Long Shot (36 page)

Anyway, I wanted to get the lowdown on HGH—like a lot of players, I was trying to sort all this stuff out—so I did a little reading on the subject, then went to Fred Hina, the Mets’ trainer, and asked him, “Fred, what’s the deal with this growth hormone? Are the teams going to be giving it out?” I figured, if it was so good and generally accessible, why wouldn’t the ball clubs make it available just like Vioxx, Indocine, Voltaren, and cortisone? I assumed HGH was simply the next step in the evolution of medicating the ballplayer, the latest drug that teams would use routinely for rehabbing injuries. Standard procedure.

When I inquired about it, Fred was sort of speechless for a moment, then said, “I’ll check around and get back to you on that.” I think he was genuinely curious about it. A day or two later, he came to me and said something about the feds, like it was some big thing, and that was the end of that. Fred made it clear to me that HGH was considered a controlled substance—although
it wasn’t officially banned by MLB until 2005. The whole episode was kind of amusing, actually, and more than a little bewildering. Like creatine, HGH is made up of amino acids and is produced naturally in the body. The problem lies in the fact that people pig out on the stuff. That’s when it becomes unhealthy. At the time, though, so little was known about supplements and such, and the scene was changing so fast, and baseball’s policies were so ambiguous, that players often found themselves on unmarked trails, trying to navigate a hazardous (but promising) new frontier. It wasn’t simply a steroids issue. On a broader scale, guys were trying to figure out what they could do nutritionally in terms of supplements, sorting through the fitness magazines and health food stores for something that might help their games yet respect the rules and not create a firestorm like the one over McGwire’s bottle of androstenedione. A power hitter, in particular, was simultaneously teased and taunted by a general, growing premise that there was some sort of magic formula, a secret of unlocking athletic potential, to be summoned from the inside of a can or some other product easily found at the mall. There’s no such thing; but there was certainly the
rumor
of it, the tantalizing, unremitting murmur. It was an age of exaggeration, misinformation, and, most of all, confusion. It could be disorienting.

Given the nature and abundance of the New York media, it was surprising that more wasn’t reported on PEDs in those days. I suspect that the writers were as bewildered about the whole subject as we were. It certainly didn’t come up often in my experience, which is why the instance with Hermoso stands out to me.

At any rate, when New York got in my face, whether it was the fans, a newspaper guy, or the city itself, I had a refuge. And I’m not talking about New Jersey.

I mean music. My answer—especially before a ball game, in the car and the clubhouse—was to crank it up and drown out the rest of the world: Anthrax, AC/DC, Boston, Bad Company, Van Halen, Yesterday and Today, Zebra; everything from A to Z, as it were.

• • •

After he sent up Todd Pratt to bat for me in the ninth inning of an 8–3, early April game in Montreal in which I had three hits, including a home run, and five RBIs, Bobby told the press that he did it so “Todd Pratt could tell his grandkids one day that he pinch-hit for Mike Piazza.” Actually, it was because I slightly tore the medial collateral ligament in my right knee—although we didn’t know the exact nature of the injury at the time—in a rundown between second and third after Brian McRae missed a bunt. Bobby
initially wrote me into the lineup the next day, but he took me out after Fred Hina observed how much the knee had swollen. Then they put me on a plane to Newark, so I could get an MRI. I missed a couple of weeks.

It wasn’t much of a problem for the ball club, because we had a hell of a lineup in 1999, starting at the top with Rickey Henderson. (Now that I think of it, I still owe Rickey a pair of headphone amplifiers. I had a nice set that he envied and I told him I’d pick one up for him. Never did. Sorry about that, Rickey.) It’s common knowledge that Henderson was one of the greatest leadoff hitters of all time and also one of the greatest characters. I didn’t know him well before the season, because he’d spent most of his career in the American League, but whenever he’d come up to bat against us he’d turn around and say, “Whaddup, P?” He could make you smile.

So many Rickey stories made the rounds that you were never sure what was true. Rick Rhoden, one of his teammates with the Yankees, told me that Rickey had had some issues with their manager, Lou Piniella, and after they met in Piniella’s office one day somebody asked Rickey how it had gone. He said, “We agreed to let bye-byes be bye-byes.” Most of the lines, though, involved Rickey referring to himself as Rickey—such as “Rickey don’t like it when Rickey can’t find Rickey’s limo.” A lot of that might be urban legend, but this much is definitely true: Rickey Henderson was a consummate pro, a bighearted guy and a player I really appreciated as a teammate. For starters, he was always on base, even at the age of forty. That’s a big part of the reason why we got outstanding seasons that year from so many people—namely, Edgardo Alfonzo, Robin Ventura, John Olerud, Roger Cedeno, and Benny Agbayani. We scored nearly a run a game more than we had in 1998. With all that production across the board, we played through my injury and were doing well . . . until we somehow lost eight straight games in late May and early June.

The last two of those were my introduction to Yankee Stadium. For the most part, I enjoyed the hell out of playing there. The first time I walked into the park, fans were lined up outside chanting, “Piazza sucks! Piazza sucks!” I got a chuckle out of that. But I wasn’t laughing after we dropped the first two games of that weekend series, and neither was Steve Phillips. In New York, you don’t lose eight straight without consequences.

The consequence, this time, was that, on June 5, Phillips and Bobby engaged in an hour-long meeting/argument, during which Phillips fired three of Bobby’s coaches—the pitching coach, Bob Apodaca; the hitting coach, Tom Robson; and the bullpen coach, Randy Niemann. So we now had two owners who didn’t get along and a serious split between the manager and
GM. And Bobby saying that he didn’t deserve to keep his job if the ball club didn’t pick up the pace over the next couple of months.

And Roger Clemens pitching against us the next day.

At age thirty-six, it was Clemens’s first season with the Yankees after thirteen in Boston and two in Toronto, where, both years, he led the American League in wins, ERA, and strikeouts. In my only previous appearances against Roger, the season before, I’d had a couple of singles in a game at Toronto. I remember thinking, hmm, I see the ball pretty well off this dude. I could pick up the split-fingered fastball coming out of his hand—because I was blessed with great eyesight, I could actually see the spread of his fingers—and was able to eliminate that pitch, which he depended upon heavily.

That was my plan when I faced Clemens leading off the second inning on that Sunday in ’99, with Al Leiter going for us. The result was a double over Bernie Williams’s head in center field, which got us started on a four-run rally. In the third, Olerud singled and I made it 6–0 with a home run. Four batters later, we’d knocked the big guy out of the game.

That got us going on a roll in which we won fifteen out of eighteen, and had some fun doing it. Bobby saw to that. I’m referring specifically to June 9, an extra-inning game against the Blue Jays at Shea Stadium.

Joe Ferguson had taught me how to subtly cheat on pitchouts by running into the ball to shorten the pitch and build up some momentum for the throw. I tried it in the twelfth inning that day with Pat Mahomes pitching, Shannon Stewart on first base, and Craig Grebeck at the plate. I suppose I might have taken an extra step forward to try to nail Stewart, and the umpire, Randy Marsh, called catcher’s interference on me. It was an unusual call, which prompted Bobby to come rushing out of the dugout and get himself tossed. The next inning, I looked over and did a double take. There he was—we all knew it instantly, which he’d fully expected—leaning against the ledge alongside the steps that led to the tunnel. He’d taken two of those strips that players use for eye-black and made a mustache out of them. He’d also put on a Mets T-shirt, a different cap, and dark glasses. I don’t know if he was trying to masquerade as a grounds-crew guy or what, but of course the cameras caught him, and the league wasn’t as amused as we were. He got suspended for two games and fined five thousand bucks.

But he had succeeded in loosening us up, which was very much in order because the dugout had been decidedly tense for a few days: bad vibes between Valentine and Bobby Bonilla. Valentine had benched Bonilla, Bonilla had refused to pinch-hit, there was some shouting, Valentine had snubbed him the next time he needed a pinch hitter, and so on. Anyway, we won the
fake-mustache game in the fourteenth with smiles on our faces, completing a sweep of Toronto, then took two out of three from the Red Sox and Reds, three out of four from the Cardinals, and three straight from the Marlins before the Braves—always the Braves—stopped us.

In the opener of the Boston series, the Mets honored my old hero and backyard instructor, Ted Williams. Tom Seaver drove him to the mound in a golf cart, Lasorda introduced him, and it was my privilege to catch his ceremonial first pitch. The guy was eighty years old, so I stepped out in front of the plate. He waved me back and delivered a strike. As you might expect, I was eager to do something noteworthy that night, and tied the game, 2–2, with a two-run homer off Tom Gordon in the bottom of the ninth. But the Sox beat us in the twelfth.

Nevertheless, we were six and three against the American League by the time the Yankees came to Shea to resume the Subway Series on a weekend in July. I continue to watch the Subway Series every year, and it’s still a great show; but at that stage it was novel, immensely competitive, and truly special. The modern version of the series had started in 1997, and when they visited us in 1999, the Yankees, predictably, had gotten the best of all three sets. They were also sailing through the AL East, up three games on the Red Sox. And once again, they had the ball right where they wanted it—in the meaty hands of Roger Clemens.

But in the bottom of the sixth on the ninth day of the month, with the score tied 2–2, I had Clemens where I wanted
him
—at two and one, with a couple of runners on base. He served me the slider I’d earned by laying off the splitter, got it up a bit, and I lined it into the temporary picnic area set up beyond left field. Leiter had the situation in hand, and 5–2 was how it ended. It appeared that Al and I
both
had Clemens’s number.

In the Saturday game, on a sinker that Ramiro Mendoza didn’t get as low as he would have liked, I crushed a higher, longer (measured at 482 feet) three-run homer that landed on top of the picnic tent and put us up 7–6 in the seventh. For the second day in a row, I took a curtain call from a fired-up crowd. Even the Yankees were buzzing about that blast. Jorge Posada said it was the hardest-hit ball he’d ever seen. When Derek Jeter came up to bat in the top of the ninth, he inquired, suppressing a smile, as to whether I’d gotten it all. Still, after I’d been intentionally walked, it took a two-out, two-strike, two-run pinch single by Matt Franco, against Mariano Rivera, to pull the game out in the bottom of the ninth, 9–8.

Sunday, I had three singles, but my old buddy Orel Hershiser—we had signed him as a free agent at the end of spring training—didn’t have one of
his better afternoons and the Yankees salvaged the finale. Regardless, we’d made our statement, and I felt like I’d made mine, as well. For a while there, I’d started to take some flak again about not hitting in important games and situations. In the Subway Series, I’d proved to New York that I could do that.

And I’d proved to myself that I could do New York.

• • •

At the end of July, we began to bob and weave with Atlanta. On the West Coast in mid-August, I hit a stretch in which I pounded five home runs in six games, and Robin Ventura was right there with me, virtually matching long ball for long ball and RBI for RBI. Edgardo Alfonzo—Fonzi—wasn’t far behind. That’s how teams get hot.

After falling a few games behind the Braves again, we revisited the coast in September, starting in Los Angeles; starting with Kevin Brown, the pitcher the Dodgers had signed in the off-season for the money I’d been requesting. He was good that night. So was Hershiser, pitching as a Met against the team he won 135 games for. With one out in the sixth and the Dodgers up 1–0, Olerud reached on an error. The count on me went to two and two. I fouled off four pitches, mostly fastballs. Then Brown let one drift too far over the plate, and I dropped it into the left-field seats. The Los Angeles fans gave me a standing ovation. Hershiser held the Dodgers to two hits in eight innings, Armando Benitez finished them off, and the final was 3–1.

The next day, Bill Plaschke wrote in the
Los Angeles Times
,

Thursday was poignant reflection of what has been evident around here since the day Dodger blue turned to black. The deal that Fox’s Chase Carey cut behind everyone’s back? The one that has made May 15 the most infamous date in club history? . . . Turns out, it was not a trade, it was a wound. Turns out, it was a cut so deep, 16 months later it is still there. . . .

Come to find out, this suddenly unsteady organization needed Mike Piazza more than he needed it. Turns out, the complaining he did about his contract was just a whisper compared to the griping his former teammates have done since then. And today, I admit, I miss him. Despite his clubhouse aloofness, I miss his on-field stability. Even with his October disappearances, I miss his September presence. Part of me wanted to cheer him Thursday for taking another team toward the playoffs. Part of me wanted to boo him for leaving us behind.

Yet again, reports surfaced that the Dodgers had been attempting to get me back. The
Times
made it known that Kevin Malone, the Dodgers’ general manager, had twice that year contacted Steve Phillips about trading for me. “The significance of the revelation,” wrote Jason Reid, “is that Malone is trying to correct what many Dodger fans consider the worst mistake in franchise history.” It was all very flattering, but otherwise of little consequence. I wasn’t thinking about the Dodgers. I was thinking about the Braves.