Long Shot

by Mike Piazza

  Our half of the inning must have ended quickly—Clemens was so shaken up that he retired the next seven batters—because, before the doctor even took a look at me, he handed over the telephone and said that Roger wanted to talk to me. I grabbed it, threw it, and said, “Tell him to go fuck himself.”

  Roger Clemens had near-perfect control. I wouldn’t have batted an eye if he had just brushed me off the plate—of course, that’s what he said he was trying to do—and I wouldn’t have thought twice about it even if he’d put the ball in my ribs. But to stick one in my forehead . . . that’s another story altogether. Clemens had always come across to me as the playground bully, huffing and puffing and snorting and yelling at batters, doing whatever he could to intimidate them. Way back when Roger was named MVP in 1986, as the ace of the Red Sox, Hank Aaron expressed his opinion that pitchers shouldn’t be eligible for the MVP award because they don’t play every day. Clemens’s response was “I wish he were still playing. I’d probably crack his head open to show him how valuable I was.” I had every reason to believe that Clemens was throwing at my head, and I’ll be damned if I was going to take his phone call before the doctor could even check me out.

  A few minutes later, I was driven to the hospital, where X-rays showed just a minor concussion. So I went back to Yankee Stadium, and after the game, our PR director, Jay Horwitz, knowing that the media would swarm me in the clubhouse, suggested that we move to a separate room to accommodate them. That was fine with me, because I didn’t want to answer the same question a couple of dozen times and I didn’t want my teammates to be inconvenienced by the mob. Naturally, I was criticized for being a prima donna by holding my own press conference. In The Yankee Years, by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci, Clemens himself is quoted as saying (through Brian McNamee, the Yankees’ assistant strength coach and Clemens’s principal accuser in the steroids controversy), “Who gets hit and has a press conference?” (On the same page, again through McNamee, there is also a damning, very perplexing quote attributed to John Franco. Something about me being “a pussy.” When asked about it for this book, Franco stated, “That’s so far from the truth. I would never say that to Brian McNamee. I met him once at a St. John’s baseball dinner. I never even talked to him about that. I would never say that about a teammate.”)

  At the so-called press conference, I stated my firm belief that Clemens had thrown at my head, and was criticized for that, too. A year later, Don Zimmer, who was coaching for the Yankees, took me to task in an interview with Esquire. He said, “Piazza made a little man out of himself. I don’t care who knows it, I lost a little respect for Piazza.” I suppose Zimmer was sticking up for some old-time baseball code that he lived by—he was once knocked out for two weeks by a hanging curveball and woke with four silver buttons in his skull, which was the impetus for pro players wearing batting helmets—but I can’t respect a custom that tolerates a man throwing a baseball ninety-two miles an hour at another man’s head . . . and doesn’t tolerate an honest response to it. I might also point out that, in Zimmer’s day, there were other ways to reply. Even in the American League, the pitcher had to bat.

  Clemens pitched into the eighth inning that night and beat us, 4–2. Sunday, back at Shea, I watched as Mike Hampton combined with Armando Benitez to shut down the Evil Empire, 2–0.

  The All-Star Game was two days later. I thought it best to sit it out.

  • • •

  On the first night after the all-star break, when I’d had four days to clear the mist between my ears, we drew the Red Sox and, wouldn’t you know it, Pedro Martinez, the other hard-throwing, right-handed, superstar pitcher who had hit me after I’d been hitting him. This time, neither of us hit the other. I did single in the eighth off Rich Garces to drive in a run and put us up, 3–2, but Boston won the game on a two-run double by Brian Daubach with two outs in the bottom of the ninth.

  There’s always a little trepidation when you first come back from a beaning, and I found some relief in surviving Pedro. The next night, as the designated hitter, I tied the game in the fourth inning with a home run off Pete Schourek, and in the eighth, with Alfonzo on, put us ahead for good, 5–4, by driving a curveball from Derek Lowe off one of the giant Coke bottles on the light tower above the Green Monster. I went deep again against Garces in the ninth inning of the finale—I could get used to Fenway Park—but Ramon Martinez beat us to take the series. Boston was the beginning of a brutal eleven-game road trip that ended with two more losses in Atlanta. It was late July and we were six games behind the Braves.

  August, for me, was a gauntlet. In Arizona, I sprained my medial collateral ligament when I turned abruptly to argue being called out at first. In Los Angeles, I slid into an outcropping of concrete trying to catch a foul pop fly, messing up my hip, and, going after another one, landed on my head in the box seats. At Shea against the Diamondbacks, our center fielder, Jay Payton, threw out Jay Bell at the plate, and in the process I took a forearm to the face. When I got up, the New York fans were chanting, “MVP! MVP!”

  By then, I’d begun to enjoy the favor of the city. For one thing, we were suddenly stringing wins together and making a run at the Braves and the postseason. Along with that, I had gotten into the spirit of New York on the social level.

  My informal tradition of in-season girlfriends was still going strong, and this time it was public. I’d met Darlene Bernaola when she was wearing an evening gown at a Playboy party in New York, not long after she and her twin, Carol, who were raised in Peru, had been featured in the January 2000 Playboy as the “Playmates of the Millennium.” I still had an off-season place in Boynton Beach but was thinking of moving to South Beach (which I did in 2001), and I happened to know that Darlene lived in Miami. So, a couple of weeks later, I called to ask her about the area, using that as an excuse to buy her dinner. Next thing I knew, the season had started and she was practically living with me in New Jersey.

  Dating Darlene was one of the more adventurous things I’ve done on the personal level. Up until then, I’d made an effort to keep my social life conservative and at least relatively private; but it’s hard to be inconspicuous when you’re dating the Playmate of the Millennium in New York City. (At various times, there had been rumors that I was seeing Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz. I met Jennifer a time or two through her brother, when we worked together on a commercial. He told me she thought I was cute. But that was the extent of it. If I could take credit for dating her, I surely would. The closest I ever got to Cameron Diaz was knowing somebody who knew her.) What’s more, the husband of Darlene’s sister owned a club in town, and he liked to publicize our visits there to drum up business. Darlene was a hot item in the gossip pages.

  I went into the relationship like a hopeless romantic, thinking, what a crazy story. We had each other’s initials tattooed on our ankles. I gave her the baseball I hit off Clemens for the grand slam. But once the magic dust wore off, we found we had some serious philosophical differences. Complicating the whole thing was the pressure from my family. The relationship was a little too visible for my mom and dad’s tastes, and just not traditional enough. By late summer, we were probably ready to break up, but I was leery of doing it then: I knew it would be in the papers and didn’t need the distraction while the team was in the thick of a pennant race. It would have to wait until the season was over.

  We pulled even with the Braves at the end of August. In September, true to form, they shook us off. I was dragging, paying the price for a long summer of lumps. The Braves led us by three games going into a late-season series in Atlanta—which meant we had a chance to catch up with them again—and proceeded to manhandle us the first two nights.

  While we were still in good shape for the wildcard, those two losses didn’t sit well with Bobby. The Braves had swept us in late September the previous two years, and he was sick of it. He wanted to do an intervention. So he called a meeting before the third game—which was a Wednesday night ESPN telecast—and screamed at us to get our heads
out of our asses. Then, before it broke up, he said something to the effect of “Mike, I don’t know if you’re tired or if you don’t give a fuck, but if you don’t want to be in there, let me know.”

  Deep down, I knew what he was up to. Coming after me was a way to dramatize his message and give it some wow status. I figured he figured that if he tamed me, he’d have the whole team under his thumb. But I didn’t give a shit what his strategy was. I wanted, really wanted, to kick his fucking ass, right on the spot. Instead, I headed straight to the laundry room looking for something to abuse. Dave Wallace, one of my old mentors with the Dodgers and Bob Apodaca’s replacement as the Mets’ pitching coach, eased in and tried to calm me down. He said, “What the fuck was that all about?” I couldn’t answer. The whole thing felt like an ambush.

  The next day, a reporter asked me, “Did Bobby say anything to you in that meeting yesterday?” I totally lied. And the whole time I was thinking, where could he have gotten that information? I don’t claim to understand all the inner workings of the universe, but I felt I had a pretty good read on that one. My antenna was in the air, and it was picking up signals from the manager’s office. There were plenty of instances like that, and it definitely affected the players’ trust in Bobby.

  It’s hard for anyone to understand how that dynamic works in a competitive media market like New York, but I can see how Mike and others had the impression that I talked too much to reporters. Sometimes it was probably reality. I might have said things I shouldn’t have.

  —Bobby Valentine

  At the same time, though, nobody—or at least, not many of us—thought he was a bad guy or a bad manager. The fact is, I liked Bobby. He was over-the-top sometimes, and probably took himself too seriously most of the time, but he could also be self-effacing in a way that would charm you. Once, we were challenging Scott Rolen with two-strike fastballs, because he was a very good breaking-ball hitter, and he was fighting them off, as he typically did. I looked over into the dugout and Bobby was giving me the sign for a curveball. I put down the curveball sign and Rolen stroked it out of the park. When I got back to the dugout, Bobby just shook his head and said, “Don’t listen to me anymore.” He could make you smile. The way I saw it, he had his quirks, but in the end he was just Bobby, the same as Tommy had just been Tommy. I was well trained for him.

  We went ahead and beat the Braves on the night after the meeting and I homered in the eighth inning off Mike Remlinger, which Bobby probably thought was his doing. That was the game in which Chris Berman kept calling me Honest Abe because of the shape of my beard. The Dominican players—mainly, Armando Benitez—had brought in a Dominican barber to cut their hair, and I used the guy, too, because he was an artist. Unlike the Dodgers, the Mets had no policy restricting hair below the lower lip, which hadn’t really stopped me anyway, so I let this guy go to work on me. He would spray some kind of clear shaving cream on my beard and then use a straight razor to carve in whatever crazy shape I wanted. Ballplayers are all a little superstitious, and I was just looking for the right facial-hair combination. I hit a home run as soon as I went to the Lincoln look, so I kept it for a while. I thought it looked pretty cool, actually. It also paid tribute to a couple of my passions—home runs and American history.

  The victory got us back on track. We won our last five games and eight of the last nine to finish one behind the Braves and easily win the wildcard spot. On a personal level, I felt as though I’d carried the team for significant stretches—carried it, effectively, to the playoffs—but some of the writers pointed out that, when the division title was on the line early in the month, I went four straight games without a hit (we won three of those) and struggled through a two-for-twenty-seven slump.

  So, with thirty-eight home runs, 113 RBIs, and a .324 average, I finished third in the MVP voting behind Jeff Kent and Barry Bonds, teammates with the Giants, who won three more games than we did. There were at least four people who thought that, in spite of just 482 official at-bats (Bonds had only 480, but a lot more walks), I was actually the most valuable player in the National League that year—three of the voters and yours truly.

  • • •

  The Giants happened to be our opponents in the NL division series, and I was definitely not the MVP of that.

  San Francisco, playing at home, won the first game, but we were in control of the second until J. T. Snow hit a three-run, pinch-hit home run off Benitez in the bottom of the ninth to send it into extra innings. In the top of the tenth, Darryl Hamilton doubled and Jay Payton came through with a two-out RBI single to give us back the lead, 5–4. Benitez returned for the bottom of the tenth, and Armando Rios started it with a single. At that point, Bobby called in Franco, who had just turned forty and didn’t save many games anymore but still had the stuff and brains to get anybody out. Of course, Barry Bonds wasn’t just anybody, and he came to the plate with two outs and a runner still on first. The count ran to three and two, game and possibly the series on the line. As the story goes, I called for a fastball at that point, thinking that Bonds would be sitting on the changeup, and Franco shook me off. Johnny wanted to throw his change, no matter what—he had a good one that night, almost like a screwball—and since he’d saved more than four hundred games over seventeen seasons, all because he knew what the hell he was doing, I let the man throw the changeup. It was a classic. Strike three, called. A lot of the papers alluded to Johnny shaking off the fastball, and now and then he needles me about still wanting him to throw it. The only thing is, I don’t remember it that way. I remember calling for the changeup because I knew that’s what Franco would be determined to throw in that situation. The replays I’ve seen don’t show him shaking me off. Either way, though, it was a great, gutsy pitch, by a great, gutsy pitcher.

  The series then switched to Shea, and Benny Agbayani delivered a colossal home run in the bottom of the thirteenth to put us ahead, two games to one. In game four, I walked with two outs in the first and Ventura came through with a blast. That was more than Bobby Jones would need. He pitched a one-hitter in a 4–0 victory that set us up in the league championship series against the Cardinals. God bless them, they had beaten the Braves.

  We started fast in St. Louis. In the first inning of the first game, against Darryl Kile, Timo Perez doubled to lead off, Alfonzo walked, I doubled in a run, and Ventura drove in another with a fly ball. My double—past Placido Polanco at third base, on the first pitch—was especially welcome, considering the funk I’d been in. At least our bench coach, John Stearns, thought so. When I was standing on second, Stearns, who was miked for television, suddenly went off, shouting, “The monster’s out of the cage! The monster’s out of the cage!” It became a mantra. Meat Loaf—a huge baseball fan—even recorded a song, “The Monster Is Loose!”

  Mike Hampton took care of the rest, pretty much, with seven shutout innings, then turned it over to Leiter for game two. The Cardinals’ starter was Rick Ankiel, a twenty-one-year-old, phenom lefty who’d been having serious problems with his control. He’d thrown five wild pitches in one inning against the Braves in their division series, an all-time record. As Timo Perez stepped in to lead off, Pat Mahomes came running down from the bullpen, yelling, “Hey, this is the motherfucker with the control problems, isn’t it?” Then Ankiel fired his first pitch over Timo’s helmet, sending him sprawling, and Mahomes goes, “Goddamn!”

  Timo had just been called up for the first time in September and was not exactly a student of the game yet. He didn’t know who anybody was, and got up all ticked off, assuming that Ankiel was throwing at him. He ended up taking strike three before the fun started. Alfonzo walked. Then, with me batting, Ankiel threw one in the general direction of the press box and Fonzi went to second. I fouled off a two-two fastball, and Ankiel finally walked me on another fastball to the screen that sent Fonzi to third. Zeile hit a fly ball to bring in Alfonzo, and Ankiel walked Robin on four pitches. Agbayani followed with a double and I scored all the way from second (yes, that’s a jo
ke). That was it for Ankiel. He would start only six more games in the major leagues before converting to the outfield.

  I homered in the third against Britt Reames, but the Cardinals tied it, 3–3, in the fifth. Ultimately, the hero was again Jay Payton, who ripped a run-scoring, ninth-inning single to center field off Mike Timlin to put us up 6–5. When Benitez held them in the bottom of the inning, we had taken control of the series on the road.

  At Shea, the Cardinals beat us in game three, but in the next one, after falling behind 2–0 in the top of the first, we jumped on Kile with back-to-back-to-back doubles by Alfonzo, me, and Ventura, and then another one from Agbayani. Altogether, we scored seven times in the first two innings. I homered in the fourth to put us up 8–3, on the way to a 10–6 victory that left us just one slim win from the Mets’ first National League championship since 1986. In game five, we came out hitting, Hampton threw a three-hitter—he was the series MVP—and it was ours, by a score of 7–0.

  The clubhouse celebration was positively euphoric. It was an incredible, spontaneous, dreamlike kind of happiness that I’d never before experienced.

  We were in the World Series.

  Against the Yankees.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Give New York a big story and the city will inevitably make it bigger. The first World Series between the Yankees and Mets was not enough; not even with an irresistible, custom-made nostalgia factor—the flashback to the famous Subway World Series matchups of the 1940s and ’50s, the Yankees against the New York Giants and especially the Brooklyn Dodgers.