Long Shot (54 page)

I admired Pedro’s competitiveness and didn’t actually dislike him. Ironically, he and my father became pretty good friends. If I ran into Pedro today, I’d probably give him a hug. Nevertheless, our differences ran deep and were a matter of record. At various times in our personal history—which was tied to my chilly relationship with his brother Ramon, in spite of catching his no-hitter in 1995—he had hit me in the hand, questioned my manhood, and referred to me publicly as “Fucking Piazza.” So this wasn’t going to be easy, seeing as how, once again, I was a catcher and only a catcher.

Thanks to Willie Randolph and Omar Minaya for that, incidentally. It turned out Omar didn’t have to deal me away to solve the first-base problem. With Willie’s blessing, he put me back where I belonged and traded for Doug Mientkiewicz, going for the maximum upgrade around the bag. It was what the Mets should have done the year before.

As far as Pedro was concerned, I was resolved not to let the team be affected by our little feud. I’d mellowed a little bit, I guess, and had come to realize that, for the most part, you don’t achieve the level of success that Pedro ultimately did—especially in a foreign country—without being a motherfucker; without having the fire and fury inside you. The fact is, I couldn’t relate to players who
didn’t
have that, the ones who were just kicking the can down the road. And sometimes, in cases like Pedro’s, I locked horns with the guys who
did
, because we were snorting bulls in the same pen. That’s probably why I never had many friends in the game. For whatever reason or reasons—immaturity, selfishness, trying too hard, or some other of my numerous character flaws—I wasn’t always the best teammate.

Apparently Pedro was feeling the same spirit of conciliation. At his first press conference in New York, he stated that “whatever happens before when we were not teammates or whatever—whatever words were said—have to be forgotten the first moment I became a teammate. He’s now my family.”

Détente had its reward on Opening Day in Cincinnati, when Pedro struck out twelve Reds in six innings, although we lost in the bottom of the ninth, 7–6, on back-to-back home runs off Braden Looper by Adam Dunn and Joe Randa. Our working relationship remained good enough, and Pedro settled in nicely as our ace; had a hell of a year, in fact. I can’t say, however, that he and I ever became confidants, or even buddies.

Our relationship was part of a bigger scheme of things, and a very strange dynamic. Going back to my days with the Dodgers, there was a bizarre sort of energy between me and the Spanish-speaking pitchers, in particular—Pedro, Ramon, and Ismael Valdez. Fraternization is widespread in the big leagues, especially between Latin American players, and honestly, I felt as though there was some kind of weird Hispanic conspiracy against me, almost like a secret brotherhood, a Latin mafia type of thing that had it in for me. I know it sounds paranoid—a dramatic way of describing what could just be a combination of coincidence, the nature of the game, and a few friends comparing notes—but there’s a litany of circumstantial evidence for something on that order, winding through my experiences in the low minor leagues, the comments from Ramon and Valdez in Los Angeles, the verbal assaults from Pedro, and getting hit with pitches from Pedro, Guillermo Mota—twice—and, later in 2005, Julian Tavarez. And that’s just the conspicuous stuff. The real sense of it comes simply from the vibes you pick up.

That said, I suspect the Latin players were picking up vibes from
me
, as well. It was a clash of styles. I’m not anti-Latin by any means. For Pete’s sake, I had the initials of a Peruvian woman tattooed on my ankle. There were plenty of Latin players whom I liked, respected, and got along with just fine. Generally speaking, those were the guys who felt blessed and lucky to have the opportunity to play Major League Baseball in the United States and make a lot of money at it, just like I felt blessed and lucky. It’s a privilege. I admire the Spanish-speaking players who honor that privilege by learning the language of the nation where the dream comes true.

When I played in the Dominican Republic and Mexico, I picked up some Spanish so that I could order my meals, talk to taxi drivers, and communicate better with my teammates. I’m currently taking Italian lessons so that I can converse with the guys I coach for the Italian national team and
do a few interviews with the Italian media. It’s a matter of respect. Except for Toronto, which is an English-speaking city, Major League Baseball is played in the United States. For some Latin players, there seems to be a mentality that since they come from a less advantaged socioeconomic background, it exempts them from having to adapt to our culture. That’s misguided, in my opinion. I strongly disagreed, for instance, with Ozzie Guillen’s complaints that organizations typically provide translators for Asian players but not Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans, or Mexicans. The fact is, a Japanese or Korean player would be totally isolated without an interpreter. A Latin player is far more likely to find himself in the company of teammates and even coaches who speak his language. In a sense, the Latin guys have interpreters all around them.

I can’t speak for every club, but in my experience with the Dodgers, in particular, no category of player was more catered-to than the Latin American. To start with, the organization ran an academy in the Dominican Republic with English teachers and three square meals a day. From what I’ve seen on the larger scale, major-league teams go to great lengths to prepare their Spanish-speaking players for successful careers in the United States. And they should. I certainly don’t dispute that Latin players are entitled to the same dreams and opportunities I had, but I’m sorry: when they arrive on U.S. soil, the onus isn’t on the American players to learn Spanish, although that certainly helps; it’s on the Latin players to learn
English
. Speaking English permits them to better serve the ball clubs they play on, just like learning the signs or staying in shape in the off-season. It also provides benefits from the personal standpoint, connecting them to the public and making them more marketable. It’s in everybody’s best interests.

No doubt, my views on the subject—in general, on the privilege of being a big leaguer—came through, one way or another, to the Latin players, and their attitude toward me, at least to some degree, was a response.

There were some mixed messages coming from Mike, in a way. He had this Southern California flip-flop thing, this
GQ
guy with his kick-back disposition, a father who adores him and was there all the time; but there was also this stern, play-the-game-right, don’t-be-a-hotdog, run-the-ball-out attitude. Not one time did I ever see Mike just jog to first base on a ground ball, even a ground ball to the second baseman. Here he is catching a hundred and forty games a year, trying to leg out infield singles. Often, on ground balls to the shortstop, he wouldn’t run past the bag but just bang his foot down
on the bag trying to beat it out. The trainer would cringe. It always seemed amazing that he didn’t blow out an Achilles or something.

That’s just how he approached the game, and sometimes the Dominican [style] would bother Mike. When guys were fucking around, his thing was, cut it out, let a sleeping dog lie. He’d say that all the time. Don’t make other players want to kick your ass.

—Al Leiter

We hung in the race for the first few months of the season, and I have to say that Pedro Martinez had more to do with it than I did. In the back of Randolph’s mind, he probably wished he didn’t have to play me as much as my salary more or less dictated. Around mid-April, I did muscle up for one of my longest home runs—a shot off Vicente Padilla at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia that landed up by Bull’s BBQ (Greg Luzinski’s place) in the left-center-field pavilion—but my stats stunk and my throwing hadn’t gotten much better, in spite of the fact that I had hired Steve Yeager to work with my catching mechanics.

That was my dad’s idea. I learned a lot from Yeager, but my body was simply deteriorating at that point. I did think, however, that I did a nice job with the pitching staff, Pedro included, although Ramon Castro got several of the starts when Pedro pitched.

In June, I actually got ejected arguing balls and strikes on Pedro’s behalf. Well, that’s stretching it, I guess; but it started out that way. Eric Cooper was the umpire on a Sunday afternoon when we played the Angels at Shea, and I thought he squeezed Pedro on the first two pitches of the ball game. So Cooper and I had a chippy little dialogue going on (some of my teammates, in fact, were calling me Chip in those days), and when I came to bat he rang me up on a three-two pitch. I had a thing or two to say about it, and kept riding him when I got to the dugout, at which point he tossed me. In a rage, I bolted out of the dugout toward Cooper and might have earned myself a hefty suspension if Mientkiewicz hadn’t intercepted me in the on-deck circle.

Mientkiewicz, in fact, kept me in check on a regular basis with his interventions. When I was slumping and moping—so out of sorts at the plate that I was chasing bad pitches, which I didn’t ordinarily do—he told me that I’d probably be leading the league in home runs if I played in a normal ballpark, which was a lie but a helpful one. Cliff Floyd was another guy with a talent for being able to make a friend feel and sometimes play better. That’s what a good teammate is all about.

Floyd also had a huge power season going, which made him an even
better
teammate. Together, he and David Wright, who came into his own as a big-time player that year, more than compensated for the drop-off in my hitting. We had also added Carlos Beltran, a switch-hitting center fielder who strengthened the middle of our lineup when he moved into the three-hole. For the first time in a few years, we weren’t bad. I only wish I could have said the same about myself.

I did, however, make my twelfth all-star team, joining Beltran at Comerica Park in Detroit. I started the game for the eleventh time and was hoping to catch Clemens again, to improve upon our misadventure of the year before. But when he entered the game to pitch the fifth inning, I left in favor of Paul Lo Duca, who, like me back in the day, had been traded from the Dodgers to the Marlins.

• • •

A couple of days before the all-star break, Randolph had nudged me from the cleanup spot back to fifth in the batting order. Floyd moved up. I understood. Then, less than a week
after
the break, Wright moved up, deservedly, to the five-hole, and I found myself batting sixth. In early August, I sank to seventh.

It was a blow to the ego, but nothing I was compelled to complain about—I didn’t want to be just another guy who couldn’t face the fact that he wasn’t what he used to be—and nothing that I didn’t see coming. All signs pointed to the fact that the Mets were phasing me out. It was a reality I chose not to fight.

Then, for three weeks starting in mid-August, I wasn’t in the lineup at all. A bone in my wrist was fractured by a foul tip off the bat of Freddy Sanchez of the Pirates. By that time, although we still had a winning record, we’d fallen into last place in our loaded division. When I came off the disabled list on September 10, we had dropped under .500, twelve games behind the Braves.

That night we played in St. Louis, and in my first at-bat I gave us a 1–0 lead with a solo home run off Jeff Suppan. But we trailed, 4–1, when I led off the eighth against Julian Tavarez, a tall, slender right-hander from the Dominican Republic. He humped up and nailed me in the right earflap.

I left the game with a concussion, but something happened in the bottom of the inning that hurt worse. Randolph and Sandy Alomar, a former big-league infielder from Puerto Rico who was one of our coaches, got hooked up in a heavy discussion over who we were going to throw at in retaliation. Randolph’s original thought was to wait for Albert Pujols, who
was due up fourth against Aaron Heilman, but Sandy said something like “No, you can’t hit Albert. He’s a
much
better player than Mike is right now.”

That jolted me on two levels. One, it sounded like a little more of the Latin conspiracy that I was increasingly convinced of. And two, it was a big-time reality check. Make that a kick in the nuts. A couple of years before, I’d have been an even exchange for Pujols. I like Albert a lot, and I didn’t want to see him hurt, but he knew he was the one who was supposed to get drilled in that situation. Instead, we hit
David Eckstein
. Don’t get me wrong, Eckstein was a tough dude and I admired the way he played; but he stood five foot six and muscled up for a home run about every other month or so. All of a sudden, the payback for me is
David Eckstein
? That was a big, fat humble pie in the face.

It also let me know exactly what the Mets thought of me at that point, confirming, for all practical purposes, that they had no intention of re-signing me and I’d be out of there in a few weeks. But not before I had a few choice words for Sandy Alomar. I confronted him on the spot.

That, however, didn’t settle the matter of Tavarez. After the game, I stormed over to the Cardinals’ clubhouse to find him. Tony La Russa spotted me first and took me back to his office. He apologized, and one of the St. Louis owners did the same, which I appreciated; but I still wanted to see Tavarez. It didn’t happen. Plan B was to fight him the next day before the game. I waited through batting practice to catch him coming off the field, but he eluded me by walking out through the center-field gate. That was my last shot at him for the season.

The following spring, I was training in Florida with the Italian national team before the World Baseball Classic and riding with Frank Catalanotto of the Blue Jays, telling Frank how badly I wanted to beat the shit out of Julian Tavarez, when we pulled up to the Ritz-Carlton and there he was. Frank said, “Here’s your chance.”

I walked up and Tavarez goes, “What’s up, my friend Mike Piazza?” He had a phone to his ear.

“Get off the phone,” I said. “I want to talk to you. Let’s take a walk.”