Long Shot (56 page)

Remarks like that, I realized, were vastly overstated, and I took them for what they were worth; but please understand something: As baseball players, most of us know that what we do is not the most important thing in the world. And most of us, one way or another, would like somehow to make our work mean a little more than two runs in the sixth and a victory over the Astros now and then. We desire to benefit people and good causes, if we can. I love baseball, and if I’m able to help grow it in a country I also love, it’s a contribution I can cherish.

In that spirit, it irks me that teams and critics complain about the WBC diverting players away from spring training. For one thing, it’s not like the guys are off sailing or snowboarding. They’re playing competitive, meaningful, good-for-the-game
baseball.
As for wearing themselves out—there really aren’t enough games involved to do that; not nearly as many as in the Latin American winter leagues or spring training itself. I really don’t have any tolerance for those complaints.

Our Italian team lasted three games in the historic WBC tournament of 2006, mercy-ruling Australia, 10–0, in the first, in which I caught and doubled, and losing the next two to Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, when I was the DH. (I guess our coaches had heard about my arm.) Wearing number 31 on a blue and gray uniform that made me feel like I was back with the Dodgers, I mustered just one hit in eleven at-bats. Thus ended my career as an international player.

I told the Italian officials, though, that I’d be happy thereafter to help coach, conduct clinics, eat truffles, or whatever.

• • •

The Padres’ manager, Bruce Bochy, had been a catcher. That must be why he understood the game, and me, so well.

It was a nice situation. I loved the feel of the ball club, and also the city. I’m not sure that San Diego would have been the best place for me when I was young and over-the-top in my intensity, but in 2006 I’d been around the league fourteen times already—
aging
was the operative word—and was letting my hair down. Literally. (
Sports Illustrated
called it a “scruffy mop.”)

Alicia and I rented a nice apartment a few blocks from the beach, she enrolled in some classes to get started on her master’s degree in psychology, and I batted fourth in a pretty good lineup that included Adrian Gonzalez, Brian Giles, and my former Mets teammate Mike Cameron. I homered off Jason Schmidt in my first at-bat as a Padre, caught a strong performance from Jake Peavy, and we took care of the Giants to start the season properly.

That, however, was about all that went right over the first month. Approaching the end of April, we were seven games under .500 and, although I’d hit my four hundredth home run (off Jose Valverde of Arizona), I was batting a dismal .210. It was a midlife crisis.

I called Danny from San Francisco and said, “I’m done!”

Then I called Alicia and said, “I’m done!”

Danny said, “Give it a few more weeks. You’ve always hit well in May.”

Alicia said, “Mike, it’s just April. You need to think about this.”

For a player’s wife, it’s torture to see them struggling or getting booed when they come to the plate. You feel helpless. You wish you could pick up a bat and hit the ball for them. It was probably even harder in our case, because Mike was so intense and emotional about baseball. There were times when he would come home and actually throw temper tantrums because he wasn’t hitting well or whatever. I’m talking about full-blown tantrums, with all the f-words and throwing things and everything else. Or he’d just be in a horrible mood and wouldn’t say anything. I’d tell him, “Mike, you’re losing touch with reality. You have to get a grip.” I had to say that for his own well-being, and also because I was going to have to deal with being married to this person.

I’d become accustomed to the temper tantrums and the overreacting, but that time, I actually believed he might quit. This one was for real. He called when I was buying produce at the grocery store and said that he was retiring because he respected the game
too much to go on playing the way he was. He said the game was trying to tell him something. I understood about the respect for the game, but it just didn’t feel right. Not for him. Mike’s a finisher. I told him to calm down and finish his contract.

We all rallied around him, urged him to just get through it. Then I got on a plane and flew to Chicago to meet him there. And all of a sudden he started playing well.

—Alicia Piazza

So, boom, I go into Chicago and go four for five in the first game and in the second I hit a three-run, two-out, ninth-inning, game-winning homer off Ryan Dempster. Just like that, we’re on a winning streak, I’m jacking up my average and it was like, okay, I’ll hold off on that quitting thing, no big deal here. That was pretty interesting. We ended up winning fourteen out of fifteen and taking over first place. It was nice, incidentally, to play in a division that the Braves weren’t part of.

The moral support made a big difference, but I also tinkered with my stance. I crouched a little more and kept my weight back to make myself quicker to the ball. It was a fairly dramatic change. Tom Robson, my old hitting coach with the Mets, had once said that my posture was the most important factor in my swing, and it was based on the strength in my legs. A hitter’s torque, which results in bat speed, begins with his legs. Robson timed my swing at fourteen-hundredths of a second from the time it began until contact with the ball. The only player who ever equaled that, by his watch, was Paul Molitor. But with age and injuries, I’d lost some of the quickness that had enabled me to fight off inside pitches. Consequently, pitchers had taken to pounding me in on my fists. I’d been overcompensating, in a way, by gearing myself to pull the ball more regularly than I had in my prime, thereby sacrificing some of my natural power to right field. Now, by revamping my setup to get into the hitting zone earlier, I wouldn’t have to make that concession.

The modification in my stance was a more conspicuous change than most I’d made over the years, but in essence it was just another step in the process. There was nothing new to me about the practice of making adjustments. It’s a critical part of hitting. Major-league pitchers are good enough that they won’t allow a hitter to succeed by doing the same thing the same way all the time. They figure something out, then it’s the batter’s turn. It was nice to know that I still had enough left to take my turn in that ritual. I also—and this is vital—still had my twenty-ten eyesight and my depth perception,
which the Mets’ doctors described as stunning. Even Alicia, who’s chronically hard to impress, was in awe of my eyes. She’d buy shoes or something and try to hide the receipt in the bottom of the shopping bag, but I’d peek in and say, “You spent six hundred dollars for those?” My vision was something else I had in common with Ted Williams, who was said to be able to read the label of a 78 RPM record while it was spinning on the turntable.

Once I got back on track in Chicago, I was able to relax. For the next three months—half the season—I batted .330. It helped that I was hitting in front of Adrian Gonzalez, who was fast becoming a star. It also helped that Bochy stuck with me in spite of my throwing issues. He had a good system of spotting and spelling me—the three-headed monster, they called it. I’d catch for seven innings, get my three or four at-bats, and then he’d bring in Rob Bowen for defense if we were ahead. A couple of times a week, he’d give me the day off and Josh Bard would start.

The only downside, from my perspective, was that I seldom had the opportunity to catch Trevor Hoffman, our great closer and the all-time leader in saves. Of course, Trevor himself might have preferred it that way, because after a while I got a little tired of hearing about his fabulous changeup. The changeup was a tremendously effective pitch for him, obviously, but I thought that his two-seamer, cutter, and slider were pretty good, too, and shouldn’t be neglected. I put that opinion into practice one night when I happened to catch him in the ninth inning of a scoreless game against the Rockies. Trevor wasn’t sticking his changeup where he wanted it and gave up a single to Matt Holliday, followed by a double to Brad Hawpe, to start the inning. I went out to the mound and said, “Here’s the deal, dude. We’re not gonna throw one more fucking changeup.”

He said, “What?”

I said, “Just do what I say, okay?”

“Well, if you’re feeling it . . .”

I wanted to get out of the jam with his other stuff because I was sick of the changeup, and besides, I knew that the Rockies would be sitting on it. Trevor was cool enough to understand that I’d said what I said in a light tone but with serious intent, and I appreciated the fact that he had enough trust in me to play along. He proceeded to strike out Troy Tulowitzki, Chris Iannetta, and Yorvit Torrealba without a single changeup and we won the game in the eleventh on a two-out, pinch-hit home run by Paul McAnulty, the only pinch home run he ever hit.

I really enjoyed playing for Boach. He has a great feel for the game and could invariably tell if I was getting tired or being nagged by something I
didn’t want to talk about. Boach was the kind of manager I’d run through a wall for. He just got me; understood the psychology part of it. And truthfully, being a catcher might have had something to do with that, because working with pitchers can be very much an exercise in psychology. It’s not merely a matter of coddling. Sometimes it’s about being straight with people; blunt, if necessary. And nobody was blunter than Bochy.

For example, we were playing at Arizona one night in May and El Duque (Orlando Hernandez) was pitching for the Diamondbacks. Boach looked at me and said, “You know what you’re hitting against this guy?” Some pitchers, I just knew when I stepped into the box that I was going to crush them. I could feel it as I gripped the bat. Other guys, it was like, oh man, I’ve got to put on a good act here. I can’t explain it. Why do you like pepperoni on your pizza and I like anchovies? It’s just the way it is. I couldn’t do a thing with El Duque.

I said, “Uh, no, not exactly, but I can assure you it’s pretty bad.”

Bochy said, “It’s fucking horseshit. One for thirteen. You’re not playing tonight.”

“All right, Boach.”

“Be ready in the eighth inning to pinch-hit if I need you.”

“All right, Boach.”

Sometimes, that kind of plain talking can be a form of respect, a token of appreciation that you can handle the truth. It also allows for better communication. Bochy knew that I didn’t take offense where none was intended, and it freed him up to speak his mind.

There was also the time when we were battling the Dodgers for first place, the game was tied in the bottom of the sixth, they had runners on first and second with nobody out, Alan Embree, a tough lefty, was pitching for us, and Cla Meredith, a righthander who threw from down under, was getting ready in the bullpen. Bochy marched out to the mound and said, “All right, no bullshit here. Make the easy play and be sure you get the out, then I’ll bring in the submariner.”

The next guy bunted the ball to Embree’s glove side, and I’m out there yelling, “three, three, three!” We had plenty of time to get the lead runner at third, except that Russell Branyan, our third baseman, had taken a couple of steps in for the bunt and got tangled up going back to the bag. Everybody was safe. So Boach comes back out to make his pitching change, turns to me, and goes, “What the fuck did I tell you?” There wasn’t much I could say.

After Meredith took over, Rafael Furcal grounded the ball to Josh Barfield at second, and I had to stretch and scoop the throw out of the dirt
to get the force at home for the first out. Kenny Lofton, one of the fastest runners in the game, was the next hitter. He bounced the ball right back to Meredith, and we got a home-to-first double play to end the inning.

I was feeling pretty good about it. When we got to the dugout I said, “I think you owe me an apology, Boach.”

He said, “Go fuck yourself.”

(Unfortunately, that was the night when the Dodgers hit four consecutive home runs to tie us in the ninth, and then, after Josh Bard had put us ahead with an RBI single, Nomar Garciaparra beat us with a two-run shot in the tenth.)

By spotting me sensibly and simply working with me, Bochy got some pretty good mileage out of my rusted old chassis. I worked with him, too. Once, when we had a day game after a night game—a situation in which I usually received a rest—there was a left-hander going for the other team, and Bochy says, “You think you can suck it up and play?”

“Absolutely, Boach. Whatever you need.” We had an understanding. It clicked.

I’ll tell you what else clicked for me. San Diego. One newspaper. A beach. Pleasant fans. If I struck out with a runner on second, nobody booed. If I went one for nineteen, nobody shouted, “Retire!” If I made a bad throw, nobody screamed, “Play first base!” Nobody ripped me on the radio. Nobody questioned my toughness, sexual orientation, or moral rectitude. A courteous constituency can actually be a good or bad thing for a player, depending on his wiring and history; but for me, coming off a litany of challenging times in New York City, it was just what the doctor ordered.

I had more fun in San Diego than a thirty-seven-year-old man ought to be allowed. For one thing, I hadn’t imagined how much music I’d find there. I went three or four times with various teammates to see Metal Skool. They let me play some drums, and on one occasion Jake Peavy, Clay Hensley, and I joined them on stage to sing “Sweet Home Alabama,” which was the only country song they knew. It had to be country for Peavy to sing it.

As for me, I’ll sing anything. Metallica once handed me the mike for “Enter Sandman,” which, like I said, I was sick of hearing when Mariano Rivera was strolling in from the bullpen—it meant that the Yankees were about to win—but didn’t mind so much in street clothes. Skid Row let me sing, too, which was like a dream come true. I have to say, the bands have been great to me over the years. They don’t take themselves too seriously, and neither do I. When it comes to music, I’m totally uninhibited, because, hell, it’s just
fun.
I don’t care how bad I sound. Danny Lozano and I were at
a karaoke club in New York one night and I told him to get up there and do a song and he kept saying he couldn’t. I don’t get that. I was like, “Dude, so you stink—who cares? That’s part of the fun!” When I get hold of the mike, I’ll hang around for three or four songs and people will be going, “All right, enough, enough! Get off the stage!”