Long Shot (46 page)

Anyway, as soon as Danny heard of the
Post
report, he phoned to say that he’d already received a call from Jay Horwitz of the Mets, informing him that the rumors were all over the airwaves and the club wanted to set up a conference call with those two (Danny and Horwitz), me, Steve Phillips, and Fred Wilpon.

When we got hooked up, Fred was supportive and very concerned, assuring me that all he cared about was my reputation and that the club would have my back. Knowing that there would be a lot of media waiting for me the next day at the Vet, somebody broached the idea of a press conference. I
didn’t want to do anything that formal. I respected and got along well with Dave Waldstein of the
Newark Star-Ledger
, so Danny suggested that we ask Dave to toss me a question about the rumors. We agreed, and Danny called Waldstein. We figured my comments would maybe show up in the notes sections of the papers and everybody would move on.

Tuesday evening, I made myself available outside our dugout during batting practice. The notebooks, cameras, microphones, and tape recorders came out, reporters leaned several-deep into a semicircle, and Waldstein asked me, flat out, if I was gay.

“I’m not gay,” I said. “I’m heterosexual. I can’t control what people think. I can say I’m heterosexual. I date women. That’s pretty much it. I don’t see a need to address it any further. I deny those rumors. I don’t know how they got started. I don’t know why. I don’t know where. But obviously, these things do not apply to me at all.

“I can’t control what people think. I can only say what I know and what the truth is, and that’s that I’m heterosexual and I date women. That’s it. End of story.”

Yeah, I
wish
that had been the end of the story. Even the story about the story became a story. Wallace Matthews wrote a column critical of the article by Neal Travis, who was a colleague at the
New York Post
, and the
Post
refused to print it. The next morning, Matthews—who in effect was defending me against “scurrilous” (as he called it) journalism—successfully submitted the column to a national website, and prefaced it with harsh remarks about the
Post.
That afternoon, the
Post
released a statement saying that it had terminated him. (Matthews contended that he had quit.) I’d had my differences with Wally, but this time I had to tip my cap to him for his guts and principles.

Meanwhile, my dad wanted to sue everybody in sight. I think—no, I’m
sure
—the incident hurt him more than it hurt me. He was distraught. I was more dumbfounded than anything. And awakened.

The experience changed me almost immediately. I’d never strayed far from my Catholicism, but at that point I reaffirmed my faith. I became more inward and philosophical, lower-key. I realized that the life of the playboy sports star wasn’t fulfilling me or even making me superficially happy. I was carrying on that way, in large part, because I felt like I should, and I felt like I should because everybody
else
seemed to think so. I’d allowed myself to be caught in a tangle of image and expectation. It had only made me excessively public and inherently vulnerable, an object of invasion, speculation, and innuendo.

What offended me most about the whole to-do was not the charge
of being homosexual. It was the general insinuation that, if I
were
gay, I wouldn’t want everybody knowing about it. That I’d perpetuate a lie in the interest of some personal agenda. I found it hugely insulting that people believed I’d go so far out of my way—living with Playmates, vacationing with actresses, showing up at nightclubs—to act out a lifestyle that would amount to a charade. If I was gay, I’d be gay all the way. I had plenty of faults and character flaws, but being fake was never one of them. I was proud of that.

I was proud, also, of the friends who came to my defense. A reporter from the
Post
got hold of Darlene Bernaola, and she told him, “Mike is definitely not gay. Our sex life was very, very healthy. Do you think a gay man would have my initials tattooed on his ankle?”

Vance Wilson, our backup catcher, was probably the most defiant guy on the ball club, saying that the rumors were an embarrassment to the New York media. Even opposing players offered support in their own ways. That Wednesday night, I singled and was standing at first base next to the Phillies’ first baseman, Travis Lee, when some of the fans—good Philadelphia boys—yelled out, “Travis, don’t get too close to his ass!” Travis said, “What the fuck is
wrong
with people?”

I couldn’t answer that. And other than Neal Travis, I couldn’t blame the situation on anybody in particular, at least not definitively. Certainly not Bobby. He had given an honest, seemingly innocuous answer that became embellished and distorted in the subsequent spinning. Then Travis repeated a rumor and fired the starting pistol. This all came at a time when blogs and online forums were just getting hot and a whole lot of silly stuff was going unchecked. The Internet was a cesspool of irresponsible rumormongering, and I was a convenient casualty. A common theme had me being spotted at gay bars in Manhattan’s Chelsea district.

It didn’t let up for a while. On one baseball website, the fashion was to post gay jokes under my name. They called it Piazza-posting. In the meantime, I received a call from a woman with Fox News in Los Angeles who said she wanted to sit down and let me tell my side of the story. My side of
what
? I didn’t have a side of anything. There was no story. There was nothing to tell.

As I might have expected, David Letterman absolutely crushed me. It may have had something to do with the fact that I’d snubbed his show years before in order to take my trip to Hawaii with Debbe Dunning; but more likely, the material was just too easy for him. He got me more than once, and even held up the tabloid headline that screamed
I’M NOT GAY
next to a
full-page picture of me. My brother Vince said I should go on the show and punch him in the face. I opted to laugh at the jokes.

Then there was the song called “Piazza, New York Catcher”—by a Scottish band, Belle and Sebastian—that made reference to the rumors (“Piazza, New York catcher, are you straight or are you gay?”) and was actually on the sound track of the movie
Juno.
All in all, the saga had a phenomenal shelf life. Further adding to it was the ironic coincidence that there is a well-known activist named Michael S. Piazza, who was the leader of the world’s largest gay-and-lesbian church and has authored several books on issues related to homosexuality. He lives in Dallas and, as far as I know, is not related to me.

At one point, it came out that the “local TV personality” to whom Travis had alluded was Sam Champion, a weatherman—he now does the weather for
Good Morning America
—whom I never met. There was also a subsequent report that I’d beaten him up over a lover’s quarrel and gotten arrested. People were saying that the police covered it up. Wow. But that drivel
did
get around. When we played in Cleveland once, some hardworking heckler was having a great time shouting, “Sam Champion! Sam Champion!”

To this day, when there’s an article circulated about a gay athlete, my name invariably appears. I read one recently about a gay
cricket
player, for Pete’s sake; and there I was again. What bugs me about it is not the inference, but the way in which the media continues to sensationalize and exploit the situation for its own purposes. As a rule, I haven’t been treated unfairly by reporters—especially those in the mainstream press, where I’ve come across an impressive amount of integrity and professionalism—but skepticism, it seems, is written into their job descriptions. Speculation makes the rounds. Sometimes, reality is strayed from and myth is manufactured. And with the lines increasingly blurring between genuine news media and the modern alternatives—the likes of bloggers, message boards, fan pages, gossip media, shock media, and social media—the trend is taking us further removed from accountability.

I should point out that the gay community itself hasn’t really stoked the rumors or gotten involved in any perpetuating way. For that matter, I can think of only one occasion when I felt I was being checked out by another man. It was a year or two later, when I was buying a CD in Union Square. A guy came up to me in a manner that was unusually friendly. He definitely had the gay-dar up, as they call it. But all he said was “I thought you handled that situation very well.” I appreciated that.

My favorite remark, though, came from a website named
iSteve.com
. It
said: “What’s with the NYC media calling obviously straight baseball stars gay? Piazza is a metalhead whose obsession is playing heavy metal tunes on his electric guitar. Trust me, a guy whose favorite band is AC/DC isn’t AC/DC himself.”

• • •

Not much more than a week after the gay flap,
Sports Illustrated
published Tom Verducci’s special report on steroids in baseball, in which Ken Caminiti became the first big-time player to publicly admit using them and estimated that half of all major leaguers did. Naturally, the New York press jumped all over it, buzzing around our clubhouse with questions. My response was “Whatever happened to baseball? It’s not baseball anymore.”

That may have been a dismissive remark, but it reflected how I was feeling right about then. The reckless reporting of the gay rumor had sensitized me to the media’s exploitation of athletes and public figures, and the
SI
story struck me as possibly another instance of it. Ultimately, Verducci’s investigation would be hailed as a significant turning point in the recognition and correction of the steroids problem in baseball, and in that respect it served its purpose; but when it came out, I was frankly more concerned about its effect on Caminiti.

Beyond that, I simply wanted all the noise to stop so I could get back to just playing the game. At age thirty-three, with my skills declining after catching an average of 136 games in the six full years since the strike (not counting 1995, which was abbreviated), baseball was hard enough without extracurricular distractions every week. It was so hard, in fact, that I went more than two months without throwing out a base stealer. The Marlins got seven against me one night.

But I wasn’t the only one on the ball club feeling the pressures of age and New York. Our new headliners—Vaughn, Alomar, and Burnitz—were all scuffling. Mo could never get as healthy as he wanted to and struck me as a little disengaged, for whatever reason. Roberto seemed uncomfortable with all the trappings of the city. Burnitz wasn’t the same hitter he’d been for five years running in Milwaukee.

All the while, Nelson Doubleday and Fred Wilpon, who simply couldn’t coexist, were still haggling over their negotiated divorce, which would involve Wilpon buying out Doubleday. To a degree, I thought their creative tension had been a helpful thing—Doubleday was the aggressive, free-spending owner and Wilpon kept him in check as the more conservative party—but by this time it had deteriorated to the point of dysfunction, which trickled down to field level. Somehow, we hung in with the Braves
and everybody until the end of May, but couldn’t put together all the pieces that Phillips had assembled over the winter. Steve had brought in proven run producers, and it was hard to blame him for that, but the ball club had a contrived look and feel to it. On a good team, players make each other better. We didn’t fit that description. Over the first couple weeks of June, we fell seven and a half games behind. We needed something to galvanize us. We needed some collective focus.

Roger Clemens was usually good for that. He would actually be pitching in Shea Stadium on June 15, the middle game of our weekend series with the Yankees—his first time facing us since the hurling of the splintered bat. But even that wasn’t the pure, uncluttered baseball that I was starving for. The shows and papers were full of retaliation speculation. There was also a bonus subplot concerning Clemens, who was being investigated by baseball for plunking Barry Bonds after saying he would introduce himself to Bonds’s elbow guard just to make things sporting. Bobby was in his element expounding on all of it. Shawn Estes was pitching for us.

When Clemens came to bat, Estes threw his first pitch at Roger’s rear end and somehow missed it. In his own way, though, Shawn
did
eventually get him. He dinged Clemens with a home run in the fifth inning. The next inning, I nailed him, too, with a leadoff shot. Roger was gone a couple of batters later, having bruised his foot running out a double. Meanwhile, Estes pitched seven innings of shutout ball as we pounded the Yankees, 8–0. In spite of Shawn’s great game, however, Rob Dibble criticized him on ESPN for not continuing to throw at Clemens until he actually hit him. Bobby, of course, fired back at Dibble. Another day, another sideshow.

A week later, the Braves were in town. It was a series we badly needed to take. You’d think everybody in the organization would be zoned in on that challenge, but before the second game—we’d lost the first—Doubleday announced at the batting cage that he would be suing Wilpon over the appraisal that set the price for the sale of the club. (Doubleday’s suit never happened, but two weeks later, Wilpon actually sued
him
to force him to sell at the established price.) Then, during the national anthem, Alomar and Roger Cedeno had to be separated in the dugout.

Nobody—possibly including Alomar and Cedeno—was ever quite sure what they were fighting over. First off, as players, they were diametrically different. Roberto was the intellectual, analytical type, stealing signs, breaking down pitchers, and picking up on all the little things. I think he’d tried to develop some synergy with Cedeno on the bases, and it wasn’t working. Roger was more of a raw-talent guy. He was an amazing physical specimen,
but not the most intuitive or graceful player. The two of them just weren’t a match. To make it worse, they were probably both feeling a little testy. For really the first time in his career, Roberto wasn’t playing like a star, and the Mets crowds were riding Cedeno something awful. Even coming from Philadelphia, I’ve never heard fans open up on a player with such relish and contempt. For whatever reason—mostly, I guess, because he struggled in the outfield—Roger Cedeno was the people’s whipping boy, and it hurt him. Hell, it hurt
me
.