took my leave. When they pulled me over into the shade to get me some water, Abdul was so scared he was shaking.