Long Shot (50 page)

What hurt most, though, was the fact that I’d been crushing the ball. To be so hot and get stopped so cold . . . it made me feel beaten. I’d never planned to succumb to the line of thought that catchers start to break down after a certain age; but there I was.

The team arranged for me to rehab with Lisa Kearns from SportFit in Coral Gables, Florida. It was nearly a month before I could even exercise. I more or less knew what to expect, because the same thing had happened to my dad a few years before when we were playing golf. He took a swing and just crumpled to the ground. I thought he’d tripped, and I started to laugh until I realized what kind of pain he was in. But my dad could still sell cars with a groin strain. All I could do was train carefully and watch news reports about the war in Iraq. My days were devoted to the underwater treadmill and the BBC.

Even when I got back to New York, I was as far from catching as the Mets were from catching the Braves. Alicia was there with me, and one night, when we were walking to dinner, I had to make it up some stairs. I guess I didn’t look so good doing it, because a guy watching me shook his head and said, “Man, your shit is fucked up.” It was a depressing period, exacerbated by the knowledge that when I returned—and even that wasn’t certain—it would be to a last-place team.

The Mets were playing badly enough to get Steve Phillips fired as general manager (replaced by Jim Duquette). Still, it was hard to blame the GM for the depletion of our high-priced starting lineup. On top of Vaughn and me, injuries had also claimed Alomar and Burnitz, who was having an excellent year. It was grim. All of a sudden, the prospect of playing baseball just wasn’t as compelling as it had always been. At the same time, though, I was determined to get back on the field in 2003, even if it was just for a week or month. I never wanted to end a season on the disabled list.

To my mounting discouragement, the calendar kept turning. When I was still hobbled after the all-star break, I sat down next to Cliff Floyd, all pitiful, and said, “Dude, I got nothin’ right now.” Cliff—what a great teammate—told me, “Don’t stress, man. Don’t mess yourself up. Get your shit right and come back when you’re ready.”

Finally, on August 13, after I had grumbled through seventy-six games
of misery and restlessness, Howe penciled me into the three-hole against the Giants, ironically, at Shea Stadium. A rookie pitcher named Jerome Williams was working for San Francisco, and it was the first time I’d ever played with our rookie shortstop, Jose Reyes, whose speed and talent were downright astonishing. Reyes had come up in June and won a few games almost single-handedly. One night, when he was beating some team or another with his bat, his legs, his glove, everything, David Weathers and I looked at each other and I said something like, “Who
is
this guy?”

Against Jerome Williams, Reyes led off the bottom of the third with a bunt single and then stole second. I was the next batter and somehow caught one well enough to get it out of the park. I finished the night with five RBIs. It felt
good
.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep it going. After the adrenaline rush of getting back on the field, it didn’t take long to realize that I just wasn’t myself, psychologically. I’d lost that feeling of invincibility. My personal myths had been shattered. The doubts had taken root. I was no longer able to clear my mind of the questions and fears that can hold an athlete back, and inevitably do.

For obvious reasons, my groin injury had postponed the first-base experiment. I’d been restored to my customary position, but with the self-awareness, this time, that I couldn’t catch 140 games a year anymore and probably never should have. A catcher needs some days off. In my years with the Dodgers, Joe Ferguson used to remind Tommy now and then that I was due for a blow, but Tommy would just tell him that November will come around soon enough. And I was with him all the way—I didn’t
want
him to sit me down. It was a point of pride. Or stubbornness. With Bobby and the Mets, the program was pretty much the same.

Without a doubt, though, the innings had taken their toll. Three months on the disabled list had brought it all home. The irony is that, if I hadn’t hit so well for those first ten years, I likely would have stayed longer at the top of my game because I’d have been afforded more rest. That said, I’m not willing to return any of the extra hits or home runs that came from being in the lineup every day. And I surely wouldn’t have wanted to take any longer to catch Carlton Fisk.

When we went to Atlanta near the end of August, I drew within four of the record by reaching Shane Reynolds and Greg Maddux on consecutive nights. (Fisk’s record was 351, and I actually had 358 homers altogether, but eleven of mine had come as a DH or pinch-hitter.) The second of those was the eleventh and last home run I would hit that year.

September was a tough month to endure. We finished a wretched
twenty-nine games under .500 and 34
¹
/
₂
behind the Braves. As the season wound down, I swung the bat so horribly that my average dropped all the way to .286.

True to New York, however—true to the Mets—the last week would not pass quietly. We were about to lose our final home game, against the Pirates, when Howe made a ninth-inning double switch that seemed to stop the trains and rattle the windows in the Empire State Building. Vance Wilson came in to catch and I took over at first base.

I actually made all three putouts in the inning, on a line drive from Carlos Rivera—a bullet, of course, the very first batter—and throws from Pedro Feliciano in front of the mound and Ty Wigginton at third. It doesn’t sound like much, but from where I stood, it was all pretty damn scary. And pretty damn lucky, because none of the plays required any range, which I knew I didn’t have.

Of course, those three insignificant outs only escalated the speculation about whether I’d switch to first base full-time in 2004. The corollaries included untrue reports that I’d continue to resist the move—mostly, I just doubted that I’d be very good as an infielder—and public discussion over whether I should be traded for a
real
first baseman. There were even rumors that I’d
asked
to be traded. That was bogus; but I wouldn’t have minded at all if somehow, from somewhere, a proven first baseman had been found and brought over. In my mind, that would have been the ticket not only for my purposes but for the ball club’s, as well. When no move was made along those lines, it felt as though, rather than going properly about the business of building the team, the Mets were taking the easy way out, putting the onus on me. The message seemed to be that, with the money I was making, I had to be the answer, no matter what the problem was.

To tell the truth, the whole deal was kind of frightening. I could handle pressure in the batter’s box—I was accustomed to that—but wasn’t so sure about fielding it at first base.

Nevertheless, I had no intention of filing for divorce. As unimpressed as I was with the way the organization had been run for the past couple of years, I felt a strong connection to the Mets. By the end of 2003, I’d actually played more games in their uniform than I had as a Dodger.

• • •

In November, Major League Baseball announced that between 5 and 7 percent of the players who had been tested for steroids that season were found to have used them. The Major League Baseball Players Association had agreed to the survey on the grounds that it was anonymous, with the
consequence that if at least 5 percent of the tests turned up positive, we’d be randomly checked over the next two years, with punishments established for offenders identified by those results.

There would be no sanctions based on the 2003 findings, and since names were not to be released, either, some guys had regarded the season as sort of a free spin. And yet, the season stats didn’t reflect any significant uptick in power. It was actually the first year since 1995 that nobody in either league had hit fifty home runs.

In the end, the survey proved to be not quite as anonymous as everybody had been assured it would. The union neglected to destroy the list of guys who had tested positive, and a grand jury subpoenaed it for the BALCO investigation the following spring.

When that occurred, Dan Lozano said to me, “Mike, this list might be coming out. You’ll probably be hearing from the media.” He was right, of course. I wasn’t involved, but that made no difference. Whenever there was news on the steroids front, various reporters were eager to link me to it.

The same thing happened three years later, when the
New York Daily News
broke the story about Kirk Radomski pleading guilty to distributing performance-enhancing drugs to major-league players between 1995 and 2005. Radomski, who was a principal source for the Mitchell Report—baseball’s investigation into the PED issue, released in 2007—had been an assistant in the Mets clubhouse from 1985 to 1995, which meant that he’d been gone for nearly three years when I arrived in New York. I guess there was some confusion over the timing, because just before the news got out, Gene Orza, the chief operating officer of the MLB Players Association, called to alert me that I might be asked about Radomski. Orza was good about keeping players apprised of what was going on and sending out a heads-up when it was in order. I was playing in Oakland that year, and Gene caught me early in the day as I was walking the streets of San Francisco, just off Union Square.

I didn’t know Radomski, but I knew I wasn’t on any list of steroids users that might appear in the Mitchell Report or anywhere else. So I took the opportunity to say, “Gene, I want to clear my name. I want for writers to be able to call you and ask you if I’m on a list.”

Orza was sympathetic, but he told me, “I can’t do that, Mike. If I do that, the writers will put every single player on the spot and say, ‘Hey, can I call the union and ask if you’re on the list?’ ”

Sure enough, the next day a reporter from the
Daily News
showed up in Oakland to ask me about Radomski. I had nothing.

Ultimately, my skeptics were undeterred by the fact that I wasn’t implicated
in either the 2003 tests (the government eventually limited its BALCO subpoena to ten players, and theirs were the only names that went public) or the Mitchell Report, which was released in 2007. A certain baseball blogger came out with the curious observation that the acne on my back had mysteriously disappeared between 2002 and 2004, citing that as compelling evidence that I’d used and then stopped using steroids. What he wrote, specifically—actually calling it an online column as opposed to a blog, I should point out—was “Then all of a sudden the acne was gone. Piazza’s back was clear and clean. There was not a speck of acne on it. His back looked as smooth as a baby’s bottom. What a remarkable development. It was a medical miracle.”

I frankly don’t know if my acne receded or not around that time; or if it did, how much or why. But I know bullshit when I see it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

At my age and level of wear and tear, facing a very possible switch in position—the plan, as it stood, was to give it a try and go from there—I needed a different kind of off-season training regimen. I needed now to address mobility and flexibility; to back off a bit on the strengthening of my body, which I’d undertaken from the time I was barely a teenager, and concentrate on its preservation.

I didn’t junk the weight training but I supplemented it with more-athletic workouts, including a lot of the fashionable core stuff. At the time, my rehab trainer, Lisa Kearns, was working with Ty Law, a defensive back for the New England Patriots, and I’d meet them at a track for agility and speed drills. I have to say, it was sobering; actually, scary, in a sense. I admire and defend the skill of baseball players, but I was knocked for a loop by the realization of how much of a nonathlete I was compared to someone who really
is
an athlete, in the traditional sense. Ty Law was a physical specimen, and I doubt that, among football players at his level, he was an exception in that respect. Up close, the combination of size and speed simply blew me away. I developed a sudden and profound appreciation for the athletic demands on a professional football player. Those guys have to block, tackle, throw, catch, fake, juke, accelerate, change direction, think quickly, and, with it all, endure, to boot. Hitting a baseball is a special talent, and chances are that most football players wouldn’t be able to do it against major-league pitchers; but at the same time, I don’t know that there are a lot of baseball players who are pure, classic, world-class athletes.

Later in the winter, a few weeks before reporting to spring training, I flew with Alicia to California, where she introduced me to a lanky, uncombed, unshaven guy she knew named Andy Bourell, a sort of personal trainer and nutritionist for some of her friends. Andy was well schooled in the methods he preached, and by practicing them had lost a lot of weight at one point.
Alicia suggested that some of the stuff he advocated, such as sophisticated stretching and dietary habits—less beer and red meat, in my case—could help get me through the season, and I couldn’t disagree. So I hooked up with Andy and liked it.

The first time he saw me, he noticed a problem with my right calf and the arches of my feet when I went into my catcher’s crouch. In his opinion, my groin injury had developed from a strain of the tendons on my right side and could have been prevented with more stretching. He went to work correcting my posture through yoga. In a short time, I felt so much better that I brought Andy to Florida when I reported to spring training with the pitchers and catchers. He was there for a couple of weeks, staying at my house and preparing me uncooked dinners involving, among other things, spinach, mushrooms, alfalfa sprouts, garlic, and sunflower seeds. We’d stretch and do some yoga poses. I called him my yogi. He’d also accompany me to the ballpark, wearing an old wool cap and carrying a bag of apples and seeds along with a drink he concocted from apple cider vinegar, grade-B maple syrup, flaxseed oil—sugars and carbs—and cayenne pepper, which is good for circulation. Naturally, my yogi became a big story in New York. Eventually, though, the Mets asked Andy not to come into the clubhouse anymore, because MLB had restricted the access for what they called personal assistants.