by Mike Piazza
It was a weird scenario all the way around, so weird that it made me wonder. Had Beane been trying to get me back behind the plate in order to showcase me for a trade? Had he kept me on the DL, and pressed the point about catching, to try to get me to quit? Was there a money angle here? I had no tangible evidence of that, but the very possibility gave rise to a pertinent question. If Billy Beane is the general manager of the ball club and also a partial owner (with Lew Wolff), isn’t that a conflict of interest? Billy is one of the sharpest general managers in the business, no question; but theoretically, the GM is the guy who’s supposed to fight tooth and nail to convince the owner to go out and spend that last dollar to get that last guy who’s going to make the ball club better. He’s the one counted on to represent the baseball side. If the GM is also an owner, however, then he’s involved with the bottom line, and he’s coming at the whole thing from a different perspective. In that arrangement, it seems like there might be a balance problem between the yin and the yang.
Meanwhile, in this arrangement, as I saw it, there was a balance problem between player and management. I’d done the A’s a favor—had saved them close to $7 million—by signing for one year instead of two. But they were doing me no favor in return. Not that I expected them to, or had one coming; I’m just pointing out the way it was. Fans, typically, are quick to pounce on players for swinging the hammer at contract time, but they don’t see the other side. They don’t understand that a ball club looks after its own interest—sometimes with a vengeance—and it’s up to the player to look after his. I certainly don’t mean to portray myself as a victim, because I made a hell of a lot of money in the game. For that matter, I was making a hell of a lot of money that very year. I’d simply like for the public to better appreciate the players’ position in these situations. I got hurt by playing hard for the Oakland A’s. After that, Billy Beane was just trying to put out the cigarette. It’s a tough business.
At any rate, on my second day back, July 21, DH’ing against the Orioles, with Cust playing right field and batting in front of me in the three-hole, I started on an eight-game hitting streak that included fifteen hits altogether and my first home run since April 5. Then we flew down to Anaheim, where I picked up six hits and two homers and drove in six runs in the three-game series . . . and an ignorant Angels fan made a big mistake.
The dude hit me in the helmet with a water bottle.
I wasn’t in the most agreeable mood to start with. It was an afternoon game, the series finale, and I’d homered in the fifth inning against John Lackey to put us ahead 3–2, although the lead hadn’t lasted. It felt great to rake again, but it also underscored the frustration of missing eleven weeks—nearly half of them unnecessarily—at this late stage of my career. From where I stood, an important opportunity, for both me and the ball club, had been senselessly squandered. It was a lost season, and very possibly my last. I was feeling cheated.
Then, in the ninth inning, as we were trying to rally from three runs down, I was standing in the on-deck circle studying Frankie Rodriguez when there was a loud, unnerving pop and my head began to ring. At first, I couldn’t be sure what it was. It scared the shit out of me. When I realized that somebody had actually beaned me with a bottle of Dasani, about three-quarters full, the fear turned to fury. If you’ve watched any of the videos of the time I went after Guillermo Mota and seen the wicked expression on my face when I was being held back from getting at him, you know the look I had when I turned to the crowd and yelled, “Who the fuck did that?”
Immediately, four people pointed to the same guy. So I made it five and charged up to the wall, screaming, “You’re a chickenshit! You’re a piece of shit! Get your fucking ass down here!”
It wasn’t my finest moment. Bottle rage, I guess. But an act like that is so malicious, so hateful, so asinine and out of line that it just sends a bolt of anger up your spine and out your mouth. The guy only made it worse when he gave me some obscene and cocky body language—the very signals that would tell me to rush a pitcher. Fortunately, I couldn’t get over the wall. If I had, I’m pretty sure I would have done something I’d have regretted. In the meantime, the sucker just turned and walked up the steps. I yelled, “Grab that guy!” He almost made it to the tunnel before security got to him.
When the game resumed, I singled to center, but we fell short by a run. Afterward, a lieutenant from the Anaheim police department came down to the clubhouse to tell me that they had the fellow.
I said, “I’m pressing charges.”
He’s like, “What?”
“Yeah, I’m pressing charges for assault.”
The cop’s expression said, oh geez, here we go. But he took me to the security office to identify the guy, who was standing there with two others.
“Yeah, that’s him,” I said. “And I’m pressing charges.”
A couple of days later, I got a follow-up call from the district attorney’s office. My guess is that they expected me to drop the complaint, since it would require another trip back to Anaheim to testify, but I told them to just give me a few days’ notice and I’d be there. My response might have been a bit extreme, but things had piled up and I’d had enough. I was going to make this guy pay for all the shit—the insults, rumors, baseballs, whatever—that people had been throwing at me for twenty years. Plus, by that time I’d heard he was going to be a teacher. I sure as hell didn’t want a jerk like that teaching my children.
As it turned out, there was no trial. When he heard I was willing to testify, the bottle chucker pled guilty and was sentenced to thirty days in prison.
• • •
My pleasant season in San Diego had spoiled me, I suppose. In Oakland, the drama was back. And reminiscent of New York, the media was in the middle of it.
A beat writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, Susan Slusser, asked me, ostensibly off the record, about some minor mistake that Bob Geren had made—so minor that I don’t even recall what it was. I explained it as his fault, more or less, but instead of leaving my comment out of the paper, as I’d expected, she ran it as an anonymous quote. I don’t know if Geren figured out from the context that the quote came from me—it definitely sounded like me—or if Slusser told him or what, but he was obviously bothered by the remark. He called a meeting the next day and, in front of the team, asked me how a situation like that should be handled.
I flashed back to when Tommy Lasorda would call similar meetings, hold up the newspaper, and tell us, in a way that only Tommy could, that if we didn’t have the guts to say something to somebody’s face, we shouldn’t be saying it in the paper. So I replied, “Well, you have a meeting and tell everybody, ‘If you’re not man enough to say it to my face, then you shouldn’t be saying it in the paper.’ ” I didn’t happen to mention that I was the player quoted. So I’m mentioning it now, Bob. I apologize for not coming forward at the time. I can’t adequately explain why I didn’t, except to say that I’d reached the point, I think, at which I actually didn’t care enough anymore to take an ethical stand and do what I knew was right. I was falling out of touch with my professional principles. I’d never been a fan of clubhouse lawyering, or party to it. In New York, I’d always detested the stories in which “one Met said.” Now I was that guy, that one Athletic. I didn’t care for what I saw myself evolving into. I should have been more accountable.
The whole thing had started out as a trivial incident, but, to me, ballooned into a symbol of a season gone bad. At my age, I didn’t have time for that. I was disappointed by all the little annoyances that 2007 had brought with it—I thought I’d outdistanced those days—and, more to the point, by my own breaches of discretion. I was well aware, for instance, that when teams are down and out of it, the press likes to fan the brushfires into full-fledged controversies. Normally I played pretty good defense against that sort of thing. But this time around, I’d only aggravated the situation, which told me, in turn, that my guard was down; I was no longer on top of my game. I wondered if it
was a sign that I was ready to move on to another team or profession.
At the trade deadline, I was hitting around .300, leading the club in that respect—of course, I hadn’t come to the plate very many times—and still batting cleanup; but, in spite of rumors, I wasn’t dealt anywhere. Once again, I was stuck playing out the string for a struggling team that was looking toward a future that didn’t include me. This time, though, I hadn’t seen it coming. Given the youth of the A’s and the success they’d experienced the year before, I’d sincerely hoped that the 2007 season would get me another crack at a World Series title, the pursuit of which still drove me. But the playoffs weren’t happening for us, and they weren’t happening in a big way. It was a lousy situation that affected my appetite for the game. For my whole professional career, and long before it even started, I’d been a circling shark on a relentless mission to satisfy some deep-down hunger. Now I didn’t have the stomach to play that way anymore, and I couldn’t play any other way, either.
That said, I was grateful for the opportunity—and yes, the money—that Oakland had given me, and for the chance to share my experience with the younger players. I thoroughly enjoyed that part of it, working, for instance, with Kurt Suzuki on things like blocking the plate and with Huston Street on even more urgent matters, like his taste in music.
Our last road trip of the season ended with two games in Boston. I loved hitting in Fenway Park, but didn’t play in the opener. In fact, I’d started only once in nearly two weeks and hadn’t had a solitary hit in all that time. Hoping I’d be in the lineup and knowing it might be his last chance to see me in a major-league uniform—we’d finish up with three in Oakland—my brother Vince came to the second game.
It was the fifth inning, and he hadn’t done much. The Red Sox had a left-hander pitching, Jon Lester. I’m sitting there thinking, “Please, God, just let him get a home run.” I hadn’t been to church in a long time, but I said to myself, if he gets a home run here, I’m going back to church. And no sooner did I complete the thought than, crack, home run to left field. I freaked out. But I held up my end of the bargain. I started going to church.
—Vince Piazza Jr.
The Red Sox took it to us both games, and afterward Vince asked me, “Are they that good or are you guys that bad?”
I said, “They’re that good.”
That was the year they swept the Rockies in the World Series. Meanwhile, we finished in third place in our division, ten games under .500. But we did beat the Angels, 3–2, in the final game of the season, on a rally that started when I singled to right, off Chris Bootcheck, leading off the ninth inning. Shannon Stewart pinch-ran for me and scored the game-winner on a hit by Suzuki.
My little single, which left my batting average at .275 for the year and .308 for my career, was hit number 2,127 over my sixteen seasons. I had no idea whether there would be another one, but I hoped there would.
• • •
Danny made some calls after the season. There were only eight teams that I was interested in playing for at the age of thirty-nine, and he contacted all of them. Two or three replied. None offered right away.
So I waited. I hadn’t had any closure in Oakland, I hadn’t won a World Series, and I definitely didn’t feel like major-league pitching had overtaken me. All those factors impelled me toward one more season of baseball. I questioned only two things: my intensity and my market.
Admittedly, my competitive edge hadn’t stayed sharp in my lost season with the A’s, but that could be attributed to the circumstances. At least, that’s what I told myself. Ideally, a player should never allow any kind of issue or distraction to affect his levels of focus and drive, and I wasn’t proud that I had; but realistically, that’s a hard standard to live up to. I was willing to believe that my loss of passion was nothing that a better situation wouldn’t take care of. The bigger issue was finding the situation, or having it find me. In the meantime, I worked out, searched my soul, and got to know the sweetest baby in America.
In mid-February, I also played in the annual Tico Torres—the drummer for Bon Jovi—charity golf tournament at PGA National in Palm Beach. My partner was Gary Carter. We talked a little about catching and a lot about his two knee replacements. It was something to bear in mind when I kicked around the idea of undertaking a seventeenth season, very possibly as a catcher again. In fact, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. At this stage of the game, with a family started and no pressing financial concerns, did I really want to run the risk of another injury, or of exacerbating any of the problems I was already dealing with?
The way things were looking, though, it would probably be a moot point. Late in the process, I heard a little something about the Royals, a little something about the Reds, but nothing happened. As always, there was a Dodgers rumor. Tommy told me he was going to talk to Ned Colletti, the general manager, about bringing me to Los Angeles as the backup catcher to Russell Martin. My dad said that Tommy was also talking to Kim Ng, the assistant GM. It was, at best, a lot of talking.
Ultimately, the word from Tommy was that yeah, they were going make me an offer but decided instead to sign Gary Bennett. I thought, isn’t that typical? Even to the end, ten years after they’d traded me, the Dodgers were still jerking me around. If they’d brought in Pudge Rodriguez, sure, I could understand that. But Gary Bennett? No offense to Bennett, but he’d been with seven teams in seven years; not exactly a priority signing. He ended up contributing four hits to the Dodgers in 2008.
All the while, Danny had been telling teams that I’d come to spring training and we could take it from there. The idea of playing at home appealed to me, so he went to the Marlins and laid out a scenario by which I’d report to their camp, try out—I was pretty confident that I’d be their starting catcher by May—and sign for whatever they wanted to pay me, even if it was just the major-league minimum. They didn’t even go for that. I was beginning to get the message. Spring training came and went.
The lack of interest was humbling—a blow to my pride, I guess you could say—but not nearly as depressing as I might have expected. I was loving my extra time with Alicia and Nicoletta, who was now a year old. I was also catching up on my reading, riding my bike around South Beach, outfitting our home theater, expanding my musical interests—nothing like a little Dvorak to chase down Dangerous Toys—and checking in on my Honda dealership in Philadelphia.
After the season started, there was some chatter about the Mets signing me for one day and letting me retire in their uniform, except that it wasn’t coming from the Mets themselves. I was interested, but I wasn’t about to call them and ask. In addition, I hadn’t yet resigned myself to the notion of not playing anymore. It wasn’t inconceivable that, at some point—after an injury, somebody not cutting it, whatever—a team would take another look at its roster and figure it could use a bat like mine at a bargain rate.
I wasn’t entirely sure how I might respond to a situation like that, especially if the team had little chance of making the postseason . . . until I went to the papal mass in Washington on April 17. Stan Kasten, the president of the Washington Nationals, was there, which was interesting, because he’d studied at a rabbinical college and remained active in the Jewish community. Maybe he somehow knew I’d be attending. Maybe he was just interested in theology. At any rate, he approached after the mass and asked me, “Are you in shape?”
Before I answered, it suddenly, finally, emphatically occurred to me how I felt, deep down, about coming back for one final season. I suspected there might be an opening here if I said, “Yeah, sure, Stan, I’m in shape. Give me a call. I’ll go down to Triple-A for a few weeks and play and see how it goes, and if it goes well, we can talk some more.” But I didn’t say that.
I said, “Nah.”
Baseball, I realized right then, was out of my system.
There was some tangible relief in that thought—a sense of liberation in the fresh understanding that I could leave it all behind and get on with my new life
—but some melancholy, as well. I lamented the lessening of my enthusiasm for the sport, and felt that I’d somehow enabled it; that I hadn’t guarded my heart as I might have.
On the other hand, I had hit the hell out of the ball. The game and I had gotten everything we could get out of my body and soul.
I let it all sink in for a while, hashed it out with Alicia, had a talk with my dad, and then told Danny it was time. My preference was to just ride off into the sunset without a word; no fuss or fanfare and certainly no press conference. Danny persuaded me that there had to be some kind of announcement, just for the sake of closure, so we put together a press release and sent it out on May 20, by email.
The statement said: “After 19 wonderful years, I have come to the decision to officially retire from Major League Baseball. At this point in my career and after discussing my options with my wife, family and agent, I felt it is time to start a new chapter in my life. It has been an amazing journey and everything I have, I owe to God, for without His help, none of this would be possible. He blessed me with the ability to play the greatest game in the world and it has been a dream come true.”
I went on to write, with genuine feeling, about the two decades since I’d been a sixty-second-round draft choice, and thanked, by name, my owners, general managers, managers, clubhouse managers, teammates, agent, wife, kids, mom and dad, and, not by name, the fans.
“I can’t recall a time in my career when I didn’t feel embraced by all of you. Los Angeles, San Diego, Oakland, and Miami—whether it was at home or on the road, you were all so supportive over the years. But I have to say that my time with the Mets wouldn’t have been the same without the greatest fans in the world. One of the hardest moments of my career was walking off the field at Shea Stadium and saying goodbye. My relationship with you made my time in New York the happiest of my career, and for that, I will always be grateful.
