Long Shot

by Mike Piazza

  At that time, I was having more trouble than ever throwing out runners, which my pitcher friends were not reluctant to point out. They didn’t have a lot to say when I homered three times and drove in six runs, but I’d hear from them on days like the very next one, when the Rockies embarrassed me by stealing ten bases, six of them by my old teammate Eric Young. We lost that one, 16–15. For what it’s worth, I homered in that game, too. Just saying.

  Russell had been my manager in Albuquerque, and he was a good bench coach for Tommy, but after he took over the Dodgers, he and I didn’t gel. I’m not sure what the problem was. There were some strange dynamics running through the organization in those days. Tommy became a vice president when he stopped managing, and a lot of people seemed to be afraid that he would take their job, or that associating with him would somehow put them on the wrong side of something or other. My dad once walked into Billy’s office and was appalled to find no trace that Tommy had ever been there. All of the old pictures had been taken down except for one of Walter Alston. Russell had actually played more for Tommy than he had for Alston, not to mention the fact that Tommy was the one who had hired him. It seemed like a slap in Tommy’s face, which of course my dad couldn’t tolerate. He said, “Billy, what the hell are you doing? How can you have that picture up there and nothing of Tommy to go with it?”

  According to my dad, Russell told him, “I’ve got to protect my own ass.”

  That’s the way it was around there. Billy had been warned to steer clear of Tommy. He wanted my dad to convey that message to Tommy, but my dad didn’t think it was his place to do that, per se. What he said to Tommy was, “That stupid ass is telling me that Fred Claire said he should stay away from you.”

  Later in the year, when reporters asked Russell who he thought deserved the MVP award, he answered, “Ken Caminiti.” It was hard not to take that personally, as much as I admired Caminiti. A tough-guy third baseman, Caminiti was carrying the Padres while battling through a barrage of hardship. At various times in 1996, he dealt with injuries to his abdomen, biceps, elbow, groin, hamstrings, and back. Then, on August 18, a day after we’d taken over first place, San Diego was playing the Mets in Monterrey, Mexico, when Caminiti had a bout with nausea, dehydration, and Montezuma’s revenge. They put him on the training table with an IV and a Snickers bar, and he got up, marched out, and hit two home runs to bring the Padres back into a tie with us.

  Meanwhile, I was still limping around with a gimpy right knee—torn cartilage, it turned out. It must have happened when I hurt myself sliding in May, but I never knew it until an MRI on the knee showed a “minor disruption” about the size of a pebble. The doctor said I could play on it if I could handle the pain. I figured I could handle pain better than surgery. I was terrified of knee surgery. I’d seen too many catchers who were never the same after it. Anyway, the knee didn’t bother me in the batter’s box—and my comparative health is not the point here. The point is, I was a Dodger, and the Dodgers’ manager was lobbying, at my expense, for a player on the team we were dueling for the division title. I don’t know if Billy was instructed to say that or not, but I got the distinct impression that the organization was trying to suppress my value. We were due to negotiate a new contract at the end of the season.

  I sometimes had my issues with Tommy, too, but for as long as he was my manager, he was always an ally. I couldn’t say that about Billy Russell. There was a game, for instance, when Ramon Martinez had two outs in the ninth and two strikes on Ryan Klesko—we were way ahead of the Braves—and threw a nasty cutter that I missed, which allowed Klesko to reach first base. Ramon got the next guy, no problem, but when I walked out to the mound he wouldn’t shake my hand. I don’t expect a pitcher to give me a hug and kiss for doing what I’m paid to do, but from my perspective, I’ve busted my ass back there and a “hey, good job, way to work hard” isn’t too much to ask. I loved catching Jim Gott, for instance, because he’d get genuinely excited about any little thing I did to help him out: “Good job, Mike, way to go! Way to block that ball!” But Ramon . . . Sometimes, I’d start toward the mound and he’d just turn his back on me. This time, I was so incensed I wanted to kick his ass right on the spot. Russell could tell I was furious about something, although he wasn’t sure what, and got in my face about it. I could understand that he’d have problems with my temper, but at that moment he was only making it worse. We came very, very close to fighting.

  In spite of the O’Malley influence, the Dodgers were not a big-happy-family kind of ball club, and after Tommy retired, the rift between pitchers and hitters only grew wider. Both Ramon and Ismael Valdez went anonymously to Maryann Hudson of the Times and said that I didn’t know how to call a game. I have to acknowledge that, at times, I was hard on Ramon in the media, so it worked both ways. As for Ismael—he was a guy who, when the game reached the later innings, was usually looking at the bullpen, and he knew that I thought he should suck it up more often. He certainly knew Eric felt that way, because one night after a bad loss in Florida we had a team meeting and Karros spoke his mind about it. Basically, he called Ismael a pussy. Valdez confronted him outside the shower, of all places. They started fighting, the only problem being that Eric was in his towel and shower shoes. Naturally, the towel fell off, and Billy Ashley said, “What are you going to do now, Eric? Hit him with your cock?”

  It’s ironic to me that the pitchers I had the most difficulty with were the Latin guys, whom I’d been catching since I went to camp in the Dominican Republic. I didn’t have the same kind of trouble with Nomo, Chan Ho, or Candiotti, even though I’d never before caught a Japanese, Korean, or knuckleball pitcher. One of the complaints was that I obsessed too much over my hitting, that if I struck out or bounced into a double play, my concentration drifted when I was behind the plate. There’s a double edge to that. Hell yeah, it bothered me when I didn’t come through with the bat, and maybe that showed up in my body language. But there was a lot of pressure on me to carry the club offensively, and I took that responsibility very seriously. I never consciously let a bad at-bat affect my defense, but sometimes it’s inevitable. Pitchers are sensitive, and they pick up on those things. In addition, some pitchers are insecure to the point that they’re eager to blame anything but themselves for their failures. I’ve had pitchers who were getting lit up tell me that the other team had my signs. No, dude, they don’t have the signs.

  And then, thankfully, there are those who put the whole thing in perspective. Candiotti used to say, “I don’t give a shit if you ever throw a guy out. Just hit me a three-run homer.”

  I was well aware that I needed to straighten out my throwing. To that end, I watched some tapes of myself from 1993 and put in some dedicated sessions with Mike Scioscia. He pointed out a couple of technical flaws, but throwing is not an easy thing to fix. When guys started to steal on me, I tended to rush my throws, and that led to bad habits. Plus, because of my bat, I was playing nearly every day, which meant my body was tired and beat-up most of the time. I’m not offering excuses—just saying that there was a lot going on, a lot of moving parts. I told Jim Murray that year, “You have to remember, we have a staff that includes Candiotti, who throws a knuckleball, and Hideo Nomo, who throws the ball out of a corkscrew and the forkball sometimes goes in the dirt.”

  That said, I concede my shortcomings as far as throwing out base stealers—I guess I have to, considering that I missed 155 of them that year, the most in the majors—but I’ll also argue that that’s only a small part of what a catcher does defensively. The primary task is to coax the best game possible out of the pitchers. I did that by knowing their strengths, studying the hitters, and being aggressive in the strike zone—especially early in the count. I made sure, as much as I could, that we didn’t fall behind in balls and strikes. I insisted that our guys pitch with confidence, whether they had any or not. It worked. Pitchers didn’t walk as many batters when I caught. And I’ll point out, proudly, that in 1996 the Dodgers led the National League
in ERA.

  There’s a lot of chemistry and trust involved in the pitcher-catcher relationship and I embraced that part of the job. I also welcomed the break that conscientious catching provided from the pressures of hitting in the middle of the lineup. By nature, I was so consumed by hitting that, with idle time on my hands, I’d have been inclined to overthink my approach to it. I believed in going to the plate with a clear head so that I could focus on simply seeing the ball—on freeing up my swing, letting it come naturally—and the constant demands of catching helped me do that.

  Mike as a receiver . . . this never gets mentioned, but in my view he always caught the ball extremely well. He never got credit for what he accomplished as a catcher. There were a lot of people who said, let’s move Mike to first base, as if it would be an easy transition. I never really thought that was in the best interest of our team or Mike. I just tried to look at what the player brought to our team, and Mike was so much on the plus side that I never thought about making a change. As a catcher, he hit in record proportions. There was never anybody better.

  —Fred Claire

  That whole summer, we continued to shuffle back and forth with the Padres. One of the more interesting games came against Montreal at the end of August, when Ramon faced off against his brother, Pedro, whom we had traded because, as I heard it, the Dodgers thought he might be too small for a heavy workload.

  I only wish I’d gotten along with either Martinez half as well as they got along with each other. They really did have a special relationship. Pedro was known to sit in the dugout and pray for Ramon when his brother pitched against his team—or slip back to the Montreal clubhouse, where he could cheer more openly. On the night they opposed each other, Pedro was asked what he was thinking after Ramon walked three straight batters in the bottom of the third to let in the first run of the game. He said, “I was hoping he’d make some adjustments.” Ramon did, and we won, 2–1, on back-to-back homers by me and Eric in the fourth.

  We were playing great ball in that stretch—I had a nineteen-game hitting streak at one point—and kept it up into the final month of the season. On September 1, in Philadelphia, I crushed one of my favorite home runs ever. It was off Mike Williams, a reliever who became nastier later when he developed a split-fingered fastball, and it disappeared into a tunnel in one of the upper decks in left-center. We lost that game, but less than two weeks later, Nomo beat the Cardinals, 4–1, to put us half a game ahead of San Diego.

  In his next start, following a shutout by Valdez, there was a tricky, unexpected element to work around. The mound at Coors Field was slippery and Nomo had a little trouble with it early on. I talked to our pitching coach, Dave Wallace—people might not realize that the catcher and pitching coach work together closely—and before the second inning we convinced Hideo to pitch out of the stretch all the way. We started out with mostly fastballs in the first few innings, but Nomo’s forkball was so evil that night that we went to it heavily in the latter stages of the game. We were both feeling it.

  That was an example of a ball game in which I didn’t get a hit and didn’t really care. When a guy has it working the way the Tornado did against the Rockies, the catcher gets into a rhythm just like the pitcher does, and probably enjoys it just as much. There’s a satisfying sense of control, empowerment, and total involvement—putting down a sign and a target and watching the pitch pour into your mitt exactly the way you had in mind. Nomo walked four batters but he never did make a mistake in the strike zone. His masterpiece was the second no-hitter I’d had the privilege of catching in as many seasons. More important, it came at a critical time, stretching our lead in the division to a game and a half with less than two weeks remaining in the season.

  We lost the series finale and carried a half-game advantage to San Diego for an enormous four-game series that didn’t change a thing. We had a chance to take three out of the four going into the last one, but the Padres got to Nomo for three runs in the fifth inning. I hit one of my longest home runs in the eighth—they measured it at 446 feet—to make it 3–2, and that was it. The San Diego crowd was chanting “MVP!” for Caminiti—who had an incredible second half of the season—when he hit two singles and made a great defensive play in the ninth, all with a torn rotator cuff. I seemed to be losing out in the suck-it-up-and-play competition, even though the cartilage tear in my knee was making me pop Advil every day. But I continued to lead the league in hitting (only because Gwynn didn’t have enough at-bats to qualify) and felt like I was still the front-runner in the MVP race—that I had to be—in spite of all the noise to the contrary.

  Back at home, we took two out of three from the Giants to go up two games with only three to play. Against the Padres. With a single victory, the division title would be ours.

  Valdez started the first game for us and led, 2–1, going into the eighth, when Caminiti tied it with a homer to center field. It seemed like every time he did something against us that year, Vin Scully would go, “Ken Caminiti, everybody’s MVP!” Thanks, Vin. But Caminiti had a compelling case, obviously, and added to it in the tenth inning, doubling home Steve Finley with the winning run.

  Meanwhile, everybody seemed to think I was packing it in because I openly speculated that the series wasn’t that big a deal: if we won the division, we’d play the Cardinals, and if we didn’t, we’d be the wildcard and face the Braves right away in a five-game series instead of—inevitably—a seven-game set in the next round. I thought that was a very pragmatic perspective. Fred Claire went nuts.

  After the Padres beat Nomo on Saturday, it all came down to the final game. Russell and Claire spoke to the team beforehand, urging us to have some pride, lay claim to the NL West, and for Pete’s sake, don’t get swept. That was well and good, but the theme was watered down a little bit when we pulled out Ramon Martinez after one inning so we’d have him ready for the first game of the playoffs. Kind of a mixed message, I’d say. Ironically, the strategy worked out to the extent that Pedro Astacio took over and shut the Padres down.

  It was still 0–0 in the bottom of the ninth. Wayne Kirby led it off for us and walked, then Hollandsworth reached when they misplayed his sacrifice bunt. That brought me up against Dario Veras with two on and no outs. A base hit would win the division. I struck out. Then Karros grounded into a double play. In the top of the eleventh, Finley doubled against Chan Ho Park, Caminiti singled him to third, and, wouldn’t you know it, Chris Gwynn—Tony’s brother, who had come up in the Dodger organization—smacked a changeup into right-center to bring them both home. Trevor Hoffman got us one-two-three in the bottom of the eleventh.

  So the Padres sprayed their champagne right in front of us, Tony Gwynn picked up enough at-bats to clinch the batting title again, and Caminiti, with forty home runs and 130 RBIs, was a unanimous choice for MVP. I was second in the voting with a .336 average, thirty-six homers, and 105 RBIs.

  To that, my emotional reaction was pretty much the same as it had been in 1995: fuck the MVP. I was already jaded by the voting process. Six years later, after Caminiti admitted in a controversial Sports Illustrated story to using performance-enhancing drugs, a lot of people thought that it tainted his award; but I couldn’t get worked up over that. From my point of view, it wasn’t steroids that won it for Caminiti; it was the popularity contest. It was the legend of getting off the training table, pulling out his IV, polishing off his Snickers bar, and clubbing two home runs against the Mets in Monterrey.

  This is a cliché, I know, and perhaps a rationalization, but what mattered more to me than even the MVP award was the respect of my peers—which was why I was so offended by the indifference of the Dodgers on my behalf. The highest compliments I got seemed to come from San Diego. The Padres’ manager, Bruce Bochy, told the Los Angeles Times, “Being a former catcher myself, I can’t tell you how impressed I am. For him to catch a hundred and forty games and hit like he has all season is absolutely unbelievable.”

  And then there was the official endorsement of anothe
r guy from San Diego, one whose authority was unsurpassed, in my book, and whose approval meant more to me than that of anyone else connected to the game. Ted Williams operated a museum and Hitters Hall of Fame in St. Petersburg, Florida, and in 1996, for the first of three consecutive seasons, I was honored by it as the Most Productive Hitter of the Year. Me—the kid with the batting cage!

  • • •

  When we lined up before the first playoff game, most of us were wishing that we had, indeed, won the damn division and were looking across the field at the Cardinals (who, incidentally, swept the Padres). The Braves’ reserves included the likes of David Justice, Terry Pendleton, Andruw Jones, and Luis Polonia. As they were being announced, Mondesi nudged Karros and whispered, “Holy shit, they’ve got two teams!”

  They also had a nice late-season pickup in Denny Neagle, one of the league’s best left-handed pitchers. It seemed like we were always getting outmaneuvered in the way of ad hoc acquisitions. It seemed, also, that our roster was perpetually young, which was not really the perfect prescription for a postseason matchup with Atlanta. As much as we fought the feeling, there was no denying a certain sense that we were doomed in that series.

  Even now, I can offer no other explanation for game one. Ramon pitched well, and of course John Smoltz pitched well for the Braves. It was 2–2 in the bottom of the eighth inning when I came to bat with two outs and nobody on. I squared the ball pretty well to right field—well enough to get it over the fence at Dodger Stadium. I’d hit enough home runs over that fence to know what one felt like, and that was a home run. Except that Jermaine Dye backed up, reached up, and, to my astonishment, caught the damn thing.

  To this day, I don’t know how that ball stayed in the park. And I wasn’t the only one. Guys said it to me, and they said it to the Los Angeles Times.