Long Shot

by Mike Piazza

  Abdul was sort of a guru-philosopher type, and he conferred upon us some peculiar nicknames. I was Koya, for reasons I never understood. There was another kid named Dave Jones—a pretty good player—whom he called Robot. One day, in practice, Robot’s pitching, I’m playing third, and I’m daydreaming like little kids tend to do. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Robot step off the mound and fire a rocket right at me. I turn at the last instant and am able to catch the ball, but if I hadn’t seen it, it surely would have conked me in the head. I don’t know whether Abdul told Robot to do that, but he got a good chuckle out of it. That scene is seared in my memory.

  Not for a second, though, did I ever want to be anywhere else. I remember going up to the plate for the first time, and how excited I was to hear the PA announcer call my name, in his big, booming voice: “Now batting for the A’s, number so-and-so . . . MIKE PIZ!” That’s what he called me. After he realized he’d left out a few letters, it became, “Mike Pie-AY-za!”

  I loved everything about Little League. I loved Opening Day, when everybody’d be in their new uniforms, looking great, and then the Tigers and Mets would play the first game—the Mets in yellow and the Tigers in maroon. I loved the free pretzels (mine with ketchup) after the games. I loved the trains that tooted their whistles as they rolled by, dramatically slow, on the tracks behind the park; all the kids would put pennies on the rails, and after the caboose had passed and we ran down to pick them up, they’d be perfectly flat. And I loved all the special days, like the time we hosted some kind of all-star game and one of the kids on the other team was Brad Kalas, a son of Harry Kalas, the great announcer for the Phillies, and Harry actually climbed up into our little PA booth and called an inning or so.

  Baseball was taken very seriously in Phoenixville. In our town, at that time, nobody at the youth level was ashamed of trying to win or being the best team you could be. Because it was so competitive, people turned out to watch us play—and not just parents. Little League was embedded into the culture of the community. Starting with age twelve, most of the games were reported in the Evening Phoenix, complete with full box scores, including, believe it or not, pitch counts.

  That year, the Cardinals were an expansion team and took me with the first pick in the draft. Playing now at the “major-league” field and installed at third base, just like Mike Schmidt, I started actually feeling like Schmidt—especially when I whacked a couple of home runs over the fence. That was kind of a big deal. From then on, every time I came to bat somebody would yell “Mike’s up!” and about ten kids would run out beyond the fence waiting for the ball.

  After our local season was over, I joined a Phoenixville all-star team that competed in the state tournament, which was hosted in a small town called Palmyra. (Because I was bigger than the other guys, I was always the only one to have my birth certificate checked.) Our players stayed in the homes of Palmyra players, and my guy lived on a dairy farm. When they grilled up the best steaks I’d ever torn into, I figured I now knew what the big leagues were going to taste like. It was a nice family, and I corresponded with them for a long time afterward.

  We won the first game—I hit two homers and a triple—and kept winning all the way to the championship round against Palmyra, which came up out of the losers’ bracket after being sent there by us. The title game was a circus. The Palmyra parents—who had been so hospitable to our whole team—now stood behind the backstop and heckled us from the first pitch, which was not the kind of thing that my dad was about to put up with. He tried to get a couple of our parents to walk over there with him, but he was on his own. So he joined the Palmyra people at the backstop and yelled at their kids, only louder. One of the officials asked him to quit, and he said he’d quit when they did. At least he refrained from slugging anybody. I homered to center, but we lost, 7–4.

  At thirteen, we advanced to the Babe Ruth league and the games were moved to deSanno Field, where the fences were deeper and go-kart races were usually roaring on the track next to the park. I became only the second thirteen-year-old to clear the fence at deSanno, and in the district tournament hit a home run against Coatesville that the paper described as 330 feet. When I was fourteen and fifteen, the Evening Phoenix often described my long home runs to center field, which was where most of them went. We once had an exhibition game against a really good traveling team from Puerto Rico, and I got hold of one that, honestly, might have been four-hundred-something feet. Over the road and into a field. As far as I knew, they never found the ball. After that, they started giving kids a hot dog or something if they returned a ball hit over the fence.

  It was like a scene out of The Natural. The place was absolutely packed, and the clouds had started to get dark in the background. Mom was walking around with the younger kids down the right-field line, as usual—she didn’t like to watch the games with me, because I could get a little loud—and I was standing behind the backstop with Butch Nattle (one of the other parents). The bases were loaded, it was a tie game or something, or maybe we were behind, and Butch says to me, “I guarantee you, Mike’s gonna hit one out.”

  Jesus Christ, he hit that ball. Against that dark background, you could see that white ball going up and over everything—the fence, the trees, everything. Straightaway center field. Then the rain and lightning started up.

  —Vince Piazza

  I pitched a couple of no-hitters in Babe Ruth ball, including one—a 1–0 win—in which I walked twelve batters and threw 154 pitches. Another game, when I was sixteen, I threw 162 pitches and hit two home runs. But that summer there was a better pitcher on our team, Joe Weber, and we went all the way to the state championship game again, this time losing in extra innings to Levittown. Honestly, I wouldn’t remember all that—at least, not in detail—if the newspaper clippings weren’t pasted into my mother’s scrapbooks.

  Even though he’s two years younger, my brother Danny played on our team one year. There was an occasion in batting practice when I hit a big fly ball out to him in right field and it plunked down right on his head, just like Jose Canseco. We all had a good, long laugh about that—even Danny. It might explain why he became a lawyer. Vince started out on my team, too, then quit, came back a few years later, and quit again. His heart wasn’t in baseball. But his greatest moment is preserved in one of Mom’s scrapbooks. He once went three for three. I remembered that, but didn’t remember why. When I was home visiting not long ago, we came across the clipping and he explained it to me.

  He said, “The pressure was off that day, because I had already made up my mind that I was quitting after the game. I could never do the pressure thing. Remember the time I had to face you when you were pitching? That was pressure. You threw me lobs, tried to let me get a hit, and I still struck out. But that last game, when I knew I was quitting, I finally didn’t give a crap; and all of a sudden I’m playing good baseball. I had the game of my life.”

  • • •

  In 1980, my man, Mike Schmidt, hit forty-eight home runs on his way to the first of two straight Most Valuable Player awards, and my team, the Phillies, beat the Kansas City Royals in six games to win the World Series. Also, Tommy Lasorda sent shimmering, cheesy, satiny blue Dodger jackets to me and Vince.

  Tommy was great to us, and he always kind of straddled that line between thrilling and embarrassing me. The jacket managed to do both. Of course, we had to wear them to school—Phoenixville Junior High—and of course, we got abused: “The Phillies are the world champions! Why are you wearing a fucking Dodgers jacket? What’s wrong with you guys?” I told my dad he might as well slap a kick-me sign on my back. We were in seventh grade, and I couldn’t tell you how many times I had to put up with ninth graders yelling, “Dodgers suck! Dodgers suck!” The ninth graders used to crush me. One time, when I’d had enough, this freshman rushed by me and as he did I pushed him. He punched me right in the face. The next year, the Dodgers won the World Series, and I’m thinking, all right, finally we get our vindication; now we can wear o
ur Dodger jackets with pride. And as soon as we get off the bus, everybody starts in again: “Dodgers suck! Dodgers suck!” Classic Philadelphia fans. We were lucky we didn’t get our asses kicked.

  It was the following season that I became the batboy for the Dodgers whenever they played in Philadelphia. My first game, I showed up in a pair of really crappy Pro-Keds and desperately wanted some spikes. I put in a request to Nobe Kawano, the Dodgers’ equipment manager, and he told me, no, kid, your shoes are fine. I felt like a goof but forgot about it pretty quickly. At that time, the batboy would kneel next to the on-deck circle. When I took my place, I was struck by an electrifying pulse of energy from the lights and the crowd and the game and the fastballs hitting the catcher’s mitt . . . it was euphoric to me. Even better: by the second time the Dodgers came around, my dad had bought me some Mizuno spikes.

  Before one of the games, I took some swings in the cage underneath the tunnel, with Manny Mota, the Dodgers’ batting coach, pitching to me. Mota was throwing right over the top, like a machine, and I was just crushing the ball. My dad called Tommy to come down and take a look, and some of the coaches gathered around, and they were astounded. They were like, What the fuck?

  (Mota was even throwing me curveballs, and I actually had a clue. For all my work with batting-cage fastballs, it wasn’t as though I was completely foreign to the curve. For me, the really tough pitch, when I first saw it, was the slider. That was when I thought, what the hell was that? But Mota helped me hit the curveball. The first thing he told me was, “Once you recognize the curveball, wait.” Most guys get out in front of an off-speed breaking pitch because their head goes down. The key is to be patient, keep your head in there, and pick up the spin. It’s eyesight—locking in quickly on the ball and determining if it’s going to be in the strike zone. Most good curves are out of the strike zone. When they’re in the zone, they’re probably hanging. People say that certain guys can’t hit the curveball, but what’s really happening, generally, is that they can’t hit the off-speed pitch.)

  The only problem with being a batboy was that it meant I had to occasionally miss one of my Babe Ruth games back in Phoenixville. I was down at the Vet one time when my best friend, Joe Pizzica, threw a no-hitter against my team, the Orioles. “They broke my stones about that,” Joe said. “Everybody told me that was the only reason I pitched a no-hitter.”

  When I was fourteen, I was invited to go on the road with the Dodgers to Shea Stadium. My mom was upset with my dad for letting me do it, but Mark Cresse, the Dodgers’ bullpen coach, took me under his wing and put me up in his hotel room. Tommy and most of the coaches had actually taken a limo to Atlantic City and then another limo to New York, so I rode up with Bill Russell, the Dodgers’ shortstop, and his wife. Billy saw to it that I got checked into the Grand Hyatt in New York. The next day, Cresse and I went out on the number-seven train to Shea. I hit a little there, checked out Darryl Strawberry in the cage, and then ventured into the clubhouse . . . where most of the team was watching a porno film. There was one little TV in the training room, and they were all crowded around it. I have to admit that, coming from the straightlaced, deeply Catholic background that I did, it was a little unsettling. I didn’t tell my mother.

  Back at the Vet, I was determined to hit a ball into the seats during batting practice, and finally, that year, I popped one over the fence. It almost made me feel like I belonged there. For that matter, the players did, too, for the most part—guys like Mike Marshall, Greg Brock, Ed Amelung, and Bob Welch.

  Steve Sax, however, was another story. The Dodgers used to play little games in batting practice, and occasionally I got to be on one of the teams. Mark Cresse would decide whether the ball you hit was an out or a double or what. One day, Saxie was on my team and I played like shit, made a bunch of outs. After I chalked up another one, Sax said, “That fucking kid never gets a hit!” Or something like that. He didn’t mean it in a malicious way—he really didn’t—but I was devastated. I mean, I was ready to cry. Jose Morales was a pinch hitter for the Dodgers, and he had this warm-up bat with the handle sawed off and a can on the end, filled with lead to make it weighted. Vince came down before the game and I was so mad that I was swinging that thing around with a vengeance, nonstop. Finally, a player named Lemmie Miller, a cup-of-coffee outfielder, walked up and consoled me. He said, “Don’t let Sax get you upset.” It wasn’t profound advice, but it was enough.

  I was sixteen, in 1985, when a Dodgers pitcher named Alejandro Pena—who had won the ERA title the year before—was rehabbing from shoulder surgery and Tommy told me to grab a bat because Pena was throwing a simulated game. Pena wasn’t a hundred percent at that point, but he wasn’t taking it easy on me, either. There were some breaking pitches involved. I hit a few balls hard, then banged one off the wall. Some of the coaches were exchanging glances. There was a little note about it in the local paper.

  That was when Tommy started talking me up, telling everybody about this kid hitting a double off the ERA champ.

  • • •

  Among the baseball friends my dad accumulated over the years—most of them through Tommy—was Eddie Liberatore, a longtime scout for the Dodgers who lived in Norristown and was a consort of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams.

  To me, Ted Williams was pretty much the head honcho of hitting. By the time I was sixteen, I’d read his famous book, The Science of Hitting, enough times to have it nearly memorized. I can still recite his three keys: one, proper thinking; two, get a good pitch to hit; and three, have a quick bat. As you might expect, I had tried to copy Mike Schmidt’s batting style, but I gave it up when I realized how different it was from Ted Williams’s—almost the antithesis. Schmitty stood deep in the box with a closed stance and his elbow up; then he’d step forward, dive into the ball, and practically hook it to left field. Williams was more about staying back, keeping your hands close to your body, your power packed in tight, and waiting. That was what worked for me. His keys to hitting were my keys to hitting—which, at that point, were more or less my keys to life.

  So when he came to town for a card show at the George Washington Motor Inn in King of Prussia and Liberatore told my dad to stop by and meet Ted Williams, I felt like the luckiest kid on the continent. Then, before I know it, we’re standing there, in awe, while he signs cards and bats and such—I was kind of lingering back a little bit—and Liberatore says to him, “My friend Vince here, he’s got a kid who’s a pretty good-looking player, and he’s got his own batting cage at his house.”

  And Ted Williams says, “Let’s go see him hit!”

  It was arranged that he’d come by the next morning. Even so, I had a hard time believing that Ted Williams would actually show up at my house to watch me do what I did, all by myself, for hours and hours, day after day. But the next morning, I’ll never forget, there’s the car, smack dab in the driveway, and there’s the Splendid Splinter himself, sure enough, headed straight this way, wearing a corduroy jacket and cussing up a storm.

  Too nervous to talk, I flipped on the machine and started hitting. Fortunately, we taped it. So I can tell you exactly what Ted Williams had to say when he watched me bat in our backyard on South Spring Lane in 1985, standing a few feet to my right.

  “This kid looks good. I’m gonna tell you the truth—I don’t think I hit the ball as good as he does when I was sixteen, I’m not shittin’ ya . . . . Try to lower the bat now. Get a little lower hand position. That’s it! That’s it! That’s it! . . . He looks good. He really looks good. You really look great, buddy! You do!”

  To my dad: “I bet you got scouts on him already, for Christ sake.”

  To me: “I’ll be your agent, buddy!”

  To Liberatore: “You know who he hits like, don’t you? I’m gonna give you one guess. He’s in the big leagues. You know him.”

  Liberatore mentions a name that can’t be made out on the tape.

  “No! Hell, no!”

  Liberatore: “In the National League?”

&nb
sp; “Yeah, a buddy of yours. Mike Marshall, for Christ sake! He looks like Marshall! He looks more like Marshall than anybody I’ve seen.”

  My dad: “Hit a couple left-handed, Mike.”

  “He looks good that way. Good swing. He looks good enough, he should hit that way, too. Yes, sir.”

  Dad (exaggerating): “Tommy’s never seen this kid. Nobody’s ever seen him.”

  “Cock and stride. Cock and stride. Stay back, like you did then. Stay back. Don’t go out and get it. Stay back there. Do it again! Do it again! That’s better! Better! Jesus Christ, I never saw anybody who could pick things up like he does. I never did.”

  Dad (fibbing): “He’s got average, good speed, and a good glove. He can play any position.”

  “Well, you know, hitting’s going to be his big suit.”

  With that, I was finished, but as I walked—or floated—out of the cage, the great man gave me his best advice of the day. “But that’s only half the battle,” he said. And he tapped the side of his head. “The rest is up here.”

  We then sat at the kitchen table for a little while, and I asked Ted if he’d sign my beat-up copy of The Science of Hitting. Needless to say, I still have that book. And on the first page, in Sharpie-style blue, it says:

  To Mike,

  Follow this book and as good as you look now I’ll be looking for tickets in 1988.

  Ted Williams

  CHAPTER THREE

  The batting cage was not the first unusual thing to be housed in our backyard. There was that stupid pony.