Long Shot

by Mike Piazza

  September was a tough month to endure. We finished a wretched twenty-nine games under .500 and 341/2 behind the Braves. As the season wound down, I swung the bat so horribly that my average dropped all the way to .286.

  True to New York, however—true to the Mets—the last week would not pass quietly. We were about to lose our final home game, against the Pirates, when Howe made a ninth-inning double switch that seemed to stop the trains and rattle the windows in the Empire State Building. Vance Wilson came in to catch and I took over at first base.

  I actually made all three putouts in the inning, on a line drive from Carlos Rivera—a bullet, of course, the very first batter—and throws from Pedro Feliciano in front of the mound and Ty Wigginton at third. It doesn’t sound like much, but from where I stood, it was all pretty damn scary. And pretty damn lucky, because none of the plays required any range, which I knew I didn’t have.

  Of course, those three insignificant outs only escalated the speculation about whether I’d switch to first base full-time in 2004. The corollaries included untrue reports that I’d continue to resist the move—mostly, I just doubted that I’d be very good as an infielder—and public discussion over whether I should be traded for a real first baseman. There were even rumors that I’d asked to be traded. That was bogus; but I wouldn’t have minded at all if somehow, from somewhere, a proven first baseman had been found and brought over. In my mind, that would have been the ticket not only for my purposes but for the ball club’s, as well. When no move was made along those lines, it felt as though, rather than going properly about the business of building the team, the Mets were taking the easy way out, putting the onus on me. The message seemed to be that, with the money I was making, I had to be the answer, no matter what the problem was.

  To tell the truth, the whole deal was kind of frightening. I could handle pressure in the batter’s box—I was accustomed to that—but wasn’t so sure about fielding it at first base.

  Nevertheless, I had no intention of filing for divorce. As unimpressed as I was with the way the organization had been run for the past couple of years, I felt a strong connection to the Mets. By the end of 2003, I’d actually played more games in their uniform than I had as a Dodger.

  • • •

  In November, Major League Baseball announced that between 5 and 7 percent of the players who had been tested for steroids that season were found to have used them. The Major League Baseball Players Association had agreed to the survey on the grounds that it was anonymous, with the consequence that if at least 5 percent of the tests turned up positive, we’d be randomly checked over the next two years, with punishments established for offenders identified by those results.

  There would be no sanctions based on the 2003 findings, and since names were not to be released, either, some guys had regarded the season as sort of a free spin. And yet, the season stats didn’t reflect any significant uptick in power. It was actually the first year since 1995 that nobody in either league had hit fifty home runs.

  In the end, the survey proved to be not quite as anonymous as everybody had been assured it would. The union neglected to destroy the list of guys who had tested positive, and a grand jury subpoenaed it for the BALCO investigation the following spring.

  When that occurred, Dan Lozano said to me, “Mike, this list might be coming out. You’ll probably be hearing from the media.” He was right, of course. I wasn’t involved, but that made no difference. Whenever there was news on the steroids front, various reporters were eager to link me to it.

  The same thing happened three years later, when the New York Daily News broke the story about Kirk Radomski pleading guilty to distributing performance-enhancing drugs to major-league players between 1995 and 2005. Radomski, who was a principal source for the Mitchell Report—baseball’s investigation into the PED issue, released in 2007—had been an assistant in the Mets clubhouse from 1985 to 1995, which meant that he’d been gone for nearly three years when I arrived in New York. I guess there was some confusion over the timing, because just before the news got out, Gene Orza, the chief operating officer of the MLB Players Association, called to alert me that I might be asked about Radomski. Orza was good about keeping players apprised of what was going on and sending out a heads-up when it was in order. I was playing in Oakland that year, and Gene caught me early in the day as I was walking the streets of San Francisco, just off Union Square.

  I didn’t know Radomski, but I knew I wasn’t on any list of steroids users that might appear in the Mitchell Report or anywhere else. So I took the opportunity to say, “Gene, I want to clear my name. I want for writers to be able to call you and ask you if I’m on a list.”

  Orza was sympathetic, but he told me, “I can’t do that, Mike. If I do that, the writers will put every single player on the spot and say, ‘Hey, can I call the union and ask if you’re on the list?’ ”

  Sure enough, the next day a reporter from the Daily News showed up in Oakland to ask me about Radomski. I had nothing.

  Ultimately, my skeptics were undeterred by the fact that I wasn’t implicated in either the 2003 tests (the government eventually limited its BALCO subpoena to ten players, and theirs were the only names that went public) or the Mitchell Report, which was released in 2007. A certain baseball blogger came out with the curious observation that the acne on my back had mysteriously disappeared between 2002 and 2004, citing that as compelling evidence that I’d used and then stopped using steroids. What he wrote, specifically—actually calling it an online column as opposed to a blog, I should point out—was “Then all of a sudden the acne was gone. Piazza’s back was clear and clean. There was not a speck of acne on it. His back looked as smooth as a baby’s bottom. What a remarkable development. It was a medical miracle.”

  I frankly don’t know if my acne receded or not around that time; or if it did, how much or why. But I know bullshit when I see it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  At my age and level of wear and tear, facing a very possible switch in position—the plan, as it stood, was to give it a try and go from there—I needed a different kind of off-season training regimen. I needed now to address mobility and flexibility; to back off a bit on the strengthening of my body, which I’d undertaken from the time I was barely a teenager, and concentrate on its preservation.

  I didn’t junk the weight training but I supplemented it with more-athletic workouts, including a lot of the fashionable core stuff. At the time, my rehab trainer, Lisa Kearns, was working with Ty Law, a defensive back for the New England Patriots, and I’d meet them at a track for agility and speed drills. I have to say, it was sobering; actually, scary, in a sense. I admire and defend the skill of baseball players, but I was knocked for a loop by the realization of how much of a nonathlete I was compared to someone who really is an athlete, in the traditional sense. Ty Law was a physical specimen, and I doubt that, among football players at his level, he was an exception in that respect. Up close, the combination of size and speed simply blew me away. I developed a sudden and profound appreciation for the athletic demands on a professional football player. Those guys have to block, tackle, throw, catch, fake, juke, accelerate, change direction, think quickly, and, with it all, endure, to boot. Hitting a baseball is a special talent, and chances are that most football players wouldn’t be able to do it against major-league pitchers; but at the same time, I don’t know that there are a lot of baseball players who are pure, classic, world-class athletes.

  Later in the winter, a few weeks before reporting to spring training, I flew with Alicia to California, where she introduced me to a lanky, uncombed, unshaven guy she knew named Andy Bourell, a sort of personal trainer and nutritionist for some of her friends. Andy was well schooled in the methods he preached, and by practicing them had lost a lot of weight at one point. Alicia suggested that some of the stuff he advocated, such as sophisticated stretching and dietary habits—less beer and red meat, in my case—could help get me through the season, and I couldn’t disagre
e. So I hooked up with Andy and liked it.

  The first time he saw me, he noticed a problem with my right calf and the arches of my feet when I went into my catcher’s crouch. In his opinion, my groin injury had developed from a strain of the tendons on my right side and could have been prevented with more stretching. He went to work correcting my posture through yoga. In a short time, I felt so much better that I brought Andy to Florida when I reported to spring training with the pitchers and catchers. He was there for a couple of weeks, staying at my house and preparing me uncooked dinners involving, among other things, spinach, mushrooms, alfalfa sprouts, garlic, and sunflower seeds. We’d stretch and do some yoga poses. I called him my yogi. He’d also accompany me to the ballpark, wearing an old wool cap and carrying a bag of apples and seeds along with a drink he concocted from apple cider vinegar, grade-B maple syrup, flaxseed oil—sugars and carbs—and cayenne pepper, which is good for circulation. Naturally, my yogi became a big story in New York. Eventually, though, the Mets asked Andy not to come into the clubhouse anymore, because MLB had restricted the access for what they called personal assistants.

  For all the flexibility work I’d put in, I was still venturing into new territory at first base, subjecting myself to unfamiliar strains, twists, and twitches of the body. I’d been in shin guards for sixteen years, and even though I’d played first base in high school and college and occasionally even in the minor leagues, it wasn’t like riding a bike. At the age of nineteen, without much of an identity defensively, I’d been able to reinvent myself as a catcher. Starting over at thirty-five, after nearly fourteen hundred big-league ball games in a squatting position, was a different deal altogether. I labored. I also tweaked my left thigh and missed valuable practice time.

  It appeared, though, that first base would be at least a second home to me in 2004. I was okay with that. Scared as hell, but okay. Pretty sure that it was happening too damn fast, but okay. As much as I still considered myself a catcher and still believed that was what I should be, I’d come to grips with the fact that life as I knew it was changing in a lot of ways.

  I’d have preferred, though, that the whole world didn’t watch me bumble through the transition. I knew my hands were good enough to handle first base; I was mainly worried about the footwork and finesse. At one of the first spring-training workouts, the Mets covered the chain-link fence of the practice field with a dark privacy screen so I could fumble and stumble in privacy. When Jeff Wilpon saw it, he ordered it taken down immediately. Whatever.

  One way to deflect attention from the position issue was to hit the ball like I used to. I was pleasantly surprised how well the new off-season regimen had gotten me into hitting shape. The very first day of camp, I blasted so many balls out of the park that Art Howe declared me back. He was well aware—and so was I, believe me—that, at the end of 2003, I hadn’t homered in my last eighty-eight at-bats, the longest, most troubling dry spell of my career. That suddenly seemed like a long time ago. In a Grapefruit game against the Expos in Viera, Florida, I crushed two home runs and really felt like I was back. I lingered a while in the clubhouse trying to burn those swings into my brain. I knew that if I could stay in that groove, it would take the pressure off my defense, wherever I played.

  Incidentally, I wasn’t the only one on the club changing positions that spring. For reasons I’ve never figured out, the Mets decided to move Jose Reyes from shortstop, where he’d been spectacular as a rookie, to second base, so that Kaz Matsui—the first Japanese infielder ever signed by a major-league team—could move in at short. We also had a new center fielder, Mike Cameron, and closer, Braden Looper. Both of them were terrific teammates. I’d always hated hitting off Looper—he owned me—but I loved the guy.

  Braden wasn’t a natural closer, however, so I figured I’d help him out a little. I felt it was my duty and obligation to find him an appropriate coming-in-from-the-bullpen song that wasn’t “Enter Sandman,” which was the choice of Mariano Rivera and, to my extreme annoyance, just about everybody else who even thought he was a closer. I was highly motivated to come up with something different for Looper. I ended up picking a tune called “Lightning Strikes,” from the only Aerosmith album that Joe Perry, the guitarist, wasn’t a part of. Unfortunately, it didn’t really cut it.

  Cameron, meanwhile, was batting behind me, and I was catching, when we opened the season in Atlanta. Matsui, who hadn’t hit well in the spring, led off and went three for three with a home run. I homered, also, and we won, 7–2, behind Glavine.

  Our old teammate Mike Hampton started against us in the second game and I reached him for a two-run homer in the first inning. We took a 6–0 lead, but the Braves scored eleven runs in the third. Damn. My second home run of the game, to straightaway center in the seventh inning—it was measured at 456 feet, the second-longest ever recorded at Turner Field—tied me with Joe DiMaggio for fifty-eighth place on the all-time list and left me one short of Fisk’s record for catchers. In the bottom of the inning, I made my first appearance of the season at first base and handled a ground ball off the bat of Adam LaRoche. I then doubled in the eighth to complete a five-for-five night, which didn’t count for much in an ugly 18–10 defeat.

  My maiden voyage as a starting first baseman occurred in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the Sunday afternoon finale of a three-game series we played there against the Expos. It went well enough—I took care of a foul pop-up, a throw in the dirt, and three ground balls, without incident—except for a little collision at first base that I got the worst of. Peter Bergeron, Montreal’s speedy leadoff guy, had bunted to Glavine, who didn’t have a good grip on the ball when he tossed it to me. Just as Bergeron crossed the bag, I reached for the throw and took an elbow to the back of the head. It left me a little dingy. I also hyperextended my elbow, which caused me to miss our home opener the next day. Swell. I’d made my peace with the move to first base, in part, because it was supposed to spare my body the beating it took behind the plate. So much for that theory. Mask, please!

  Two days later, I was back at first. The good news was that, on a cold and nasty night, hardly anybody came to watch. The bad news was everything else. To get us started right away on the act of losing, I made my first error as a first baseman on the first play of the game, a hard grounder down the line by Dewayne Wise that I whiffed at. It was looking like I might not be such a horrible catcher after all.

  Glavine, for one, must have gotten his fill of me at first base pretty quickly, because he complimented my game-calling when he beat the Dodgers in Los Angeles on April 28 (the night after I appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live and Kimmel had me fire a BB gun at Roger Clemens bobbleheads). Of course, he might have been influenced by my home run in the sixth inning off my old friend Hideo Nomo, which put us ahead and made Tommy the winning pitcher. The homer came after I’d gone sixty-three at-bats without one, and gave me 351 as a catcher. I was tied with Fisk.

  I was still tied with Fisk when the Giants came to Shea during the first week of May. In my head, and also in my conversations with reporters, I tried to downplay or even marginalize the record. For one thing, I knew it wasn’t DiMaggio’s hitting streak or Aaron passing Ruth. For another, it’s not cool to preoccupy yourself with personal accomplishments in a team sport. And lastly, I was fed up with the way the record had been twisted into a symbol of my resistance toward playing first base. All things considered, I was happy to be the secondary story to the arrival in town of Barry Bonds, who happened to be tearing up the league at the time. A couple of weeks before, he’d hit eight home runs in eight days. He was in the high 600s now, with a bead on Ruth’s and Aaron’s career totals.

  I was happy, also, on Wednesday night, May 5, to get the count to three and one in the first inning against Jerome Williams, the guy I had touched up the year before in my first game back after the groin injury. This may sound trite, but it’s true: As he released the next pitch, a strange feeling of peace came over me. It was like time stood still—one of those rare occasions whe
n the game actually slowed down. I distinctly recall how clearly I saw the ball leaving Williams’s hand, and saying to myself, this is going to be a home run to right field.

  It was a little sinker that caught too much of the plate. I took a rip and it landed in one of my favorite spots, off the bottom of the scoreboard in right-center, just over the Mets’ bullpen. I ran the bases to the accompaniment of the theme song from Chariots of Fire and video highlights of my career as a Met. As much as I had tried to soft-pedal the record, I decided right then, under the influence of bliss, to simply own it. To celebrate. In the best tradition of Bonds—who sat out the game with a sinus infection—I tapped my chest and pointed to the heavens when I stepped on home plate.

  Meanwhile, my mind was dancing. I’m the greatest home-run-hitting catcher in baseball history. That incredible thought was crowded in with fly-by memories of all the skepticism and cynicism that had followed me into the sport and hung around; of those who had doubted, dismissed, discouraged, resented, or out-and-out rooted against me. In a surge of inspiration, I found myself surprisingly grateful for all of that. Suddenly, I got it: that nothing worthwhile comes easy; and if it did, a person couldn’t possibly appreciate it as much as I was appreciating that very moment.

  I flashed through the scenes along the way: my backyard batting cage, practically begging to be signed, the tarantulas in the Dominican Republic, chasing balls to the backstop, sitting on the bench in Vero Beach, the negotiations, the trade, the Marlins, the booing, the World Series, the game after 9/11, the face of my dad . . . Then I ducked into the dugout, hugged my teammates, and jumped back out to acknowledge the crowd.