Long Shot (27 page)

• • •

When we lined up before the first playoff game, most of us were wishing that we had, indeed, won the damn division and were looking across the field at the Cardinals (who, incidentally, swept the Padres). The Braves’
reserves
included the likes of David Justice, Terry Pendleton, Andruw Jones, and Luis Polonia. As they were being announced, Mondesi nudged Karros and whispered, “Holy shit, they’ve got two teams!”

They also had a nice late-season pickup in Denny Neagle, one of the league’s best left-handed pitchers. It seemed like we were always getting outmaneuvered in the way of ad hoc acquisitions. It seemed, also, that our roster was perpetually young, which was not really the perfect prescription for a postseason matchup with Atlanta. As much as we fought the feeling, there was no denying a certain sense that we were doomed in that series.

Even now, I can offer no other explanation for game one. Ramon pitched well, and of course John Smoltz pitched well for the Braves. It was 2–2 in the bottom of the eighth inning when I came to bat with two outs and nobody on. I squared the ball pretty well to right field—well enough to get it over the fence at Dodger Stadium. I’d hit enough home runs over that fence to know what one felt like, and
that
was a home run. Except that Jermaine Dye backed up, reached up, and, to my astonishment, caught the damn thing.

To this day, I don’t know how that ball stayed in the park. And I wasn’t the only one. Guys said it to me, and they said it to the
Los Angeles Times
.

Bobby Cox: “I thought Piazza’s ball was out. Way out.”

Smoltz: “I thought it was gone. It was one of the worst sliders I’d thrown all year.”

Tim Wallach: “What happened to Mike’s ball? I don’t understand it . . . . It was weird.”

What was even weirder was that, leading off the tenth inning, Javy Lopez, Atlanta’s catcher, hit a ball to right-center that
didn’t
look like it was going out. And, of course, it did.

You can imagine how disheartening it was to come off a game like that and have to face Maddux in the next one. Valdez actually outpitched him into the seventh, but then Fred McGriff and Dye hit home runs and they beat us, 3–2. The last game was less suspenseful. Nomo wasn’t at his best, and Glavine was.

And so, we had once again fallen short. Everybody said so. We had five Rookies of the Year on our club; we were
supposed
to win. Making the playoffs two years in a row wasn’t good enough. Raising our winning percentage for the fourth consecutive year wasn’t good enough. After losing to the Braves, we heard the same refrain that we had heard before and would hear again, over and over: the Dodgers were chronic underachievers. Eric and I talked about it all the time because it drove us crazy. If having a bunch of Rookies of the Year means you’re supposed to win in the postseason, then I guess we were supposed to win in the postseason. But it also means you’ve got a young, inexperienced team.

After the season, I found out what it was like to play on a club that
wasn’t
young. MLB put together an all-star team for an eight-game series in Japan. Alex Rodriguez was still a young guy, but we also had Cal Ripken Jr., Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield, Ivan Rodriguez, Andres Galarraga, Juan Gonzalez, John Franco, Jeff Brantley, and Sammy Sosa. And Nomo, which was interesting. Now,
that
team was supposed to win. Sure enough, we kicked some ass.

• • •

On the first Monday of 1997, six months after Tommy stepped down as manager, Peter O’Malley announced that he would be selling the Dodgers. It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of that development.

No matter how our personal circumstances had played out, those of us who were Dodgers realized that we were part of a special organization. Tommy hammered that home in his inimitable way, but Peter was the man who made it so. He was the one who set the tone by serving ice cream to club employees every time we took over first place or widened our lead, by entertaining us in Dodgertown with barbecues and hay rides and a huge St.
Patrick’s Day party and even a visit from Santa Claus, by allowing family members to fly free on the team plane anywhere we went, by actually listening to our suggestions about things like flight food and room arrangements, and, most important, by maintaining his dignity at every turn. Not only were the Dodgers considered a family, but they were, in fact, the last entirely family-owned team in the game.

Ultimately, that was the reason O’Malley felt compelled to sell. As he said at his press conference, “Professional sports today is as high-risk as the oil business. You need a broader base than an individual family to carry you through the storm.” In the attempt to broaden his base, Peter had wanted to build a football stadium at Chavez Ravine and lure the NFL back to Los Angeles; but the city opted to use the Coliseum for that purpose. I think that took a toll on him, and so did baseball’s latest collective bargaining agreement, which had been signed in November.

The new collective bargaining agreement included a luxury tax imposed on the well-heeled teams, to be distributed among those in smaller markets. It wasn’t just the principle of revenue sharing that bothered O’Malley, but the peculiar position it put him in. He could have been obligated to cut a check to the Anaheim Angels, who competed against him for the same market. It would have amounted to the O’Malley family handing out money to the Disney corporation, which was in the process of taking over the Angels. That was hard to swallow. At the same time, however, the five-year agreement gave baseball some much-needed stability, which made it a good time to sell.

In order to soften the shock of the sudden announcement, the press conference conveyed the message that everything would continue on, business as usual. We knew differently, of course. There’d be no more Santa Claus in Dodgertown, and it was not likely that I’d see the new owner at Mass every Sunday, as I did O’Malley.

As if to prove their point, though, the Dodgers did some very important business just two days later. They signed Eric Karros to a four-year, $20 million contract, making him the club’s highest-paid player. Eric was due to become a free agent after the 1997 season, a year before I was. But my contract had expired, as well, and by signing Eric first, Fred Claire and Sam Fernandez appeared to be doing one of two things: declaring him as the top priority or setting some kind of precedent for me. Either way, I didn’t find it warm or particularly fuzzy.

I’d asked for a four- to six-year deal at $10–13 million a year, which was somewhere in the range of what Albert Belle had just received from
the White Sox; probably a smidgen less. I figured the organization would be motivated to dodge arbitration—I had two more years of it—and, at the same time, tie me up through my early seasons of free agency. It made perfect sense to me. Nevertheless, Eric’s contract, whether calculated to do so or not, made my request look a little out of whack, if not outrageous. The Dodgers were aiming to give me four years at about $30 million, total, which seemed pretty damn generous by comparison. Those numbers also fell in line with the $6,665,000 for which the Rangers signed Ivan Rodriguez about ten days after Eric’s deal was done, avoiding arbitration by giving Pudge the biggest one-year contract in history and more money than a catcher had ever made in a season. Even so, Dan Lozano and I had our own calculated notions of what I had coming to me, and we weren’t daunted by any of that.

When it became painfully obvious that our attempts at a long-term deal were going nowhere, and since I’d hit more home runs and driven in more runs over my first four years than any other catcher, ever, we decided to go for a record arbitration bid. Nobody had ever requested more than $6.5 million—Jack McDowell in 1994—but we hinted to reporters that we’d be shooting for around $8 million, which was roughly Ken Griffey Junior money. The way baseball arbitration works is that the player will submit his figure and the team will submit its own, and rather than arrive at a number in between, the arbitrator must choose one or the other. We hoped that by throwing eight million out there, the Dodgers would be nervous enough to nudge their offer a little higher. I truly didn’t want to go through the arbitration process, but we had arrived at that point and we had a game plan in place. When we submitted the official asking price, we set it at $7,650,000. It wasn’t the $8 million we’d floated to the press, but it was still a record arbitration figure, and it was enough to get the club off its duff.

In no time at all, we’d settled for two years and $15 million. Sam and Fred were willing to go to three years for a little less money per season, but that third year would be my first crack at free agency. I didn’t see any reason to sell it out for a salary I was sure I could beat, by a lot, when the time came.

In the end, the deal left the Dodgers at significant risk of losing me after my sixth season. Needless to say, they knew that. Or at least they
should
have.

Then again, ownership of the club would soon be changing. Whose problem was it, really?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Early in spring training of 1997, Bob Nightengale, the Dodgers’ beat writer for the
Los Angeles Times
, approached me to ask about the rumors. Apparently, it was unimaginable that a sixty-second-round draft choice—and a courtesy pick, at that—could legitimately hit .326 and average a hundred RBIs over his first four seasons of Major League Baseball. Apparently, it was all but impossible for a guy who wasn’t a particularly gifted athlete—couldn’t run, not especially graceful—to be strong, quick, and skillful enough to drive so many balls out of so many ballparks. Apparently, it was not plausible that the son of a prosperous businessman with friends in high places would actually put in the work required to make himself—at the rate I was going—the best-hitting catcher in the history of the game, according to the numbers.

Apparently, my career was a story that nobody cared to believe. Apparently, my success was the work of steroids.
Had
to be. Those were the rumors.

I didn’t mind that Nightengale asked the question. He was ahead of the curve on the steroids issue. In 1995, he’d written a story in which Randy Smith, the general manager of the Padres, estimated that 10 to 20 percent of major leaguers used steroids. Tony Gwynn was quoted saying, “It’s like the big secret we’re not supposed to talk about, but believe me, we wonder just like the rest of the people. I’m standing out there in the outfield when a guy comes up, and I’m thinking, ‘Hey, I wonder if this guy is on steroids.’ ” Bear in mind, too, that in 1996 the Orioles, Mariners, and A’s had all exceeded the previous single-season record for home runs, and more than twice as many players as ever before had hit forty—including Ken Caminiti and Mark McGwire, who reached fifty for the first time. Those two had not yet been implicated, but steroids had become part of the conversation. And in the course of that conversation, my name was being dropped. This was a chance to speak for myself.

“They’re saying, ‘Piazza is on steroids. Piazza is doing this, Piazza is doing
that,’ ” I told Nightengale. “People can say what they want, but I don’t use steroids. I’m not upset by the rumors, but I’ll be upset at myself if I ever start listening [to them] . . . . I think if people saw how much work I put into this game, those rumors would stop. And it’s not only training. It’s my diet.”

Nearly everything I put in my mouth was gauged for its muscle-building value. That was a habit I’d picked up from my dad and the Joe Weider magazines, way back when, and refined through my associations with trainers and nutritionists on the teams I’d played for and the gyms I’d lifted in. There were a lot of supplements available that didn’t have to be acquired illegally or through a prescription. You could walk into GNC and buy androstenedione, or “andro.” Or you could pick up the Monster Pak, with those intriguing before-and-after pictures. There was clearly a line that had to be crossed to get from the Monster Paks to the controlled substances classified as performance-enhancing drugs. For those, essentially, you needed a dealer. You had to seek out somebody to supply you with something you couldn’t get at the mall. You had to break the law. I was interested in power, but not prison.

The Monster Pak served my purpose. It included andro, creatine, and various types of amino acids. In the off-season, I’d eat eggs and whole wheat toast, take the stuff in the Monster Pak, and head to the gym to train. Or go to Bucky Dent’s camp in Boca Raton, Florida, and work out there. I do believe that supplements make a difference, but they have to be used in conjunction with serious training and a good diet. I always included protein shakes in the mix, as well—and still do. I never bought andro separately in a bottle, like the one that was spotted in McGwire’s locker in 1998, but frankly, I never made a point of
not
buying it that way. I just didn’t need to, because it was part of the Monster Pak. Andro was so accessible, and so common, that it never occurred to me to consider it cheating. When we heard about McGwire’s locker, players didn’t think of him as a cheater. But the media made such a commotion about it that the perceptions shifted. As a result, I felt compelled to phase andro out of my routine. Of course, it was later (in 2004) banned by the Food and Drug Administration and baseball as a “steroid precursor.”

I’d disagree with anyone who says that there was a steroid culture in the game—at least, there wasn’t one on the teams I knew—but there was a
drug
mentality, and it blurred the lines between what was acceptable and what wasn’t. With the Dodgers, and I’m sure with most teams, you pulled a hamstring and boom, there’s the Vioxx. We had a big trunk full of drugs for your aches and pains and inflammations. Charlie Strasser, the trainer, always said that if somebody really wanted to rip off the ball club, he shouldn’t go for
the bats or balls or gloves but for that big trunk with all the drugs in it. They had Vioxx, Indocin, Voltaren, you name it. As soon as you yanked a muscle, they’d bring you a cardboard sheet with the foil in the back and they’d punch out whatever pills you needed. But I should add that medications weren’t abused by the players. The trainer was the only one who could dip into the trunk. On the other hand, the stuff was there for us and we weren’t reluctant to take advantage of it. I used Vioxx because it was an intense anti-inflammatory and it made me feel good. When I’d caught for twenty-two straight days and could hardly drag myself out of bed to get to the ballpark, Vioxx picked me up. I’d sing, “It’s gonna be a Vioxx morning . . .” Vioxx was ultimately associated with heart-attack risk and was pulled from the market by the manufacturer.