by Mike Piazza
This time around, there would be no call to make. I needed a change of scenery and the Mets were clearly headed in another direction. Omar Minaya was ready to put his own stamp on the ball club, rebuilding around Wright, Reyes, and Beltran. Our equipment manager, Charlie Samuels, always looking out for me, asked Jeff Wilpon what he thought it would take to get me signed, and Jeff told him it was simply time to move on. I totally agreed.
In that spirit, I made it clear to Danny Lozano that we would put no pressure on the Mets to re-up with me. We knew that, if we told the press I wanted to stay in whatever capacity and would play for whatever they wanted to pay me, it would become a talking point and put the club on the spot. I didn’t want to go there. I didn’t want to leave New York the way I’d left Los Angeles.
I was just fine, even pleased, with the way it had ended in the eighth inning on October 2—with the fans on their feet. Thank you, New York.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
That Christmas, my first as a married man, was also my first in seventeen years without an employer. Frankly, I hadn’t anticipated that.
As a free agent with a .311 lifetime batting average and 397 home runs, I’d been expecting to hear from a handful of American League teams in search of a designated hitter. But now the off-season was winding down, and only the Phillies and Padres had shown the slightest interest. (The Mets, incidentally, continuing their tradition of good-hitting Italian catchers from the Northeast who had been with the Dodgers and Marlins, had picked up Paul Lo Duca to replace me.) It was discouraging to the point that it forced me to consider retirement. Reluctantly.
Without too much difficulty, though, I was able to willfully put that thought aside on the grounds that, 1) I didn’t like the idea of going out on two bad years in a row—I needed to prove I was better than that—and 2) I was eager to see how I could do if I were away from the madness of New York. The second factor got me thinking harder about San Diego, which was about as far away as anywhere. At the same time, though, there was some appeal to the notion of playing for the team I grew up watching. That was clearly what my father wanted me to do. He’d been in the ear of Hank King, who was the Phillies’ advance scout and a friend of his, about them signing me, going so far as to tell King what he figured they could have me for.
Shortly after the holidays, Charlie Manuel and Pat Gillick, the manager and general manager of the Phillies, flew down to Miami for lunch with me and Danny Lozano. We hunkered over a table at the Mandarin Oriental and they set about flattering me, which was definitely a good strategy. But they also told me the truth, which included the fact that their starting catcher was still Mike Lieberthal, who was due to make $7.5 million that year.
I didn’t understand every last thing about the machinations of baseball, but I understood that $7.5 million players don’t sit the bench. Besides that, I didn’t want to make Lieberthal sit, even if I could have. He was a career Phillie, a local fixture, in the last year of his contract. Of course, I might have felt differently about the whole thing if I’d known that Lieberthal would get hurt a few times in 2006 and catch only about sixty games. The way it stood, though, Manuel’s plan was to have me catch here and there, DH in the interleague games, and put in a little work at first base. As he laid it out, I imagined myself sitting around for two weeks and then pinch-hitting against Billy Wagner—who, ironically, had signed with the Mets—in the bottom of the ninth. As cool as I thought it would be to play eighty-one games in front of my friends and family (being a Phillie would also have given me a chance to work on my relationship with Phoenixville, which, frankly, has never been quite what I’d like it to be), and as much as I wanted to please my dad, and as grateful as I was for the organization’s interest in me, and as enticing as it sounded to swing the bat in Citizens Bank Park for six months, that was a big thanks-but-no-thanks.
San Diego it was. If we could work it out.
The Padres—in the person of the general manager, Kevin Towers—put a million and a quarter on the table, along with the starting catcher position, which was more important. Tommy Lasorda suggested I take it, which helped ease my father’s disappointment that I’d turned down the Phillies. Apparently my dad wasn’t too upset about the way things were going, because, before we’d announced a deal with the Padres, he let it out that I was signing. That was a little awkward for Danny, who was still trying to squeeze a few more dollars out of Kevin Towers, but my dad enjoys his visits with the media. He’d been talking to a San Diego radio guy named Bill Werndl, whom he knew from back home—Philly Billy, as he was called, had been trying to enlist me as a lobbyist for Pete Rose to get into the Hall of Fame—and got a little ahead of himself. I blew up at him, which wasn’t unusual, and we had a little bit of a rift for a while. It was nothing serious—mostly just me venting about being a married man of thirty-seven, the leading home run hitter among all catchers in the history of the game, and still feeling like a daddy’s boy at times. Of course, if my father hadn’t been the way he was, I wouldn’t have grown up with freakish forearms, a backyard batting cage, and a batboy gig for the Dodgers, etc. I wouldn’t have been drafted, most likely. I probably wouldn’t have eaten noodles at the Mandarin Oriental with Pat Gillick and Charlie Manuel, either. I realized all of that. I was still mad at him. That was just our methodology.
A couple of weeks after becoming a Padre, I reported with the pitchers and other catchers to their spring-training camp in Peoria, Arizona, but stayed only a few days before I left to join the Italian team in Florida for the inaugural World Baseball Classic. I was eligible because my grandfather, Rosario Piazza, had been born in Sicily; but my connection to the old country seemed to have been magnified by my visit to the pope. I was referred to in the press as baseball’s ambassador to the Vatican.
Playing for Italy was an honor I took very seriously. It was something that my Italian-blooded predecessors—great players like Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Roy Campanella, Ernie Lombardi, Joe Torre (those last four were all catchers, by the way), Tony Lazzeri, Phil Rizzuto, Rocky Colavito, Carl Furillo, Ron Santo, and Tony Conigliaro—hadn’t been afforded the privilege of doing. Over the course of a century, Italian-Americans had gained enormous stature in the game, and if I could bring some of that cachet back to the homeland of my ancestors, it made me immensely proud. Our first baseman, Claudio Liverziana, told reporters, “The first time we saw him, for us, baseball-wise, it was, God is among us.”
Remarks like that, I realized, were vastly overstated, and I took them for what they were worth; but please understand something: As baseball players, most of us know that what we do is not the most important thing in the world. And most of us, one way or another, would like somehow to make our work mean a little more than two runs in the sixth and a victory over the Astros now and then. We desire to benefit people and good causes, if we can. I love baseball, and if I’m able to help grow it in a country I also love, it’s a contribution I can cherish.
In that spirit, it irks me that teams and critics complain about the WBC diverting players away from spring training. For one thing, it’s not like the guys are off sailing or snowboarding. They’re playing competitive, meaningful, good-for-the-game baseball. As for wearing themselves out—there really aren’t enough games involved to do that; not nearly as many as in the Latin American winter leagues or spring training itself. I really don’t have any tolerance for those complaints.
Our Italian team lasted three games in the historic WBC tournament of 2006, mercy-ruling Australia, 10–0, in the first, in which I caught and doubled, and losing the next two to Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, when I was the DH. (I guess our coaches had heard about my arm.) Wearing number 31 on a blue and gray uniform that made me feel like I was back with the Dodgers, I mustered just one hit in eleven at-bats. Thus ended my career as an international player.
I told the Italian officials, though, that I’d be happy thereafter to help coach, conduct clinics, eat truffles, or whatever.
• • •
It was a nice situation. I loved the feel of the ball club, and also the city. I’m not sure that San Diego would have been the best place for me when I was young and over-the-top in my intensity, but in 2006 I’d been around the league fourteen times already—aging was the operative word—and was letting my hair down. Literally. (Sports Illustrated called it a “scruffy mop.”)
Alicia and I rented a nice apartment a few blocks from the beach, she enrolled in some classes to get started on her master’s degree in psychology, and I batted fourth in a pretty good lineup that included Adrian Gonzalez, Brian Giles, and my former Mets teammate Mike Cameron. I homered off Jason Schmidt in my first at-bat as a Padre, caught a strong performance from Jake Peavy, and we took care of the Giants to start the season properly.
That, however, was about all that went right over the first month. Approaching the end of April, we were seven games under .500 and, although I’d hit my four hundredth home run (off Jose Valverde of Arizona), I was batting a dismal .210. It was a midlife crisis.
I called Danny from San Francisco and said, “I’m done!”
Then I called Alicia and said, “I’m done!”
Danny said, “Give it a few more weeks. You’ve always hit well in May.”
Alicia said, “Mike, it’s just April. You need to think about this.”
For a player’s wife, it’s torture to see them struggling or getting booed when they come to the plate. You feel helpless. You wish you could pick up a bat and hit the ball for them. It was probably even harder in our case, because Mike was so intense and emotional about baseball. There were times when he would come home and actually throw temper tantrums because he wasn’t hitting well or whatever. I’m talking about full-blown tantrums, with all the f-words and throwing things and everything else. Or he’d just be in a horrible mood and wouldn’t say anything. I’d tell him, “Mike, you’re losing touch with reality. You have to get a grip.” I had to say that for his own well-being, and also because I was going to have to deal with being married to this person.
I’d become accustomed to the temper tantrums and the overreacting, but that time, I actually believed he might quit. This one was for real. He called when I was buying produce at the grocery store and said that he was retiring because he respected the game too much to go on playing the way he was. He said the game was trying to tell him something. I understood about the respect for the game, but it just didn’t feel right. Not for him. Mike’s a finisher. I told him to calm down and finish his contract.
We all rallied around him, urged him to just get through it. Then I got on a plane and flew to Chicago to meet him there. And all of a sudden he started playing well.
—Alicia Piazza
So, boom, I go into Chicago and go four for five in the first game and in the second I hit a three-run, two-out, ninth-inning, game-winning homer off Ryan Dempster. Just like that, we’re on a winning streak, I’m jacking up my average and it was like, okay, I’ll hold off on that quitting thing, no big deal here. That was pretty interesting. We ended up winning fourteen out of fifteen and taking over first place. It was nice, incidentally, to play in a division that the Braves weren’t part of.
The moral support made a big difference, but I also tinkered with my stance. I crouched a little more and kept my weight back to make myself quicker to the ball. It was a fairly dramatic change. Tom Robson, my old hitting coach with the Mets, had once said that my posture was the most important factor in my swing, and it was based on the strength in my legs. A hitter’s torque, which results in bat speed, begins with his legs. Robson timed my swing at fourteen-hundredths of a second from the time it began until contact with the ball. The only player who ever equaled that, by his watch, was Paul Molitor. But with age and injuries, I’d lost some of the quickness that had enabled me to fight off inside pitches. Consequently, pitchers had taken to pounding me in on my fists. I’d been overcompensating, in a way, by gearing myself to pull the ball more regularly than I had in my prime, thereby sacrificing some of my natural power to right field. Now, by revamping my setup to get into the hitting zone earlier, I wouldn’t have to make that concession.
The modification in my stance was a more conspicuous change than most I’d made over the years, but in essence it was just another step in the process. There was nothing new to me about the practice of making adjustments. It’s a critical part of hitting. Major-league pitchers are good enough that they won’t allow a hitter to succeed by doing the same thing the same way all the time. They figure something out, then it’s the batter’s turn. It was nice to know that I still had enough left to take my turn in that ritual. I also—and this is vital—still had my twenty-ten eyesight and my depth perception, which the Mets’ doctors described as stunning. Even Alicia, who’s chronically hard to impress, was in awe of my eyes. She’d buy shoes or something and try to hide the receipt in the bottom of the shopping bag, but I’d peek in and say, “You spent six hundred dollars for those?” My vision was something else I had in common with Ted Williams, who was said to be able to read the label of a 78 RPM record while it was spinning on the turntable.
Once I got back on track in Chicago, I was able to relax. For the next three months—half the season—I batted .330. It helped that I was hitting in front of Adrian Gonzalez, who was fast becoming a star. It also helped that Bochy stuck with me in spite of my throwing issues. He had a good system of spotting and spelling me—the three-headed monster, they called it. I’d catch for seven innings, get my three or four at-bats, and then he’d bring in Rob Bowen for defense if we were ahead. A couple of times a week, he’d give me the day off and Josh Bard would start.
The only downside, from my perspective, was that I seldom had the opportunity to catch Trevor Hoffman, our great closer and the all-time leader in saves. Of course, Trevor himself might have preferred it that way, because after a while I got a little tired of hearing about his fabulous changeup. The changeup was a tremendously effective pitch for him, obviously, but I thought that his two-seamer, cutter, and slider were pretty good, too, and shouldn’t be neglected. I put that opinion into practice one night when I happened to catch him in the ninth inning of a scoreless game against the Rockies. Trevor wasn’t sticking his changeup where he wanted it and gave up a single to Matt Holliday, followed by a double to Brad Hawpe, to start the inning. I went out to the mound and said, “Here’s the deal, dude. We’re not gonna throw one more fucking changeup.”
He said, “What?”
I said, “Just do what I say, okay?”
“Well, if you’re feeling it . . .”
I wanted to get out of the jam with his other stuff because I was sick of the changeup, and besides, I knew that the Rockies would be sitting on it. Trevor was cool enough to understand that I’d said what I said in a light tone but with serious intent, and I appreciated the fact that he had enough trust in me to play along. He proceeded to strike out Troy Tulowitzki, Chris Iannetta, and Yorvit Torrealba without a single changeup and we won the game in the eleventh on a two-out, pinch-hit home run by Paul McAnulty, the only pinch home run he ever hit.
I really enjoyed playing for Boach. He has a great feel for the game and could invariably tell if I was getting tired or being nagged by something I didn’t want to talk about. Boach was the kind of manager I’d run through a wall for. He just got me; understood the psychology part of it. And truthfully, being a catcher might have had something to do with that, because working with pitchers can be very much an exercise in psychology. It’s not merely a matter of coddling. Sometimes it’s about being straight with people; blunt, if necessary. And nobody was blunter than Bochy.
For example, we were playing at Arizona one night in May and El Duque (Orlando Hernandez) was pitching for the Diamondbacks. Boach looked at me and said, “You know what you’re hitting against this guy?” Some pitchers, I just knew when I stepped into the box that
I was going to crush them. I could feel it as I gripped the bat. Other guys, it was like, oh man, I’ve got to put on a good act here. I can’t explain it. Why do you like pepperoni on your pizza and I like anchovies? It’s just the way it is. I couldn’t do a thing with El Duque.
I said, “Uh, no, not exactly, but I can assure you it’s pretty bad.”
Bochy said, “It’s fucking horseshit. One for thirteen. You’re not playing tonight.”
“All right, Boach.”
“Be ready in the eighth inning to pinch-hit if I need you.”
“All right, Boach.”
Sometimes, that kind of plain talking can be a form of respect, a token of appreciation that you can handle the truth. It also allows for better communication. Bochy knew that I didn’t take offense where none was intended, and it freed him up to speak his mind.
There was also the time when we were battling the Dodgers for first place, the game was tied in the bottom of the sixth, they had runners on first and second with nobody out, Alan Embree, a tough lefty, was pitching for us, and Cla Meredith, a righthander who threw from down under, was getting ready in the bullpen. Bochy marched out to the mound and said, “All right, no bullshit here. Make the easy play and be sure you get the out, then I’ll bring in the submariner.”
The next guy bunted the ball to Embree’s glove side, and I’m out there yelling, “three, three, three!” We had plenty of time to get the lead runner at third, except that Russell Branyan, our third baseman, had taken a couple of steps in for the bunt and got tangled up going back to the bag. Everybody was safe. So Boach comes back out to make his pitching change, turns to me, and goes, “What the fuck did I tell you?” There wasn’t much I could say.