Long Shot (51 page)

For all the flexibility work I’d put in, I was still venturing into new territory at first base, subjecting myself to unfamiliar strains, twists, and twitches of the body. I’d been in shin guards for sixteen years, and even though I’d played first base in high school and college and occasionally even in the minor leagues, it wasn’t like riding a bike. At the age of nineteen, without much of an identity defensively, I’d been able to reinvent myself as a catcher. Starting over at thirty-five, after nearly fourteen hundred big-league ball games in a squatting position, was a different deal altogether. I labored. I also tweaked my left thigh and missed valuable practice time.

It appeared, though, that first base would be at least a second home to me in 2004. I was okay with that. Scared as hell, but okay. Pretty sure that it was happening too damn fast, but okay. As much as I still considered myself a catcher and still believed that was what I
should
be, I’d come to grips with the fact that life as I knew it was changing in a lot of ways.

I’d have preferred, though, that the whole world didn’t watch me bumble through the transition. I knew my hands were good enough to handle first base; I was mainly worried about the footwork and finesse. At one of the first spring-training workouts, the Mets covered the chain-link fence of the practice field with a dark privacy screen so I could fumble and stumble
in privacy. When Jeff Wilpon saw it, he ordered it taken down immediately. Whatever.

One way to deflect attention from the position issue was to hit the ball like I used to. I was pleasantly surprised how well the new off-season regimen had gotten me into hitting shape. The very first day of camp, I blasted so many balls out of the park that Art Howe declared me back. He was well aware—and so was I, believe me—that, at the end of 2003, I hadn’t homered in my last eighty-eight at-bats, the longest, most troubling dry spell of my career. That suddenly seemed like a long time ago. In a Grapefruit game against the Expos in Viera, Florida, I crushed two home runs and really
felt
like I was back. I lingered a while in the clubhouse trying to burn those swings into my brain. I knew that if I could stay in that groove, it would take the pressure off my defense, wherever I played.

Incidentally, I wasn’t the only one on the club changing positions that spring. For reasons I’ve never figured out, the Mets decided to move Jose Reyes from shortstop, where he’d been spectacular as a rookie, to second base, so that Kaz Matsui—the first Japanese infielder ever signed by a major-league team—could move in at short. We also had a new center fielder, Mike Cameron, and closer, Braden Looper. Both of them were terrific teammates. I’d always hated hitting off Looper—he owned me—but I loved the guy.

Braden wasn’t a natural closer, however, so I figured I’d help him out a little. I felt it was my duty and obligation to find him an appropriate coming-in-from-the-bullpen song that wasn’t “Enter Sandman,” which was the choice of Mariano Rivera and, to my extreme annoyance, just about everybody else who even
thought
he was a closer. I was highly motivated to come up with something different for Looper. I ended up picking a tune called “Lightning Strikes,” from the only Aerosmith album that Joe Perry, the guitarist, wasn’t a part of. Unfortunately, it didn’t really cut it.

Cameron, meanwhile, was batting behind me, and I was
catching
, when we opened the season in Atlanta. Matsui, who hadn’t hit well in the spring, led off and went three for three with a home run. I homered, also, and we won, 7–2, behind Glavine.

Our old teammate Mike Hampton started against us in the second game and I reached him for a two-run homer in the first inning. We took a 6–0 lead, but the Braves scored eleven runs in the third. Damn. My second home run of the game, to straightaway center in the seventh inning—it was measured at 456 feet, the second-longest ever recorded at Turner Field—tied me with Joe DiMaggio for fifty-eighth place on the all-time list and left me one
short of Fisk’s record for catchers. In the bottom of the inning, I made my first appearance of the season at first base and handled a ground ball off the bat of Adam LaRoche. I then doubled in the eighth to complete a five-for-five night, which didn’t count for much in an ugly 18–10 defeat.

My maiden voyage as a starting first baseman occurred in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the Sunday afternoon finale of a three-game series we played there against the Expos. It went well enough—I took care of a foul pop-up, a throw in the dirt, and three ground balls, without incident—except for a little collision at first base that I got the worst of. Peter Bergeron, Montreal’s speedy leadoff guy, had bunted to Glavine, who didn’t have a good grip on the ball when he tossed it to me. Just as Bergeron crossed the bag, I reached for the throw and took an elbow to the back of the head. It left me a little dingy. I also hyperextended my elbow, which caused me to miss our home opener the next day. Swell. I’d made my peace with the move to first base, in part, because it was supposed to spare my body the beating it took behind the plate. So much for that theory. Mask, please!

Two days later, I was back at first. The good news was that, on a cold and nasty night, hardly anybody came to watch. The bad news was everything else. To get us started right away on the act of losing, I made my first error as a first baseman on the first play of the game, a hard grounder down the line by Dewayne Wise that I whiffed at. It was looking like I might not be such a horrible catcher after all.

Glavine, for one, must have gotten his fill of me at first base pretty quickly, because he complimented my game-calling when he beat the Dodgers in Los Angeles on April 28 (the night after I appeared on
Jimmy Kimmel Live
and Kimmel had me fire a BB gun at Roger Clemens bobbleheads). Of course, he might have been influenced by my home run in the sixth inning off my old friend Hideo Nomo, which put us ahead and made Tommy the winning pitcher. The homer came after I’d gone sixty-three at-bats without one, and gave me 351 as a catcher. I was tied with Fisk.

I was still tied with Fisk when the Giants came to Shea during the first week of May. In my head, and also in my conversations with reporters, I tried to downplay or even marginalize the record. For one thing, I knew it wasn’t DiMaggio’s hitting streak or Aaron passing Ruth. For another, it’s not cool to preoccupy yourself with personal accomplishments in a team sport. And lastly, I was fed up with the way the record had been twisted into a symbol of my resistance toward playing first base. All things considered, I was happy to be the secondary story to the arrival in town of Barry Bonds, who happened
to be tearing up the league at the time. A couple of weeks before, he’d hit eight home runs in eight days. He was in the high 600s now, with a bead on Ruth’s and Aaron’s career totals.

I was happy, also, on Wednesday night, May 5, to get the count to three and one in the first inning against Jerome Williams, the guy I had touched up the year before in my first game back after the groin injury. This may sound trite, but it’s true: As he released the next pitch, a strange feeling of peace came over me. It was like time stood still—one of those rare occasions when the game actually slowed down. I distinctly recall how clearly I saw the ball leaving Williams’s hand, and saying to myself, this is going to be a home run to right field.

It was a little sinker that caught too much of the plate. I took a rip and it landed in one of my favorite spots, off the bottom of the scoreboard in right-center, just over the Mets’ bullpen. I ran the bases to the accompaniment of the theme song from
Chariots of Fire
and video highlights of my career as a Met. As much as I had tried to soft-pedal the record, I decided right then, under the influence of bliss, to simply own it. To celebrate. In the best tradition of Bonds—who sat out the game with a sinus infection—I tapped my chest and pointed to the heavens when I stepped on home plate.

Meanwhile, my mind was dancing.
I’m the greatest home-run-hitting catcher in baseball history.
That incredible thought was crowded in with fly-by memories of all the skepticism and cynicism that had followed me into the sport and hung around; of those who had doubted, dismissed, discouraged, resented, or out-and-out rooted against me. In a surge of inspiration, I found myself surprisingly
grateful
for all of that. Suddenly, I
got
it: that nothing worthwhile comes easy; and if it did, a person couldn’t possibly appreciate it as much as I was appreciating that very moment.

I flashed through the scenes along the way: my backyard batting cage, practically begging to be signed, the tarantulas in the Dominican Republic, chasing balls to the backstop, sitting on the bench in Vero Beach, the negotiations, the trade, the Marlins, the booing, the World Series, the game after 9/11, the face of my dad . . . Then I ducked into the dugout, hugged my teammates, and jumped back out to acknowledge the crowd.

When I returned inside, I said to Art Howe, “Get me to first base. I’m tired of catching.”

Just so you know: I was joking.

An hour later, I was wondering if I really
had
set the record. It rained so hard, the game was delayed after the fifth inning, with the score tied 2–2. If we couldn’t resume, the stats would be wiped out and the whole thing
replayed. It was a substantial delay, but we finished. And we scored six times in the eighth to make it all good.

Afterward, Fisk graced me with a thoughtful phone call and issued a statement that made my day. “When someone broke my home run mark,” he said, “I was hoping it would be Mike.”

I was too, actually. I told the reporters, “I’m blessed. I’ve lived a dream. Everything from here on in is icing.”

• • •

The next night, we completed the sweep of the Giants. I was back catching, Bonds was back in left field, and in the eleventh inning he leaped in vain to catch a ball I hit over his head and the fence to win the game, 2–1, after great pitching from Leiter, Looper, Mike Stanton, and David Weathers. They walked Bonds twice, and it worked. Jim Brower pitched to me, with two outs, and it
didn’t
work.

In a strictly baseball kind of way—in its spontaneity and timeliness—that home run might have been more satisfying and emotional than the one the night before. When you’re celebrating purely for the
team
, there’s no need to pull your punch. There’s no self-consciousness holding you back. I raised both fists into the air as I circled the bases. At that instant, the game was good.

A week later, after discussing it with me, which I appreciated, Howe announced that I’d be catching only a couple of games a week for the rest of the season and playing first base on most of the other days. Jason Phillips and Vance Wilson would take over the majority of the catching. I’d be sharing first with Todd Zeile, whom we had signed as a free agent. It was our fourth shift as teammates—Dodgers, Marlins, Mets, and now the Mets again—and, for Todd, would be the last of sixteen seasons in the major leagues. I needed three more years to get to sixteen. It made me wonder.

For the time being, though, I was feeling frisky. At Houston in mid-May, we got a rare shot at Clemens, who was 7–0 after signing with the Astros as a free agent. He was zoned in, giving up only two hits in seven innings, neither of them to me. But in the ninth, with two outs, two strikes, Eric Valent on second base and Octavio Dotel pitching, I homered into the Houston bullpen to tie the game, 2–2, and deprive Clemens of his victory. The Astros’ manager, Jimy Williams, had come to the mound to suggest to Dotel that he walk me, but Dotel disagreed. Jason Phillips finished off the comeback in the thirteenth with his first homer of the season. Afterward, the writers tried to get me to say that there was some personal gratification in pulling the rug out from under Roger that way. I ducked the question by telling them, “I just do my thing.” Suffice it to say, it was a hell of a day.

For that matter, it was a hell of a month or so. In June, Fisk, Johnny Bench, Gary Carter, and Yogi Berra—a Catchers Hall of Fame—came to Shea Stadium to honor me for the home run record. I’d had my differences with the Mets, but that night they stepped up big.

What I thought was going to be a low-key affair took on a life of its own. We happened to be playing the Detroit Tigers, which pulled in two more esteemed members of the catching fraternity—Lance Parrish, a nineteen-year veteran with fifteen seasons of double-figure home runs, in addition to being the guy the Dodgers brought to camp in 1993 just in case I didn’t make it; and Pudge Rodriguez, the best defensive catcher of my era. Also, Doc Mainieri, my old coach at Miami-Dade Community College, was nice enough to come. Mainieri had been one of the first to endorse my move to catcher, more or less. (He did that by promising me I could catch if I played for his son, Paul, the next year at St. Thomas University. It might not sound like a whole lot, but solid encouragement had been hard for me to come by in those days.)

The presence of all the famous catchers turned the event into a testimonial for the position, which, thankfully, deflected the attention from me, to some extent, and spared me some serious discomfort. In no way did I care to be exalted above the likes of Johnny Bench.

My opinion is that, as the complete catcher, Johnny will always be alone on the island. It’s difficult to compare the two of us because I was just a different animal. I feel that I was a complete
hitter
—power and average—who could also catch. (Bench compared my bat speed to Bonds’s and George Foster’s.) Obviously, I wasn’t the greatest defensive catcher in the game, but, in spite of all the hullabaloo, I wasn’t the worst, either. While I had some terrible times throwing out base stealers, my career average of 23 percent was not all
that
far off the major-league average, which was 31. Given that I normally gave up a hundred or so stolen bases a season, that comes out to roughly eight extra bases a year that were attributable to my arm, about one every three weeks. My fielding percentage was almost dead-on the average. More important, I prided myself on receiving pitches in a way that would encourage the umpires to call them strikes—not “framing” them, per se, but letting the ball close the glove, keeping my body still and my mitt quiet so that the ump got a good, long look and didn’t think I was trying to manipulate him. Recent studies have shown that a helpful receiver can get his pitchers a couple hundred extra strike calls over the course of a season, and save his team as many as thirty or forty runs. I’d like to think that my efforts in that respect had something to do with the damn good catcher’s ERA that I maintained over
my career, which, for my money, is the most significant measure of a catcher’s defense. Putting it all together, I can state with confidence that my body of work in the tools of ignorance lands me somewhere around the middle of the pack, at the very least. The fact is, I’ve seen a lot of backup catchers who have stuck around the big leagues playing worse defense than I did.