by Mike Piazza
My season—hell, my career—turned around at that point. From an outside perspective, it might have seemed like I came back gung-ho and rededicated. I’ve heard it said that the Vero Beach incident made me appreciate what I had; allowed me to turn the page and start fresh and fired up. Nope. That wasn’t it.
It did, however, refine my focus, which was no longer fixed on pleasing my manager, my dad, or Tommy Lasorda. Nor on the privilege of being a professional ballplayer. I was locked in now on the baseball itself. Specifically, on hitting the shit out of it.
I was also zeroed in on getting away from the Dodgers, if I could. Right after I came back, we were playing the Phillies in Vero Beach and I found out where they were staying. Their manager was Lee Elia, who was from Philadelphia, so I called the hotel and they put me through to him. I said, “Lee, I’m really frustrated here. I’m not really getting along with the Dodgers and I don’t know what’s going to happen. They might even release me. I was thinking maybe the Phillies would be interested in me. Is there any interest there?”
Elia said, “Let me tell you something. Baseball is like college. If you have the grades, you’re going to graduate. It doesn’t matter where you are; if you can play, you’re going to get to the big leagues.” He also told me that the Phillies were cutting back and, in short, weren’t interested. That was my mental detachment from the Phillies. Before then, I was thinking that maybe they’d save me.
In the meantime, we had a pretty good team at Vero Beach, starting with Eric Young, who stole seventy-six bases that year. I did my part. Against Dunedin, I hit a walk-off home run, and when I got back to the dugout, Alvarez said something like “You keep working on that and you’re gonna be a heck of a hitter.”
Gradually, I raised my average to around .300; but a season in Florida takes a lot out of you, and by August most of the players with good averages started sitting on them, claiming little nagging injuries or whatever. Since I didn’t give a shit, I went out and played a lot while the other guys were recuperating. My average dropped to .250.
Apparently, that was reason enough to keep me on the bench when the playoffs started. In the first round, we played Port St. Lucie and they had a good pitcher named John Johnstone going for them. I was sitting in the bullpen and said to the guys there, “You watch what happens. We’re gonna be losing and Alvarez is going to have to put me in and I’m gonna have to fucking save the day.” Wouldn’t you know it, I’m warming somebody up, we’re behind, it’s around the fifth inning, and I hear, “Piazza, come on down!” Alvarez pinch-hits me with two guys on, and I think I knocked a double off the wall.
We won that series. In the next one, against Port Charlotte, I hit a monster home run, over the lights, and walked while I watched it. Probably shouldn’t have done that, but it was all part of the new attitude. Port Charlotte’s manager, Bobby Jones, told somebody they were going to deck me. I was not well liked in the Florida State League, and I didn’t really give a damn. Not as long as I hit.
In the finals we played West Palm Beach, the team we’d finished behind in our division during the regular season. We won again. League champs.
The next day, in the Vero Beach newspaper, there was a picture of me pouring a bottle of champagne over the head of Joe Alvarez.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It’s strange, the little things that stick in a person’s head. For me, one of those was something that happened during the Instructional League in the fall of 1990, right after my season at Vero Beach.
I attended Instructional League for a few years in a row, and it was always worthwhile. Johnny Roseboro would be there, puffing his cigarette and dispensing his colorful, catcherly wisdom. And Reggie Smith, a guy I could relate to as a hitting coach. Reggie had some advanced ideas but tried to still keep it simple. His philosophy was “Hit ’em like you live—hard and in the alleys.”
This particular day, I was hitting in the cage with Reggie and happened to notice that some guys were setting up for a little workout on the main field at HoHoKam Park. I saw Billy Lott warming up over there—he was a big, strapping former football player from Mississippi who had been drafted in the second round in 1989—and also Billy Ashley, who was the third-round draft choice the year I was taken. I thought, great, I’ll jump in when I can and get some extra swings. So I walked over and said, “Hey, who’s pitching BP? Let me get some cuts in with you guys.”
Tom Beyers was there. He was my manager at Salem and would be my manager again the next season at Bakersfield. Beyers was a nice guy and helped me in a lot of ways, but I don’t think he was ever my biggest fan. Not as long as I was a catcher.
He said, “Uh, Mike, this is just a special workout for Billy Lott and Billy Ashley.”
“Oh, really? Okay, all right, fine. Sorry.”
I picked up my bag and bats, slinked back to the cage, flipped on the machine, and hit for two hours straight.
That told me exactly where I stood in the organization. After two years, I was still the sixty-second-round draft choice. The courtesy pick. And I knew the only way I would change that perception was by hitting the ball so fucking hard that they couldn’t dismiss me any longer.
That was my mission at Bakersfield.
• • •
To get ready for it, I lifted. I lifted a lot.
After being sick twice in 1990 and worn down by a long summer in Florida, I was at my lowest point, strength-wise, since I’d started using the weight room at Miami. I thought, man, I gotta get it in gear. So I hit the weights hard when I got home to Philly after Instructional League, then spent a month or so at our family place in Boynton Beach and hit them even harder, working with a guy who had gone to college with my brother Vince and knew his way around the gym. The more I learned about proper training—routines, repetitions, plateaus, muscle groups, nutrition, the whole bit—the more enthused I became about it.
My workouts that winter left me in great shape for spring training, 1991, which went well. For that I could also thank Reggie Smith.
Reggie was an unorthodox batting coach who had learned a lot in Japan from Sadaharu Oh and brought some Asian, martial-arts philosophies into hitting, like thinking of the bat as a sword. His basic approach was to cut the ball in half. But he was also a disciple of Ted Williams—which was where I came from—and it all tied in. Minimizing movement. Keeping the head still. Tucking the elbow. A slight uppercut. Essentially, a short swing. That spring, Reggie showed me one particular drill that opened up my world. He brought a pitching screen to the plate and placed the nearest edge behind my hands, a little closer than the catcher’s mitt would normally be. All I had to do was hit the ball off a tee. But when I swung, my bat smacked that vertical pole and stung the hell out of my hands. I didn’t see how I could possibly get to the ball with that damn screen there.
Reggie laughed, walked up, grabbed the bat, stood where I stood, and smoked a line drive. Then he explained that I was swinging around the ball instead of through it. With a shorter, tighter, and consequently quicker stroke, he said, I’d have more time to recognize the pitch before committing to my swing. He was so right. The extra split second made me much better at identifying not only the types of pitches coming at me but the strikes, as well. As a result, I was less likely to get myself out and more likely to put the head of the bat on the ball. And here’s the beauty of it: at the same time, I became more explosive at the plate, with the power now packed in close to my body.
The whole concept really hit home in an intrasquad game, when I was facing a guy named Javier Delahoya, who had been a fourth-round pick out of Los Angeles in 1989. Delahoya threw me an inside fastball and I just tucked in my elbow, kept my hands in tight, took the bat straight through the ball—boop!—and drove it out of the park. I was like “It’s that fucking easy?” It was a watershed moment for me. I kept working with Reggie on that drill, and by the end of the spring I was actually squaring up the ball with my eyes closed. Muscle memory, Reggie said.
Spring training ended on
a high note when I accompanied the Dodgers to an exhibition game in New Orleans. I’m pretty sure that was Tommy’s doing, and I appreciated it; but it demonstrated, on the maturity front, that I wasn’t ready to hang with the big boys. As a preview of the years to come, I found myself with Eric Karros—who would spend the season at the Dodgers’ Triple-A club in Albuquerque—and on the town, in the presence of refreshments and single women. In particular, there was a very attractive blonde whom we were sparring over, and as the evening moved along, she asked if we’d be coming back to New Orleans anytime soon. I sensed that I had the edge on Eric, so I said, “Oh yeah, we’ll be back.” And Eric, in a dry, bitter voice, muttered, “We’ll probably never see this town again for the rest of our lives.” I tried to play it down at the time but told him later, “You dick. You’re such a sore loser.”
The next day, we were joking about it in the clubhouse, and John Candelaria, who was playing out the string with the Dodgers, cornered us and said, “Hey, when you’re in here, don’t ever talk about the night before. That’s your own business. Nobody wants to hear that shit.”
But I was ready for Bakersfield. My extra muscle proved to be a nice complement to the friendly dimensions of Sam Lynn Park and the desert wind of the California League. (One night, the tin roof blew off our dugout.)
We had a stacked team that year. Billy Lott was on it, but most of the hype was over Raul Mondesi and Pedro Martinez. In our first win, I homered with Mondesi on base and Pedro threw a two-hitter. In our second, I hit a grand slam for my roommate, a tall right-hander named Greg Hansell. The next time Pedro pitched, I hit two homers. Hansell took a no-hitter into the seventh on his second victory, and I crushed a 430-footer, according to the local paper.
In spite of being a pitcher and a couple of years younger than I was, Hansell was a good roommate from the day we moved into our apartment. That’s because his parents, who had driven up from Los Angeles County—where his father was a sheriff—met us there with silverware, a TV, and everything else we needed packed into their Camry. His mother, Margo, had been a professional housecleaner, and she had our place looking about as good as it could for a couple of guys making twelve hundred bucks a month. Almost immediately, she became my West Coast mom, more or less. After I got to the big leagues and came to public attention, I hired Margo to handle all my fan mail.
My little flurry of home runs gave me the league lead and a more regular place in the lineup. For the first couple of weeks, Beyers had been splitting the catching between me and Ed Lund, a good defensive player from Notre Dame. On the days I wasn’t catching, I’d sit or DH or play first base, where Beyers believed I should have been on a regular basis.
It was easy to see how he thought that. My Johnny Bench imitation left a lot to be desired. I threw some balls away and spent quite a bit of time at the backstop. But my defense didn’t prevent our pitching staff from finishing second in the league in ERA. I was getting better and picking up the support of at least a few people in the organization. Mel Didier was a scout for the Dodgers, and he did me a good turn by telling Beyers a story about when he was working for the Expos and they drafted a high school pitcher whom they converted to catcher. He said the kid wasn’t much of a catcher at first, and his manager insisted on playing another guy instead. Didier told the manager, “If you don’t catch that kid every day, I’m firing you and getting somebody in here who will.” He was talking about Gary Carter. It was Mel’s way of suggesting that Beyers let me catch.
My competition for the league home run title came from Jay Gainer of High Desert, who had the advantage of playing in a park where your hat would blow into the bleachers. I hit one over the scoreboard there. In Bakersfield, I hit four balls over the sun screen in center field. They said that nobody else had ever done that more than twice. Beyers was impressed, and kind to me in the papers. He said, “That kid has some devastating power. When you hit a ball 400-feet-plus, let alone to center field, let alone on a breaking pitch, that’s power . . . . You couple bat speed with Piazza’s strength, and you’ve got what you’re seeing now.”
Going into the final month of the season, I was sitting at around twenty home runs and Hansell had fourteen wins. Feeling cocky, I wagered him that I would end up with at least two homers for every victory of his. It kept things interesting around the apartment—especially when I got hot and he kept piling up no-decisions. He’d thought he was on to a sure thing, and it was my pleasure to make him squirm.
My only real issues with Hansell, though, had to do with dinner and snacks. He always wanted to grab a pizza or a Big Mac and fries after a ball game. Carrying forth in the image of my dad, I was more particular about what I ate. But we could deal with that. More important, Hansell had the good sense to steer clear when I wasn’t feeling sociable, which was too much of the time. Even more important, he didn’t mind when I cranked up the stereo in the car. He even came along with me to local concerts. Over a summer in Bakersfield, Hansell got an education in heavy metal and I got a good taste of his new-wave and alternative stuff—bands like Depeche Mode (“Personal Jesus,” “People Are People”), Oingo Boingo, and the Smiths, with Morrissey.
I remember going with him to see Dangerous Toys. There was all this screaming, and all of a sudden a guy sticks a microphone in Mike’s face—and Piazza knew all the words! For the most part, though, you couldn’t tell he was a heavy-metal guy if you didn’t know that it was usually Metallica playing in his headphones.
I’ll never forget the day [August 13, 1991] when Metallica’s new album—the Black Album—was released. He woke me up early and told me he was going down to the record store because he had to be the first one in line to get it. He got it, came back, put his headphones on, and disappeared into his room. Three hours later, he came out pretty upset. I asked him what the problem was. He said, “They sold out, man.” He didn’t mean the store was out of albums; he meant that Metallica had lost its soul and gone mainstream. The album wasn’t hard enough for him. I listened to it, and when I was done I told Mike that I thought it was really good. He said, “Exactly.” I guess a guy like me wasn’t supposed to think that. He was almost in tears.
There were just a few things Mike really cared about. First was his family, then music, then cars, then food. He stuck to himself pretty much. I didn’t realize the kind of background he came from until we went down to the dealership in Torrance one day and they hooked him up with a brand-new Acura. I said, “Wow, your dad must have some good friends there.”
He said, “Well, he owns the dealership.”
He didn’t advertise that part of his life. In fact, Mike wasn’t a real social guy. He worked out and listened to his music and that was about it. When he listened to music, he was doing one of two things. Either he was playing the air drums or he was squeezing his hand grippers. He had those grippers in his hands all the time. The steel ones. He worked at it nonstop. Once, he squeezed one of them so hard he broke it, and he was really upset about that. I remember him saying, “Man, those things cost me fifteen bucks.” I was in awe because I could barely squeeze it with both hands. He’d leave them on the coffee table in our apartment and people would pick them up and try to squeeze them and they wouldn’t budge. They thought it was a practical joke.
—Greg Hansell
Meanwhile, as we proceeded to clinch our division, Hansell’s streak of no-decisions continued all the way to five and the end of the regular season. He never got off of fourteen wins. And my home runs kept coming. The last one was my twenty-ninth, making me the insufferable winner of the bet, which, although I don’t recall exactly, was probably for a lunch at Olive Garden. We used to tear that place up for the free salad and bread sticks.
My home run total was two short of Jay Gainer for the California League title, but the fourth highest in all the minors. I made the all-star team again and led the league in slugging percentage. In short, I had accomplished what I profoundly needed to—put up numbers that the Dodgers couldn’t help but notice. I know f
or a fact that my season got the attention of Fred Claire, the Dodgers’ general manager. In his words, I was now, for the first time, “a legitimate prospect.”
I was pleasantly surprised to find out, also, that the Dodgers weren’t the only ones who had made a note of my breakout. Around the time I was overtaking Hansell in our little wager, I started hearing from agents suddenly interested in representing me. Among them was Hansell’s guy, Dan Lozano. One day, Greg was meeting Lozano for lunch at Marie Callender’s and asked me to come with him. Danny still rags me about showing up with “the best bed-head ever.” But he obviously had no bias against bad hair. We got along. He didn’t pressure me. He didn’t even try to recruit me.
For the league playoffs, Beyers wanted me to shuffle over to first base because our regular guy, Rex Peters, was hurt. That was fine. I knew it was a tough situation for Beyers because a lot of people were in his ear about me catching. It undermined his authority and probably offended him, to some degree. To his credit, Beyers never took it out on me. But he did bring it up in a way that was probably for my own benefit. He said something like, “Geez, Mike, I just don’t understand the way Tommy interferes in your career . . .”
Whether the chirping came from Tommy or my dad, it wasn’t going to stop until I was either out of the game or catching on a regular basis. My dad, especially, would see to that. As the playoffs moved along, Ed Lund may have gotten nicked or something, I don’t recall, but I was behind the plate one night against High Desert and happened to throw out a bunch of guys—I think it was four in a row—trying to steal. They were probably running because it was me back there, but I did have an arm. Sometimes I’d hurry and lose my mechanics, but I definitely had enough on the ball to throw people out. This time, my father was there to see it, sitting with Johnny Roseboro, who, like everybody else, knew how frustrated he was about the organization’s reluctance to leave me behind the plate. My dad recalls Roseboro grabbing his arm afterward and saying, “Goddamn, what a game he caught!”
