Long Shot (21 page)

The jeans were in my head, but the poem was in my hands. The jeans . . . the poem . . . the
poem
. . .

“I just don’t think so.”

I suppose I was a difficult case. I wasn’t a one-night-stand kind of guy, and I wasn’t in a marrying frame of mind, either. Not at that point. I was smack in between—all about the girlfriend. Somehow, I felt much better about suspending my Catholicism with a girlfriend. Plus, I craved the companionship. My teammates were tired of hearing me bitch and cuss; I needed a sympathetic ear, preferably attached to a beautiful face. I didn’t get into a relationship for the wild side of it. I just liked having somebody to share my life with—on a short-term basis. The biggest compliment Eric Karros ever paid me was when he said he’d give me permission to date his daughter. Actually, he said that all the time.

My first major-league girlfriend was a flight attendant who worked the team plane one night. I stopped seeing her after the all-star break, when I heard she was talking to Roger McDowell, one of our relief pitchers.

Then there was Debbe Dunning. You might know her as the Tool Time girl on
Home Improvement
. We were introduced by Brian Cohen, who worked with Danny Lozano and had met her at a ball game. She was beautiful, obviously, and we had a nice thing going over the second half of the season. She even met my dad. He came out to Los Angeles and we had dinner together, and Debbe’s saying Michael and I did this and Michael and I did that, and I could see my father silently flipping his lid. Later, when we were alone, he made no attempt to keep quiet about it. He was clear and very stern: “Don’t get married. Don’t get married. Don’t get married.” But it wasn’t that he didn’t like her. If she had been a movie star who came from a billionaire family and gave up her career to work with underprivileged children, that still wouldn’t have been good enough. He just didn’t want anything messing with my career.

After the season, I had a promotional trip to Hawaii and took Debbe along. Then it was my mom’s turn. She didn’t care for that
at all.
But I was flaunting my independence in those days. I even turned down an appearance on David Letterman’s show to make that trip. It was a good time, and we were still together until around Halloween, when one night she brought over some pumpkins and her dog. I’m not quite certain how it turned bad, but I’m pretty sure it involved me suggesting that it was time to move on. That was just my rhythm. When the off-season came, I needed to break free of my regimen and cut loose a little. Evidently, that wasn’t what Debbe had in mind. There was screaming and crying, and then the Tool Time girl waffled my ass. She’d been doing this Tae Bo boxing thing, and she had a huff worked up, and I hadn’t taken a punch like that in a long time. Then she and her dog were gone.

A few months later, I saw her at an MTV rock-and-jock softball game. Darren Daulton, the Phillies’ catcher, was there, and he said, “Hey, that Tool Time girl is hot.” I mentioned that we had dated. I don’t think he believed me, but just then Debbe walked up and said, “Mike, you don’t have to ignore me,” or something like that. Very gracious. When Eric got home that night, he told me that Debbe and Daulton had hooked up. So I guess it worked out pretty well for everybody.

Anyway, my dad was happy.

• • •

Daulton was the starting catcher for the National League in the 1993 All-Star Game, and Bobby Cox, the manager, picked me to back him up. Given my hunger to be recognized on my own merits, it meant a lot to me.

I was the first rookie catcher to make the team since Gary Carter in 1975, and that was not my only distinction. I was also the only player that year not to hit at least one ball over the wall at Baltimore’s Camden Yards during the home run derby. I crushed a bunch of them in the warm-up round, but in the regular contest they threw some lefty coach I’d never seen before. The guy was cutting and sinking the ball—not on purpose, I’m sure—and I couldn’t elevate it. After about five or six pitches, I was thinking, get me the hell out of here.

I already had some bad karma going, because I’d brought along the flight attendant I was dating and, at an event the night before, she sort of offended Barry Bonds’s wife, Sun. My girlfriend asked how long they had dated before they married, and when Sun said six months or whatever it was, she said, “Oh, that’s not very long.” I was just a rookie trying to blend in with the scenery and I figured she’d be happy to do the same, and here she is popping
off to Barry Bonds’s wife. The next day Barry came into the clubhouse and said, “Who the hell was that girl?” It wasn’t really a problem with Barry, who was always friendly with me, but it made me want to go sit in a corner, which I did, more or less. From that point on, I pulled off a really good rookie routine by keeping my mouth shut, except to laugh, as I listened to Daulton, Mark Grace, and John Kruk—who looked like he’d just climbed out of a coal mine—bullshitting in the players’ lounge.

In those days, fraternization was discouraged during the season, which was how I liked it. There was a bunker mentality, a strong sense that the other team was the enemy. I thought it added a little bit to the game when Tommy Lasorda would be hollering insults at the guys in the other dugout, or at least making sure we knew what assholes they were. He was that way even in
spring training.
We’d be getting ready for the game and he’d be telling us about the other pitcher and say, “Let’s get this motherfucker.” Tommy absolutely hated the opposition and made that perfectly clear to anyone within range of his voice, which carried well.

(As a point of information, Tommy’s disregard for social graces, once the game was on, was applied to his
own
players, as well. Mark Cresse told me that, before I got to Los Angeles, a couple of the Dodgers’ outfielders had once collided chasing a fly ball and were sprawled on the ground as the batter circled the bases. Tommy was very concerned. “Get the ball!” he shouted. “
Then
die!”

Don’t get me wrong, though; Tommy really did care about his players. He just cared more about winning, and it didn’t matter to him how it sounded. Once, when things weren’t going well for us, he hit the team with a speech that went something like this: “If you don’t like me because I want to win, and if you don’t like me because I want you to concentrate and do your best, and if you don’t like me because I tell you to stop staying out all night, then fuck you. I don’t like you, either.”)

But the All-Star Game was different. Marcus Allen, the Hall of Fame football player, once said that a good player could always muster up enough hate for the other team to get him through the day; so, in that respect, the All-Star Game didn’t compromise anybody’s basic competitiveness. It was just your chance to see what these guys were
really
like. That was the coolest thing about being an all-star, especially a young one. That and the grab bag full of great stuff from the sponsors—shoes, bats, you name it. The uncoolest thing, especially for a young player, is a toss-up between offending Barry Bonds’s wife, taking an oh-for in the home run derby, and striking out to end the game. I pulled off the hat trick.

Back with the Dodgers, though, I was playing well enough that Tommy bent the club policy and let me keep my mustache an inch or two below my lip. He busted my balls about it but didn’t press the point, which was a good thing, because I’d become superstitious about the mustache—which was really just a prop—and wouldn’t have cut it even if he had insisted. I was leading a third-place team in average, home runs, and RBIs. It was all about swinging the bat.

Along those lines, out of the blue, Mizuno sent me a batch of new ones to try out. When I’d been a batboy in Philadelphia, I’d picked up some heavy wood that the players used. The power hitters, especially, would walk up to the plate with bats that weighed thirty-eight or forty ounces. That had changed by the time I got to the big leagues. I started out with a thirty-four-inch, thirty-two-ounce Louisville Slugger that was one of the biggest bats in the rack. The ones that Mizuno gave me, late in the year, had been made for Jose Canseco—they actually had his name on them—but he had switched to another brand. They had thinner handles than the ones I’d been using, and I decided to take some hacks with them on September 14 in San Diego. When I hit two homers that night, I became a Mizuno man.

A week and a half later, my thirty-third home run broke the rookie record for a catcher, set by Matt Nokes of the Tigers in 1987. A week after
that
, my 107th RBI, on a double against the Giants’ John Burkett, broke the Dodgers’ rookie record.

The world seemed to be mine for the taking. Dan Lozano believes that, maybe in a James Dean kind of way, people were somehow attracted to my anger and my attitude of not giving a shit about anything but baseball. Almost in spite of myself, life just kept getting better. After the
Sports Illustrated
piece, I shot a commercial for ESPN—the only ballplayer they used that year, I was told. It was taped at Blair Field in Long Beach, and they had me steal home, which asked a lot of the imagination. The commercial showed my grandmother—not my real one—watching on TV and cheering me on. They paid me something like fifteen grand.

But the topper came with the final game of the season, Fan Appreciation Day. It was the last of four against San Francisco, which arrived in town trailing the Braves by one game in the NL West. The Giants beat us the first three, which gave them 103 victories, but the only thing that mattered to them was winning one more than Atlanta; it was the last season of only two divisions in each league, with no wildcards, which meant that you had to win your division to play in the postseason.

Bonds claimed his third MVP award that year, and the Giants had a lot
more going for them than just him. Matt Williams had a big season, too, and their rotation included a couple of twenty-plus-game winners in Burkett and Billy Swift. Rod Beck was a tremendous closer, but the guy in their bullpen who frightened me was Mike Jackson. He was a menacing-looking dude, with the bill of his cap creased down over his eyes to the point that it looked like he couldn’t see, and he had an intimidating motion that came from way the hell over on the right side. He was also a little bit unpredictable, which is what makes a pitcher scary. I’d go so far as to say that Mike Jackson was the only guy I ever faced who scared the shit out of me. I actually fared okay against him—four for nine, with just a couple of strikeouts—but it didn’t feel like it. On one of my hits, I broke my bat in three places. When I came up against him, my objective was not to lose my face. Of course, I found out later that he was the world’s nicest guy.

Fortunately, when I stood in against him in the sixth inning of the season’s 162nd game and lined out to left, we were already up 6–1. The Giants needed to win to keep pace with the Braves, who were sweeping Colorado, and we needed to win to finish the year at .500. Considering that we’d lost ninety-nine games in 1992, that would mean a lot to the organization. Fred Claire had made a rare appearance in the clubhouse that day to give us what sounded like a World Series pep talk. It must have worked. The Giants started a rookie, Salomon Torres, and we knocked him out in the fourth inning. I homered in the fifth against Dave Burba, and when I came to bat against Dave Righetti in the eighth, I was caught off guard by a standing ovation.

I still have the video of that. It includes the home run I crushed to right-center, my thirty-fifth of the season—the most any Dodger had hit since Duke Snider in 1957; more, incredibly to me, than even Steve Garvey, Frank Howard, or Pedro Guerrero. The crowd kept at it until I came out of the dugout for a curtain call. I felt like John, Paul, George, and Ringo, all bundled up in blue and white. After I trotted to home plate to catch the ninth inning, Tommy sent out Carlos Hernandez to take my place so the fans could give me
another
standing ovation. When I watch that tape, even now, I get the chills. We won 12–1 behind Kevin Gross, broke even on the season, and had the satisfaction of knocking a great team out of the playoffs.

Most of the crowd stayed after the game because they were giving away a car. Our PR guy told me to get out there: Karros and I were going to raffle off our game shirts. I grabbed the microphone and said, first, that Eric and I were all set to party that night, and then that whoever holds this number will win a signed jersey from last season’s Rookie of the Year, Eric Karros.
The place went wild. Then Eric took the mike and said, “And the next winner will get a signed jersey from
this year’s
Rookie of the Year, Mike Piazza!”

Of course, that hadn’t been announced yet, which made it even cooler. In all my time with the Dodgers, that may have been my greatest moment. Throughout the last month or so of the season, I’d felt a warm wave of fan support and affection, and that was the day it all washed over me.

Right about then, I loved L.A.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I was able to publicly thank Roy Campanella when the Rookie of the Year award was announced in late October. The Dodgers were in Taiwan at the time, playing a series of exhibition games, and Maryann Hudson of the
Los Angeles Times
reached me with the news that it had been a unanimous vote. While acknowledging Campy, I also expressed my appreciation for Eric and the rest of my teammates, trying to play nice and do all the right things for a change.

But I couldn’t finish the deal. For reasons I don’t recall—apathy, irreverence, ignorance?—I neglected to show up for the Baseball Writers’ dinner where they handed out the actual awards. In the years ahead, when I came up short for various honors that I thought I might have deserved, I often wondered if it had anything to do with blowing off that banquet.

In the start of a private tradition, I also won the Silver Slugger award as the best hitter at my position. What made me proudest, though, was catching 141 games as a rookie and throwing out fifty-eight runners trying to steal—the most in the major leagues and in Dodger history. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I should have won a Gold Glove that year (instead of Kirt Manwaring of the Giants), but Karros was kind enough to say it for me.