Long Shot (55 page)

I was waiting for him to say, “Fuck you,” but he started yammering and yabba-dabba-dooing and asked me why I didn’t charge Roger Clemens. Mota, Pedro, Tavarez—they all said the same thing. I’m not sure why I didn’t punch him right then and there.

Out of all the guys who hit me, I felt that Julian was the one whose ass I definitely should have kicked. But I guess I’ve mellowed since then. Away from the game, my anger has subsided somewhat. When I saw Tavarez on
the occasion of the Marlins’ last game at Sun Life Stadium, we exchanged greetings and he even introduced me to his family. Seemed like nice people.

• • •

As the Mets’ support of me slackened, the fans’ actually picked up. It was a significantly different dynamic than I’d endured in Los Angeles, when the organization had effectively alienated me from its constituency. At Shea, the customers gave me a standing ovation every time I hit a home run.

I was moved—not only by the gestures but by the evolution of my relationship with New York. That first year, the Mets’ crowds had booed me unreasonably. Seven years later, here they were
cheering
me unreasonably. I think—I hope—that, through all the weirdness and drama, they appreciated my role in reestablishing the Mets as a credible, capable franchise. It’s something I was proud of.

The loudest home run cheer may have been the one for my nineteenth and last of 2005, a 450-footer in the opener of our four-game, season-ending series against the Rockies, which everyone pretty much understood would mark my farewell as a Met. Appropriately, David Wright hit two that night, and Glavine threw a two-hit shutout that I thoroughly enjoyed catching. The victory, 11–0, assured us of at least a .500 season.

By the time Sunday came around—the final game of the year—I thought I was ready for it. The warmth of the fans hadn’t budged my feeling that it was time to move on, and I was fairly certain it hadn’t changed the organization’s position, either. In my mind, in fact, the good karma served as reassurance that this, indeed, should be my so-long to Shea. I went to the stadium mass that morning in a melancholy mood.

The sermon was about the victims of 9/11. It got me. Combusting with my frame of mind, it rekindled all the emotions of that time, from the horror of the event to the high of the home run. It reminded me, also, of how that ternble day in 2001 had clearly divided my eight seasons with the Mets. We’d been on the rise before it and the decline thereafter; and the same applied to me. As I listened, the scenes and tribulations of those years came swirling back in my memory—that first day at Shea, with thousands of people walking up for tickets; the sleepless nights that year; the tough decision whether to stay in New York; seeing your breath in April home games; Bobby V; the Subway Series; Clemens; the smoke over the city; the rumors; the injuries; first frigging base . . . Finally, I had to get up and move to the back of the room, off by myself.

Ordinarily, when there’s a lot running through a ballplayer’s mind, the field itself is a refuge. But on the way to it this time, walking through the
tunnel, I had to stop and collect myself. The weight of the day was pushing on my head, and along with it, there was something else—something even heavier—that I found uncomfortable. It was the first time I’d ever sensed that a particular ball game was largely about
me.

To start, I’d always felt a certain amount of uneasiness about being a star, especially in New York. I wasn’t drawn to the spotlight the way Reggie Jackson was, for instance, or Joe Namath. If anything, I shied away from the attentions of the media. The more they pried, the more I shied. Usually I could get away from all that by losing myself in the competitiveness of a baseball game, but the outcome of this game wouldn’t make a hell of a lot of difference. If we lost, the Marlins could tie us for third place in the division. The Rockies would finish last in theirs, either way. Other than my every move, there was little else for 47,718 pairs of eyeballs to focus on.

I might have convinced myself that the whole ballpark wasn’t
really
watching me if half the people there hadn’t been wearing the number 31. But I was flattered by that, and also by the observation of Sheldon Souray, the hockey player who had introduced me to Alicia. He said the cool thing about my jersey was that anybody could wear it, from a teeny-bopper to a punk rocker to a young professional to a pipefitter to a grandparent. There certainly seemed to be all types at Shea that day. To indulge them, and me, Randolph turned back the clock and wrote me into the cleanup spot.

Victor Zambrano was pitching for us—and pitching and pitching and pitching. He walked only three, but it seemed like a dozen. In less than six innings, his pitch count approached 120. The Rockies were swinging at first pitches—they wanted to get the hell out of there and go home—but Zambrano insisted on running up the count anyway. Colorado, meanwhile, was pitching a sinkerballer, Aaron Cook, and he kept grounding me out to the shortstop. Three times, I grounded out to short and the crowd cheered as though I’d smoked the ball off the scoreboard, where, from time to time, the Mets were putting up video highlights of some of my better swings and moments.

Then, during the seventh-inning stretch, they showed my feature video, which, to their credit, was very cool, set to “The Great Divide” by Scott Stapp from Creed. I happened to look over into the Rockies’ dugout, and they were standing and applauding—a nice gesture. When the video was finished, the fans brought me out for three curtain calls. I gotta tell you, it was touching. To be taken in as a true, appreciated Met, after all the ups and downs and controversies . . . Not knowing quite what to do, I bowed and blew kisses.

I was still 0 for 3 when I reported to my position behind the plate in the top of the eighth and Mike DiFelice trotted out to replace me. Randolph was
allowing me to receive one final ovation as I left the field. It was a loaded moment. I could see people crying in the crowd. At the same time, my dad and brothers were up in our box going, “No! Give him one more at-bat! He may go deep!”

Willie was criticized for removing me prematurely, because I would have come up to hit in the bottom of the eighth, but I had no complaint. There was no dramatic stroke in me at that point; no stirring send-off about to happen. There just wasn’t. Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ PR guy, had said to me that he’d never seen a player who could rise to the occasion in a big-time situation the way I could, and I cherished that remark, but, to me, this wasn’t that kind of situation. We were losing badly in a game that scarcely mattered. Besides, I was emotionally spent and Aaron Cook was still firing up that damn sinkerball. As they say, it was all over but the shouting. And I was okay with that. I actually thought there was a metaphor in the fact that I hadn’t been able to deliver that one crowning memory. My tank was empty. I had some more baseball left in me—of that, I was pretty sure—but no more New York.

The city had made me older faster, in this respect: While it’s true that, as the years pile up, it gets harder for your body to recover, it’s even harder for your
spirit
to keep bouncing back. Passion is what New York uses up in a player, like no other town. Mentally exhausted, generally jaded, and physically torn apart, I had none in reserve. Not as a Met, anyhow. The emotion of my final game at Shea was a reaffirmation not only of that but also of the wrenching judgment I’d made seven years before, when I decided, against the testimony of all that had happened and the advice of people I respected, to sign and stay. It was the right call.

This time around, there would be no call to make. I needed a change of scenery and the Mets were clearly headed in another direction. Omar Minaya was ready to put his own stamp on the ball club, rebuilding around Wright, Reyes, and Beltran. Our equipment manager, Charlie Samuels, always looking out for me, asked Jeff Wilpon what he thought it would take to get me signed, and Jeff told him it was simply time to move on. I totally agreed.

In that spirit, I made it clear to Danny Lozano that we would put no pressure on the Mets to re-up with me. We knew that, if we told the press I wanted to stay in whatever capacity and would play for whatever they wanted to pay me, it would become a talking point and put the club on the spot. I didn’t want to go there. I didn’t want to leave New York the way I’d left Los Angeles.

I was just fine, even pleased, with the way it had ended in the eighth inning on October 2—with the fans on their feet. Thank you, New York.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

That Christmas, my first as a married man, was also my first in seventeen years without an employer. Frankly, I hadn’t anticipated that.

As a free agent with a .311 lifetime batting average and 397 home runs, I’d been expecting to hear from a handful of American League teams in search of a designated hitter. But now the off-season was winding down, and only the Phillies and Padres had shown the slightest interest. (The Mets, incidentally, continuing their tradition of good-hitting Italian catchers from the Northeast who had been with the Dodgers and Marlins, had picked up Paul Lo Duca to replace me.) It was discouraging to the point that it forced me to consider retirement. Reluctantly.

Without too much difficulty, though, I was able to willfully put that thought aside on the grounds that, 1) I didn’t like the idea of going out on two bad years in a row—I needed to prove I was better than that—and 2) I was eager to see how I could do if I were away from the madness of New York. The second factor got me thinking harder about San Diego, which was about as far away as anywhere. At the same time, though, there was some appeal to the notion of playing for the team I grew up watching. That was clearly what my father wanted me to do. He’d been in the ear of Hank King, who was the Phillies’ advance scout and a friend of his, about them signing me, going so far as to tell King what he figured they could have me for.

Shortly after the holidays, Charlie Manuel and Pat Gillick, the manager and general manager of the Phillies, flew down to Miami for lunch with me and Danny Lozano. We hunkered over a table at the Mandarin Oriental and they set about flattering me, which was definitely a good strategy. But they also told me the truth, which included the fact that their starting catcher was still Mike Lieberthal, who was due to make $7.5 million that year.

I didn’t understand every last thing about the machinations of baseball, but I understood that $7.5 million players don’t sit the bench. Besides that,
I didn’t
want
to make Lieberthal sit, even if I could have. He was a career Phillie, a local fixture, in the last year of his contract. Of course, I might have felt differently about the whole thing if I’d known that Lieberthal would get hurt a few times in 2006 and catch only about sixty games. The way it stood, though, Manuel’s plan was to have me catch here and there, DH in the interleague games, and put in a little work at first base. As he laid it out, I imagined myself sitting around for two weeks and then pinch-hitting against Billy Wagner—who, ironically, had signed with the Mets—in the bottom of the ninth. As cool as I thought it would be to play eighty-one games in front of my friends and family (being a Phillie would also have given me a chance to work on my relationship with Phoenixville, which, frankly, has never been quite what I’d like it to be), and as much as I wanted to please my dad, and as grateful as I was for the organization’s interest in me, and as enticing as it sounded to swing the bat in Citizens Bank Park for six months, that was a big thanks-but-no-thanks.

San Diego it was. If we could work it out.

The Padres—in the person of the general manager, Kevin Towers—put a million and a quarter on the table, along with the starting catcher position, which was more important. Tommy Lasorda suggested I take it, which helped ease my father’s disappointment that I’d turned down the Phillies. Apparently my dad wasn’t
too
upset about the way things were going, because, before we’d announced a deal with the Padres, he let it out that I was signing. That was a little awkward for Danny, who was still trying to squeeze a few more dollars out of Kevin Towers, but my dad enjoys his visits with the media. He’d been talking to a San Diego radio guy named Bill Werndl, whom he knew from back home—Philly Billy, as he was called, had been trying to enlist me as a lobbyist for Pete Rose to get into the Hall of Fame—and got a little ahead of himself. I blew up at him, which wasn’t unusual, and we had a little bit of a rift for a while. It was nothing serious—mostly just me venting about being a married man of thirty-seven, the leading home run hitter among all catchers in the history of the game, and still feeling like a daddy’s boy at times. Of course, if my father hadn’t been the way he was, I wouldn’t have grown up with freakish forearms, a backyard batting cage, and a batboy gig for the Dodgers, etc. I wouldn’t have been drafted, most likely. I probably wouldn’t have eaten noodles at the Mandarin Oriental with Pat Gillick and Charlie Manuel, either. I realized all of that. I was still mad at him. That was just our methodology.

A couple of weeks after becoming a Padre, I reported with the pitchers and other catchers to their spring-training camp in Peoria, Arizona, but
stayed only a few days before I left to join the Italian team in Florida for the inaugural World Baseball Classic. I was eligible because my grandfather, Rosario Piazza, had been born in Sicily; but my connection to the old country seemed to have been magnified by my visit to the pope. I was referred to in the press as baseball’s ambassador to the Vatican.

Playing for Italy was an honor I took very seriously. It was something that my Italian-blooded predecessors—great players like Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Roy Campanella, Ernie Lombardi, Joe Torre (those last four were all catchers, by the way), Tony Lazzeri, Phil Rizzuto, Rocky Colavito, Carl Furillo, Ron Santo, and Tony Conigliaro—hadn’t been afforded the privilege of doing. Over the course of a century, Italian-Americans had gained enormous stature in the game, and if I could bring some of that cachet back to the homeland of my ancestors, it made me immensely proud. Our first baseman, Claudio Liverziana, told reporters, “The first time we saw him, for us, baseball-wise, it was, God is among us.”