by Mike Piazza
Tommy had that game in mind when, a month down the road, he tried, unsuccessfully, to talk the front office out of calling up a big first baseman named Mike Busch. Busch had been a tight end at Iowa State and was a pretty good power prospect. For most of us, though, the operative fact was that he had crossed the line in spring training. He had a wife and a baby and a ranch in Missouri and had given us the whole I-have-to-cross-because-I’ve-got-a-farm-payment-to-make-and-my-mother-is-elderly thing. Our thing was not only did we have bills to pay, too, but there were a lot of minor-league lifers with wives and kids of their own who had honored the strike. When Busch came up, Brett Butler, whom we had just picked up in a trade with the Mets, made some remarks to the press about him being a scab. I went on a radio show and was asked about having Busch as a teammate. I said I didn’t respect his decision but what am I going to do, not throw him the ball?
It turned ugly. The Los Angeles Times dredged up some of our quotes about Busch from spring training. Then the fans started booing Brett Butler. The Dodgers even held a press conference to handle the situation. At that point, I said it shouldn’t have become a public matter, that it was our dirty laundry and wasn’t for the media to wave around. That was not well received. The whole thing was a spectacle.
Personally, I didn’t think a distraction like that was going to do us any favors in a pennant race, and I sure didn’t want anything messing with my focus and timing. Two nights before Busch’s debut, in a getaway game at Philadelphia, in front of my family and no doubt some friends, I’d gone four for four with two doubles, two home runs, and seven RBIs. My man Delino DeShields told the Times, “He hit the ball tonight as hard as I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Did you see those balls he hit? Damn, that’s crazy right there.” Until that night, I didn’t have enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title. Suddenly, at .367, I popped right into the lead, with Gwynn—who’d already won it five times—trailing by ten percentage points. No catcher had won a batting title since Ernie Lombardi in 1942, and he caught only eighty-five games.
Of course, I knew damn well that Tony Gwynn was not the guy you wanted to challenge in a batting race. He was the greatest high-average hitter of my generation, by far—the greatest since Ted Williams, for that matter—and dedicated himself to being just that. It seemed to me that Gwynn could have hit with more power if he’d wanted to, but that wasn’t his game of choice. He was all about spoiling pitches and finding holes. There was a general belief among pitchers, catchers, managers, and scouts that the better the pitches you made to Gwynn, the more he’d hurt you. Many times I stretched my mitt far to my left to catch a ball below and beyond the strike zone, and before it got to me, Gwynn had simply served it into left field, nice as you please. Now and then we’d run out of ideas for him and say, what the hell, let’s just throw it in there and see what happens. He was so geared to handling supposedly unhittable pitches that it sometimes seemed as though he didn’t know what to do with a ball right down the middle. He’d pop it up. As a rule, though, you weren’t going to prevent Tony Gwynn from getting his hits.
Two weeks after I jumped into the batting lead, I was down under .360, Gwynn was up over .360, and I was smacked on the wrist by a pitch from Mark Leiter of the Giants, who called the next day to apologize. I left that game but didn’t miss any others. We were going stride for stride with the Rockies, and Tommy’s no-bat-long-enough principle was in full effect. When the Giants left town, San Diego assumed their place. All things considered, I thought I was well within my rights to take a personal moment when Gwynn dug in to hit in the first inning. I told him it was time he stepped aside. He cracked up and had to walk out of the batter’s box.
We played two series with the Padres in the final week and a half, separated by only three critical games at home against Colorado. The Rockies came to Chavez Ravine a half game ahead of us, but we were playing well, having won three in a row. In the series opener, we were down 3–2 in the sixth when I reached on an error and Karros slammed a huge two-run homer that won the game and gave Martinez his seventeenth victory. We split the next two and jogged down the road to San Diego with a half-game lead. Thousands of Dodger fans came with us, and we wanted nothing more than to clinch the division in front of them.
By that time, Gwynn—whose brother, Chris, played for us that year—had easily wrapped up the batting title, but I was more than happy with the trade-off: we beat the Padres the last two games of the season to wrap up the NL West by a single game over the Rockies, who also won their last two. I homered in the Saturday game—my thirty-second of the year—and in the finale, Mike Busch, of all people, struck the big blow with a tiebreaking three-run blast in the seventh.
Although he had batted only seventeen times on the season, Busch was a hero to Dodger fans. The players, meanwhile, acknowledged his role in helping us to the title; but that didn’t matter much when we held our meeting to divvy up the playoff shares. We were a strong union team and felt like we needed to make a statement. We voted him nothing, not even a partial share. The way we saw it, that was money that the union had negotiated, and Busch was a scab. He had acted against the union, not with it. So now we’re going to vote him a share? Nope. Can’t have it both ways, pal. Fred Claire thought we were wrong in what we did, and he called in Eric and me to ask us to reconsider. “I just think it’s bad,” he told us.
I said, “Well, then, you give him a fucking share.” Then we walked out. For what it’s worth, Busch was not on the postseason roster.
In the meantime, we partied at Prego in San Diego. The star of the evening was Tim Wallach, who hadn’t made it to the postseason since 1981 in Montreal. Wallach got so drunk that four guys had to carry him to his car. The whole time, his wife is going, “Oh God, Timmy.”
The division series pitted us against the Reds, led that year by Barry Larkin, who had always been a great shortstop, and Pete Schourek, who had never been a great pitcher. In his prior years with the Mets, Schourek, a left-hander, was the kind of guy who was actually fun to hit against. He gave up some of the longest bombs of anybody in the league. Then he went to Cincinnati in 1995 and all of a sudden you couldn’t touch him. He never pitched that way again.
In the first game of the playoffs, in Los Angeles, I reached Schourek for a home run but we fell short, 7–2. In the second game, Karros hit two home runs, I went 0 for 5—including a strikeout, looking, in the ninth, against Jeff Brantley—and we lost, 5–4. Butler and Chad Fonville were on base all day in front of me, and Eric was crushing the ball behind me, so you can imagine how I felt—especially having it go down that way in our own ballpark. The strange thing was, though, that Dodger Stadium felt different in the playoffs. Since the games started at five o’clock for national TV, the sun would be setting for a good portion of them, and it wasn’t the same hitting atmosphere that we were accustomed to. That’s not an excuse, because the other team played in the same atmosphere, but the upshot was, we didn’t feel too badly about having to go to Cincinnati for game three. Besides, we had Nomo lined up. David Wells blew us away, 10–1.
The sweep was a miserable end to a season that I felt pretty good about, otherwise—which, of course, only made it worse. Had we won or even made it to the World Series, I could have relished the facts that I’d put up the highest slugging percentage (.606) in Dodgers history; that, after three years in the big leagues, nobody but Babe Ruth and my hitting idol, Ted Williams, had ever hit more home runs (91) with a higher batting average (.327) than I had; and that I’d finished a very close second to Barry Bonds (1.009 to 1.006) in OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage), a favorite statistic of the sabermetrics people. The great Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times wrote a column comparing me favorably to the most renowned catchers in history. With the MVP vote coming up, I liked my chances.
The irony, though, was that they would probably be compromised by my best friend in baseball—as would his by me, for that matter. Karros and I had the same number of home runs that ye
ar, and he actually drove in more runs. He was also in better graces with the press. There was some consensus among the Dodger media to push Eric for MVP. That was all good, except that I couldn’t agree entirely with the rationale. Writers kept saying that Eric had held the team together when I was hurt. He did hit well in those times—he hit well all year, especially in the clutch—but the fact was, we had a losing record when I wasn’t in the lineup. From my perspective, that seemed to underscore my value to the ball club. I guess it was a matter of how you looked at it.
At any rate, I thought we both had better seasons than Barry Larkin, who, after a full frontal assault by the media starting in early September, ended up winning it, with Dante Bichette of Colorado—who led the league in home runs and RBIs—second. And Greg Maddux (19–2, with a 1.63 ERA) third. I finished fourth, one place ahead of Eric.
That was the beginning of a growing cynicism I nurtured over the years toward the MVP award. And the writers, too.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Hideo Nomo shut out the Braves, 1–0, in our first home game of 1996, outpitching Tom Glavine. As great as Glavine was, somehow I went three for three against him, all singles, to make it eight for sixteen in my career. I suspect it’s because I was willing to be patient and take the ball to right field. That year, I would actually lead the major leagues in opposite-field hits, which served me well against craftsmen like Glavine, who will abuse impatience. In any case, we took two out of three from the Braves, which was a good sign, seeing as how Atlanta set the standard in the National League.
It wasn’t long, though, before the season took a grim turn. Early in May, Brett Butler left the team to have a cancerous tumor removed from his throat. Butler was still one of the best center fielders and top-of-the-order hitters in the game, but he was almost thirty-nine and would have to undergo intensive radiation treatments. Most people figured he was through as a ballplayer.
We never found a long-term replacement for Brett in center field, but Todd Hollandsworth, a rookie playing mostly in left, picked up a lot of the slack in the batting order. Amazingly, he would become our fifth consecutive Rookie of the Year (following Karros, me, Mondesi, and Nomo).
Eric, Mondesi, and I did our parts, as well, in holding things together. I was leading the league in hitting late in May, when I slid clumsily into second base—the only way I knew how, it seemed—and hyperflexed my knee. Players don’t ordinarily admit this, but I badly wanted to win a batting championship. I would have preferred it even to a home run title. As I’ve noted, I didn’t like to make outs.
My knee was swollen and sore, but it was playable, and we were straining to hang close to the Padres, of all teams. In June, we asserted ourselves by taking three out of four in Atlanta, the last of them coming behind Candiotti, 3–2, when I hit a couple of homers. That finally pulled us even with San Diego. We then won two out of three in Chicago, wrapping up the final game in thirteen innings after some strong relief work by Chan Ho Park, who actually drove in the winning run with a bases-loaded walk.
Afterward, Park was having a wonderful time talking to the writers when one of them glanced into his locker and noticed that the sleeves and pants of his suit had been chopped off. Raul Mondesi was the perpetrator in an act of good-natured rookie hazing, a tradition we observed to make new players feel like part of the ball club. Chan Ho didn’t see it that way. He went into a rage, flinging a chair across the clubhouse. Apparently, sophomoric humor wasn’t cool in Korean clubhouses, but showing up your teammates in front of the media wasn’t cool in ours. I kind of ripped him in the papers for that, and he, in turn, made a public thing of it. I suppose I should have been more sensitive to the cultural considerations, but the bottom line was, I didn’t click with Chan Ho the way I did with Nomo.
Nevertheless, we arrived home in first place, looking good and gathering steam. That Sunday, we came from behind to tie the Astros with two runs in the eighth and beat them in the bottom of the ninth on my one-out home run against Xavier Hernandez.
It was June 23. After that date, nothing was ever quite the same.
• • •
For all of the difficulties I had with the Dodgers over the years—from their lack of interest in me after the draft to the minor-league drama to the contentious contract negotiations—I always appreciated the fact that they weren’t just another baseball team. The Dodgers had a soul.
Actually, they had two souls. One belonged to Peter O’Malley, the family-oriented owner and gentleman whose father, Walter, had brought the team over from Brooklyn in 1958, ten years before I was born; and the other—proud, public, loyal, loud, and a little chaotic—was, unmistakably, Tommy Lasorda’s. Tommy, of course, had replaced Walter Alston, who had accompanied the club from Brooklyn and managed it well for twenty-three years. Alston went about his business in a strong but quiet and conservative style, which fit right in with the O’Malleys—especially Peter. When the time came, credit Peter for having the self-assurance to hire a flamboyant Italian cut from a drastically different cloth. Between them, O’Malley and Lasorda were the Dodgers, as we knew them.
That lasted until the moment I stomped on home plate to put away the Astros.
Sometimes, it seems like the game of baseball is out of our hands. We think we’re swinging a thin-handled bat at a two-seam fastball, taking Glavine the other way or going deep against Xavier Hernandez, and really, it’s some other power taking over—God, fate, poetry, whatever you want to call it. The victory on June 23 was the 1,599th of Tommy’s incredible, Hall of Fame career as a major-league manager. And the last.
That night, he attended a charity dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel and complained to his wife, Jo, about abdominal pain. She took him to the hospital the next day, an off day. On Tuesday, he was diagnosed with an ulcer. On Wednesday, he underwent angioplasty surgery. Tommy had suffered a minor heart attack, and the doctors weren’t sure when.
Billy Russell, his old shortstop and coach, took over the team, expecting to return it to Tommy in a week or two. Tommy expected the same. Meanwhile, the docs were telling Tommy to start taking things a little easier. He knew that wasn’t feasible as long as he was managing the Dodgers. Maybe somebody else could take it easy in that job, but not Tommy Lasorda. About a month later, there was a press conference at Dodger Stadium, and Tommy’s voice was shaking when he said, “For me to get into a uniform again—as excitable as I am—I could not go down there without being the way I am. I decided it’s best for me and the organization to step down . . . . That’s quite a decision.”
Yeah, it was. I wished I could have lightened the moment somehow. In the best tradition of Tommy himself, maybe I should have pulled him aside and jumped all over him the way he always jumped on me when I felt like I shouldn’t play: “You mean to say you can’t sit in the fuckin’ dugout and tell Billy Ashley to go up there and pinch-fuckin’-hit? You can’t walk out to the fuckin’ mound and hold up your right fuckin’ hand for Todd Worrell? What the fuck? I’d love for you to get some rest, Tommy, but we don’t have a lineup card big enough that we can read it from your fuckin’ house in Fullerton.”
On one hand, even though he was sixty-eight, managing the Dodgers was everything to Tommy, and I’d always thought they’d have to haul him out of the dugout in a box. On the other, I suppose we could see it coming while he was convalescing. He was scheduled to coach at the All-Star Game, which was in Philadelphia that year, and there was no way he’d miss the trip back home if he could help it. But he watched from his couch in California.
Tommy was the only thing missing from that night. There were about fifty family members and friends of mine in the crowd, and I had a good time with the whole scene. The year before, at the All-Star Game in Texas, I’d taken a batting-practice ball to the outfield and had Barry Bonds and a few other guys sign it. When it was covered with autographs, I held it up to one section of the crowd and got everybody cheering and screaming, then took it over to another section and got the people worked up over there. Wh
ichever section made the most noise got the ball. When I tossed it into the seats, it turned into a scrum to see who could come up with the prize. I reprised the act in Philadelphia, and they went wild over it.
I’d been the leading vote-getter for the game—I was hitting .363 with twenty-four homers at the break—and found that immensely gratifying. Even so, it didn’t quite equal the honor of catching the first pitch from Mike Schmidt, the guy I’d always wanted to be like. At that instant, it hit me that I really was like Mike, in a superficial, just-getting-started sort of way. (Thankfully, I was booed less—although, within a couple years, I would make up a lot of ground in that department.) To top it off, he signed the ball: Mike, I think you’re the best.
That was the greatest moment of the evening . . . until the bottom of the second inning, at least, when I cranked a long home run off Charles Nagy, the American League starter. According to Bob Nightengale of the Los Angeles Times, Tommy sat up and screamed when the ball came down in the upper deck of Veterans Stadium. That was the greatest moment of the evening . . . until we’d completed the 6–0 shutout and I was named the game’s MVP (I also had an RBI double).
At the end of the night, though, the greatest moment might have been seeing my mom crying tears of joy as I held up the MVP trophy. Or watching my dad accept congratulations from half the population of Chester, Montgomery, Delaware, Bucks, and Philadelphia counties. He was beaming and bragging so much, I finally had to say, “That’s enough, Dad.”
In the postgame interviews, I told the writers, “This is a small tribute to my dad.” I meant that, of course. But if I’d known what was going through Tommy’s head at the time, I could have dedicated my award to him and my father. I think they both would have liked that.
• • •
After four losses, Billy Russell’s first win came in Colorado on a night when I homered three times and drove in six runs. We led 13–0 going into the bottom of the eighth, behind Ismael Valdez. The final score—classic Coors Field—was 13–10, with the tying run on deck.
