Long Shot (3 page)

That’s
when they became inseparable, as long as the Dodgers were in town. After a game at the Vet, my dad and Tommy would meet back up—along with a couple of cars full of Tommy’s players and coaches—at the Marchwood Tavern, the Italian restaurant and bar that the Lasorda brothers opened up in Exton. For whatever reason, my father just couldn’t get enough baseball—never could—and Tommy was his connection to it, the only guy he could truly and completely share his passion with.

Until I came along.

CHAPTER TWO

Little League was available when a kid turned eight, and to get me good and ready for it, my dad set up a mattress against the basement wall so I could fire baseballs at it from my knees. He also requisitioned a few highway cones for me to use as batting tees. I’d take a mighty rip and smack the ball into the mattress.

But that was just the opening act. The batting cage went up piece by piece, in the corner of the backyard, beginning when I was eleven.

First, it was merely a home plate underneath some netting draped around poles that my dad set in concrete. He was the pitcher. But he worked long hours and wasn’t the least bit comfortable with the thought of me not hitting all that time, so he bought a JUGS machine with an automatic feeder. (Ironically, I would later do endorsements for JUGS.) Of course, the machine needed protection from the weather, so he installed a little shed over it. Then a roof over the whole shebang, like a carport. Then metal sheeting on the sides. After a while, the batting cage had morphed into a monstrosity so big and unsightly that a zoning inspector came by and asked my father what the hell that thing was. Dad said, “It’s my son’s ticket to the big leagues.”

He even hooked up lights, and I’d be out there still hitting late at night. It’s amazing that the neighbors never complained. They probably noticed that I took a lot of pride in the groundskeeping. I had a little rotor mower and tried to stripe the grass between the pitching machine and the plate, like the big leagues. I’d rake in sand around the plate. In the winter, I shoveled the snow out of there. The batting area would still be all messy and slimy, so we covered it with plywood. Other than that, the cold was not a problem. We wrapped my bat—an aluminum Bombat, made in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania—with insulation tape so it wouldn’t sting my hands. (I always wore gloves, anyway, after reading that Ted Williams used to hit
until his hands bled.) In the morning, I’d set the baseballs next to the stove in our rec room, and later on my mom would light the fire in time to have them all warmed up when I got home from school. Eventually we put a little portable heater out by the cage. It was crazy.

After school, I’d have some apple Fig Newtons—then they came out with strawberry—and a glass of milk, watch
Inspector Gadget
or
Gilligan’s Island
reruns, then go hit for a few hours. Vince would be on his Stingray, delivering the
Evening Phoenix
, and I’d just whale away in my own little world. I rigged the feeder so that the pitches came out every six seconds. Mainly, I hit fastballs, but now and then one would act like a little bit of a knuckleball. One time I got hit in the nose. Never knew what happened. It fucking hurt.

Home plate was only a few feet from the dirt road that separated a cornfield from our lot on South Spring Lane. Invariably, an older guy named Blaine Huey would walk past on his way to Pickering Creek Reservoir (“the Res”), where everybody else hung out—there were docks, rafts, rope swings, bonfires, the whole bit—while I was whacking eighty-mile-an-hour fastballs into a net. Blaine would glance over at me, shake his head, and mutter something like “Look at this guy. Thinks he’s gonna be a big baseball star.”

Thunk. Dink. Thunk. Dink. Thunk. Dink. You could hear it all the way down the street. He was out there a lot. Too much. I pretty much thought he was nuts. What I always said about Mike was, “Do you think he’s gonna make it, really?” But I wasn’t the only one who said that, because, who makes it, really?

—Blaine Huey, Phoenixville, Pennsylvania

The results of all that hitting were pretty obvious. Every spring, I’d notice that I was driving the ball a little harder, which only drove
me
a little harder. It became an addiction—not just hitting, but
power
hitting. From the very beginning, the major leaguers I took after were always the big, strong guys. Andre Dawson. Dave Parker. Bob Horner.

And of course, Michael Jack Schmidt, the greatest player in the history of the Philadelphia Phillies.

It happened that Schmidt hit two home runs in the first game I ever attended, sitting in the upper deck of Veterans Stadium in 1975. The next year is when my dad got season tickets on the third-base line, next to the Herr’s potato chips people (who, to my delight, treated us frequently to the latest flavors, like sour cream), and I had my picture taken with number
twenty himself—this was when he had his big, poofy seventies perm—on Fan Appreciation Day.

We were good Phillies fans. My dad would stomp his feet and I’d keep my eyes trained on Schmidt, checking out his mannerisms, his facial expressions—which seldom changed—and his solemn, efficient approach to the game. Years later, when I was with the Mets, one of our coaches, John Stearns, said to me, “You know, Schmidt always had the worst body language. He always looked like he just ate a lemon.” There was a distinct impression that he wasn’t having much fun out there. It’s hard to say why that appealed to me, but it did.

For some mysterious reason, though, Schmidt had a deeply contentious relationship with the fans of Philadelphia. This was in spite of the fact that he was the best all-around third baseman the game has ever seen. To the malcontents at the Vet, it apparently didn’t matter much that he won a Gold Glove just about every year, ten in all, the most of any third baseman in National League history; or that he led the league in home runs a record eight times (and from 1974 to 1986, virtually the entire period I regularly attended Phillies games, topped all of baseball
by nearly a hundred
); or that he picked up three Most Valuable Player awards; or that he carried the Phillies to the first world championship (MVP in both the regular season and World Series) in all their ninety-eight years. I couldn’t begin to tell you what the people wanted from the guy. They absolutely booed the hell out of him; practically crucified him if he happened to strike out. I thought the fans were dead wrong, and their behavior provided a basis for my point of view on the player-fan relationship. For a long time—most of my career, I’d have to say—I carried a chip on Schmidt’s behalf.

I tried, again and again, to get my dad to explain to me, if he could, why Philadelphians were so hard on Schmitty—much harder than they were on Larry Bowa, Greg Luzinski, or anybody else—but there was no acceptable explanation. Maybe the body language had something to do with it. Maybe the fans resented the fact that he somehow made the game look easy, as so many great players do. They called him Captain Cool, and it wasn’t really meant as a compliment. Schmidt was simply the city’s whipping boy, and it made me admire him all the more. I respected the fact that he wasn’t another rah-rah, goody-goody kind of guy; that he’d take all the shit, convert it to energy, and shut everybody up with a three-run homer. In fact, I loved that. And I loved Michael Jack. I idolized him. I liked his game, his swagger, and especially his controlled aggression. I even liked his gold chains and open-necked shirts. They reminded me of my dad.

If you watched him as closely as I did, you could sense that there was a lot of pent-up tension inside Schmitty, a lot of pressure that he was dealing with, all of which seemed to come gushing out when he broke down at the start of his retirement speech. Later, in an interview on Tim McCarver’s television show, he said, poignantly I thought, that, “[l]ooking back, I probably would have given up some of my accomplishments to have been more appreciated by the fans in Philadelphia . . . . I would have given anything to be the hero to the fans in Philadelphia, and they had no idea how hard I was working to be that guy.”

Somehow, though, I think I had an idea. I felt like I understood Mike Schmidt.

• • •

In the car, on the way to a Phillies game, we’d snack on Tastykakes, and when the box was empty, my father would roll it up like a carpet, hand it to me, and say, “Here, squeeze this for a while.” It was to strengthen my hands and wrists. For hitting.

When I was ready to take it up a notch, he bought me a cheap set of hand grippers at a local store. I couldn’t put them down. Every night, when the light in my room went off, my mom would hear the incessant
squeak, squeak, squeak
coming from the bed. I’d squeeze those grippers literally a thousand times before I went to sleep. I squeezed them watching TV. I squeezed them in the car. I squeezed them when I was supposed to be doing homework. I was an OCD guy—obsessive-compulsive disorder—and I suppose that was a prime example.

After I wore out the store-bought grippers, I saw some advertised in a muscle magazine—probably
MuscleMag
or Joe Weider’s
Muscle & Fitness
magazine, which I looked at on a regular basis—and sent off for the real McCoys from IronMind Enterprises. The “Captains of Crush,” they were called. There were four levels, and only a handful of guys in the world had ever squeezed the number-one level. It was like a tire spring. I was one of the few around who could close even the number-three. On the number-twos, I’d put a coin in between the handles and hold it there as long as I could. After a while, I could move the number-one an inch or two. I was religious about those things. They don’t do you much good unless you are.

Meanwhile, my dad had read in
Life
magazine about Ted Williams devising an exercise for his hands and forearms by attaching the head of a sledgehammer—or any weight, for that matter—to the end of a short rope, which was fastened to a stick, and raising and lowering it by rolling the stick in his hands. So I did that. Then, in one of my muscle magazines, I noticed
an article about a guy with a handlebar mustache who did various other drills with a sledgehammer. I started out with a ten-pound sledgehammer and then moved up to a twelve-pounder. Eventually I could hold the sledgehammer straight out in front of me, then cock my wrists to raise the head and bring it down to my face in an arc. For a gag, I’d kiss it, then take it back the other way to the horizontal position. I’d do the same thing with two sledgehammers, one in each hand, dropping them slowly to the tip of my nose. And of course, a couple hundred times a day, I’d swing one like a bat.

There weren’t many progressive ideas that my father was reluctant to try out. That was just his style. Dad, for instance, was into nutrition and eating healthy stuff long before it all became the fashion. He would have been the first guy in line at Whole Foods. Even now, he still eats wheatgrass—mixes it and freezes it in a plastic bag. His thing was always “If you want to be strong like a horse, you gotta eat like a horse.” Oats, whole wheat, wheat kernels, grains; he’s really a maniac about that sort of thing. Mom wasn’t allowed to buy us Cap’n Crunch. The most sugary cereal we could have was raisin bran. And forget about candy. If we were caught with candy, it was grounds for a beating.

My brothers seemed to miss the sweets and junk food more than I did, though. They tried their best to resist the regimen that Dad imposed. None of them would eat oatmeal; but I did. Pepperidge Farm was the only whole-wheat bread back then, and I hated it because it was like chewing an oven mitt; but I ate it. I was with the program all the way.

• • •

My first team in the Phoenixville Little League was the A’s, and my first official coach a local legend named Abdul Ford-Bey. He was a good baseball guy, but definitely from a different era.

I’m not sure that Abdul’s drill-sergeant techniques would be politically acceptable today. There was a night game, for instance, in which we didn’t play very well, and afterward he made us run six or eight laps around the whole minor-league field at Vic Marosek Park (named for one of Vince’s coaches). Another time, he made us circle the bases for so long that I passed out. I can still picture the stars in my eyes before I took my leave. When they pulled me over into the shade to get me some water, Abdul was so scared he was shaking.

Abdul was sort of a guru-philosopher type, and he conferred upon us some peculiar nicknames. I was Koya, for reasons I never understood. There was another kid named Dave Jones—a pretty good player—whom he called Robot. One day, in practice, Robot’s pitching, I’m playing third, and I’m
daydreaming like little kids tend to do. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Robot step off the mound and fire a rocket right at me. I turn at the last instant and am able to catch the ball, but if I hadn’t seen it, it surely would have conked me in the head. I don’t know whether Abdul told Robot to do that, but he got a good chuckle out of it. That scene is seared in my memory.

Not for a second, though, did I ever want to be anywhere else. I remember going up to the plate for the first time, and how excited I was to hear the PA announcer call my name, in his big, booming voice: “Now batting for the A’s, number so-and-so . . . MIKE PIZ!” That’s what he called me. After he realized he’d left out a few letters, it became, “Mike Pie-AY-za!”

I loved everything about Little League. I loved Opening Day, when everybody’d be in their new uniforms, looking great, and then the Tigers and Mets would play the first game—the Mets in yellow and the Tigers in maroon. I loved the free pretzels (mine with ketchup) after the games. I loved the trains that tooted their whistles as they rolled by, dramatically slow, on the tracks behind the park; all the kids would put pennies on the rails, and after the caboose had passed and we ran down to pick them up, they’d be perfectly flat. And I loved all the special days, like the time we hosted some kind of all-star game and one of the kids on the other team was Brad Kalas, a son of Harry Kalas, the great announcer for the Phillies, and Harry actually climbed up into our little PA booth and called an inning or so.