by Mike Piazza
In 1995, spring training started with replacement players. That was a gigantic bone of contention, because it meant that the owners were actually planning to open the regular season without us. At the very end of March, we sought an injunction to stop them. The National Labor Relations Board had asked a federal district court to support its petition charging the owners with unfair labor practices, and the players had voted to go back to work if the court came through. The judge was Sonia Sotomayor, and it took her about twenty minutes to rule in our favor and restore all the terms of our previous collective bargaining agreement. Fourteen years later, when she was nominated for the Supreme Court and was getting crushed by conservatives—whom I generally count myself among—I thought, Hmm, Sotomayor . . . she’s not that bad a lady.
Her decision cleared the way for the 1995 season to start about three weeks late, even though a new labor agreement wouldn’t be reached for another couple of years.
• • •
For me, the silver lining of the strike was the chance to spend some time on the beach. Not that I made a beeline for it. In the beginning, we figured the season would pick back up anytime, so Eric and Billy Ashley and I worked out every day at the gym. I wouldn’t let myself believe we were done for the year because, for one thing, we had a great shot at making the playoffs, and for another, my whole deal, as far as an annual goal, was thirty homers, a .300 batting average, and a hundred RBIs. I had the batting average, but was still six home runs and eight RBIs short. By pumping weights every day, I was trying to will the strike to end.
We stayed with our regimen for two or three weeks, but finally one day, in the middle of our workout, Karros said, “Dude, we’re not going back.” I kept lifting on a regular basis—it extended into the longest stretch of weight training I’d ever been through—but the urgency wasn’t there anymore. With the sun and sand in mind, I turned to beefing up my bird legs.
I got into volleyball games whenever I could and became friends with Gabrielle Reece through Nike promotions, which were always a day at the beach. We staged our own goofy Olympics. They were sort of like a Southern California citizenship test. I once threw a Frisbee into a bucket from thirty feet, thirty consecutive times. Another time, there was a televised spot in which I dove into the sand and guided the volleyball just over the net into the corner, as if I knew what I was doing. Truthfully, I wasn’t bad at volleyball—a hell of a lot better than I was at basketball. It might have been Gabrielle who was teaming with Holly McPeak when I played against them with football star Jerome Bettis—the Bus—as my partner. I believe we actually won. Gabrielle tended to come at things from the athlete perspective, but I had some good discussions with her about my dating habits. From those, she was the one who came up with the term “season girlfriend.”
My girlfriend for that season was an actress and stuntwoman named Anita Hart. During the strike, she was doing an episode of Baywatch, and I guess that’s how I got involved in it. Season five. “Deep Trouble.” Anita was the girl I saved. I’m swinging a baseball bat on the beach, in full uniform—yeah, whatever—and Pamela Anderson walks up to me and says, as I remember it, “What are you doing?”
I say, “I’m a baseball player.”
Pamela: “Why are you swinging a bat on the beach?”
Me: “I’m working on my swing while we’re on strike.”
Right then, Anita starts yelling “Help!” and I run out into the bay with Pamela to save her. When we pulled her in, Anita looked at me and said something like “You’re cute,” and my response made it pretty clear that we’d be hooking up. It was a tough assignment for me, playing myself. I went Method.
There was method, though, to my silliness. I hoped it would show that I could lighten up a little bit and didn’t take myself too seriously. For that gig, the only thing I was serious about was meeting Pamela Anderson. Took one for the boys back home.
And then, for the girls back home, I struck up a friendship with Fabio.
I’m a high-end audio geek and happened to see an article about the stuff Fabio collected, which was the same kind of stuff I collected, mostly from a company called Krell. The article said that Fabio had spent about a million dollars on amplifiers, preamplifiers, speakers, digital-to-audio converters and such, and he had a full mixing board in his house. Not long after, I met him at a Super Bowl party in California that my stuntman friend Eddie Braun had gotten me and my dad into. We started talking about audio and Krell and before you know it, lo and behold, I’m at Fabio’s house. I walk in and there are three Great Danes and about thirty motorcycles. His kitchen was stuffed with dirt bikes. In the living room, where he kept the stereo equipment, he had a big-ass, three-gun projector—some incredibly cool stuff.
We hung out a few times. Nice guy. Fabio told me he was one of only three people in the world who had an American Express card with a single name on it. The other two were Cher and Madonna. He pulls out his wallet and says—he’s from Milan, you know—“Mike-a, here it is, a-my American Express-a card. It has-a my one a-name: Fabio.” One time he calls me, and he goes, “Hey-a, Mike-a. Let’s-a go get-a some a-breakfast, and then we’ll-a listen to some-a stereo.” He always ate breakfast at this little café on Sunset Boulevard; so I meet him there, and as we’re eating, a tourist bus pulls up. The driver slows down and I can hear the guy saying, “There’s Fabio . . . There’s Fabio eating breakfast with Mike Piazza.” All the tourists are snapping pictures and I’m thinking, is this really happening? I was on the tourist tour.
Needless to say, it was an off-season like no other. I also appeared on Married with Children and The Bold and the Beautiful. I was a presenter for the MTV awards show. I met Eddie Van Halen and played golf with Charles Barkley. Tommy took Eric and me down to the Doral Open in Miami and made Jack Nicklaus feel my forearms. A woman in Bakersfield named her horse after me (and I’ll resist the corresponding joke).
But I was still in my batting cage on New Year’s Eve, still obsessed with crushing the baseball.
• • •
It was April by the time we got to spring training. Most of the replacement players had already left, but enough remained to make it contentious.
For that matter, it was contentious before we even showed up. Karros had taken some heat about disparaging remarks he made in the press concerning the scabs. He felt terrible about it, so I said, all right, dude, I’ll get you off the hook. I was ready to let it rip, because some of the replacement players—mainly, a pitcher named Rafael Montalvo, who had pitched one inning for the Astros back in 1986 and hadn’t played organized ball in the States for three years—were saying things like they were going to have us five games in first place by the time we got back and we’d probably want to thank them. Bob Nightengale of the Los Angeles Times got hold of me and I said, “Who’s going to care if we have a five-game lead in scab games? That’s ridiculous. Does someone really think we’ll be rooting for these guys? What do they think we’ll do if we win it, give them a playoff share? Do they want rings? We’ll give them rings, all right—made of tin.”
When the season finally started, there were no replacement players on the roster. There was, however, an import who helped us into first place. A year after reeling in Chan Ho Park out of Korea, the Dodgers had turned to Japan and snatched-up Hideo Nomo, a pitcher more accomplished and much readier to contribute. The signing showed some impressive enterprise on the organization’s part. In Japan, Nomo had been involved in an unusual contract squabble that resulted in him being declared a free agent prematurely. Peter O’Malley was on the prowl for international players, and when the opportunity presented itself, the Dodgers made Nomo the first native of Japan to come over from the Japanese major leagues and play in ours. O’Malley may not have struck many people as a pioneer, but he was ahead of the game when it came to finding players in foreign countries. It was a structured philosophy on his part. At times, I suspected that O’Malley’s appetite for international talent—especially as an alternative to free agency—
was so strong that it took precedence over winning. But the organization deserved nothing but credit for this acquisition. Nomo—the Tornado—turned out to be the leading edge of a wave of excellent Japanese players to bring their skills to America. He became the Dodgers’ fourth straight Rookie of the Year. Plus, a good friend.
As it happened, the Tornado wasn’t the only one who relocated that year. When I arrived back at Eric’s condo from spring training, I found that Billy Ashley had been staying in my room. I was a little peeved about that, and decided it was time to get my own place. I bought a small town house close by, still in Manhattan Beach, on the edge of both the village and the golf course. As the first order of business—I knew my limitations—I brought in an interior designer and asked her if she knew anybody who could run errands and do laundry and basically hold the place together. She recommended her niece, Teri O’Toole, who happened also to be an artist. So Teri took care of not only the housekeeping but the paintings for the walls, as well.
Of course, Dodger Stadium was my second home in Los Angeles; but it had been so long since we’d played that I’d actually forgotten the combination to my locker. For a while that year, everything was just a little out of whack, in fact.
I tugged a hamstring in our second game and had to miss a few, including the home opener. But I came back whaling and was hitting .537 on May 10 when I smoked a ball to the right-field wall in San Diego and thought it was gone. Out of the box, I Cadillac’d a little bit, and when I saw the ball hit the wall I had to accelerate. Then I realized I’d missed first base, hit the brakes to go back, slipped, put my hand down to get my balance, and landed clumsily on my left thumb. Tore the ulnar collateral ligament, an injury known as gamekeeper’s thumb (named for the affliction that was common to Scottish gamekeepers when they killed rabbits and such by pushing down really hard to break their necks). Reggie Smith was coaching first base at the time, and I looked at him and said, “I just fucked up my thumb.” He told me to yank it out. When I did, I wanted very badly to scream, which of course, like crying, is not allowed in baseball. In denial, I caught another inning. Ramon Martinez was pitching, and his ball moved a lot, so my hand was getting pummeled. When I got back to the dugout, it was badly swollen. I told our physical therapist, Pat Screnar, that I couldn’t handle any more. My batting average would have to hold at .537 for a while.
The thumb was placed in a cast, and as soon as it was removed, Screnar got me working with putty and rubber bands to build the strength back. After about a week of that, I tried to hit off a tee. On the first swing, I took a big rip and the bat went flying out of my hands. I actually did scream that time—it was okay because it wasn’t a game—and hopped around and undoubtedly swore a good bit. Pat said, “What are you doing? Take it easy.”
Late in May, the club left for a ten-game road trip and I worked out at the stadium with Mike Scioscia. It felt downright eerie to be in there when the place was so empty and quiet, with the grass uncut. But it was a good working environment, and when I got to the point at which I could at least hold on to the bat—around the time the team was returning to Los Angeles—I suggested to Fred Claire that I go down to Albuquerque for some rehab. He said, “That won’t be necessary.” So Pat designed a support system with tape, strips, disposable wrap, and more tape. He did a good job.
I didn’t argue with Fred, because I desperately wanted to be back in the lineup. Of course, Tommy was all for it, as well. We were 8-14 while I was on the DL (9-17 counting the games I’d missed earlier with the hamstring problem), and Tommy, on general principle, didn’t care to see me sitting. He had a favorite expression he’d recycle every time the subject of me taking a day off came up. He’d say, “I don’t have a bat long enough for you to hit from the bench.” I couldn’t complain. I was young, I liked being in the lineup, and I especially didn’t want to miss the day games after the night games, which is when catchers and old guys usually rest. Dodger Stadium was a pitcher-friendly park, but the ball carried better in the daytime and I wasn’t interested in wasting that good, warm air making small talk in the shade of the dugout. It was, in fact, a day game when I came off the disabled list—Sunday, June 4, against the Mets. The crowd was humming and my adrenaline was revved up. I homered against Pete Harnisch and caught Candiotti without a passed ball, which was probably a bigger accomplishment.
The home run was a little misleading, as it turned out. It took a few more weeks for my power to make it all the way back. In spite of how I felt about it at the time, I had probably come off the DL too early. But by June 26, I was strong enough to hit a ball clean out of Dodger Stadium in batting practice. That didn’t happen often. We were playing the Padres that night, and a few hours later, with the score tied in the ninth inning, I was due up third against Trevor Hoffman, who proceeded to hit Delino DeShields and walk Jose Offerman. He probably wasn’t too worried, considering that he had gotten the better of me all three times we’d previously met, with two strikeouts. Before I stepped to the plate, I told Karros, “Just kill me if I get cheated up there.” I lived. Hit the first pitch on a line and over the right-field fence to end the game.
The next day, Tony Gwynn and some other Padres started talking about me being the MVP, which seemed a little premature considering how many games I’d missed. But I appreciated it. Nobody on the Dodgers was saying that, with the exception of Joey Amalfitano, our third-base coach.
That was around the time we were jockeying with the Rockies for first place. On June 29, Nomo shut them out, 1–0, to put us up by half a game. Colorado loaded the bases in the eighth inning, with one out, and Nomo threw a splitter that Andres Galarraga nubbed back to the mound. Hideo brought it home and I threw a rocket to Karros at first base to complete the double play. Tommy went nuts: “Jesus Christ, you threw the shit out of that ball!” That was fun, and so was catching the Tornado. He was sensational that year—led the league in strikeouts, shutouts (tied with Greg Maddux), and fewest hits per nine innings.
Part of Nomo’s success stemmed from the fact that, unlike a lot of modern pitchers, he wasn’t afraid to keep the batter off the plate. A couple of years later, after Scott Rolen of the Phillies had touched him up for a couple home runs, Hideo hit him three times. After the third time, Rolen—a big guy whom I’d definitely put in a category with Brooks Robinson and Mike Schmidt as the greatest defensive third basemen I’ve seen—showed up at our clubhouse door looking for him. Nothing came of it, but it was clear that Nomo had made his reputation. With us, though, he already had one. When Nomo pitched, it was his game. We had a left-handed reliever named Mark Guthrie, whom I really enjoyed because he was hilarious and a huge hard-rock guy and shared my affinity for cigars, and Gut would walk into the clubhouse on a day when it was Nomo’s turn and go, “Why am I here? It’s Tornado night. I don’t think I’m even gonna get dressed.”
Obviously, there was a language barrier between Nomo and me. But as a catcher for the Dodgers, there was almost always a language issue with the starting pitcher. Over the next couple years, Chan Ho Park (Korea) would complete our United Nations rotation, which already included Nomo (Japan), Ramon Martinez and Pedro Astacio (Dominican Republic), Ismael Valdez (Mexico), and Tom Candiotti, who spoke knuckleball. It was so confusing that I once walked out to the mound to talk to Nomo and started jabbering in Spanish.
Hideo and I, however, understood each other in the ways that counted. After his games, when he would retreat to a separate locker room at Dodger Stadium (where I used to dress as a batboy) and answer questions for the hordes of Japanese reporters that followed the team all year, he was always very gracious about shooting credit in my direction. His generous words had an unexpected benefit. Nomo’s agent, Don Nomura, was friendly with Danny Lozano, and they landed me a three-year endorsement deal with Komatsu, a Japanese heavy-equipment company. I also did a Japanese underwear commercial for Gunze that showed me sliding into home with my feet in flames, then reclining on the plate in nothing but my briefs. I was the Jim Palmer of Japa
n.
Martinez was also an ace for us that year, and on July 14, at Dodger Stadium against the Marlins, he happened to get plenty of latitude from Eric Gregg, the home plate umpire. Gregg’s strike zone was so generous that, after the third inning, I called for nothing but fastballs, which Ramon was spotting crisply off both corners. He sliced through the Florida lineup in twenty-eight batters, without giving up a hit.
I took some special pride in catching that game, in light of the fact that, in other ways, Ramon and I had trouble finding a comfort level with each other. Among the many examples was a game the year before in which Ramon had covered first base against the Giants and bobbled the toss from Karros. That prompted our former teammate Darryl Strawberry, who had been on second base, to round third and barrel toward home. I didn’t block the plate, because that’s a bad idea when the runner’s legs are eight feet long and you don’t know where the throw is going to be. Strawberry came in standing up, and was pretty much past me by the time the ball arrived. Afterward, Ramon got all over me: “Why didn’t you block the plate?” I said, “Why didn’t you catch the ball?” Ramon also grumbled sometimes about the way I called games, but there was none of that on the night of his no-hitter.
Two weeks later, Ramon beat the Reds, 4–2, to keep us within range of the Rockies, who had been threatening to pull away with the NL West. But the memorable aspect of that game had to do with Cincinnati’s final relief pitcher. Rick Reed had been a replacement player, and we all knew it. A bunch of us—admittedly, I was front and center—crowded the railing of the dugout and yelled, “Scab!” I’d like to say it wasn’t with malice, that we were just trying to start a rally in a close and important game, but it was a volatile time.
