Long Shot (15 page)

Eventually, Paquin let me strap on the gear now and then. Looking back on that winter, it was probably a blessing that I didn’t spend too much time behind the plate and put more wear and tear on my body—an aspect of catching with which I would become well acquainted later on, when I was back there for 140 games a year in the National League.

CHAPTER NINE

Tommy was like a little kid sometimes, which was probably one of the reasons I enjoyed him so much and a lot of the organizational people didn’t. And I liked him best in spring training, when he was at his youngest. Like the night in 1992 when Burt Hooton challenged him to a ball game.

This was at the end of the day, after the regular Grapefruit League game had been played. Even at that hour, Burt knew there was no way Tommy would turn down the challenge. So they chose up sides, with the two of them pitching, of course—Tommy tossing up his big lefty roundhouse and Burt countering with his famous knuckle-curve. The only concession was that they moved the pitching rubber a few feet closer and threw from behind the protective screen. Otherwise, it was the real deal—three strikes, four balls, run it out, everything. Tommy took me as his catcher, but I don’t recall the rest of the teams, except that Burt chose Eric Young, who had stolen 146 bases over the previous two minor-league seasons. Naturally, Eric made it to second base somehow—probably stole it—then took off for third. I nailed him, and Tommy was beside himself. He’s out there on the mound, screaming, “Attaboy, Michael! Attaway to throw him out!” He was
into
it. After three or four innings, Burt and Tommy were sucking the oxygen out of the stadium. This was during the period when Tommy was making his Slim-Fast commercials (“If I can do it,
you
can do it”), but he was sixty-four years old, for Pete’s sake, and he was sweating his ass off. Finally, Peter O’Malley shut off the lights to make them quit.

It wasn’t the only time that Tommy got himself worked up on my behalf that spring. Hitting-wise, I was able to build on my experiences in Bakersfield and Mexico and capitalize on some opportunities to play with the big-league club. I homered three times. One of them was on a big breaking ball from Jose DeLeon, a pitch I couldn’t possibly have done anything with before I went to Mexicali. And one—the big one—was a pinch-hit grand
slam to right-center against Paul Gibson of the Mets. On that occasion, it was like a flash of light exploded in Tommy’s head; as if he had seen the future and been startled by the speed at which it was approaching. As soon as the ball landed, he ran up to Mark Cresse and shouted, “Get him down to the bullpen! Get him to start blocking some balls! Work with him!”

That game was in Port St. Lucie, and my dad was taking it all in next to a Cubs scout named Ed Lyons. When I came up to bat with the bases loaded, Lyons asked him, “Is that your kid? Who the hell scouted him?” My dad turned halfway around and pointed to Tim Thompson, a Cardinals scout from Pennsylvania who was sitting a couple of rows behind them. Thompson was one of the scouts who had advised me to get an education instead of worrying about being drafted.

“Tim Thompson? He’s a hell of a scout,” Lyons said.

“I know. He’s a friend of mine. Please don’t say anything.”

“Oh hell no, I wouldn’t say a word.”

My dad claims that he called the grand slam, even the spot where it cleared the fence. The moment it did, Lyons stood up, turned toward Thompson, and bellowed, “Hey, Tim, did you have a chance to sign this kid?”

Thompson just looked at my dad, shook his head, and said, “So, Vince, you finally got even with me, huh?” It was all good-natured, but there might have been more truth in that remark than my father would ever admit.

It was an important Grapefruit season for me, because I was on the Dodgers’ forty-man roster for the first time. That didn’t mean I’d make it to Los Angeles—or even to the Triple-A club in Albuquerque—but it protected me from being taken by another team in the Rule 5 draft, and it indicated, finally, that the organization saw a little value in me. At least,
some
people in the organization did, although I was never quite sure which.

On that front, I was interested, years later, to read an article in the
Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2009
that was written by Craig Wright, an analyst who had been employed by the Dodgers as an advisor to Fred Claire. Wright wrote,

During my 21 years working full-time with the major league teams, I was asked to make evaluations or recommendations involving several future Hall of Famers. It was fun to see their careers fulfill their promise, but I rarely felt like I had done anything to help their careers along. Players with Hall of Fame talent are generally so obvious that they rarely need any help in getting their careers
on track. Mike Piazza was a very different case, perhaps the most unusual in the history of great players. Unlike most Hall of Famers, Mike Piazza was far from a scout’s dream. No one drafted him out of high school; no one considered signing him as an undrafted player. He didn’t throw or run well, and he played first base, a position where you had to hit like Ted Williams to get noticed. And there was always something about Piazza’s stance and swing that bothered a lot of visual scouts. He was abnormally upright in his swing with little bend in his knees, and his swing seemed a tad long. His hands were way down on the bottom of the bat with the pinky over the knob, and he would stand a little far off the plate. While other hitters with that stance would dive into the plate to compensate on certain pitches, Piazza seemed to be just reaching out to cover the plate, almost flicking at the outer pitch, though with surprising pop. It was different, and it was easy to be concerned that he might eventually hit a wall—that he would start to be overwhelmed by power pitchers, that against good pitchers he’d have a big hole low and away, and that he wouldn’t be able to generate power on quality pitches away.

. . . I personally started to get excited about Piazza’s big league prospects during his 1991 season in the California League . . . . When I expressed my excitement about Piazza that off-season to general manager Fred Claire, I was surprised to hear that the assessments of Piazza by our scouts and player development people were very mixed, and the consensus was, at best, lukewarm about his prospect status. Some felt he would never be more than a “minor league hitter,” and some also thought he would never make it as a catcher and would have to move back to first base . . . . Fred indicated that he was encouraged by Piazza’s 1991 season, but with so many conflicting views, and with the prospects we had in front of Piazza, we could not be making any plans around him. That disappointed me.

At the time, it seemed to me that Tommy had been beating the drum as a one-man band on my behalf. Not that my viewpoint is objective, but I really believe that, in an ironic sort of way, Tommy, unlike most of the nonplaying personnel I’d come across in the organization, considered my prospects without the clutter of bias, without being hung up on draft positions, prototypes, pedigree, politics, jealousy, resentment, or any of the stuff that packed my minor-league years with so much tension.

I was never certain which factor actually hammered me the hardest: the skepticism over my catching skills or the animosity over Tommy’s meddling. It was no secret that he and a lot of the minor-league people weren’t the best of pals. Tommy and the Albuquerque manager, Terry Collins, hated each other, simple as that. At organizational meetings, Tommy would complain that the minor leagues seldom sent him anybody he could work with, and Albuquerque’s general manager, Pat McKernan, would stand up and argue that Tommy didn’t know what to do with the talent he got. What I didn’t realize until later, though, was the size of the rift between Tommy and Fred Claire. Those two couldn’t have been more different in background and style. Fred had started out writing for newspapers, then joined the Dodgers as a public relations assistant and methodically worked his way up to GM. Tommy was all baseball. Fred was slim, buttoned-down, and soft-spoken. Tommy was Tommy. Tommy thought Fred was a pencil-pusher. Fred thought Tommy was a loose cannon.

So, while Tommy was having visions of me behind the plate at Dodger Stadium—not right away, because Mike Scioscia was the most respected player on the team, but soon enough, because Scioscia was thirty-three years old—the front office had me ticketed for the Double-A team in San Antonio, with a guy named Bryan Baar scheduled to be the catcher in Albuquerque. My dad, of course, grumbled to Tommy that I should be the one in Triple-A because I’d outplayed Baar the year before. (Baar, however, had spent the season a level higher.) Tommy told him not to worry about it because if something happened and he needed a catcher, I’d be the one coming up to Los Angeles. I wasn’t complaining, anyway, because Baar had pretty decent credentials, for one thing—good arm, good power—and for another, Greg Hansell was also going to San Antonio, which meant I’d have a first-rate roommate and an apartment all tidied up by his mother. Besides, being a history buff, I was happy to find myself in the city of the Alamo—and possessed, no less, of a fresh affinity for the Mexican influence, since I could now hit breaking pitches.

The effects of my newly acquired aptitude showed up, big-time, in the Texas League. When the season got cranking, I was hitting about a hundred points higher than I ever had before. Meanwhile, I found that, in baseball, nothing acts in a vacuum: I carried a greater sense of confidence to the plate, and that confidence served to raise not only my batting average but also my expectations—which, in turn, wound me a little tighter still.

Once he was able to do in the Texas League what he had done in the California League, people recognized that he was legitimate.
But he still had something to prove. His anger was probably directed toward management. He wanted to prove to a lot of people that he was there because of his own merits, not because of anything given to him. I think that escalated his intensity to a level where he literally couldn’t hold it in. He was kind of a red-ass, frankly.

Of course, his favorite word was the f-word. He would go three for four and that fourth at-bat, if he struck out, it would probably weigh on him a little harder than it should have. It wasn’t a nice, soft, to-yourself kind of curse. It was people in the cheap seats hearing the f-bomb. It’s not fair to say that Mike wasn’t a team player, but when you do those things, that’s what people are going to think. It makes you look a little selfish. But the fact is, he never gave an at-bat away. He just had that drive. He took it to the next level. Even after games that most people would celebrate with a beer, he’d go back to the gym and have a protein shake while the other guys were out in the bars.

—Greg Hansell

In San Antonio, thankfully, I was able to loosen up at a nice apartment. Instead of staying at the nondescript complex where the players usually lived, Greg and I found a place with a pool, mixers, and a date night. The lady in the office kind of liked me, and she gave us the furnished model, complete with potted plants. I’d never had plants before. It was a great setup until Hansell was called to Albuquerque.

Then, about thirty games into the season, with my average at .377, the manager, Jerry Royster, summoned me into his office to tell me that Bryan Baar was coming down and I was moving up. I said, “Oh, shit.” Not that I didn’t want to go to Albuquerque. It was just that Hansell usually took care of the bill-paying and utilities and whatnot, and with him already gone, it meant that I had a lot to do before I could leave the next morning.

My flight took me from San Antonio to Dallas to Salt Lake City to Seattle, and I grabbed a cab to Tacoma, where we were playing. I pulled up to the ballpark on two hours of sleep. To borrow a phrase from Tommy Lasorda, I looked like I’d been welding all night without a helmet. Bill Russell was the Albuquerque manager, and when I saw him I said, “Man, I hope I’m not playing tonight. I’m exhausted.”

He said, “You’re playing. We’ve got a doubleheader and nobody else to catch.”

I dragged myself out for infield practice and one of the coaches hit me a
high pop-up. I looked up, got dizzy, saw two or three balls in the air, and collapsed. Everybody had a good laugh, the first game started, and I went three for four. Had three more hits in the second game. After one of them, I was standing at first and the Tacoma first baseman, Dann Howitt, said, “Hmm, I see you’re really having a hard time making that adjustment to Triple-A.”

But my odyssey wasn’t over yet. We bused back to Seattle, flew overnight—Seattle to Salt Lake to Phoenix to Albuquerque—and landed around noon. I was staying at the Howard Johnson’s (most of the players already had their own places, of course), and when I got there they said my room wasn’t ready yet; all they had available was one suite. I said, I’ll take the suite. They said that wasn’t authorized. I said, it’s authorized, give me the suite. When I got to the ballpark that night, Pat McKernan’s assistant said something like “Oh, you’re going to take the suite, huh?” I’m sure they thought I was being a rich-boy prima donna. Around that time, my dad was in the news a lot because he was bidding to buy the San Francisco Giants. People knew my story. What they didn’t know was how desperate I was for a few good hours of sleep.

In just under four hundred at-bats for Albuquerque, I hit .341, with a twenty-five-game hitting streak and sixteen home runs on top of the seven I had for San Antonio. Defensively, my progress was apparent in one sequence when I blocked a curveball in the dirt, called for another, and blocked that one, too, which impressed one of our scouts so much that he phoned Fred Claire to tell him about it. I was smelling the big leagues at that point—so close, so focused, so locked in that I could think of nothing else, other than the chords and lyrics pounding in my headphones. I had no idea, however, that the Dodgers had been kicking around the idea of bringing me up since midseason. In the
Hardball Times
article, Craig Wright provided a firsthand account of the internal debate: