Long Shot (58 page)

I couldn’t do that. After what they’d said in spring training about me catching, I was stunned that they’d ask; but that wasn’t the point. While my shoulder was healed enough to swing the bat, there was simply no way I could throw the ball to second or third base. I said as much to Billy, but it didn’t make any difference.

When we played a weekend series at Shea in late June, Geren let me bring out the lineup card—to a nice standing ovation—but that was all. Then, on July 16, Beane traded Jason Kendall to the Cubs. One of the players the A’s received in return was Rob Bowen, who’d been part of our three-headed
monster in San Diego. They also brought up Kurt Suzuki, a rookie catcher. Another three-man rotation seemed to make sense, except for the little complication that
I couldn’t throw.

So the A’s simply kept me on the disabled list. Beane had made up his mind that I’d stay in rehab until I was ready to catch. When I kept trying to throw and couldn’t, I went in for an MRI that revealed two old tears of the rotator cuff that had been aggravated by the AC joint injury. I suggested to Billy that he send me down to the minors for a week or so to get my swing together, and after that he could activate me, trade me, or release me outright. Instead, in an abrupt change of direction—I guess he had finally accepted the fact that I couldn’t come back as a catcher—he went ahead and took me off the DL right then. I’d been on it for eleven weeks, which was about five too many, in my opinion. In the meantime, we had slipped to five games under .500 and eleven out of first place.

It was a weird scenario all the way around, so weird that it made me wonder. Had Beane been trying to get me back behind the plate in order to showcase me for a trade? Had he kept me on the DL, and pressed the point about catching, to try to get me to quit? Was there a money angle here? I had no tangible evidence of that, but the very possibility gave rise to a pertinent question. If Billy Beane is the general manager of the ball club and also a partial owner (with Lew Wolff), isn’t that a conflict of interest? Billy is one of the sharpest general managers in the business, no question; but theoretically, the GM is the guy who’s supposed to fight tooth and nail to convince the owner to go out and spend that last dollar to get that last guy who’s going to make the ball club better. He’s the one counted on to represent the baseball side. If the GM is
also
an owner, however, then he’s involved with the bottom line, and he’s coming at the whole thing from a different perspective. In that arrangement, it seems like there might be a balance problem between the yin and the yang.

Meanwhile, in
this
arrangement, as I saw it, there was a balance problem between player and management. I’d done the A’s a favor—had saved them close to $7 million—by signing for one year instead of two. But they were doing me no favor in return. Not that I expected them to, or had one coming; I’m just pointing out the way it was. Fans, typically, are quick to pounce on players for swinging the hammer at contract time, but they don’t see the other side. They don’t understand that a ball club looks after its own interest—sometimes with a vengeance—and it’s up to the player to look after his. I certainly don’t mean to portray myself as a victim, because I made a hell of a lot of money in the game. For that matter, I was making a hell of a lot
of money that very year. I’d simply like for the public to better appreciate the players’ position in these situations. I got hurt by playing hard for the Oakland A’s. After that, Billy Beane was just trying to put out the cigarette. It’s a tough business.

At any rate, on my second day back, July 21, DH’ing against the Orioles, with Cust playing right field and batting in front of me in the three-hole, I started on an eight-game hitting streak that included fifteen hits altogether and my first home run since April 5. Then we flew down to Anaheim, where I picked up six hits and two homers and drove in six runs in the three-game series . . . and an ignorant Angels fan made a big mistake.

The dude hit me in the helmet with a water bottle.

I wasn’t in the most agreeable mood to start with. It was an afternoon game, the series finale, and I’d homered in the fifth inning against John Lackey to put us ahead 3–2, although the lead hadn’t lasted. It felt great to rake again, but it also underscored the frustration of missing eleven weeks—nearly half of them unnecessarily—at this late stage of my career. From where I stood, an important opportunity, for both me and the ball club, had been senselessly squandered. It was a lost season, and very possibly my
last.
I was feeling cheated.

Then, in the ninth inning, as we were trying to rally from three runs down, I was standing in the on-deck circle studying Frankie Rodriguez when there was a loud, unnerving pop and my head began to ring. At first, I couldn’t be sure what it was. It scared the shit out of me. When I realized that somebody had actually beaned me with a bottle of Dasani, about three-quarters full, the fear turned to fury. If you’ve watched any of the videos of the time I went after Guillermo Mota and seen the wicked expression on my face when I was being held back from getting at him, you know the look I had when I turned to the crowd and yelled, “Who the fuck did that?”

Immediately, four people pointed to the same guy. So I made it five and charged up to the wall, screaming, “You’re a chickenshit! You’re a piece of shit! Get your fucking ass down here!”

It wasn’t my finest moment. Bottle rage, I guess. But an act like that is so malicious, so hateful, so asinine and out of line that it just sends a bolt of anger up your spine and out your mouth. The guy only made it worse when he gave me some obscene and cocky body language—the very signals that would tell me to rush a pitcher. Fortunately, I couldn’t get over the wall. If I had, I’m pretty sure I would have done something I’d have regretted. In the meantime, the sucker just turned and walked up the steps. I yelled, “Grab that guy!” He almost made it to the tunnel before security got to him.

When the game resumed, I singled to center, but we fell short by a run. Afterward, a lieutenant from the Anaheim police department came down to the clubhouse to tell me that they had the fellow.

I said, “I’m pressing charges.”

He’s like,
“What?”

“Yeah, I’m pressing charges for assault.”

The cop’s expression said, oh geez, here we go. But he took me to the security office to identify the guy, who was standing there with two others.

“Yeah, that’s him,” I said. “And I’m pressing charges.”

A couple of days later, I got a follow-up call from the district attorney’s office. My guess is that they expected me to drop the complaint, since it would require another trip back to Anaheim to testify, but I told them to just give me a few days’ notice and I’d be there. My response might have been a bit extreme, but things had piled up and I’d had enough. I was going to make this guy pay for all the shit—the insults, rumors, baseballs, whatever—that people had been throwing at me for twenty years. Plus, by that time I’d heard he was going to be a
teacher
. I sure as hell didn’t want a jerk like that teaching
my
children.

As it turned out, there was no trial. When he heard I was willing to testify, the bottle chucker pled guilty and was sentenced to thirty days in prison.

• • •

My pleasant season in San Diego had spoiled me, I suppose. In Oakland, the drama was back. And reminiscent of New York, the media was in the middle of it.

A beat writer for the
San Francisco Chronicle
, Susan Slusser, asked me, ostensibly off the record, about some minor mistake that Bob Geren had made—so minor that I don’t even recall what it was. I explained it as his fault, more or less, but instead of leaving my comment out of the paper, as I’d expected, she ran it as an anonymous quote. I don’t know if Geren figured out from the context that the quote came from me—it definitely
sounded
like me—or if Slusser told him or what, but he was obviously bothered by the remark. He called a meeting the next day and, in front of the team, asked me how a situation like that should be handled.

I flashed back to when Tommy Lasorda would call similar meetings, hold up the newspaper, and tell us, in a way that only Tommy could, that if we didn’t have the guts to say something to somebody’s face, we shouldn’t
be saying it in the paper. So I replied, “Well, you have a meeting and tell everybody, ‘If you’re not man enough to say it to my face, then you shouldn’t be saying it in the paper.’ ” I didn’t happen to mention that
I
was the player quoted. So I’m mentioning it now, Bob. I apologize for not coming forward at the time. I can’t adequately explain why I didn’t, except to say that I’d reached the point, I think, at which I actually didn’t care enough anymore to take an ethical stand and do what I knew was right. I was falling out of touch with my professional principles. I’d never been a fan of clubhouse lawyering, or party to it. In New York, I’d always detested the stories in which “one Met said.” Now
I
was that guy, that one Athletic. I didn’t care for what I saw myself evolving into. I should have been more accountable.

The whole thing had started out as a trivial incident, but, to me, ballooned into a symbol of a season gone bad. At my age, I didn’t have time for that. I was disappointed by all the little annoyances that 2007 had brought with it—I thought I’d outdistanced those days—and, more to the point, by my own breaches of discretion. I was well aware, for instance, that when teams are down and out of it, the press likes to fan the brushfires into full-fledged controversies. Normally I played pretty good defense against that sort of thing. But this time around, I’d only aggravated the situation, which told me, in turn, that my guard was down; I was no longer on top of my game. I wondered if it was a sign that I was ready to move on to another team or profession.

At the trade deadline, I was hitting around .300, leading the club in that respect—of course, I hadn’t come to the plate very many times—and still batting cleanup; but, in spite of rumors, I wasn’t dealt anywhere. Once again, I was stuck playing out the string for a struggling team that was looking toward a future that didn’t include me. This time, though, I hadn’t seen it coming. Given the youth of the A’s and the success they’d experienced the year before, I’d sincerely hoped that the 2007 season would get me another crack at a World Series title, the pursuit of which still drove me. But the playoffs weren’t happening for us, and they weren’t happening in a big way. It was a lousy situation that affected my appetite for the game. For my whole professional career, and long before it even started, I’d been a circling shark on a relentless mission to satisfy some deep-down hunger. Now I didn’t have the stomach to play that way anymore, and I couldn’t play any
other
way, either.

That said, I was grateful for the opportunity—and yes, the money—that Oakland had given me, and for the chance to share my experience with the younger players. I thoroughly enjoyed that part of it, working, for instance, with Kurt Suzuki on things like blocking the plate and with Huston Street on even more urgent matters, like his taste in music.

Our last road trip of the season ended with two games in Boston. I loved hitting in Fenway Park, but didn’t play in the opener. In fact, I’d started only once in nearly two weeks and hadn’t had a solitary hit in all that time. Hoping I’d be in the lineup and knowing it might be his last chance to see me in a major-league uniform—we’d finish up with three in Oakland—my brother Vince came to the second game.

It was the fifth inning, and he hadn’t done much. The Red Sox had a left-hander pitching, Jon Lester. I’m sitting there thinking, “Please, God, just let him get a home run.” I hadn’t been to church in a long time, but I said to myself, if he gets a home run here, I’m going back to church. And no sooner did I complete the thought than, crack, home run to left field. I freaked out. But I held up my end of the bargain. I started going to church.

—Vince Piazza Jr.

The Red Sox took it to us both games, and afterward Vince asked me, “Are they that good or are you guys that bad?”

I said, “They’re that good.”

That was the year they swept the Rockies in the World Series. Meanwhile, we finished in third place in our division, ten games under .500. But we did beat the Angels, 3–2, in the final game of the season, on a rally that started when I singled to right, off Chris Bootcheck, leading off the ninth inning. Shannon Stewart pinch-ran for me and scored the game-winner on a hit by Suzuki.

My little single, which left my batting average at .275 for the year and .308 for my career, was hit number 2,127 over my sixteen seasons. I had no idea whether there would be another one, but I hoped there would.

• • •

Danny made some calls after the season. There were only eight teams that I was interested in playing for at the age of thirty-nine, and he contacted all of them. Two or three replied. None offered right away.

So I waited. I hadn’t had any closure in Oakland, I hadn’t won a World Series, and I definitely didn’t feel like major-league pitching had overtaken me. All those factors impelled me toward one more season of baseball. I questioned only two things: my intensity and my market.

Admittedly, my competitive edge hadn’t stayed sharp in my lost season with the A’s, but that could be attributed to the circumstances. At least, that’s what I told myself. Ideally, a player should never allow any kind of
issue or distraction to affect his levels of focus and drive, and I wasn’t proud that I had; but realistically, that’s a hard standard to live up to. I was willing to believe that my loss of passion was nothing that a better situation wouldn’t take care of. The bigger issue was finding the situation, or having it find
me
. In the meantime, I worked out, searched my soul, and got to know the sweetest baby in America.

In mid-February, I also played in the annual Tico Torres—the drummer for Bon Jovi—charity golf tournament at PGA National in Palm Beach. My partner was Gary Carter. We talked a little about catching and a lot about his two knee replacements. It was something to bear in mind when I kicked around the idea of undertaking a seventeenth season, very possibly as a catcher again. In fact, I couldn’t get it
out
of my mind. At this stage of the game, with a family started and no pressing financial concerns, did I really want to run the risk of another injury, or of exacerbating any of the problems I was already dealing with?