by Mike Piazza
Part of the reason for the drop-off was that I was being pitched much differently than I had been earlier in my career. Because pitchers didn’t want me to extend my arms, they were pounding me on the inside part of the plate. I actually made a pretty good adjustment and developed a shorter swing, which enabled me to pull more home runs to straight left field than I ever had; but as a rule, pull hitters are not high-average hitters.
I had always placed a premium on base hits, whatever the length. Whether it was coincidence or not, for nine straight years I’d finished with at least a .300 average and my team had finished with at least a .500 record. The first time I fell under, so did the ball club.
• • •
The day after the season mercifully ended, I was called into the principal’s office. It was odd, because I had no particular rapport with Fred Wilpon or the front-office personnel in general. They never asked me how to run the ball club and I never offered any advice. Leiter and Franco were at ease talking about big-picture stuff—Johnny and Wilpon had a natural connection because they’d attended the same high school in Brooklyn (although obviously not at the same time)—but I was more of a see-the-ball-hit-the-ball kind of guy. Plus, after my experience in Los Angeles, I was inclined to keep management at a distance.
The invitation upstairs left me puzzled and wary. I got the idea that Fred had summoned me, but I couldn’t be certain. He was accompanied at the meeting by his son, Jeff; Steve Phillips; and Phillips’s assistant, Jim Duquette.
The topic, it turned out, was Bobby.
Right off the bat, Fred said, just as he had in the clubhouse, that Bobby would be the manager again in 2003. I sensed that he was fishing for a reaction. It was already out there that the likes of Leiter and Franco had issues with Bobby—his handling of the marijuana story was a prime example—and my distinct impression was that the guys in the room wanted me to join the chorus. That way, as I figured it, they could fire him and more or less pin it on the players, which was the organization’s standard MO.
I wasn’t taking the bait. I said, “I don’t have a problem with Bobby if I play hard and do my job.” And that was that. End of meeting.
About ten minutes later, my father called. He told me that Bobby had phoned him and said, “Mike saved my job.”
The next day, the Mets fired Bobby Valentine.
Not surprisingly, the media suggested that Leiter and Franco had something to do with it. I disagree with that, and so do Al and Johnny. In the words of Franco, who to this day, in spite of all the idiosyncrasies that came along with the package, considers Bobby the best manager he ever played for, “That was so far from the truth. If we’d had that kind of power . . .”
Leiter saw the situation pretty much as I did. “[There was] a way in which the organization was trying to disperse blame,” he said. “Whether it was firing a manager or justification of a bad record, somebody had to get blamed and nobody in the highest seats wanted to blame themselves. It was a case of trying to defuse and divert the obvious. It was a franchise struggling, not going in the right direction, not really knowing what the plan is.”
For his part, Bobby didn’t hold Al or Johnny or any of the players directly responsible. He did allow, however, that “the hardest thing for a manager to do is understand and manage aging stars. The hardest thing for an aging player to do is understand his place in the world.”
The club, true to form, didn’t try very hard to let anybody off the hook for what had happened. Wilpon delivered the company line at the press conference, saying, “We put very good players in place who didn’t play very well. It’s best to jump-start and get a manager to motivate these players and get the best out of the veterans and the young players. I believe these guys are as good as we all thought they were.” Fred’s belief cost him about $2.7 million, for the last year of Bobby’s contract.
For me, meanwhile, as screwy as the baseball season had been, the year as a whole didn’t turn out so badly. In the fall, I met a very intriguing woman named Alicia Rickter.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
My first year in New York, I became friends with a hockey player for the New Jersey Devils, a defenseman with a sizzling slapshot named Sheldon Souray. He was traded to Montreal just before our World Series season, and in August 2002 married Angelica Bridges, an actress who played on Baywatch and was ranked by Maxim as one of the fifty sexiest women in the world. Sheldon and I didn’t keep in touch too much after he left town, but at some point he mentioned a friend of Angelica’s from California—also a Baywatch actress, and a former Playmate, to boot—whom he wanted to set me up with. Sounded pretty good to me.
Alicia, as it turned out, remembered me from some old commercials but had barely heard of baseball, which was fine. We got acquainted with a few phone calls, and she asked me what position I played. When I told her I was a catcher, she said, “Is that the one behind the batter?” She was better informed in other areas, and sharp and funny besides, and when I picked her up on a Sunday night in October for our first date—she rented half of Sheldon and Angelica’s house in Hollywood Hills, since they were in Canada so much—I saw that she was also the most beautiful woman I’d ever gone out with.
We had dinner at the Ivy and talked about God and fashion, among other things. She liked my religious side but not my wardrobe. I was wearing jeans and what she described as a “dorky, baggy turtleneck sweater.” My daytime style was surfer shorts, and she didn’t care for those, either—a little young for me, I suspect. Needless to say, I was no longer consulting my California clothes guy. When Alicia moved in, the first thing she did was clean out my closet and take me shopping.
In retrospect, it was a blessing that I met Alicia when I did and not sooner, when there was no room in my sights for anything but the game. Nine-eleven had changed me not only socially and spiritually; it had also marked a dividing point in my playing career. It spent me for the rest of 2001 and the aftershock lingered into that miserable 2002 season, the one that made it clear my star was no longer on the rise. Life after baseball was approaching faster than I’d realized a year or two before.
Looking ahead to it, I bought into a Honda dealership in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia: Mike Piazza Honda, “where you always catch a good deal.” My dad more or less brokered the sale, finding me a partner who was a friend of his. Mets fans would drive down from New York or over from New Jersey to buy cars there. I also had an interest in the family partnership, Piazza Auto Group. Baseball still dominated my life, but it no longer consumed it totally.
The upshot was that, for the first time, I could handle the concept of a relationship with a future. And suddenly, I had a pretty good idea of what that future looked like.
It would have to wait, though, until I got back from the old country. Before I started seeing Alicia, I’d been contacted by MLB about a goodwill tour that involved visits to baseball academies in London, Berlin, and Rome. Except for a family trip when I was a kid, I’d never been to Europe. So Danny Lozano and I stocked up on cigars, scoped out the World War II sites we wanted to see, and decided to make a vacation of it. Alicia sent me off by saying, “Now don’t fall in love with any European girls.”
The last stop on the itinerary was Rome, where I also met with the higher-ups of the Italian baseball federation about coaching and putting on a promotion for their Olympic team. The promotion was a clinic for kids, which included a hitting exhibition. I knocked some balls out of the park and there were some Italian variations on ooh and ah.
Then, while I was doing my thing for the national team, the Italian sports council surprised me by arranging a visit with the granddaddy of higher-ups. I was going to meet the pope. First, though, the Vatican had to conduct an investigation on me to find out who my priest was and make sure that I’d been baptized and confirmed; basically, that I qualified as a Catholic in good standing.
The visit was an incredible honor. The papal audience takes place in a large auditorium in the Vatican, and there
were maybe five thousand people in attendance the day I was there, including a bunch of bishops and cardinals speaking different languages. Of those received by the pope, only four or five were laypeople.
Pope John Paul II was obviously not in good health at the time, but it was thrilling, nevertheless, when they wheeled him out. I almost missed it. I was sitting right up front, with an Italian usher next to me. When I heard the cheering I turned around to see, thinking that the pope would be coming down the middle aisle, which he usually does when he’s healthy. But the usher fellow, speaking English through his thick Italian accent, goes, “Eh, no. No pope-a that-a way. There. There is-a the pope-a.”
When the pope is situated, a Spanish cardinal stands up and says, “We have a group from Chile, we have a group from Venezuela, we have a group from Mexico . . .” The groups all stand and cheer and sing hymns. Then a German cardinal gets up and says, “We have a group of pilgrims here from Stuttgart, we have a group of pilgrims from Frankfurt . . .” And they stand up and cheer and sing. And then a cardinal from England and a cardinal from Australia, and then an American cardinal. There was a group from Iowa that sang a hymn. It’s like a pep rally, more or less, and extremely cool. They do it every Wednesday. Even if you’re not Catholic but a Christian, you should go, because you will see and feel that this is the epicenter of Christianity.
After the group portion, the individuals who have been invited—there were about fifty to seventy-five the day I was there—go up one at a time to meet the pope. I was carrying a Mets jersey with me, Piazza 31. There was a guy I’d been talking to from Chicago, so I asked him, “What do you think, should I give him this jersey?”
He goes, “Yeah, man. That’s your hammer, dude. That’s your craft. Be proud of it.”
When my turn came, I went up nervously and tried to talk, but I didn’t really say anything. I just knelt, and John Paul put his hands on my head. I was kind of embarrassed, not sure what to do.
I held out the jersey. The cardinal next to him, who was like his aide, accepted it. I gave it in the spirit of “This is my offering. This is what I do. This is who I am.”
So the cardinal bends down and whispers to the pope, “Holy father, this is Mike Piazza. He’s a baseball player.”
And the pope, speaking English with an inflection that, to me, sounded as much Italian as Polish, said, “God-da bless-a Mike Piazza, the baseball-a player.”
I heard his voice in my ear, with his two hands still on my head. I really can’t say if he knew who I was, but I’d like to believe that he did. I truly felt a connection. I felt very warm. I felt very special.
I had my rosary with me, and later gave it to my grandmother. When she died, it was buried with her.
• • •
As if to prove that I wasn’t really a grown-up yet—to, you know, ease the transition and assure myself that love and religion hadn’t taken all the punk out of me—I felt it necessary to make a drunken ass of myself at an Axl Rose concert.
He had put together a new version of Guns N’ Roses and gone on tour after being underground for several years. In early December 2002, they closed out the tour at Madison Square Garden. I went to the concert with my buddy Eddie Trunk, the host of That Metal Show on VH1 Classic. Axl’s manager gave us VIP tickets, so we hung out in the hospitality tent while Axl was busy being a couple hours late. I started throwing back vodkas until I was inebriated, and then threw back a few more. I rarely drink like that, but this was a special occasion; this was Guns N’ Roses, back from the dead.
The manager gave us great seats for the show, about ten rows from the stage, and I should have shown my appreciation. Instead, I stood on a chair the whole time, pumping my fist and going through the whole angry drunk routine. Eventually, my assisted rage focused on Axl’s shirt. He had a tradition in which he would wear the team jerseys of whatever town he was playing in. He’d play a few songs in one jersey, then take a break and come back sporting another one. In New York, he wore a Rangers shirt, then a Knicks shirt, and then a Yankees shirt. Never a Mets shirt. That kind of lit my fuse. All of a sudden I yelled out, in my rambling, bad-drunk voice, “Yo, Axl, what the fuck? I’m here at the show, man. There ain’t no Yankees at the show. I’m a real fan, and you can’t even put on a Mets shirt?” It must have been my latent issues coming out. Or something.
We went to the meet-and-greet afterward, and Eddie’s telling me, “Axl never comes to these things.” And then, boom: Axl Rose is standing right in front of us.
Of course, I’m obliterated. I go, “Hey, yo, Axl! What the fuck, man? Like, you know, you think you could’ve mixed in a Mets jersey?”
Axl was like “Dude, I’m really sorry. I didn’t even buy them. I send my guy out to get some and he’s a Yankee fan, and you know . . .”
The whole thing was embarrassing, but a hell of a lot of fun.
It did not successfully cleanse me of my built-up anger, however. There was still the matter of Guillermo Mota, the Dodgers reliever who had said the previous spring that he wouldn’t forget our little encounter in Vero Beach. For that matter, he couldn’t have forgotten it if he’d wanted to, because during the winter Pedro Martinez had criticized him for not fighting me when I grabbed him by the collar.
I hadn’t faced Mota during the 2002 regular season, so when we played a Grapefruit League night game against the Dodgers during the second week of March 2003, in Port St. Lucie, I thought about approaching him during batting practice with the let-bygones-be-bygones spiel. Something like “Hey, you know, man, I’ve had a chance to think about it, and maybe I got carried away.” I decided against it.
I decided in favor of batting against him, though, when he entered the game in relief. Our new manager, Art Howe, asked me about it and I said, well, I’m gonna have to do it sometime.
The first pitch buzzed in tight, around my belt. Shit. With that, my spirit of conciliation evaporated. I thought, if this guy hits me now I’m going to fucking murder him.
And he did. In the top and back of the shoulder, which is way too high. If I hadn’t known it was coming, it might have gotten me even higher.
I flipped off my helmet, glanced over at the Dodgers’ bench—not sure why I did that—pulled back my fist, and went after him. When I got to the mound, Mota threw his glove at me and backpedaled. As the glove bounced off my forearm, I was ready to launch at him—I was doing everything just like I’d wanted to—but the catcher, David Ross, grabbed my arm from behind. Three guys wrapped me up, and Mota was about to come in and take a cheap shot as I was being held. At that point, Jeromy Burnitz made a strong move at him, which persuaded Mota to keep hauling ass backward toward second base. When Burnitz was intercepted, Joe McEwing took over the charge. Ty Wigginton was involved, too. Together, they chased Mota all the way into the Dodgers’ dugout.
It was one of the better brawls you’ll witness on a baseball field. It was also some of the fastest backward-running you’ll see anywhere. The fight ended with the cowardly pitcher safely ensconced in the dugout, yelling; three or four players—including Brian Jordan, who probably could have managed the job by himself—still holding me; and my eyes smoking as I glared at Mota and made a lewd gesture that referred to him as a female body part. Not a shining moment in my career. I’m just thankful I never got to Mota, because I honestly think I could have strangled him. Back in our dugout afterward, I was still screaming across the field at him, this time being vulgar in Spanish.
After a period of not cooling off, I went into our clubhouse, removed my spikes, slipped on my running shoes, got in my car, and drove around the stadium to the Dodgers’ clubhouse. When I walked in, the guys in there went silent. I half shouted, “Where the fuck is Mota? Where is that motherfucker?” I caught a glimpse of an infielder named Jolbert Cabrera standing on a scale in the training room and thought it was Mota. I was about to punch him when I realized I had the wrong guy. Cabrera gave me a pretty strange look. Then one of the trainers, Stan Johnson—I knew him from my time in the mino
r leagues with the Dodgers—said, “He’s gone, dude. Get out of here before you get in trouble.”
The Dodgers’ manager, Jim Tracy, had told Brian Jordan to whisk Mota off the premises and drive him back to Vero Beach. Jordan must have been their de facto security guard. I heard later that he’d been getting ready to leave the dugout when I’d come to bat, and Tracy asked him to wait a minute until this hitter was finished. (Howe even speculated that Tracy had set the whole thing up by letting Mota pitch a second inning of relief. In fact, Mota had batted between his innings and hit a three-run homer off Benitez.) Anyway, I knew that Jordan had a white Range Rover, so I ran out to the parking lot to look for it. I was too late. My next play was to try to catch them. If they stopped at a light, I was going to break the window and pull Mota out of the car. If that didn’t work, I’d try to chase them down on the freeway. One way or another, Mota was going to get hurt and I was going to end up in jail. I got in my car, raced out of the parking lot, saw no Range Rover, and finally realized how incredibly stupid I sounded to myself.
Mota and I were both fined and suspended for five games. It aggravated me that he’d now gotten in two good licks (not counting the glove he threw at me), we received the same punishment (although my sentence was later reduced to four games, starting with the second game of the regular season), and I still hadn’t touched him (except for holding him by the shirt collar). I’ve often thought about how I might have done a better job of landing a punch. I got to the mound pretty quickly, so obviously the direct route wasn’t foolproof. If I’d attempted a feint by starting to first base instead and then breaking off to the left, Ross and the umpire would have escorted me down the line, so I wouldn’t have had a clear path to Mota. I’ve decided that the best strategy might have been to assume my place on first, take my leadoff, then, as he went into his stretch, sprint over and nail him. The only problem with that would have been that he’d still have the baseball, which I’m pretty sure he would have fired at me from close range. If he didn’t throw the ball at me, he could tag me out, but who cares? It was just an exhibition game.
