Long Shot

by Mike Piazza

  For one thing, Dad was always preaching about moderation. He was furious when I came home drunk one night. But I’d have to say that it was mostly my mom’s influence that kept me from crossing the line. She was the one who carted five boys to church every Sunday and set the example by practicing her Catholicism on a daily basis.

  It was something of a dichotomy for me, growing up as a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic and loving heavy metal like I did. Some of the more controversial bands, like Iron Maiden and Slayer—I’d guess that I’ve been to nearly a dozen Slayer concerts—were called out by Christian groups, and that wasn’t lost on me. But my purpose in listening to that music was not to rebel against God and religion.

  I just loved the power of it. Heavy metal was good for me.

  • • •

  As soon as every baseball season was over, my dad would take us down to a condo we had in Wildwood, New Jersey, on the southern tip of the state. We called it the Jersey Sho-wa.

  The next town over, Cape May, is historic and picturesque, but Wildwood’s style was unpretentious and very much Jerseyesque, with cheap motels and a carnival boardwalk where you could win stuffed animals and gorge yourself on cotton candy and tubs of fries. For me, it was one of the best times of the year, mostly because the pressure was off. Dad would drive us there and then head back home to work during the week. We’d spend all day at the pool or beach. Once a week, after dinner, we’d walk to a little restaurant down the street for a sundae—which, of course, we couldn’t have done if Dad had been with us. Then we’d watch Yankees and Mets games, with all their great announcers: Bill White, Phil Rizzuto, Ralph Kiner, Bob Murphy, Lindsey Nelson. For some reason, I actually preferred the Mets. The Schaefer beer commercials. Joe Torre, as a player-manager, sending himself up to pinch-hit.

  Dad would arrive on Friday afternoon, and the first thing he’d say to me was, “Let’s go.” I’d grab a bat, we’d find a field, and he’d pitch to me. There was a dumpy, sandy field up by the beach and a beautiful, manicured Little League diamond that nobody was allowed on. We were able to use the fancy field after the director saw me hitting there one day and decided he wanted some of his players to come by and watch; but we’d usually end up on the dumpy one, which I didn’t mind because I could hit the ball out to the street. If I did, my dad would snarl at me to get back to the backstop so it wouldn’t happen again. When it rained, we played under the walkway.

  My father was a lefty, and I figure that had something to do with why I always crushed left-handers. I loved to hit off him. I just loved to hit, period. I couldn’t get enough, and my dad was happy to take full advantage of that. If my brothers came along with us, it was mainly to shag balls. Dad would throw each of them ten pitches, then give me a hundred. Amazingly, they never rebelled. Back home, on the pretense of taking the kids to visit his mother in Jeffersonville, he’d drop off my brothers at her house, drive me over to a local field, and pitch to me until his arm wore out. When we returned to Phoenixville, my mother was always surprised that we’d had such a nice, long visit.

  Another highlight of those great weeks at Wildwood was getting to see my friend Joe Pizzica. His family would vacation there, too, or he’d come down with us. I knew Joe from the all-star baseball teams in Little League, but he’d gone to the Catholic elementary, so we didn’t run around together until high school. He was a lot tighter with the in-crowd than I was. Joe’s buddies included Tony and John John Nattle, and we all played ball with each other, so—this is back in Phoenixville—we’d go over to one of their houses to watch Mike Tyson fights on pay-per-view, or whatever, and drink a little beer. It wasn’t the Ivy League crew.

  Other nights, we drove to a secluded place we knew in the nowhere farmland of Chester County, turned on the radio, and just hung out. Got drunk. We called it Ja-Blip. That lasted until Joe kind of blew me off one night. I had a crush on a girl named Kim Jeffries, who was the class president and a friend of his, and I wanted to go out with Kim and chill at Ja-Blip with Joe and those guys. But there was some kind of complication—Kim might have been seeing somebody else at the time, I don’t recall—and Joe said, “You know what, man? You don’t want to hang out with us.” It was sort of like that scene from Good Will Hunting when Ben Affleck tells Matt Damon to just get out of there and move on with his life. He was looking out for me.

  I had one other heartthrob in high school—and one other strikeout. Joe was instrumental in that one, as well. Mary Lou Retton.

  Actually, we both had crushes on her. This was just after she’d won the gold medal in the 1984 Olympics. I thought it was meant to be—her mother’s Italian, after all. So Joe was over at my house one day and we spent the afternoon figuring out how to call Mary Lou. Somehow we found the number. I didn’t have the guts to dial it, but Joe did, and I guess it threw him off when her mother answered. He was holding the phone out so I could hear, too, and he said, “Hello, is this Mary Lou Retton’s mother?”

  She goes, “Yes, who’s calling?”

  Joe just looked at me, with huge, terrified eyes, and hung up.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A fellow named Joe Godri, who is now the head baseball coach at Villanova, likes to say that he was the guy who blocked me from the Phoenixville High School lineup. Godri was two grades ahead of me, and the position we both played—first base—was his until he graduated.

  All the while, however, I had plenty of encouragement from the likes of my dad, my friends, Ted Williams, and—in front of the whole student body—the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I don’t know if my father was the one who arranged it, but Tommy Lasorda came to our high school to speak at an assembly in the auditorium, and as he was wrapping up he pointed straight at me and said, “And one day, I’m going to sign him.”

  Afterward, kids came up patting me on the back as though I’d actually made it. It was embarrassing, but also significant. That was when I started reading everything I could find about the baseball draft. Obsessing about it, really.

  With my goal clarified and my expectations taking flight, I couldn’t wait to start wreaking havoc on the Ches-Mont League. I was six foot two, uncommonly strong, and still plenty awkward—one of the youngest students in the junior class—when our coach, Doc Kennedy, turned me loose as number thirteen in purple and white, finally starting at first base for the Phoenixville Phantoms. I came out hacking.

  At Phoenixville, there was no left-field fence, and with my not-blazing speed it was almost impossible to hit a home run in that direction. The situation persuaded me to drive the ball to the opposite field, which came fairly naturally. In right, however, there was a row of trees just inside the fence, and oftentimes the umpires would have to decide whether a long fly ball should be ruled a home run or not when it was cuffed around in the leaves or knocked down by a limb. I still hit twelve homers that year—and three triples, which should have been home runs—in eighteen games, and batted .500 with thirty-eight RBIs. My mom saw it all from her Chrysler minivan.

  There has long been a misconception that I materialized out of nowhere as a baseball player. The fact is, I had two exceptional high school seasons and was not unknown to the area scouts. My junior year, by some accounts, was one of the greatest high school seasons in the history of Pennsylvania. The rap was that we played in a weak league, but I don’t know about that. Boyertown and Downingtown were much bigger schools than Phoenixville. They had senior classes of almost fifteen hundred students, while ours was just under two hundred.

  Boyertown came in as a very heralded team my junior year—they had a couple of guys who went on to play in the minor leagues, plus a stadium with lights—and they won the conference, but we drubbed them when we played. Our football team took a beating on a regular basis, but there was no problem in baseball. We had good ballplayers, including Mike Fuga, who later played at Temple. We kicked ass. It was disappointing that we got bumped out of the district tournament on a bad day, because I really felt like we had a team that could have gone far in state.


  My senior year, those trees in right field were no longer a problem. Doc appealed to the athletic director on the basis that they were a safety issue, because an outfielder could crash into one or turn an ankle stepping on a root, and they were cut down. That opened up some airspace, and I was able to land a few shots onto the street beyond the fence and into the yards beyond the street, even though opposing teams made it a point to move their left fielders way back and pitch me in tight so I’d pull the ball that way. One of the home runs that cleared the street (City Line Avenue) landed on the driveway of a friend, Rob Thompson, and bounced into his backyard. Rob’s dad, who was watching the game from a folding chair, strolled back, picked up the ball, and gave it to me later.

  But I wouldn’t describe my senior year as smooth sailing. For one thing, a lot of teams wouldn’t throw me strikes, so I finished with eleven home runs and a batting average that wasn’t quite as glittery as the season before. The other little issue was that I totally slacked off in school—even more than usual, which was quite a feat. I mean, I was a bad, bad student. I think I did one hour of homework my entire high school career. I was completely unmotivated. By the time I was a senior, I had my heart so set on being drafted out of high school, and was so cocksure that I would be, that academics just didn’t mean anything to me. The truth is, I’m not certain if I was genuinely eligible or not. I suspect that the principal might have pulled some strings so I could play.

  Other than baseball, there was simply nothing about high school that interested me. Not even dating, such as it was. I wouldn’t say that I was antisocial; just aloof, ambivalent, cynical—totally disengaged from all the structure and sis-boom-bah, as if it were a language I didn’t speak. It was my rebellious stage, and I was tenacious about it, with a defiant attitude that showed even on my face: my senior year, I played ball with a goatee and Sparky Lyle chops, just to look intimidating. I was so disagreeable that I didn’t even want to hang out with the family. My dad had bought a home in Boynton Beach, Florida, and we’d stay down there for a little while around Christmas. I don’t know what it was that I did—just being the typical jackass, I guess—but that year my dad kept threatening me that I wasn’t going. So I said, “All right, fine, I’ll just stay here and party with Joe and those guys and drink beer and have fun.” He said, “Oh no, you’re going.”

  I’m not making excuses, but I suspect that my attitude was related to the pressure I placed on myself to get drafted. In my heart, I was positive that I was good enough, and felt certain—especially after what Tommy said at the assembly, although I knew better than to pin all my hopes on the Dodgers—that somebody would notice that and pick me. I just wasn’t seeing the hard evidence of it. Eddie Liberatore would come to a game occasionally, but he never talked about drafting me out of high school. I got calls from scouts for the Giants and Blue Jays, and they’d ask me where I was playing that week, but it was never anything like “You think you’ll get drafted?” or “If you get drafted, are you going to sign?” Jocko Collins, the scout who originally signed Tommy Lasorda for the Phillies, came to one of my games and watched me hit a fly ball to center, and then it rained. He left and never came back. He told somebody I looked clumsy around first base. Tim Thompson was a Cardinals scout who was in our area quite a bit and ate at the Lasordas’ restaurant. My dad knew him pretty well. He told Dad that he’d give me the same advice he gave his own son: get an education.

  Every time I heard from a scout, or saw one in the stands, the pressure turned up a notch. I played nervous. It started to screw ever so slightly with my confidence, which made me think about looking into college ball. So I did. It was my way of acknowledging, as a sort of formality, that, well, sure, there was always a chance that I wouldn’t be drafted after all, as strange as it might seem.

  The more I looked around, the more intrigued I became about the idea of playing for the University of Texas or the University of Miami. I read Baseball America religiously and imagined myself being featured in it. But Texas didn’t call. Miami didn’t call. I got a letter from the coach at Old Dominion University. Got another one from William & Mary. The way I had it figured, though, if I didn’t get drafted I was going to be a freshman All-American, and I didn’t see that happening at Old Dominion or William & Mary.

  People used to say that Mike was a machine hitter. It was obvious that he was willing to put in additional time to hit the baseball. His hand-eye coordination was good because he saw so many pitches in his drill work in the batting cage. But the scouts wondered if, when push came to shove, he would be able to translate all that to hitting a baseball off live pitching. Plus, his defensive skills didn’t really show up as a first baseman. Scouts look for tools, and Mike did not run well. That contributed to the fact that a lot of people didn’t notice him as a player.

  Probably the only position on the field where foot speed doesn’t have a big impact is catcher. I remember talking to Mike his sophomore year about catching. I mentioned it to him because I knew he could flat-out hit a baseball, and I knew his dedication and love for the game. He looked like he’d have the body type for catching. So I asked him about it and I remember Mike saying, “You know, I talked to my dad about it a little bit . . .” And that was pretty much it.

  Another thing that people might not have realized was that Mike graduated when he was seventeen. With the numbers he put up, there should have been more scouts watching him. It was pretty evident that he had a lot of skill as a hitter. To my knowledge, there was only one scout throughout the whole process that turned in a pro report on him. That was Brad Kohler. He worked for the Major League Scouting Bureau.

  —John “Doc” Kennedy, coach, Phoenixville High School

  The fact that I was failing to impress the right people on either front—pro or college—made no sense to me. Anyone who bothered to watch me hit on a regular basis knew what I knew, deep down, in spite of my weaker moments: that I could damn well do it. The local press was well aware of it. The Evening Phoenix described my home run against St. Pius X as “a mammoth two-run blast over the center-field fence.” The Daily Local News in West Chester published a story that mentioned my relationship with Lasorda and my batting-practice privileges with the Dodgers. The Boyertown coach, Dick Ludy, told one of the papers, “Piazza’s the finest hitter in the league. He’s the finest hitter I’ve seen. He’s really a prospect.”

  Anyway, we once again lost the league to Boyertown and fell short of our expectations. The most vivid memory of that disappointing season might have been the bus trip home from Perkiomen Valley. I was sitting in the back, right behind Tony Nattle and Joe Pizzica. They liked to dip Copenhagen tobacco, so they turned around and offered me a chaw. The next time they turned around, I was throwing up out the window. If you ask my teammates, that seems to be the thing I’m best remembered for as a high school ballplayer.

  At Phoenixville High, there was a tradition by which the seniors would spend a week on the Jersey Shore after graduation. Naturally, that week fell during the American Legion season. Doc coached our Legion team, as well, and his rule was that it was okay to go to the shore as long as you made it back for the games; the drive was a little under two hours. Well, I missed a game. When I came back for the next one, Doc didn’t start me.

  By around the fifth inning, I was still in the dugout and my father had had enough. He stormed over to me and said, “Get your stuff! We’re gettin’ the hell out of here!” Doc was coaching third base at the time and sort of pretending not to notice what was going on, so there wouldn’t be a scene. But it wasn’t over. My dad believed that was the reason I lost out on the Andre Thornton Award at the end of the season. Andre Thornton was a power hitter for the Cleveland Indians who had played at Phoenixville High, and the Thornton Award was the big prize given annually to one of Doc’s Legion players. Joe Weber won it that year, and my dad was hot. There were many occasions when he kept his feelings to himself, but this time he clashed with Doc. (“Come on,” my mom said as we reminisced a
bout it nearly a quarter of a century later, after a spaghetti dinner, “he clashed with everybody.”) I just let Dad be Dad, and rolled with it. I didn’t feel slighted. Weber was our best pitcher, and he earned it.

  I was, however, selected to participate in the scouts games that were staged every year all over Pennsylvania. First came the regional events where, in addition to the games, the scouts put the players through tryouts. I think I ran a 7.2 in the sixty-yard dash, which probably got me scratched off a few scorecards right there. The scouts seemed to like my arm strength, though, which was something they hadn’t seen when they watched me play first base. From the tryouts, they selected teams for the second round, and from there, guys were picked to play in the statewide east-west game in Boyertown. After my junior year, I had been invited to the first game and tryout but didn’t make it any further. My senior year, I was chosen for the next round along with my teammate, Brett Smiley, the cousin of former major-league pitcher John Smiley. We drove together to the game—and couldn’t find the damn thing. Got totally lost. I don’t know if I’d have made the big east-west game that year, but the odds are that I would have.

  I saw Mike at the Legion all-star game in Copley, Pennsylvania, right outside of Allentown. Before that, I’d seen him at the Phoenixville High School field and distinctly recall that he hit a line drive that took two seconds to hit the school building. You could see that he had the power and was not done physically maturing yet. You could see him getting bigger. He was a slow runner, but he had what we call a quick bat. He got to the ball quickly with his hands and wrists.

  I typed up a report and turned in the “follow.” A follow means he’s a player and I or any scout would have interest in following him. I put down his worth at between four and five thousand dollars, and said that he’d be signable for that amount. Then I faxed it to our office in New York. My job was to make one report on a player and send it out, and then it’s up to the teams to follow my report or not.