Long Shot

by Mike Piazza

  At one point, it came out that the “local TV personality” to whom Travis had alluded was Sam Champion, a weatherman—he now does the weather for Good Morning America—whom I never met. There was also a subsequent report that I’d beaten him up over a lover’s quarrel and gotten arrested. People were saying that the police covered it up. Wow. But that drivel did get around. When we played in Cleveland once, some hardworking heckler was having a great time shouting, “Sam Champion! Sam Champion!”

  To this day, when there’s an article circulated about a gay athlete, my name invariably appears. I read one recently about a gay cricket player, for Pete’s sake; and there I was again. What bugs me about it is not the inference, but the way in which the media continues to sensationalize and exploit the situation for its own purposes. As a rule, I haven’t been treated unfairly by reporters—especially those in the mainstream press, where I’ve come across an impressive amount of integrity and professionalism—but skepticism, it seems, is written into their job descriptions. Speculation makes the rounds. Sometimes, reality is strayed from and myth is manufactured. And with the lines increasingly blurring between genuine news media and the modern alternatives—the likes of bloggers, message boards, fan pages, gossip media, shock media, and social media—the trend is taking us further removed from accountability.

  I should point out that the gay community itself hasn’t really stoked the rumors or gotten involved in any perpetuating way. For that matter, I can think of only one occasion when I felt I was being checked out by another man. It was a year or two later, when I was buying a CD in Union Square. A guy came up to me in a manner that was unusually friendly. He definitely had the gay-dar up, as they call it. But all he said was “I thought you handled that situation very well.” I appreciated that.

  My favorite remark, though, came from a website named iSteve.com. It said: “What’s with the NYC media calling obviously straight baseball stars gay? Piazza is a metalhead whose obsession is playing heavy metal tunes on his electric guitar. Trust me, a guy whose favorite band is AC/DC isn’t AC/DC himself.”

  • • •

  Not much more than a week after the gay flap, Sports Illustrated published Tom Verducci’s special report on steroids in baseball, in which Ken Caminiti became the first big-time player to publicly admit using them and estimated that half of all major leaguers did. Naturally, the New York press jumped all over it, buzzing around our clubhouse with questions. My response was “Whatever happened to baseball? It’s not baseball anymore.”

  That may have been a dismissive remark, but it reflected how I was feeling right about then. The reckless reporting of the gay rumor had sensitized me to the media’s exploitation of athletes and public figures, and the SI story struck me as possibly another instance of it. Ultimately, Verducci’s investigation would be hailed as a significant turning point in the recognition and correction of the steroids problem in baseball, and in that respect it served its purpose; but when it came out, I was frankly more concerned about its effect on Caminiti.

  Beyond that, I simply wanted all the noise to stop so I could get back to just playing the game. At age thirty-three, with my skills declining after catching an average of 136 games in the six full years since the strike (not counting 1995, which was abbreviated), baseball was hard enough without extracurricular distractions every week. It was so hard, in fact, that I went more than two months without throwing out a base stealer. The Marlins got seven against me one night.

  But I wasn’t the only one on the ball club feeling the pressures of age and New York. Our new headliners—Vaughn, Alomar, and Burnitz—were all scuffling. Mo could never get as healthy as he wanted to and struck me as a little disengaged, for whatever reason. Roberto seemed uncomfortable with all the trappings of the city. Burnitz wasn’t the same hitter he’d been for five years running in Milwaukee.

  All the while, Nelson Doubleday and Fred Wilpon, who simply couldn’t coexist, were still haggling over their negotiated divorce, which would involve Wilpon buying out Doubleday. To a degree, I thought their creative tension had been a helpful thing—Doubleday was the aggressive, free-spending owner and Wilpon kept him in check as the more conservative party—but by this time it had deteriorated to the point of dysfunction, which trickled down to field level. Somehow, we hung in with the Braves and everybody until the end of May, but couldn’t put together all the pieces that Phillips had assembled over the winter. Steve had brought in proven run producers, and it was hard to blame him for that, but the ball club had a contrived look and feel to it. On a good team, players make each other better. We didn’t fit that description. Over the first couple weeks of June, we fell seven and a half games behind. We needed something to galvanize us. We needed some collective focus.

  Roger Clemens was usually good for that. He would actually be pitching in Shea Stadium on June 15, the middle game of our weekend series with the Yankees—his first time facing us since the hurling of the splintered bat. But even that wasn’t the pure, uncluttered baseball that I was starving for. The shows and papers were full of retaliation speculation. There was also a bonus subplot concerning Clemens, who was being investigated by baseball for plunking Barry Bonds after saying he would introduce himself to Bonds’s elbow guard just to make things sporting. Bobby was in his element expounding on all of it. Shawn Estes was pitching for us.

  When Clemens came to bat, Estes threw his first pitch at Roger’s rear end and somehow missed it. In his own way, though, Shawn did eventually get him. He dinged Clemens with a home run in the fifth inning. The next inning, I nailed him, too, with a leadoff shot. Roger was gone a couple of batters later, having bruised his foot running out a double. Meanwhile, Estes pitched seven innings of shutout ball as we pounded the Yankees, 8–0. In spite of Shawn’s great game, however, Rob Dibble criticized him on ESPN for not continuing to throw at Clemens until he actually hit him. Bobby, of course, fired back at Dibble. Another day, another sideshow.

  A week later, the Braves were in town. It was a series we badly needed to take. You’d think everybody in the organization would be zoned in on that challenge, but before the second game—we’d lost the first—Doubleday announced at the batting cage that he would be suing Wilpon over the appraisal that set the price for the sale of the club. (Doubleday’s suit never happened, but two weeks later, Wilpon actually sued him to force him to sell at the established price.) Then, during the national anthem, Alomar and Roger Cedeno had to be separated in the dugout.

  Nobody—possibly including Alomar and Cedeno—was ever quite sure what they were fighting over. First off, as players, they were diametrically different. Roberto was the intellectual, analytical type, stealing signs, breaking down pitchers, and picking up on all the little things. I think he’d tried to develop some synergy with Cedeno on the bases, and it wasn’t working. Roger was more of a raw-talent guy. He was an amazing physical specimen, but not the most intuitive or graceful player. The two of them just weren’t a match. To make it worse, they were probably both feeling a little testy. For really the first time in his career, Roberto wasn’t playing like a star, and the Mets crowds were riding Cedeno something awful. Even coming from Philadelphia, I’ve never heard fans open up on a player with such relish and contempt. For whatever reason—mostly, I guess, because he struggled in the outfield—Roger Cedeno was the people’s whipping boy, and it hurt him. Hell, it hurt me.

  Around that time, also, some of the players had been ribbing Roberto about the photo on his rookie baseball card fourteen years before, which was reprinted in the Mets’ yearbook. When he’d heard enough, he shouted back and knocked some dominoes off a table in the clubhouse. The next day, Cedeno cut out the picture and taped it onto Alomar’s locker. They had some words by the lockers, then a few more in the dugout, and then, by the rockets’ red glare, Mo Vaughn had to step between them, which was a good thing for Roberto. With his shirt off, Roger Cedeno was shredded wheat, packed with natural muscle like no other ballplayer I’ve ever seen. Later that ye
ar, David Weathers did something or other with one of Roger’s suits for a practical joke, the problem being that Roger had a bad game that night and wasn’t in a joking mood when he came into the clubhouse afterward. David Weathers is a big man, but Cedeno picked him up practically with one arm and put him against the locker. I said to Weathers, “Let me tell you something, dude. You’re lucky you still have a head.” Anyway, the little skirmish with Alomar didn’t amount to much; wasn’t a big deal, really. Except in New York. Valentine was absolutely right when he told Joel Sherman of the Post, “It’s a constant struggle to get everybody into a baseball mode.”

  In that respect, baseball itself was setting a poor example. The commissioner’s office is forever talking about the integrity of the game, but what about the integrity of the All-Star Game?

  It was held that year in Milwaukee, and I happened to drive in the first run with a ground ball in the second inning. We scored three more in the third, two of them on a home run by Bonds off Roy Halladay, at which point it looked as though we beleaguered National Leaguers would break our five-game losing streak. But the American League rallied in the seventh and eighth to tie the game, 7–7, and that’s where it stood after eleven innings, when the commissioner, Bud Selig, called it off because both teams were out of pitchers. Which was ridiculous. We had used up ten and the American League nine. You mean to tell me that a pitching staff of nine or ten can’t make it through one game?

  Obviously, the All-Star Game is a different animal than all the rest, because pitchers work only an inning or two to save their arms and allow somebody else to make an appearance; but it wasn’t always that way. Not that long ago, starting pitchers would routinely throw three innings and the next two or three guys would go two or three more. The teams played to win. It had never been the most fiercely competitive day or night of the season, but there used to be some intensity and pride involved. Ask Ray Fosse, whose shoulder was separated by Pete Rose on the last play of the 1970 game. By the twenty-first century, however, because of the television spectacle and the movement to protect highly paid pitchers, among other things, the All-Star Game had become commercialized and distorted to the detriment of pure baseball. It had devolved into a much less serious, less meaningful event, and suffered significantly for that. The 2002 debacle was the tipping point. When the out-of-pitchers decision was ridiculed in the media—for once, I agreed with most of the writers and commentators—Selig answered by awarding home-field advantage in the World Series to the league that won the All-Star Game, starting in 2003. I thought that was silly, too, because nothing is proven by a single game in which the starting players are 1) elected and 2) then removed just on general principle. If the World Series schedule were determined by the winner of the overall interleague competition for that year, I could go along. As it stands, the home-field advantage merely adds to the all-star farce.

  Back in real time, the Mets of 2002 just couldn’t seem to get our act together. We were actually a few games above .500 at the end of July, but August began with five straight losses. My left wrist was constantly sore and I didn’t know why. It was just a nagging kind of year. I took some anti-inflammatories, kept swinging, and on a winning night in Milwaukee—the one that stopped the five-game skid—managed to homer off Ben Sheets to tie Johnny Bench for second place all-time among catchers, trailing Carlton Fisk.

  That caused me to take stock, for the first time, of what kind of company I was keeping. I mean, Johnny Bench! For my critics, however, the moment had a different effect: it seemed only to serve as a reminder of how much better Bench was defensively. (Amid all of that, Bobby was kind enough to point out that my catcher’s ERA—that is, the earned run average compiled by pitchers while I was catching them—was among the best in the league, which wasn’t unusual.) I suppose that losing tends to taint everything associated with it. And that month, we lost a lot.

  A few days after we snapped the five-game slump, we began a free fall of twelve straight defeats. Then came another five. Incredible as it sounds, we never won a home game in the month of August. Zero and thirteen for Shea Stadium. Altogether, we lost fifteen straight in our own park, a National League record. Bobby was quoted saying that certain veteran players—he meant Leiter and Alfonzo, who were definitely not the problems on our ball club—were distracted by the new contracts they’d have to negotiate after the season. Whatever was at the core of our misery, at least we made Doubleday feel better about unloading his half of the franchise, whatever the price. By the time the sale went down, we were in last place, a humiliating twenty-three games behind the Braves.

  In early September, Keith Hernandez, the great first baseman who was a color analyst for our games on Madison Square Garden Network, tore us apart in an article on the MSG website. He wrote, “The club has no heart; the Mets quit a long time ago. Bobby Valentine could’ve chewed this team out in June when this stuff started creeping in. He was quoted as saying, ‘We brought veteran players in here who I felt were professionals, and I can be more hands off and they can police themselves. Obviously, I was wrong.’ ” I took the “heart” reference as a personal affront and lashed back at Hernandez, calling him a voice from the grave. I also compared his remarks to farts in the wind, which goes to show how composed and dignified I remained through all of it. It was a tough time to be a Met. To his credit, Hernandez came into our clubhouse and apologized to the team. That was nice, but it was still a tough time to be a Met.

  We actually won seven in a row right about then. Prosperity, however, was not for us. In late September, Newsday came out with a story charging that seven Mets had used marijuana during the season. One of the players implicated was a young relief pitcher, Grant Roberts, who was pictured smoking a bong back in 1998, when he was in the minor leagues. Roberts was devastated. Apparently, a scorned former girlfriend of his, a baseball groupie, was trying to extort money from him and had released the photo when he wouldn’t comply. There was also a report about players smoking pot in a limousine. I have to say, we were an easy target for the press and public both. At Shea, one fan held up a miniature Mr. Met toking on a joint, along with a sign that said, “2002 Mets. Up In Smoke.” Others called it the season that went to pot, which sounded about right to me.

  Of course, the marijuana rumpus was another occasion for the media to descend upon our clubhouse—when you lose in New York, they’re like dogs after scraps—and Bobby, as usual, didn’t disappoint them. “I guarantee you no one was in uniform and smoking marijuana, unless they were running around with a whole lot of Visine in their eyes,” he said. “I grew up in the sixties. I think I could tell by looking in a guy’s eyes if he was smoking dope.” Then he launched into an animated, hilarious pantomime depicting a player trying to hit a baseball while he’s high. He was staggering around, like he was spaced-out, flailing at something invisible. Bobby might have been feeling the pressure at that point. He also told reporters that he had been concerned about players using marijuana during spring training and had spoken to Grant Roberts about it, a statement he retracted the next day.

  None of it helped Bobby’s cause. It was no secret that Phillips had wanted him gone for a long time. Fred Wilpon was the guy in Valentine’s corner, and the one, no doubt, who got him through the season. Toward the end of the year, when stories were circulating about players being unhappy with Bobby—and some certainly were—Fred called a meeting in the clubhouse and went apeshit on us. He was very emotional, telling us that, “If you don’t want to be here . . .” Then his voice cracked and he said something like “you can just . . . go swimming!” Nothing gets a ball club going like the prospect of chlorinated water.

  But there was no mistaking Fred’s message. He assured us that Bobby would still be the manager at the end of the season, and the following season, as well. When Wilpon endorsed him that way, Bobby, who had been sitting at a locker off to the side, turned around theatrically and smiled at all of us with a very discernible smugness, like the cat who swallowed the canary.


  Bobby took a lot of flak for our fucked-up season, but the failures were far from his alone. The high-priced veterans, in particular, came up short, and I include myself in that group. My power numbers were okay—I had thirty-three homers and ninety-eight RBIs (Vaughn was second on the club with twenty-six and seventy-two)—and I won my tenth straight Silver Slugger award as the best hitter at my position; but like everybody else, I got caught in the trap of being on a bad team.

  When a season goes to shit the way ours did, the cohesion breaks down and players tend to fend for themselves. It’s only natural, in a way, because winning, in the big picture, is no longer an option. The drill becomes every man trying to show it wasn’t his fault. The 2002 season was the first time I’d felt that way. There was a point in the year—in August, specifically—when I said to myself that all bets were off and just went to hacking. My deal was, what’s the point of giving myself up to move a guy over? Nobody else was driving in runs, anyway. Might as well get mine. Like I said earlier, I embraced a certain level of selfishness on the field, because it’s closely related to doing the most you can do for your team; but in that ridiculous season, I, like most of the Mets, took it to another level.

  If there’s a defense for my attitude—and I’m not saying there is—it has to do with being the so-called star. In that respect, my situation wasn’t much different than it had been in Los Angeles: I knew damn well that if I didn’t have the numbers to prove otherwise, I—this time, along with Bobby—would bear the brunt of the blame for our performance. The pressure I felt was concentrated mainly on hitting home runs, and I let that dictate my response, which was to screw everything else and swing for the fences. The trouble was, that doesn’t really work. It especially didn’t do anything for my batting average. I’d entered the season with the highest career average of any active player (Tony Gwynn had retired), but, at .280, I failed to reach .300 for the first time since my September call-up ten years before.