by Mike Piazza
Ventura and I, however, remain linked by a dubious distinction. On March 30, 2000, the two of us became the first players to go 0 for 5 in a major-league game played outside North America.
We opened the century in Tokyo, playing exhibition games against the Yomiuri Giants and Seibu Lions—whose star, Kaz Matsui, the Mets would sign three years later, making him the first Japanese infielder to jump to the major leagues—and two games that counted against the Cubs. Hideo Nomo had given me a good name in Japan, and I enjoyed it there, but not excessively. I left that job to Matty Franco, a pinch hitter and utility guy. One day, Matty assured me that, the night before, he and his gang had “brought Tokyo to its knees.”
For what it’s worth, I can say that I hit a home run in the first major-league game played off the continent, though not before Shane Andrews of the Cubs. We lost that game and won the next one, when Ventura and I contributed our collective 0 for 10 in the middle of the order.
We played at that running-in-place pace for about the first month and a half, getting a lot of production out of Derek Bell, a funny man and veteran outfielder who had come over with Mike Hampton in a trade with Houston. Derek was a Florida guy who had his own style. His pants covered his shoes and he sported an oversize, old-school jersey. In the year he spent with the Mets, he lived on a boat he docked off the East Side. I might go so far as to say that Bell was our MVP for the first half of the season.
For me, however, it was a mixed bag. The good news was that I was hitting to all fields. The bad news was that I was throwing to all fields, too. A May game against Arizona was a prime example. I cracked a two-run homer to drive in the winning runs, and the Diamondbacks stole seven bases.
Mechanically, my throwing was all out of whack. I’d missed a few games with a right-elbow injury after Todd Helton of the Rockies crashed into me at home plate, and that surely didn’t help the situation; but it was no excuse. For a catcher, getting run over at the plate simply comes with the territory.
That aspect of the game ultimately emerged as a point of controversy when Buster Posey, the outstanding young catcher of the Giants—who were the defending world champions at the time—got the worst of a collision with Scott Cousins of the Marlins in May 2011. The result was a gruesome injury to Posey’s leg that ended his season more than four months early.
Cousins put his shoulder into Posey, knocking him backward, and there was an outcry from fans and critics who thought it was a dirty hit; but I didn’t see it that way. There’s a difference between a runner attempting to bowl over a catcher to knock the ball loose—which Cousins did—and one who is intent upon inflicting pain. I agree, absolutely, that an umpire should call a runner out if he thinks the guy is deliberately trying to hurt the catcher. I’d label it the “dirty slide rule” and base it on such things as whether the runner had some of the plate available to him and whether the catcher was actually in possession of the ball. It wouldn’t bother me at all to see some kind of suspension attached to a dirty, dangerous play, because there’s no place in the game for it. That said, one size doesn’t fit all; every situation is a little bit different. I’d leave the call up to the umpire’s discretion rather than implementing any kind of all-encompassing legislation. The commissioner’s office has already neutered the sport too much in the area of retaliation. Enough’s enough. Let the game play out.
The most egregious hit I ever took was the one in 1998 from Michael Tucker, which I thought was more out of line than the hard lick that Brian Jordan—another Brave—put on me in the 1999 playoffs. Until the Tucker play, the worst had been perpetrated by another Brave, Mike Kelly, in April 1994, when he came home in the tenth inning on a single to right by Jeff Blauser. I took the throw a couple of feet behind the plate, which made it easy for Kelly to score, but he came after me anyway with a late slide. I was able to get out of the way somewhat and avoid an injury, but to me, that’s the kind of play that should carry repercussions. I hadn’t put myself in a precarious or vulnerable circumstance.
In any scenario at the plate, a lot depends on variables, such as where the throw comes in. I thought that Posey’s injury, as Johnny Bench said, was due mostly to him being inadvertently out of position. It was a short-hop throw and he got a little twisted up. His ankle was caught underneath him and couldn’t withstand the impact. It was a horrible situation—but not Cousins’s fault or the game’s. I’m not being critical of Posey, either; he’s a highly competitive athlete who was doing what he felt he had to do in the heat of a ball game. But, generally speaking, there are safeguards a catcher can observe on plays at the plate.
The biggest one is to prepare ahead of time. Know the runner, the fielder’s arm, and the situation. If Rey Ordonez was making the throw, I could anticipate exactly where it would be coming in. Jody Reed, not so much. If it’s the winning run in extra innings, yeah, you have to block the plate. But if it’s the first run of the game in the top of the second, I’m going to give the runner a little bit of a lane to slide in—something I learned from Mike Scioscia, who was as tough as they came. In that situation, I owe it to my teammates to keep myself out of harm’s way, if I can, because I know, and they know, that I can change the game later with my bat.
More than any other position, catching is rife with those kinds of complications. It’s a grueling, tiring trade-off, a hazardous occupation that’s inherently detrimental to hitting. But in an odd sort of way, my hitting also hurt my defense at times: It kept me in the lineup when otherwise I shouldn’t or wouldn’t have been.
When my throwing suffered in 2000, the talk started up about moving me to first base. That wasn’t an option I embraced. Even though I’d lost confidence in my throwing, I’d gained it in my ability to handle a game. I liked being in charge and needed that feeling. My father urged me constantly to take ground balls at first base during infield practice, but it didn’t work for me. In my mind, when I was no longer able to catch, I’d be a designated hitter. I just couldn’t see me at first base, and neither could Bobby. Remember when I was in college and my dad took me to Port Charlotte, Florida, so I could work out for Bobby when he was managing the Rangers? Well, Bobby remembered it, too. He remembered watching me take ground balls at first base and thinking I had no chance of ever playing that position in the major leagues. “I always had that vision of Mike in Port Charlotte,” he said.
And so, in early June, still catching and determined to do better, I was bonked again by a backswing. This time, it was on my dome, by Gary Sheffield, of all people. It actually cut my head open and bled—a minor concussion and some major fogginess. I was batting .372 at the time. I missed only one game, but a week later was down to .360 heading into a weekend series in the Bronx, with Roger Clemens starting the first game for the Yankees.
You could pretty much count on two things happening when Clemens pitched against the Mets. Al Leiter was going to beat him and I was going to take him deep. It had happened twice in 1999, and it was more of the same, in the extreme, on June 9, 2000.
There was no score in the third when I came up with the bases loaded and nobody out. Clemens had struck me out looking the first time around, but I was still figuring on laying off the split-fingered fastball and squaring-up a slider. And so it happened on a 1-0 count. I knew immediately that the ball was gone, and flipped my bat as it cleared the head of Bernie Williams and the 408-foot mark on the center-field fence—only the second grand slam Clemens had given up in his seventeen seasons.
I singled in the fourth but just missed the privilege of facing Clemens again in the sixth. Edgardo Alfonzo, the batter in front of me, chased him with a two-run homer to make it 7–2, on the way to a 12–2 final. The Yankee fans booed the hell out of Clemens as he ambled off the field. Of course, he was madder than they were.
Another month would go by before I felt the full effect of his rage.
• • •
The Yankee series put me into a groove that produced a twenty-one-game hitting streak and a fifteen-game RBI streak,
which was only two off the all-time record. I did sit out a game in that stretch, though, after Preston Wilson of the Marlins banged me on the left elbow with his backswing.
On a Thursday night at the end of June, as the conclusion of a long home stand, we finally played the Braves for the first time that season, and the first time since John Rocker’s infamous off-season quotes in Sports Illustrated, when he insulted New York, gays, blacks, women, foreigners, and—this part was nothing new, of course—Mets fans. (A little Rocker sampler, courtesy of SI: “Imagine having to take the [Number] 7 train to the ballpark, looking like you’re [riding through] Beirut next to some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. . . . The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. I’m not a very big fan of foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country? . . . Nowhere else in the country do people spit at you, throw bottles at you, throw quarters at you, throw batteries at you and say, ‘Hey, I did your mother last night—she’s a whore.’ I talked about what degenerates they were, and they proved me right.”) There were seven hundred police officers on hand for the occasion, and a protective cover over the Atlanta bullpen. He received the traditional Rocker welcome when he entered the game in the eighth—“Ass-hole! Ass-hole!”—and chopped us down in order as the Braves won the opener of a four-game series, 6–4.
They jumped on us again the next night and were leading 8–1 in the eighth inning when, as if we refused to take it anymore—I wish baseball were that simple—we rose up against their bullpen. Unfortunately, Rocker was not involved, but we didn’t mind roughing up Don Wengert, Kerry Ligtenberg, and Terry Mulholland. We took out a lot of pent-up frustration on those dudes—scored ten runs in the inning, nine of them with two outs, topped off by my three-run homer against Mulholland. Benitez closed out an 11–8 victory. For us, it was a rare taste of Atlanta blood, and worked up our appetite for more of it. Never mind that the Braves had Greg Maddux pitching the Saturday game.
As great as he was, Maddux wasn’t the type of pitcher who gave a team, or a batter, a sense of foreboding. Nobody feared his fastball, which was what he threw most. On the other hand, not many guys hit his fastball, either. At least, not hard. He’d give you that feel-good 0-for-4, when you’re always thinking that you just missed squaring one up. I had actually handled Maddux fairly well early in my career, before he figured me out. When he realized that I liked to take the first pitch, I found myself chronically behind in the count against him. That was his MO, anyway. He’d pour in strike one, then start varying the speed and location of his fastball, mixing in changeups. To me, the real test of a true pitcher is the ability, and the confidence, to take something off his pitches, as well as put a little extra something on them from time to time. Maddux was the master of that. For a while there, he was also the master of me.
Finally, Zeile suggested that, since Maddux was obviously a special case, I set aside my usual approach and start going after the first pitch. With that, the game was on. As soon as he recognized that I had adjusted, which didn’t take long, Maddux would throw ball one—just missing, of course—then nibble the corners with seemingly random velocities. We thought right along with each other, pitch for pitch, corner for corner. That’s the swordfight within the game, the personal duel, the clash of skills and wits that makes baseball so damn much fun. When all was said and done, I’d gone to the plate eighty-one times against Maddux over the course of fourteen years, and hit .238, with four homers. The only pitcher I saw more of was Tom Glavine, which suited me just fine. As a general rule, I preferred batting against the best, most accomplished starting pitchers. We were both fully prepared for each other, and all too familiar. Typically, I had more trouble with the relief specialists, the one-trick ponies whose specific job it was to march into the game and get me out. They seemed to be readier than I was for the showdowns; more focused on them. You get only one chance against those guys.
If I’d had only one chance against Maddux on that particular Saturday, he’d have won the battle. I struck out in the first inning—struck out, in fact, on a wild pitch, which enabled Derek Bell to score. In the second, though, I solved him for a two-out, two-run homer, which capped off a six-run inning and got him out of the game. Leiter had no such trouble, and we rolled, 9–1.
Concerning Glavine, who pitched Sunday, I didn’t need advice from Zeile or anyone else. For my career, I batted .343 against him in ninety plate appearances, with six home runs. (Jason Schmidt and Pedro Martinez were the only other pitchers off whom I hit that many.) When the umpires made Glavine throw the ball over the plate, I tended to like the results. But there were times against him when I took called strikes that, from where I stood, looked to be outside by the length of a football. Bear in mind, this was before MLB implemented the QuesTec system of charting pitch location, which was used to evaluate umpires. The umps were clearly generous with Maddux and Glavine, but I don’t begrudge it. They had earned the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, I homered off Glavine in the final game of the set, but, hot as we’d been for two days, he beat us, as usual, 10–2.
We then made a quick trip to Florida, where my RBI streak ended in the first game, a 2-0 loss. For the second, on the Fourth of July, I was not in the lineup. As well as I was swinging the bat—my hitting streak was at twenty-one games—I was due for the day off. But in the ninth inning, when we trailed 9–8 with one out and one on against the Marlins’ right-handed closer, Antonio Alfonseca, Bobby sent me up to pinch-hit for Joe McEwing, who was playing left field. I was a little surprised that he would jeopardize my streak in that manner, but it was bad form to say so and I’m sure Bobby was aware of that. Sometimes, I think, he just liked to remind us—especially me—that he was in control. But I also understood that, given the pressures of New York, he was certain to take some heat if he lost a one-run game without getting me to the plate. I grounded into a force-out.
We salvaged a win the next night, then flew right back home. There were four more games to play against the Yankees.
In the June series, we’d been rained out of the Sunday game at Yankee Stadium, which would be made up as part of an unusual day-night, two-venue doubleheader on Saturday, July 8. The first game was held at Shea, and the Yankees won it with Dwight Gooden pitching, 4–2. We then sat down for a team meal before most of the players boarded the bus for a motorcade across the bridge to Yankee Stadium, with police escorts and the whole shebang.
Since I lived in New Jersey, I wanted my car with me, so I drove over on my own. New York traffic is usually sufficient to take your mind off anything else, but for some reason, as I mulled over my game plan for Roger Clemens in the nightcap—unfortunately, our rotation wasn’t set up for Leiter to oppose him this time—I couldn’t shake the odd sensations in the atmosphere. To me, the entire day had a weird-energy, full-moon feel to it. The mood only thickened when, in the first inning, Clemens buzzed a pitch past the nose of our leadoff batter, Lenny Harris.
I was still picking up the peculiar vibe when I stepped in to lead off the second. In spite of my uneasiness, though, there was some comfort in the knowledge that, over the three years in which I’d faced Roger during interleague play, I was seven for twelve against him, with three home runs. And so, with a little sense of disdain—my way of saying, go ahead, show me what you’ve got, big boy—I took strike one right down the middle.
Somehow, like everything else from the time I got up that morning, it didn’t feel right. I recall thinking, there’s something strange going on here. Sometimes you just get an inexplicable premonition, and this was one of those times. It popped into my head to stay loose.
What I remember next is a two-seam fastball headed straight for my face. That vision is burned into my memory.
Even if it weren’t, it would have revisited me, year after year, during the Subway Series, when the stations and networks—mostly ESPN—replayed that infamous beanball to a point that, from my perspective, seemed sensationalized and just plain gross. I was repulsed by the overhyping. Of course, that probably had to do with the sickening feeling it brought back every time.
I truly believe that if I hadn’t gotten my head down at the last instant, Clemens’s two-seamer would have struck me in the eye and possibly killed me. Or led to a situation similar to that of Tony Conigliaro, who was hit in the cheekbone in 1967, missed a year and a half of baseball, and played only twenty-one games after the age of twenty-six, retiring early due to a permanent loss of vision. It was a deadly pitch that Roger hurled my way.
A four-seam fastball will come straight at you, and a hitter knows which way to move to get out of its path. It’s predictable and consequently less dangerous than the type of pitch that bores in on a batter. A two-seamer is like a heat-seeking missile. Typically, it’s a slightly less fast fastball that is kept low to produce a ground ball. That’s the purpose of it. Sometimes, if a pitcher is trying to move a batter off the plate with a two-seamer, it’ll shoot in like it’s going to hit you in the back foot. But a high two-seamer just follows you. When I saw the ball come out of Clemens’s hand—and like I said, I always saw it clearly when he was pitching—I was frozen until that very last moment, when I ducked just enough to get some protection from the front of my helmet.
I crumpled immediately, landing on my back, but I don’t believe I ever lost consciousness. Fred Hina got out there right away, and Bobby with him, and when I looked up it felt like my face was two feet in front of the rest of my head. John Stearns, our bench coach, was screaming and cussing at Clemens, who stood there with his hands on his knees. I was a little shaky walking up the tunnel to the clubhouse. One of the Yankees’ doctors was waiting there for me, to make sure there was no need for emergency measures.
