Long Shot

by Mike Piazza

  Other than the games in Taiwan, it was my first off-season as a pro in which I didn’t keep playing. Around the holidays, I spent some time in Philly and stopped in to see my friend Joe Pizzica at his parents’ house. He showed me the scrapbook that his mother was keeping on me and I signed a bunch of stuff for his family, which was cool. I couldn’t have known it then, but it was essentially the last time we’d hang out together; although, over the years, I periodically left him tickets when we played the Phillies. Even when he had his own, he’d stop at will call and see if there were any being held in his name. Sometimes, confused by “Pizzica,” the window clerks would hand him the envelope with “Piazza” written on it, which contained the tickets I’d left for one or more of my brothers; but he wouldn’t take them.

  About thirty minutes from our house in Valley Forge, I found a gym in Collegeville where the owner, Marc Polignano, would work with me privately every night after the place closed. There was another one in Jeffersonville with brand-new equipment, and the owner was kind enough to give me a key, since my dad owned the building. I’d go in late at night and have it all to myself. Once, the cops drove by, saw the lights on, and came in to check it out. I thought I was about to get arrested, but they were like, “Hey, Mike! How you doin’?” That gym was perfect until the power lifters took it over. I’d spend an hour or two there every Christmas Eve, after it closed early and everybody else had gone home.

  Weight training had become an important part of my baseball routine, but I was pulled deeper into it by the California factor. It’s my observation that Californians take better care of themselves than people anywhere else in the country, if not the world. Even though I’d been lifting on a regular basis for quite a while, I couldn’t help but feel inferior when I walked into a Gold’s Gym anywhere in Southern California. I developed a mild case of muscle envy. For the first time, I started working parts of my body that had nothing to do with baseball. It was intoxicating. I admit, I wanted the women to like what they saw. When I walked the beach and out of the corner of my eye caught a girl checking me out, I dug that. Between the beach and baseball, I had no problem motivating myself to get into the gym. Even on New Year’s Eve, I went straight from the gym to the batting cage in our basement. For a long time, I made it a point to be in the cage at midnight of December 31, so that the very first thing I did in the new year was hit a baseball.

  That year, I stuck around home long enough to drop by Phoenixville High School and talk to the baseball team on the occasion of its first meeting. My brother Tony, the second youngest, was trying out for the varsity, and I could tell he was uncomfortable with me being there. So I gave some autographs, told them all to work their asses off and read everything they could on hitting, advised them to go ahead and drink beer if they wanted but to keep their dignity, and got the hell out of there before my brother and the coaches threw me out. On that note, it was back to Los Angeles. And back to business, among other things. There was a contract to be negotiated.

  As a rule, I hated contract time, but this round figured to be interesting, at least. Normally, players don’t have much bargaining position after their first year because they’re not on the open market and aren’t yet eligible for arbitration, which leaves the minimum salary as the default position. Sometimes, especially when the player is obviously a big part of the team’s foundation, the organization will attempt to sign him for multiple seasons so that it can avoid arbitration when the time comes. Then there are the occasions when a team will offer above the minimum simply to act in good faith and maintain amicable relations with a player it hopes to keep around for a long time. The Dodgers had been fair to me when they kicked in an extra sixteen thousand dollars for my rookie year, but both sides knew that sixteen thousand wouldn’t get it done this time.

  There were at least three fresh developments working on my behalf. The first, of course, was that I had batted .318 and set records in home runs and RBIs while manning the most demanding position on a ball club. Statistically, it was the best season a rookie catcher had ever produced. Second was the fact that the Dodgers had paid Ryan Luzinski—Greg’s kid—a bonus of six hundred thousand bucks after drafting him in the first round of 1992. He was a catcher. It stood to reason that if Luzinski could demand that kind of money coming out of high school in New Jersey, a significant investment would certainly be in order for their starting catcher and Rookie of the Year. And in January—this is the third thing—the club shelled out more than a million to sign Chan Ho Park, a free-agent pitcher out of Korea. I felt I had a boatload of leverage.

  And I knew I’d need it, because I had designs on a multiyear contract and the Dodgers had never awarded one to a player headed into his second season. After winning Rookie of the Year in 1992, Karros had played the 1993 season for just over four hundred thousand. As expected, the club made me a preliminary offer—the usual one year—citing Eric’s precedent and setting my figure just a tad higher. But I was not of a mind to let the organization stand on its own self-serving tradition, and neither was Danny Lozano. He identified Frank Thomas as a sort of template for me. Frank’s 1991 season, his second, had been very similar to my rookie season, and the White Sox had rewarded him with a three-year contract for around $4.5 million.

  That was the ballpark we had in mind when Danny, Dennis Gilbert, and I sat down with Fred Claire and Sam Fernandez, who was the Dodgers’ legal counsel and did a lot of their negotiating. Ordinarily, the player doesn’t participate in those discussions, but Sam and Fred had requested that I be there. It was a mistake on their part. Apparently, they had misread me. I was carrying a grudge from the way the organization had treated me in the minor leagues and felt strongly that the front office owed me a show of respect.

  We laid out the Thomas example and made the appropriate comparisons, and then Sam Fernandez went into his spiel. Something like “Well, if you bring a Martian down from Mars and try to explain the system to him, he won’t understand . . .” I’m looking at Danny like, a fucking Martian from Mars?

  At that point, I couldn’t hold back. I didn’t like what they’d done with Eric’s contract, and I didn’t like what they’d done to Jody Reed. Jody had been our starting second baseman in 1993, earning around $2.5 million, and the Dodgers made him an offer—a pretty good offer, I think—for the next three years. They gave him a certain number of days to accept it and then pulled the offer off the table. He ended up signing with Milwaukee for about $750,000. I can’t really blame the Dodgers for any of that, but afterward, I saw Fred Claire on a few television shows almost reveling in the fact that, after they took back their offer, Jody Reed never did get his money. That just didn’t strike the right chord with me. So I was pretty well whipped up into a frenzy by the time I got into that meeting and saw that Fred and Sam had every intention of signing me on the cheap, figuring I had no other option. I said, “You guys paid Chan Po Park a million-two from Korea, and you paid Ryan Luzinski six hundred thousand, and you’re trying to tell me that you’re going to renew me at four hundred?”

  I went on for a while, with feeling, and threw some other names in there, too, which surprised even Danny and Dennis. But I wasn’t finished. When it was apparent that I was getting nowhere, I stood up and said, “If you guys do that, don’t fucking expect me at camp, because I ain’t showing up.” And I walked out of the meeting.

  Lozano told me later that Sam Fernandez turned white when I left the room. Dennis couldn’t believe it, either, and said, “Danny, go get him!” By that time, I was already gone. I was serious about this.

  Eventually—a week before spring training—the Dodgers capitulated on their philosophy. I got three years and $4.2 million, starting with $600,000 the first year and ending with $2.7 million for the third, which would have been my initial year of arbitration. It was not only the first multiyear contract the Dodgers had ever given to a player after one season, but also the largest; and in fact, the second-largest in baseball history. I think Fred understood that I had it com
ing, but it was harder for Sam to take. The way he saw it, Danny and Dennis had beaten him. Not only that, but I had failed to show a sufficient level of Dodger blue in my bloodstream. The club wanted unconditional loyalty and couldn’t seem to comprehend that it works in both directions, or that I might not feel so all-fire beholden to the organization that gave me a chance. For some crazy reason, I sort of thought that 112 RBIs would wipe out any debt.

  My contract was also a painful admission on the team’s part that Tommy had been right about me, and that a lot other people in the organization—some of whom couldn’t stand him and even thought he was maneuvering to become the general manager—had been severely wrong. I sensed that the grudge I’d held since Vero Beach was no longer a one-way affair. The relationship between the Dodgers and me had become personal, with tension under the surface and Danny forever in the background protecting me. The way things were playing out, he wasn’t at all sure I was going to be the Dodger-for-life that everybody assumed I would. Gradually, he was conditioning my mind to that possibility.

  In the meantime, I didn’t have to miss any training camp, except for one long day in New York. I’d been selected by the ESPY Awards as Breakthrough Athlete of the Year. The event was held in Madison Square Garden, and I originally told ESPN that I couldn’t make it because the travel back and forth would knock out two days of spring training, which my obsession wouldn’t permit. To solve that little problem, the producers actually sent a private jet to fly me up in the morning and back the same night, after the show. They also rented me a tux. So there I was, all cleaned up and bullshitting with Emmitt Smith and Jimmy Johnson, thinking, ah, now this is the big leagues.

  • • •

  In 1994, we could have been a contender. In fact, we were a contender—leading the National League West by three and a half games on August eleventh when the world, as we knew it, stopped. It was a labor strike, which meant no playoffs and no World Series and, when you get down to it, no real meaning to anything that happened over 114 games.

  For a while there, in the first couple weeks of April, I was almost hoping the season would get wiped out altogether. I was batting .086 going into a series in Pittsburgh, but broke out of it by going seven—all singles—for thirteen. A lot of power hitters turn up their noses at bloops and bleeders, but, depending on the situation, I was generally just as happy with two loopy singles to right as one bomb into the bleachers. Honestly, I never really considered myself a power hitter. I was just a hitter with some power. Those singles in Pittsburgh meant a lot to me, because I proved to myself that I could adjust, cut down my swing, and turn things around when I was going bad. From that weekend on, I hit in 1994 just like I’d hit in 1993.

  At that stage of my career, I felt I was so focused, so locked in mechanically, that there were times when I could pick up the pitch right at the release point; I could detect just a small manipulation on the ball in the pitcher’s hand. Actually, Karros was one of the best I’ve ever seen at reading the pitcher—looking for tells, we called it, like the way he held his hand or his glove for a certain pitch. Eric was the kind of hitter who always wanted to know what was coming, and he made a science of studying the pitcher with that in mind. He was frequently in the on-deck circle when I was at the plate, and sometimes he’d try to help me out by watching the catcher. Once, at Olympic Stadium in Montreal, when Darrin Fletcher was catching for the Expos, Eric said that he could tell me whether the pitch was coming inside or not. If it was, he’d just say, “Come on, Mike.” So I’m digging in and I hear, “Come on, Mike,” see a fastball headed for the inside half of the plate, and knock it off the wall for a double. Next time up, “Come on, Mike.” Boom, base hit.

  Then Eric steps in to bat, and Darrin Fletcher goes, “You wouldn’t happen to be telling Mike what’s coming, would you?”

  Eric said, “What are you talking about?” But for the rest of the series, he was screwed—scared shitless that they were going to drill him.

  I always figured that if I knew my swing, and kept it in good shape, everything else would take care of itself. For a long time, I wasn’t much of a video guy, like so many players were. Tony Gwynn started that trend, and ultimately it became so sophisticated and easy to use that I succumbed to it. But a lot of the younger players were addicted to video—and not just for studying pitchers. They’d get called out on strikes, then run down to the video room and have the guy in there rewind for the last pitch. After they saw what they wanted to see, they’d sprint back through the tunnel to the dugout and start yelling at the umpire: “That was a fucking ball!”

  Karros even stayed up to speed on all the umpires—their patterns for balls and strikes. I got to know the umpires well enough by feeling their breath on the back of my neck for 140 games a year. By and large, instead of bringing too many elements into it, I preferred to keep hitting as simple as possible. In spring training one time, a few of us were sitting on a stage speaking to some minor-league players about hitting, and I was thinking hard about how to boil it all down for them. When it came around to me, I said, “I go up there looking for a pitch. I’m looking for my pitch, and when I get my pitch, I’m trying to knock the third baseman’s dick off.” I thought that pretty much explained it. And then Eric says, “I don’t see too many dickless third basemen walking around.”

  Eric was a tough audience, but there was one theory of mine that he bought into. I pointed out to him that you get four at-bats every game, so, unless you hit the ball first, you’re going to get twelve strikes. To succeed, all you have to do is make good contact with four of those twelve. That shouldn’t be so hard, should it? If you hit the ball hard four times, you’re bound to get a hit or two, and at that rate you’ll make the Hall of Fame. If I had a mantra, I suppose that was it.

  Of course, for every grudging shred of respect that Karros would give me about hitting, he’d make up for it by piling on the shit about my baserunning. He complained that it was practically impossible to drive me in. I argued that I was on base all the time, so what’s his problem? But he had a point. Once, in Cincinnati, I was on second and Eric hit a ball that landed on top of the center-field fence and actually rolled along the ridge for about ten or twelve feet. Thomas Howard chased after it until it finally dropped back in play. Somehow—I guess I was confused—I got stuck at third. Eric rounded second base and couldn’t believe I was standing there ninety feet in front of him. He just put his hands on his hips and stared at me, like he often did. He’d stay mad for about twenty minutes at a time.

  The ideal solution, for me, was to just knock the ball out of the ballpark. In June, at Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami, against Mark Gardner, I hit 1) the first grand slam of my career, 2) the longest home run that had ever been hit at that park, and 3) the longest home run I had hit, according to the unofficial measurement: 478 feet. A lot of people, including me, think the ball I got hold of the year before in Cincinnati went considerably farther, but whatever.

  I hit another grand slam two weeks later against the Rockies, ten rows into the upper deck at Dodger Stadium. From there, it’s a quick, short-season summary: I started the All-Star Game in Pittsburgh and was shut out in the home run derby for the second time in a row (in subsequent years, I excused myself, occasionally joining Chris Berman and Joe Morgan for the blow-by-blow instead). Raul Mondesi gave the Dodgers their third consecutive Rookie of the Year. On August 11, Ramon Martinez shut out the Reds, 2–0, in Cincinnati, without shaking me off a single time, if I recall correctly, to put us two games above .500.

  And then it was over.

  The strike was a bad time in the game. It alienated the players from the owners, the owners and players from the fans, and even players from other players. But we’d known it was coming, and inevitable, because our collective bargaining agreement had expired and management was insisting on a salary cap for the next one. In fact, after we struck, the owners went ahead and imposed a cap, then withdrew it and did away with arbitration. From our perspective, the only encoura
ging thing about the whole ordeal was the impressive display of solidarity among a lot of players making a lot of money. We weren’t opposed at all to competitive balance; we just felt that that was the owners’ concern. It wasn’t our job to worry about who was competitive and who wasn’t. If George Steinbrenner didn’t care about the Reds or the Royals, the solution was for us to accept a salary cap?

  Of course, not all the players were on the same page. During the strike, Eric and I went to a union meeting at the airport Hilton in Los Angeles, and found it interesting, to say the least—starting with Tim Leary. He was a veteran pitcher, thirty-six years old, playing out the string with Texas. Actually, Leary would never pitch again in the major leagues, and he probably sensed it. He really wanted to finish the season, which was still a possibility as late as early September. Leary said, basically, “You guys, I’m just being the devil’s advocate . . .” And then Glenallen Hill, a big outfielder who was playing for the Cubs at the time, yelled out, “I don’t like him!” Glenallen proceeded to stand up and deliver what was almost like a Baptist revival speech about sticking together and staying strong. After that, it was Mark McGwire—a side of him that a lot of people haven’t seen. He had the owners’ proposal in his hand, and he goes, “Look at this! It’s fucking bullshit! We’re not gonna fucking do this!” Then he slammed it down. For my money, he and Glenallen Hill were the heroes.

  For whatever reason, a lot of the dissent on our side came from the Phillies. There was a meeting in Orlando that I didn’t attend, but some of the guys there were under the assumption that the Phillies’ management wanted Lenny Dykstra to be a shit disturber. His voice certainly didn’t blend into the chorus. Players were imitating him, going, “I’m just sayin’, dude, this might be the best deal we can get, dude.” (I know: who am I to point out somebody else saying “dude”?) The word was that Dykstra was going to cross the line, with teammates like Dave Hollins and Darren Daulton right alongside. But the weirdest thing of the whole off season was the talk of Cal Ripken Jr. walking a picket line.