Long Shot (11 page)

Among the players in camp was Pedro Martinez, who had just signed and turned seventeen. His brother, Ramon, had already made it to the big leagues, and he’d stop by to work out, as well. I caught Pedro the first time he threw in a game. After one pitch, honest to goodness, I thought I’d broken my hand. For a little guy, he threw so fucking hard I was stunned. He also had a hissing curveball and a nasty changeup. I thought, Who
is
this guy? He’s gonna be unbelievable!

In retrospect, the most amazing thing was that, down in the Dominican,
Pedro Martinez was the nicest, sweetest guy in the world, always laughing and joking. When he came to the States, he seemed to turn instantly into something else. He was the most competitive son of a bitch you’d ever see. I mean, he ate gunpowder. More to the point, Pedro was just a little prick; that’s about the only way I can describe him. I remember thinking, is this the same guy I knew at Campo Las Palmas? As our careers moved along, I had my issues with Pedro; but I’ll say this: I wish the Dodgers hadn’t traded him for Delino DeShields right after our rookie years. And I really liked Delino DeShields. I know it broke Pedro’s heart to be separated from Ramon like that. He deeply loved his brother.

When I finally got home to Valley Forge, there was only time to catch a little rest, put back a few of the pounds I’d lost—thanks, Mom—and scoot down to Vero Beach for my first spring training.

• • •

In the late winter of 1989, I arrived in heaven. They called it Dodgertown.

What a place. The moment you pulled into Dodgertown, it was all baseball. Some guys might have wanted more, but not me. When a workout was over, what I wanted to do was play more baseball. At Dodgertown, you could do that. We’d play a four-hour spring training game, and then Tommy would roll out the cage and pitch to us for as long as we wanted. We worked, man. That was Tommy’s philosophy—we fucking
worked.
Sunup to sundown. It was crazy. It was fantastic. These days, you never see anything like that. Guys are out of there by the fifth inning. Five and dive.

Tommy Lasorda was a master at generating enthusiasm—especially among the young players. Right from the beginning, he made us feel like real Dodgers. Tommy would frequently put the greenest kids from the lowest minor-league teams in major-league exhibition games. We’d play, say, a Bakersfield game, and then we’d hear on the walkie-talkie, “Piazza, Karros, Eric Young, up to the big-league field.” We’d schlep up to the stadium and the game would be almost over. Maybe we’d hit, maybe we wouldn’t; whatever. At the least, we’d sit in a big-league dugout next to pros like Kirk Gibson, Eddie Murray, Mike Scioscia, Lenny Harris, and Rick Dempsey, if they were still around. Then, after the game, somebody would wheel out the cage for extra hitting and Tommy’d be out there dropping pretty good left-handed curveballs on us. I loved it.
Loved
it.

That first year, just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, I actually made a trip with the big-league team to West Palm Beach to play the Atlanta Braves in a split-squad game. I was catching and Dale Murphy was batting and I’m thinking, how in the world did I get here? My daydream was
shattered a moment or two later when Dion James came around to score. There was a play at the plate, and he ran me over.

Those were the times when I felt like I was living the fairy tale, just like I’d always imagined it. I still remember driving up the first day and seeing Tommy in the cafeteria, then seeing the
food
in the cafeteria. Big vats of eggs and orange juice and bacon and pancakes. Even my second year, my third year, the moment I got there, the feeling was “Ah, Dodgertown!” I was pumped.

Of course, I’d been to Dodgertown the year before, when I showed off my arm for Joe Ferguson. But I knew it was for real this time when I checked in to get my uniform and the old equipment guy asked me if I was a catcher, grabbed a bag of gear, and threw it at me, as if to say, “Here’s your stuff, you piece of shit. Get out of my face.” I didn’t mind. As soon as I headed out to the field for the first time and laid my eyes upon all the players spread out and stretching, I felt the kind of adrenaline rush I remembered from walking up the steps of the Dodgers’ dugout as a thirteen-year-old batboy at Veterans Stadium.

The next thing I knew, Brent Strom, a minor-league pitching coach, was yelling, “Catchers to the strings! Piazza!” I was the first catcher summoned to the strings section, which was Dodgertown oblivion—a bullpen area that Branch Rickey devised back in the day, using thick string or cord to outline the strike zone and encourage pitchers to throw to the edges; actually hit the strings. By the time I got there, it was just a row of mounds and another of home plates. That first day, I did nothing but catch bullpens; must have been ten of them. But that’s when I really started learning to catch. I caught good curveballs. I caught pitchers who knew what they were doing.

I learned a lot from being around the pitchers. The pitching coaches—Johnny Podres, Claude Osteen, Dave Wallace, Burt Hooton—conducted meetings on pitching philosophy for the minor leaguers. Once, when they called a meeting, I figured, hey, I’m a catcher, I need to know what they’re thinking out there; I should go to that meeting. I was the only catcher there. My old roommate, Jeff Hartsock, and this pitcher from Iowa, Bill Wengert, turned around to look at me, as if a hippopotamus had just pulled up a chair, and one of them said, “What the hell are
you
doing here?”

My response: “What, I can’t go to a meeting? A meeting about pitching? And I’m a catcher?”

When I proceeded to follow up on a point that was being discussed, they thought that was revolutionary. Bill Wengert: “What the fuck? Piazza comes to the pitchers meeting and he actually asks a question!”

The catchers were usually with the pitchers anyway, down at the strings. That was our social circle. Our entertainment was the movie they’d show every night in the theater. The only guys who didn’t go were the ones sneaking off campus. I never snuck out, because I was a nerd and too tired most of the time, but I had roommates who did. A couple of outfielders, Donnie Carroll and Chris Morrow, got out one night by climbing the fence; but there was always a security guard on duty checking for guys coming back. So they got a cab to drop them off at the tree line, made their way through the woods, climbed onto a roof, and dropped down into Dodgertown like commandos. They called it Rambo-style. It was all good, except that while they were gone, one of the coaches, Tom Beyers, stopped by for bed checks, looked around, and saw there was nobody else in my room. A couple of hours later, here they come. The door opens and they start high-fiving each other, like “Hey hey, we made it!” I said, “No, no, you guys are screwed. They had a bed check.” Reggie Smith, the great switch-hitter from the old Red Sox and Dodgers, was in charge of running the players who had been caught the night before on bed check. They were known as Reggie’s Runners. Carroll and Morrow were active members of the club.

In a lot of ways, it wasn’t very smart to go out in Vero Beach. The local guys were always mad that the Dodgers would swoop down and take their girls, so there were plenty of fights. It wasn’t like you could avoid the locals, because there were only a few bars in town. The best one was Bobby’s on the Beach, but we couldn’t go in there because that was the coaches’ bar. Kevin Kennedy and Dave Wallace were responsible for holding up the walls at Bobby’s, and if they saw you in there, you earned yourself a morning reservation with Reggie’s Runners.

But Tommy took us out from time to time. Once, a few of us who had done something or other exemplary went to dinner with Tommy and Steve Boros, who was the minor-league field coordinator. Across the room, we spotted a cute blond girl with what seemed to be her family. Her brother or whoever it was came up to our table and said, “My sister is here and she would be very interested in one of these young men taking her out for the night.”

Tommy said, “Which one?”

“She said the guy in the red shirt.”

That was me. I gave out a little “woo!” Pretty girl from Canada, it turned out. I felt like it was quite an accomplishment when I made it to second base that night. I hate to sound juvenile about it, but at that time I
was
juvenile, in a lot of ways. For one, my father considered girls to be among the distractions
that he needed to keep out of my path. I also had my mother’s sense of morality instilled in me. I’d been sheltered, somewhat. Combine all that with my focus on baseball, and there were a lot of elements working together to make me socially tentative.

I can’t deny that Tommy looked after me in those years—socially, to a small degree, and definitely, in a big way, on matters of baseball. I’ll deny all day that I was ever handed anything I didn’t deserve; but indisputably, he was the steward of my entry into pro ball and conversion to catching—my enabler, so to speak. For those first few spring trainings, Tommy took the extra step of putting Joe Ferguson in charge of my catching education, although Ferguson was certainly not the only one who played a part in it.

Tommy himself actually had some hands-on input with my catching skills. When he threw BP, he usually wanted a catcher behind the plate. I’d go back there and he’d bounce the ball in the grass and shout, as only Tommy could shout, “Come on, Michael, block that ball!” He was as much a cheerleader as an instructor. But there was no shortage of coaches on call to teach me the mechanics of the position. It was a collective thing between Fergy, Johnny Roseboro, Kevin Kennedy, and Mark Cresse. Ferguson had a body type similar to mine—he was tall—and was able to show me a particular technique of blocking balls in the dirt. Most catchers kick their leg out to stop the ball, but because my legs needed more room I had to angle my feet a little differently. Joe understood that.

Cresse’s big contribution was the Catcher Olympics. He set it up for competitions in things like blocking balls, fielding bunts, and throwing to second base—you’d get points for hitting a bull’s-eye affixed to a screen in front of the bag—and the grand finale was always the pop-up-catching contest. It would go six rounds and involve all kinds of circus catches. To make it more interesting, Cresse would sometimes toss your mitt on the ground so you’d have to find and grab it before chasing after the pop-up. The all-time best performance was put on by a guy named Ken Huckaby, who eventually reached the big leagues in his thirties. Huckaby came out wearing a tie and carrying a briefcase. While the ball was in the air, he slipped into a suit jacket and pulled his mitt out of the case. He called it “the executive catch.” All the major-league and minor-league catchers were involved, and the judges gave the scores by holding up playing cards. Tommy was always a judge, of course. One day, when it was extremely windy, I ran about forty yards and slid another five to snag a really high pop-up, and Tommy erupted: “Jesus Christ, what a great catch! That was one of the best fucking catches I’ve ever seen!” I never won the Catcher Olympics, but the most important
thing was not to finish
last.
For the guy with the lowest score, Cresse would paint the top of a swim cap like a certain part of the anatomy. The prize was called the Dickhead Award, and the winner had to wear that swim cap for an entire day of practice.

What a blast it all was. At Dodgertown, I was completely, blissfully, wholeheartedly in my element. Especially that first year. In the spring of 1989, there was only one small thing that might have spoiled the mood for me—if my dad had actually told me about it.

He and Burt Hooton had a pretty good relationship. Hooton came from Texas and he liked to talk to Dad in a Philly accent. He’d go, “Yo, Vince!” My father would answer, “Yo, Burt!”

So Hooton meant well, I’m sure, when he approached my dad a few days before we broke camp and said, “Vince, I don’t know what he’s doing here. He’s not ready for this. He should be in school.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

My first club assignment was Salem, Oregon, of the Northwest League, which didn’t begin until June. So I reported to extended spring training in Port St. Lucie, Florida, living at the Holiday Inn on U.S. 1. Even
that
seemed romantic to me.

I was working hard to progress as a catcher, and no doubt making progress, but, by all accounts, Ted Williams had been right when he told my father that “hitting’s going to be his big suit.” That much was pretty obvious when, at the age of twenty, I arrived in Salem. Our manager, Tom Beyers, got tired of watching me chase balls to the backstop, so I split the catching duties with a guy from Puerto Rico named Hector Ortiz, who eventually spent some time in the major leagues but put in
eighteen seasons
at the minor-league level.

My batting average was nothing special, but my power attracted a bit of attention. The Dodgers’ owner, Peter O’Malley, flew up to Oregon to watch us (I had the feeling that he came to watch
me
, but more likely, it was to check on our top draft choice, Bill Bene), and with him looking on, I hit one of the longest home runs they’d seen at Chemeketa Community College, where we played our home games. One of our pitchers, Larry Gonzalez—we called him Lar—had become a good friend, and I can still hear him saying, “Man, that was a
bomb!”
Before long, I actually developed a little fan following. Made the all-star team.

My father came out for some games late in the season, and he was sitting along the third-base line one night when Burt Hooton—he was our pitching coach—walked over to shoot the breeze with him.

“Yo, Vince!”

“Yo, Burt!”

Dad had been stung by Hooton’s remark back in March—more specifically, by the friendly, professional opinion that I didn’t belong—but he
didn’t let on. He just said, “Well, Burt, I’ve been sitting here for six innings, and I’ve got to say, I don’t see too many prospects out there.”

As my dad remembers it, Hooton’s reply was “You know, Vince, I’ve got to apologize for what I said during spring training. If there’s anybody here who’s got a chance, it’s your son. He works longer and harder than any player we’ve got.”