Long Shot (32 page)

That effectively ended my relationship with the Dodgers, and it strained my relationship with Tommy at the same time. To make it worse, it was impossible to untangle my relationship with Tommy from my relationship with my dad. From a personal perspective,
that
was the fallout from the trade. Almost a decade and a half later, I still love Tommy and I’m pretty sure he feels the same way about me; but the fact is, although we talk and see each other now and then, we haven’t been as close as we should be since I left the Dodgers. Time has mended our feelings somewhat, but I think, deep down, the whole episode still hurts all three of us. I often wonder how different things might have been between Tommy and me if I hadn’t been traded.

Ironically, I’d barely slipped into my black and teal before rumors started up that the Dodgers would re-sign me as a free agent after the season. A
month later, when Fred was fired, Tommy took over as interim GM and made some efforts to get me back before the July 31 deadline with another trade. As far as I was concerned, though, that door was closed. I had no desire to return to the Dodgers. It just wouldn’t have been the same.

Bill Russell was canned on the same day as Claire, who, fighting his instincts to quit, had stuck around to help with the messy transition. In his book,
My 30 Years in Dodger Blue
, Fred said, “My reaction to the trade cost me my position with the Dodgers. The trade cost the Dodgers much more: their franchise player, and, more importantly over the long run, their credibility . . . . On May 15, the new owners unleashed a tsunami from which the Dodgers have yet to recover.”

Whack by whack, Fox was severing all bonds to the old Dodger culture—with the exception, of course, of Tommy, which would have been disastrous for public relations. Like Fred, Russell, too, had been with the organization for thirty years. Mickey Hatcher and Mike Scioscia were axed. Instructors, scouts, coaches—Eddie Bane, Gary Sutherland, Dino Ebel, Ron Roenicke—nobody was sacred. A week after he took over from Fred, Tommy fired two of my favorites, Mark Cresse and Reggie Smith.

Before the summer was out, the general manager’s job had been turned over to Kevin Malone. He dealt Johnson and Bonilla, waived Barrios, and chose not to pick up the option on Eisenreich, leaving Sheffield as the only player from the trade who lasted into the next season. The talent base was deteriorating, and the pressure was on Malone to make his mark. By December, Kevin Brown, a thirty-four-year-old ace, was the last big-time free agent available. The Dodgers signed him for seven years and $105 million—exactly the money and term that I’d asked for.

When I heard about the Kevin Brown contract, the first thing I thought of was my press conference in St. Louis when I joined the Marlins. Somebody had asked me if I thought signability had anything to do with the Dodgers trading me. I said no. A few of the media guys had gone, “Yeah, right.” Well, the signing of Brown reinforced my original reaction: it wasn’t the money that made them deal me away; it was all about the relationships—Danny and Sam, Fox and the Marlins, the Dodgers and me. As if to prove the point, for the next four years the Dodgers piled on the payroll. They signed Sheffield, Todd Hundley, Jeff Shaw, Carlos Perez, Shawn Green, Marquis Grissom . . . . From 1997 (my last full season in Los Angeles) to 1999, the club increased the player budget by 58 percent; from 1997 to 2000, the bump was 96 percent; from 1997 to 2001, it was 127 percent, all the way from $48 million to $109 million.

Meanwhile, through friends like Karros and Bones Dickinson, I was kept apprised of all the grassroots ways in which life with the Dodgers had become different. When Sheffield refused to cut his goatee, they changed the facial-hair policy that I’d been skirting for so long. They allowed players to wear jeans on the road. To appease Kevin Brown, they even fixed the showers at Dodgertown. We all understood those showers. When the water pressure dropped, they’d get intensely hot; so the players simply stepped aside for a moment or two. The first time it happened to Brown—I don’t know, maybe it was the second—he grabbed a bat and beat the shit out of the showerhead. After all those years, the team brought in plumbers to fix the water pressure problem.

I held on to my condo in Manhattan Beach, and that winter I found some solace in reading the local year-end reviews of what the Fox people had done to the Dodgers. One in particular helped me, perhaps, to move on. Or at least made me smile. It was part of a column in the
Times
by Bill Plaschke, who, in my perception, had always seemed to operate with an agenda when it came to matters about me, as if he preferred that I fall on my face. This time, though, with more than half a season to look back on what he had wished for, presumably, he wrote, “The difference between this trade and one of Carey’s hot projects—the movie ‘Titanic’—was that the movie eventually sailed . . . . The Piazza trade will be forever viewed as concrete shoes.”

Ultimately, I felt like I came out on the winning side of the titanic trade. It sure didn’t hit me that way in the moment; but like they say, a baseball deal can be properly judged only over time.

I’d say that thirteen years is long enough. In 2011, when the Dodgers were wallowing around in the marital and financial mess surrounding Frank and Jamie McCourt—who had bought the club from Fox in 2004—Chris Dufresne wrote this in a lengthy
Times
story about the team’s slow, sad surrender of the city: “The Dodgers’ reign lasted, unchecked, for about 40 years. The headstone would read 1958–1998 . . . .

“You can town-track the sea change, Dodgers to Lakers, to a period between March 1998 and June 1999. It began with Peter O’Malley selling ownership to Fox, much more interested in Murdoch Green than Dodger Blue. News Corp. then made the cataclysmic misjudgment, in the spring of 1998, of thinking it could trade Mike Piazza and not pay a price for it.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Nothing against the Marlins. I liked Miami well enough that I’ve made my home there. The franchise itself is sharp enough to have won two world championships in the first eleven years of its existence. The one in 1997, the year before I arrived, came in only its fifth season. It was pretty remarkable. In certain ways, Florida was an admirable organization.

But I was miserable.

It was a bad time for me and the ball club both. My pride was smarting and my head was spinning. And, although it was only mid-May, it seemed to me that the Marlins had practically packed it in. The first time I ventured into their clubhouse, in St. Louis, it felt like a morgue. I was trying to put on a good face and be all gung-ho, like “Hey, guys, let’s go, let’s
go
,” but the atmosphere sobered me up in a hurry. It was quiet, lifeless,
depressing
. Cliff Floyd was the only guy I recognized. I went up to Cliff and said hello, and that was about as lively as it got.

Right off, Jim Leyland, the manager, called me into his office and said, “Mike, I’ve got to be honest with you. We don’t know how long you’ll be here. We’re talking about a possible deal. But let me tell you something: There’s no doubt in my mind that you’re going to get your money. You’ve earned it, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. I’ll do the best I can to keep you in shape.” I took that to mean I probably wouldn’t be playing much, if at all, because, for one thing, he wasn’t going to disrupt his lineup for a temp who wouldn’t be there long enough to do laundry, and for another, the Marlins didn’t want me getting hurt while they were trying to trade me.

So I was sitting in the dugout in my turf shoes when Mark McGwire caught a pitch from Livan Hernandez and launched it against the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
sign in center field. They measured it at 545 feet, which was almost unimaginable to me, because I knew how special it felt to hit one 445. A few innings later, I looked up at the scoreboard and happened to see that
that Expos and Dodgers were getting started in Los Angeles. That’s when it really sunk in that, wait a minute, hold the phone, I’ve been
traded.
. . . What the hell just happened?

As the weird reality swept me up, I slipped into a narcissistic haze, more or less, so caught up in my own situation that it felt like I was the epicenter of the universe. In my efforts to maintain a positive spin, I’d told myself that it would be nice to move into our family house in Boynton Beach, on a golf course and close to the ocean, and let Zeile stay there for as long as we remained with the Marlins. I’d told the press that we had golf clubs, Jet Skis, and no worries. Half of me even
believed
it . . . until I saw that the Dodgers were batting in the bottom of the first without me. I didn’t snap out of it until, in the top of the seventh of the game at hand, Dave Berg was on first, Craig Counsell was on third, Hernandez was due up with us trailing 4–3, and from the end of the dugout I heard, “Piazza!”

Shit. I wasn’t even wearing a cup. Thankfully, Todd Stottlemyre gave me a first-pitch slider and I lined it to center field for a sacrifice fly that tied the game. We lost it in the bottom of the inning on a home run by Brian Jordan.

The next day, Sunday, I started against Kent Mercker, went one for five, and we got hammered. On Monday—it was an odd four-game series—McGwire amazed me with another ridiculous blast and I did something even more incredible: hit a triple. We actually won. Afterward, headed home to Miami, we walked onto the bus for the airport and one of my young teammates got up to give me his seat. I didn’t know whether to feel flattered or old.

A couple of days later, though, after two losses to the Diamondbacks, I had no trouble at all figuring out how to feel about my new life. In the second one, a day game, it was blistering hot and Amaury Telemaco, whom I was always leery of, fired a ball behind my back. Then I broke my bat on a grounder between first base and the pitcher’s mound and wanted
so badl
y to run him over at the bag, but he took a sharp left turn as soon as he touched it. I stranded four runners that day and let one in when I threw the ball into left field as Devon White stole third. Do you know what’s worse for a ballplayer than having a miserable game? When nobody cares. It was probably my self-absorption speaking, but it seemed like I was the only guy in town with any feelings whatsoever about how we played.

That was my low point. That was when humiliation overtook me. I slumped back in the dugout thinking, what am I doing here?

My only solace was the prospect that it wouldn’t be for long—with one caveat. My dad was thinking that he might get involved with the group
negotiating to buy the Marlins from Huizenga. The Marlins’ president, Don Smiley, was heading up that party, and if my father purchased an interest in the team, it was of course unlikely that I’d be traded. But that would probably take months to play out, and Dombrowski wasn’t waiting around.

Meanwhile, Dan Lozano was staying with me and Zeile in Boynton Beach, ready for anything. We had no idea what was next or when it would come. The situation was complicated by the fact that I’d be eligible for free agency at the end of the season. Some of the teams asking about me were thinking only of the current pennant race, but others didn’t want to do a deal unless they could sign me for a few more years. Then there were teams like the Angels, who said they weren’t in a position to trade but would go after me in the free-agent market.

Baltimore was a player, but, as I understood it, didn’t want to give up a young third baseman named Ryan Minor. The Rockies were talking. The Red Sox were very involved but preferred not to trade a lot of talent if they were going to have to pay me a pile of money after the season. I would have been interested in going to the Yankees, but they were in good shape, catching-wise, with Jorge Posada. On WFAN in New York, Mike and the Mad Dog (Mike Francesa and Christopher Russo) were campaigning for the Mets to trade for me, but I wasn’t seeing it. Fred Wilpon, one of the Mets’ co-owners along with Nelson Doubleday, went on their show and said, nah, the club was going to stand pat. Then Doubleday went on and said, oh yeah, the Mets would love to have me. What was up with
that
? All the while, Steve Phillips, their general manager, was telling the media that if he were to part with prospects, he’d do it to fill a position not already equipped with his leading power hitter (Todd Hundley had hit thirty homers in 1997). My guess was the Cubs, who seemed to be in the picture all along.

On Friday, May 22, exactly a week after the Dodgers had officially traded me to Florida, Danny was on the phone all morning at my place in Boynton Beach. Before I stepped into the shower, he hung up and told me, yep, it looked like I was going to Chicago.

When I stepped
out
of the shower, I walked into a brand-new world. Danny had been on the phone again, and then again. I stood there dripping, half dazed by the news. It was the Mets.

I said, “The
Mets
? Get out of here! Don’t they have Todd Hundley?”

I hadn’t realized that Hundley was hurt. The Mets needed a catcher, the sooner the better, and they needed some power. It was all good. It was fantastic, in fact. But I hadn’t heard it from the Marlins.

When I got to the stadium, Leyland was there to intercept me. The deal
had already been announced: me for Preston Wilson, a promising young outfielder; and two highly rated pitching prospects, Ed Yarnall and Geoff Goetz. I did an impromptu press conference, and Danny, who had come to the park with me, worked his own session. He’d been talking to reporters in the tunnel when somebody told him to just come on into the clubhouse and do it there. The papers took note of that, making the point that we’d reached the age of agents in the clubhouse. That was one way of looking at it. Another was that we’d reached the age of all-star catchers being traded twice within eight days of May.

When they made the trade, John Franco and I were like little kids, like twelve-year-olds trading our baseball cards. We’re going, “We got Piazza!”

—Al Leiter, teammate

The Mets were playing at home on Saturday, a four o’clock game against the Milwaukee Brewers. I planned on making it, and after a mostly sleepless night I got to the West Palm Beach airport in time for a mid-morning flight. The trouble was, my flight was actually leaving out of Fort Lauderdale. I caught a later one, and the guy I sat next to on the plane told me all about this new catcher the Mets had traded for.