Long Shot (9 page)

We started right off with fall practice, and it was evident from the outset that I was in a great environment for baseball. The first time we took infield, I thought we looked like a pro team. We had kids from Hialeah, Miami Lakes, several Cubans—no shortage of talent, including a good catcher, Pete Gonzalez, who was of Cuban descent and would become a teammate of mine in the minor leagues. There was something pure about the program. Miami-Dade was a fun place to play. I was encouraged.

That, in fact, was by design. Doc Mainieri maintained a climate of encouragement, and I got some more of it from his son, Paul, who was coaching at St. Thomas University and eventually won a national championship at LSU. Before a practice game against Florida International, Paul gave me a perfect pep talk. He knew I’d been disheartened by my experience at Miami and told me that there’s simply no way of knowing how things will play out in baseball; you’ve got to just keep plugging. It was exactly what I needed to hear. I’d expected everything to come fast and easy, and Paul was educating me to the hard fact that sometimes—
most
of the time—the game doesn’t work that way. By the time spring came around, I was in good shape, physically and mentally, and it showed.

At one point, Doc actually scheduled an exhibition game with Miami, and as I was taking batting practice, Ron Fraser walked up to my dad—it was amazing how many games Dad was able to make—and said, “He looks pretty good.” The way my father tells it, Fraser’s assistant, my old nemesis Brad Kelley, strolled by at just that moment and muttered, “Yeah, he’s a five o’clock hitter.”

Later in the day, Fraser made a point of asking my dad where I’d be going to school the next year and mentioned that he’d like to have me back at Miami. Dad told him he wanted to talk to Tommy about the chances of getting me drafted. Fraser shook his head and said, “I don’t think he’s ready for that yet.”

I probably wasn’t, but my father was undaunted and unremitting in those days. He was like the Wizard of Oz back there behind the curtain, pulling the strings. In the fall, through Tommy, he had arranged a day for me at the Orioles’ Instructional League camp in West Palm Beach. The connection was Tommy’s (and his) buddy Eddie Liberator’s, who was now scouting for Baltimore after a long career with the Dodgers. They fed me some soup and an apple—I thought, man, is
this
what they get in the minor leagues?—gave me
an Orioles hat, put me in an Orioles uniform, and stuck me in one of their instructional games. I didn’t knock anybody’s socks off. No matter: when my dad came down in the spring, he was at it again. This time he packed me into the car and took me around the state on the Tommy Lasorda Tour of spring training. The first visit was Port Charlotte, where the Texas Rangers trained. Their manager was Bobby Valentine, who was a protégé and favorite of Tommy. Bobby pitched to me in the cage, which went well, then took me out to the field for some defensive drills at first base, which didn’t.

But the key stop was Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Tommy’s personal playground. This was 1988, the year the Dodgers would beat Oakland in the World Series with Kirk Gibson limping up to pinch-hit and somehow coming through with the walk-off home run against Dennis Eckersley to win game one. The Dodgers had signed Gibson as a free agent that winter, and he asserted his will immediately. When I visited Vero Beach, it was just a few days after a teammate had put eye-black in Gibson’s hat and Gibson had gone off, screaming at everybody that this wasn’t how it was going to be, that he wasn’t there to screw around but to work like hell and win a World Series. Or something like that. He backed it up by earning the National League MVP award. Anyway, I took some batting practice and people seemed to be impressed.

Then Tommy walked over and brought up the notion of me becoming a catcher. He had discussed it with my dad and Joe Ferguson, who had caught for Tommy and was now coaching for him. They were all gathered around and Joe said, “Well, let’s see him throw.” So I went behind home plate and Ferguson told me not to bother crouching, let’s just play catch. He kept backing up until he was at second base, at which point I let it rip a few times. I think I was seeing the results from throwing the football so much. Afterward, Joe walked up to my dad and said, “Hey, he’s got a great arm!”

At Miami-Dade, though, I was still a first baseman, and hit well enough to justify it. Midway through the season, I was rolling along—batting around .360 with a few home runs, including a walk-off against Indian River Junior College—and positioned to attract some attention heading into the main scouting weeks. Then, on a play at first base, a runner bashed his knee into my left hand and split my knuckles apart. Tore a ligament. The doctor put me in a cast for three weeks or so. I wanted to get back on the field so badly that I threw batting practice with my cast on. There wasn’t much rehab involved after it came off, and I was hitting again by the end of the season. I finished at .364.

Miami-Dade was only a two-year program, which meant that I was done there. I didn’t see myself heading back to the University of Miami—I suspect that when Fraser had brought up the idea to my father, he was just being
polite—so Doc said he’d help me get into another four-year school. Then he told me he wasn’t having any luck. It so happened, though, that he had a backup plan. He suggested I go to St. Thomas, a Catholic university in Miami that had a strong NAIA baseball program, to play for his son, Paul.

Of course, my dad was involved with these discussions, and he had two things to say about it. One, he still wanted to see if I could get drafted. And two, if I went back to school, he wanted me to catch. Honestly, I had worked hard on my defense at first base and thought I was halfway decent at the college level, but I guess nobody was confusing me with Keith Hernandez. My dad thought I might be more appealing to the scouts if I projected as a catcher. Doc said, okay, if I went to St. Thomas, I could catch. They wanted my bat. As it turned out, Paul Mainieri got a job to coach at the U.S. Air Force Academy the next year and Al Avila took over as the St. Thomas coach. His dad, Ralph Avila, was the Latin America scout for the Dodgers, so—through Tommy, of course—there was still a connection. Ralph called my dad to suggest that their sons get together.

I liked the idea of staying in Miami and figured that was probably what I’d do. My dad, however, had already checked out the Phillies’ schedule to see when the Dodgers were coming to town.

• • •

To my knowledge, the first time the concept of a courtesy draft pick came to public attention was in Kevin Kerrane’s book,
Dollar Sign on the Muscle
, published in 1984 as an inside look into the world of baseball scouting. The arrangement is that, as a favor, a team will devote a low-round pick to a player who’s important to someone in or close to the organization. It’s done not with the intention of actually
signing
the player, necessarily, but perhaps to make him more attractive to college recruiters.

Ed Liberatore—who, by bringing Ted Williams to our house, had already blessed me with the favor of a lifetime—told my dad that maybe the Orioles would do that for me. Dad had called Eddie to advise him that I was going to be
catching
a game for the Skippack Skippers, the grown-up team I occasionally freelanced for, and to offer him a ride, which was accepted. Unfortunately, we were playing Norristown, a team that knew what it was doing. Norristown ran wild on me, stealing base after base. But I smoked a long home run to center field and then another one over the pavilion, and Liberatore said something like “I don’t know about his catching, Vince, but damn, that kid can
hit.
”

That’s when he mentioned about the courtesy pick. First, though, he would have to call Roland Hemond, the Orioles’ general manager, to sell the idea.

Since my dad was the one in the middle of all this, I’ll just let
him
tell the rest:

I said, “Oh, Eddie, you’d do that?”

He said, “Yeah.”

So then I called Tommy Lasorda and told him I’d just talked to Eddie Liberatore and what he was going to do. And I told him about Mike catching a little.

Tommy said, “Catching, huh? Well, all right, wait till I come in [to Philadelphia, with the Dodgers].”

So sure as hell the Dodgers come in and we go down to Vet Stadium. This is a week before the draft. We go into Tommy’s office and he said, “Michael, go get set up.” You know, put on the gear. And he’s asking me, “Do you think he really wants to catch?”

I said, “Yeah, Tom.”

So Joe Ferguson was there. Tommy says, “Hey, Joe, come here. I want you to take Michael down to the field and work him out as a catcher and tell me what you think.” Then he said, “Hey, Beach.” Beach was the bullpen coach, Mark Cresse, and he was really great at hitting pop-ups.

So we go down through the tunnel and I’m sitting on the bench watching and Beach is hitting him pop-ups and he’s catching everything. Mike was doing a nice job. So they get him behind the plate and he’s throwing down to second base and they’re out there about twenty minutes. Afterward, I walked up to Ferguson and said, “Joe, what do you think?”

He said, “This kid can make it as a catcher.”

I said, “You serious?”

He said, “Yeah.”

I said, “You mind if I tell Tommy?”

He said, “Sure, go tell him.”

So I go down through the tunnel to Tommy’s office and who’s sitting on the couch but Ed Liberatore! Tommy said, “How’d he make out?”

I said, “Ferguson said he could make it as a catcher.”

Tommy stands up behind the desk, he looks at Eddie, he’s got that crooked finger, and he points that finger at him and he says, “Don’t you fuck with that kid, you understand? We’re gonna draft him!”

Then he turned back to me and said, “Fergie said that?”

I said, “Yeah.”

He said, “Don’t bullshit me.”

I said, “No, Tom.”

So Tommy picks up the phone and dials Ben Wade, who was the scouting director for the Dodgers. He tells Ben, “I want you to do me a favor. I want you to draft Michael Piazza.”

I’m sitting there and Eddie’s looking at me and laughing a little bit. Tommy says [into the phone], “Here’s his father. He’ll give you his age and where he went to school and all of that.”

We get off the phone and Liberatore says, “Hey, can I go down and say hello to Mike?”

And Tommy says, “Yeah, but don’t you fuck with him!”

So we’re walking down the tunnel and Eddie puts his arm around me and says, “Vince, I’d rather see him as a Dodger than an Oriole.” Eddie had only been with the Orioles for about a year or so at that time. He’d been with the Dodgers for thirty-something years, and Tommy and him were like brothers. He knew about my relationship with Tommy, and Mike’s.

Then he said, “Do you mind if I tell him?”

He calls him over and tells him and Mike’s all choked up and so am I. We can’t believe this. He’s gonna play! He’s gonna go to the minor leagues!

—Vince Piazza

It was a pretty interesting summer. I caught a few more games for Skippack and actually had the game-winning hit for the South team in the Perkiomen Valley Twilight League all-star game. I also enrolled for the fall semester at St. Thomas University, just in case. And on June 3, in the sixty-second round, the Los Angeles Dodgers selected me with the 1,390th pick of the 1988 draft.

That wasn’t the last round of the draft, but it was the last round the Dodgers picked in. If it hadn’t been for Tommy, they’d have stopped after the sixty-first.

The way he tells it, “I sent five of my friends from five different organizations out to see Michael play, and nobody wanted to sign him. I
ordered
the Dodgers to draft him. I said, ‘I don’t give a shit where you draft him, but
draft
him.’

“They weren’t doing
me
a favor. I was doing
them
a favor.”

CHAPTER SIX

When it came to baseball, I was a hopeless romantic. I played it, practiced it, watched it, read about it, revered it, genuinely loved it, and always assumed it would love me back. Or at least
call
me back.

I thought my fairy tale was beginning on the day I was drafted. Whatever the round, I was rarin’ to go—just waiting for the phone to ring or the contract to show up or Sandy Koufax to knock on my door, however it worked. I got my mailgram from the Dodgers telling me I’d been picked. I saw my little name in small type in
Baseball America.
It was cool. I was on my way, feeling good and all set for the next step. Ready to sign, rock and roll. Mentally and emotionally, my bags were packed. Let’s get this party started!

. . . Nothing. Silence. Emptiness.

A month went by. Finally, my dad did what he always did when my baseball career was at a standstill. Dialed up Tommy. “What the hell is going on here? Nobody has called.”

So Tommy got in touch with Ben Wade, the Dodgers’ scouting director, and Ben phoned my dad to say, “Gosh, Vince, I thought it was a courtesy draft.” Dad told him that, whatever it was, I wanted to
get going
.

“But we never saw him play a game.”

“Well, Tommy told you about him.”

“If we’re going to sign him, we need to see him play.”

That was the opening my dad was looking for. “All right,” he said, “I’ll put him on a plane and send him out there and you can work him out. If you like him, give me back my money for the plane fare.”

By then, I was prepared to follow through at St. Thomas and play NAIA ball if it came to that. I knew the trip to Los Angeles was my best chance—maybe my
only
chance—so I booked a flight and stayed with the general manager of my dad’s Acura dealership out there. I couldn’t wait to get to
Dodger Stadium, which is probably not a healthy state of mind when you’re from out of town and navigating the Los Angeles freeways in a spanking-new Acura. Somehow, it survived.