by Mike Piazza
From that, I think, the fans of New York took their cue. It wasn’t that they didn’t care. There was none of that Miami apathy. In a short time, in fact, average attendance at Shea Stadium virtually doubled, from around eighteen thousand a game to roughly thirty-five. But people weren’t coming to the park for the purpose of showering me with hospitality and affection. Hell, no. They were looking for reasons to disapprove of me, and they found one every time I failed to drive in a teammate. Unfortunately, that happened a lot. It didn’t matter that my batting average remained high—the more runners I left on base, the more they called me out; and the more viciously. Ira Berkow of the New York Times referred to it as “serial booing.”
Deep down, the issue wasn’t simply my clutch hitting—that I hadn’t come quite as advertised—but the fact that I hadn’t declared my unconditional loyalty to the cause. I hadn’t signed with the Mets or promised that I would. Privately, I wasn’t too enamored of the prospect. The fans, sensing that, considered me a hired gun. A mercenary. It offended them and set in motion a wicked cycle: I’d ground out to short with a man on second and the crowd would clobber me with boos. The more I was booed, the less I felt like staying in New York for the long term. The less I felt like staying in New York, the more it showed. The more it showed, the harder I was booed.
The open hostility made me a wreck and all but a recluse. Each time the cycle spun around, I retreated further into my shell. I’d rented a thirtieth-floor apartment on the Upper East Side, Seventy-second and York, and rarely left it for the first month or two. It wasn’t only the treatment at Shea that affected me; the entire scenario—the whole New York thing—seemed overwhelming. As badly as the Mets wanted me to turn around the franchise, I wanted just as badly to turn it around, and the last thing I needed was extra pressure from the biggest, loudest, most demanding city in America. I put more than enough of it on myself. Bad nights only got worse when I replayed them in my head. I’d often give Al Leiter a lift home from the ballpark, and if we’d lost or I’d struck out with two guys on base, I was horseshit company. Al would try to lighten the mood with small talk, but I had nothing to say. Certainly nothing pleasant. After a while, he stopped trying.
Even the basic logistics of the city took their toll. As a visiting player, I’d never had any difficulty navigating New York—after a game, I’d just go for a steak at Peter Luger’s in Brooklyn—but dealing with it in an everyday capacity, there were so damn many restaurants, and so damn much of everything, that in the beginning it just locked me up. It might have been different if I’d arrived in the off-season or been producing the way I wanted to; if I hadn’t been distracted, daunted, and depressed. As it was, I couldn’t cope with New York and leaving runners in scoring position. The simplest things seemed forbidding. I was paying more to park my car in a garage than it cost me for a place on the beach in Los Angeles. My dad had a friend in the automobile business named John Bruno who was kind enough to show me around the town—we had some nice Sunday nights in the West Village—but I didn’t feel like a part of it, or particularly care to. My defense mechanism was kicking in.
In more general terms, an inner voice told me never to get too attached to a city. During my time in Los Angeles, I’d been friends with one of the goalies for the Kings. He had been traded as soon as he bought a house. He convinced me that, in professional sports, investing in a place to live is the kiss of death; or the kiss of trade, as it were. In Los Angeles, I’d gone ahead and bought one anyway, established some roots, connected with the town, and suffered the consequences. In New York, in 1998, I wouldn’t be making the same mistake. Not without a long-term contract, at least. Any major commitment would have to be a two-way proposition.
I really wasn’t sure how the Mets felt about that. During the trading process, they hadn’t been one of the teams that predicated their interest on signing me to an extension. And it wasn’t like I was fast becoming a local icon or anything. Negotiations were uneventful. In general, the organization seemed to be as leery about the situation as I was—in which case, why not test the market?
We were in a holding pattern, and my state of mind was stuck on gloomy. New York, frankly, was beating me. At one point, I told my dad that I didn’t give a shit anymore. He grumbled back at me, blaming anyone he could think of for the mess I was wallowing in. I’d thought he’d be happy, at least, that I was closer to Philadelphia. Nobody around me was happy.
Even my housekeeper was depressed. Teri O’Toole had moved east with me from California but was jolted by the brusque, snappish style of New York City. She eventually went into the convent.
• • •
There was at least one way in which New York embraced me without reservation. Unwittingly, and with startling regularity, I seemed to feed the city’s craving for drama. As soon as the narrative threads had been established for the Hundley controversy and the negotiations watch, Pedro Martinez went ahead and hit me in the hand with a two-seam fastball on a Friday night in Boston. This was early in June.
According to the papers, there was no way that Pedro would deliberately put me on first with two strikes already, even though there were also three balls and the base was open, with a runner in scoring position. I suppose there was a slight chance of that being true. It’s also true that he disliked me, he had exceptional control, I’d knocked him around in our previous meetings (seven for seventeen with three home runs), and it hurt like hell. I might have been hypersensitive to that sort of thing because it was my free-agent year, but it felt like a knockdown pitch. In the baseball tradition, I usually made a point of not rubbing the spot where I’d been hit or in any way acknowledging the power of the pitcher, but that time, halfway to first—after pausing to stare at Pedro for a couple seconds—I doubled over in pain. They took me straight to the hospital for X-rays. The hand, my left, was badly swollen but nothing was broken.
I returned to the ballpark in time to tell the media, “He’s been known to do that . . . . He’s buzzed a lot of guys. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last . . . . Obviously, this year he doesn’t have to hit so he can be a little bit more liberal in there . . . . Draw your own conclusions.”
At the same time, in the other clubhouse, Pedro was telling the Los Angeles Times, “He was my teammate and an acquaintance. But we were definitely not friends.”
Needless to say, the story was not over. Reporters were carrying our quotes back and forth between the clubhouses. When the Boston guys asked Pedro for his response to my statement, he said, “Fucking Piazza.”
My response to that was, “All the money in the world can’t really buy any class.”
Then it was Pedro’s turn. As recorded in the New York Post: “He’s talking about class? He was a millionaire since he was a kid . . . . He’s not a better person than me.”
Me: “If he’s got a problem with me, he knows where to find me.”
Pedro: “What does he want me to do, go and fight him? Go in and start throwing punches? That’s not me. That’s where I have my class.”
And to think we were grown men, leaders in our industry, making $20 million between us.
I missed only a couple of games; but after we lost on Sunday, we were eight behind the Braves. We were nine and a half behind them a month later, when we went to Atlanta and took a beating in more ways than one. We lost all three games, and in the second of them, on the Fourth of July, I was off again to the hospital. Gerald Williams conked me on the head while following through with his backswing.
The next day I wore a hockey mask for the first time. Meanwhile, my hand was still sore from Pedro and my shoulder was tender from when Gregg Zaun of the Marlins had slammed into me in a collision at the plate. It was hot. It was the getaway day before the All-Star Game. We went into the eleventh inning. When the Braves loaded the bases with one out against Franco, I walked out to have a talk with him. The instant I got there, the umpire, Angel Hernandez, was saying, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” I was like, “Dude, can we have a me
eting? The winning run’s on third base.”
So Walt Weiss hits a shallow fly ball to left field and Michael Tucker, the runner on third, decides he’s tagging up no matter what. Our left fielder, Bernard Gilkey, was a little surprised, I think, and his throw came in on the short hop. I managed to block the plate and snag the ball before Tucker got there, and he came at me with the dirtiest slide I’ve ever witnessed. He literally jumped into my thighs with both spikes. Didn’t even hit the ground. Left about a six-inch gash in my right leg. After the collision and tag, it took me a moment to gather myself and raise my head up. As I did, I held the ball in the air, then turned toward the dugout, hoping to get a chance to hit in the twelfth.
I couldn’t believe what I saw. Angel Hernandez had actually called Tucker safe.
I slammed the ball into the ground and started to give him hell, but Franco was already doing it. When I couldn’t even get Hernandez’s attention, I kind of spun him around. Somehow, I avoided a suspension. Franco, who bumped the ump a time or two, was not so fortunate.
Afterward, Valentine told the media, “I had a front-row view. The throw beat him. He fell into Mike’s lap with a lousy, illegal slide. He cut him up, never touched the plate, got tagged out and they boarded the plane. I saw what everyone else saw. No marks on home plate. A lot of marks on Mike’s leg where the cuts are.”
And my two cents: “That was the most ridiculous call I’ve ever seen in my ten years of pro baseball; in my twenty years of baseball, period. It was just beyond belief. I’m completely flabbergasted.”
We never did make a run at the Braves—I have to say, they were damn good—but we still had a shot at the wildcard. That’s why I was there.
For months, however, I simply didn’t help much, as the crowds were more than happy to point out in unison. There were times when I felt like booing me, too. Like the last day of July, the first time we’d played the Dodgers since the trade. I went 0 for 4, hit into two double plays, and allowed the Dodgers to tie the game in the ninth when I failed to block a wild pitch from Franco. They ended up scoring three to beat us, 4–3. But while I expected to be held accountable for my bad nights—after all, I’d grown up in Philadelphia—the New York fans were so enthusiastically brutal that any lingering prospects of me re-signing with the Mets looked pretty damn bleak. Speculation picked up that I might return to Los Angeles as a free agent.
There was a measure of humiliation in all of that—an implication that I just wasn’t cutting it in New York and might as well go back where I came from, with my tail between my legs. Maybe, as a challenge to my pride, that was the thing that got me going. Or maybe it was the fact that, around the same time, the Mets announced they would postpone any additional contract talks until after the season, which cleared my head quite a bit. I homered and drove in three runs in the series finale, the first day of August. Later that month, I drove in three in a game at Colorado, three against the Rockies at Shea, four at home against the Diamondbacks, and three in San Francisco.
August got the crowds off my back and put us smack in the playoff picture. The three RBIs against the Rockies came on a pinch-hit double off Chuck McElroy that cleared the bases and completed a doubleheader sweep. Shea Stadium rocked. When I crushed a long home run off Darren Oliver to help beat the Cardinals, the fans actually asked for a curtain call. And I actually gave it to them. A page had been turned. When I hit a grand slam off Andy Benes to help bring us from behind against Arizona, the applause was no longer out of place.
There was even a standing ovation from a sellout crowd in Los Angeles—over the top of my jeering detractors, who still remained—when, at the end of August, I returned for the first time and homered in the sixth off Carlos Perez. In the tenth, I singled to start the winning rally. The Dodger fans didn’t seem too concerned about the loss, since their team was under .500 and well out of the wildcard race by that time. In the Los Angeles Times, J. A. Adande wrote, “It was a giant wave of forgiveness for the month of April . . . . As tough as it might have seemed the last time he was here, things sure seemed better than they do today.” I was eight for thirteen over the four games. We won three of them and left L.A. tied with the Cubs for the wildcard lead. In spite of our success, though, the whole series, to me, had a strange vibe. Through it all, there were rumors that Lasorda, who was still acting as the Dodgers’ general manager, would come after not only me at the end of the season, but Valentine, too.
By early September, I’d homered eight times in two weeks. In Houston on September 14, batting in the first inning against Jose Lima, I crushed a 480-footer to straightaway center field that is considered the longest home run in the history of the Astrodome. Two days later, I hit a two-out, three-run shot in the ninth off Billy Wagner to give us a 3–2 lead in a game we ended up winning in eleven on a pinch-hit blast by Todd Hundley (who, when he started, was usually in left field).
I’d been amazed by Wagner the first couple of times I’d seen him. I just didn’t expect anybody, much less a little left-hander, to throw that hard. But I had good results when I started taking his fastball to the opposite field, and was pleased to be able to say that the two hundredth home run of my career had come against him. More important, it kept our momentum going. Heading into the season’s last two series—five games—the wildcard was ours to blow. We led the Cubs by a game and the Giants by three and a half.
Incredibly, we lost all five, the final three to the Braves in Atlanta. Even the Giants passed us by, forcing a playoff between them and the Cubs for the wildcard, which the Cubs won. After overcoming my clutch-hitting problems to drive in 111 runs for the season, I left fifteen men on base in the Atlanta series. It seemed like nothing good ever came out of playing the Braves.
It would have been nice to find a little solace in the RBIs, or in my third straight Most Productive Hitter of the Year award from the Ted Williams Museum & Hitters Hall of Fame—in something—but honestly, there wasn’t any. Not with that abysmal finish. Not with the playoffs going on without us.
• • •
To me, in fact, the whole 1998 season had the feel of failure. I had failed to reach an agreement with the Dodgers, failed to lead the Mets into the playoffs, and failed to master New York City. I was haunted not only by our collapse in Atlanta, but by the notion that New York had proved to be too much for me. I didn’t want to be remembered as just one more guy who couldn’t play there.
The more I pondered it, the more I believed that there was a reason I’d been traded to the Mets. I didn’t really know what the reason was, but I knew I couldn’t walk away from it, just because New York was difficult. I decided that if the Mets wanted me and the contract was acceptable, I’d stay.
Danny agreed. He respected my motive and was quick to point out the earning potential of that particular choice, as well.
From the moment I’d arrived in New York, Danny had encouraged as much buzz as possible. When Howard Stern invited me onto his radio show during the season, for instance, Danny was all for it. (Of course, he didn’t have to answer Howard’s questions. We talked about when I’d dated Debbe Dunning, the Tool Time girl, and Howard asked me, “Did you bang her?” I laughed it off and told him I only dated nice girls. Evidently, I handled it okay, because I received a roundabout message that Debbe thought I’d been sweet to her.)
For that matter, Danny was almost always on the side of publicity, one memorable exception being the Penthouse interview I’d been asked to do the year before, in the fall. He’d reminded me that I was a proud Catholic and shouldn’t go anywhere near that interview, but I did it anyway, without him knowing. I think it was a case of wanting to have my voice heard, to assert my independence a bit, and to squirm out of the grasp of my background, my parents, my agent, whatever. What I ended up asserting was my immaturity. I said some unenlightened things about women and spouted a stance on abortion that was the polar opposite of what I was brought up with and actually believe in. As soon as I said those things, I was pretty sure that I’d scr
ewed up, and my mother erased any remaining doubt. She made it abundantly clear that she was disappointed in me as a Catholic, a man, and a Piazza. But at least that debacle prepared me for Howard Stern. I’d learned my lesson.
That said, I’d been raised in a capitalistic household and was well aware that New York presented opportunities no other town could match. Image was important to me. On the other hand, so was privacy. The classic New York dilemma. I began to think that, if things worked out with the Mets, I ought to live away from the city, somewhere with personal space. And driveways.
After the season, I headed back to my condo in Manhattan Beach, where I could hang out with Danny and get all this resolved. My dad had assumed I’d spend the off-season in Philadelphia, which was one of several points that we saw differently in those days. He was also looking into an arrangement by which I might end up in Philly full-time. He’d gotten a call from Sidney Kimmel, the philanthropist (namesake of the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia) and founder of the Jones Apparel Group, who was interested in buying the Phillies. Kimmel was inquiring about whether my dad might want to be a partner in the franchise, and whether, if he was, he could persuade me to sign with the Phillies as a free agent. My dad’s answers were yes and yes. In fact, it had been a dream of his.
Not of mine, however. I would go to great lengths to make my father happy, but I simply couldn’t see this one his way. It was a huge relief to me that it didn’t work out—the Phillies weren’t really for sale—because the game was hard enough without the complication of my dad as an owner. First of all, it would have been a nightmare from a media perspective, inviting all manner of questions, sidebars, and snide remarks. What’s more, there undoubtedly would have been conflicts of interest that neither of us needed. What if the manager wanted to sit me down or the GM thought it best to trade me? What about contract negotiations? What about the perceptions of the other players? Would they consider me a spy for the front office? The thing was, I’d been busting my ass all these years to prove that I wasn’t my father’s puppet. It would have been a very sensitive and thankless situation.
