Long Shot (23 page)

Of course, for every grudging shred of respect that Karros would give me about hitting, he’d make up for it by piling on the shit about my baserunning. He complained that it was practically impossible to drive me in. I argued that I was on base all the time, so what’s his problem? But he had a point. Once, in Cincinnati, I was on second and Eric hit a ball that landed on top of the center-field fence and actually rolled along the ridge for about ten or twelve feet. Thomas Howard chased after it until it finally dropped back in play. Somehow—I guess I was confused—I got stuck at third. Eric rounded second base and couldn’t believe I was standing there ninety feet in front of him. He just put his hands on his hips and stared at me, like he often did. He’d stay mad for about twenty minutes at a time.

The ideal solution, for me, was to just knock the ball out of the ballpark. In June, at Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami, against Mark Gardner, I hit 1) the first grand slam of my career, 2) the longest home run that had ever been hit at that park, and 3) the longest home run
I
had hit, according to the unofficial measurement: 478 feet. A lot of people, including me, think the ball I got hold of the year before in Cincinnati went considerably farther, but whatever.

I hit another grand slam two weeks later against the Rockies, ten rows into the upper deck at Dodger Stadium. From there, it’s a quick, short-season summary: I started the All-Star Game in Pittsburgh and was shut out in the home run derby for the second time in a row (in subsequent years, I excused myself, occasionally joining Chris Berman and Joe Morgan for the blow-by-blow instead). Raul Mondesi gave the Dodgers their third consecutive Rookie of the Year. On August 11, Ramon Martinez shut out the Reds, 2–0, in Cincinnati, without shaking me off a single time, if I recall correctly, to put us two games above .500.

And then it was over.

The strike was a bad time in the game. It alienated the players from the owners, the owners and players from the fans, and even players from other players. But we’d known it was coming, and inevitable, because our collective bargaining agreement had expired and management was insisting on a salary cap for the next one. In fact, after we struck, the owners went ahead and imposed a cap, then withdrew it and did away with arbitration. From our perspective, the only encouraging thing about the whole ordeal was the impressive display of solidarity among a lot of players making a lot of money.
We weren’t opposed at all to competitive balance; we just felt that that was the owners’ concern. It wasn’t our job to worry about who was competitive and who wasn’t. If George Steinbrenner didn’t care about the Reds or the Royals, the solution was for
us
to accept a salary cap?

Of course, not all the players were on the same page. During the strike, Eric and I went to a union meeting at the airport Hilton in Los Angeles, and found it interesting, to say the least—starting with Tim Leary. He was a veteran pitcher, thirty-six years old, playing out the string with Texas. Actually, Leary would never pitch again in the major leagues, and he probably sensed it. He really wanted to finish the season, which was still a possibility as late as early September. Leary said, basically, “You guys, I’m just being the devil’s advocate . . .” And then Glenallen Hill, a big outfielder who was playing for the Cubs at the time, yelled out, “I don’t like him!” Glenallen proceeded to stand up and deliver what was almost like a Baptist revival speech about sticking together and staying strong. After that, it was Mark McGwire—a side of him that a lot of people haven’t seen. He had the owners’ proposal in his hand, and he goes, “Look at this! It’s fucking bullshit! We’re not gonna fucking do this!” Then he slammed it down. For my money, he and Glenallen Hill were the heroes.

For whatever reason, a lot of the dissent on our side came from the Phillies. There was a meeting in Orlando that I didn’t attend, but some of the guys there were under the assumption that the Phillies’ management wanted Lenny Dykstra to be a shit disturber. His voice certainly didn’t blend into the chorus. Players were imitating him, going, “I’m just sayin’, dude, this might be the best deal we can get, dude.” (I know: who am I to point out somebody else saying “dude”?) The word was that Dykstra was going to cross the line, with teammates like Dave Hollins and Darren Daulton right alongside. But the weirdest thing of the whole off season was the talk of Cal Ripken Jr. walking a picket line.

In 1995, spring training started with replacement players. That was a gigantic bone of contention, because it meant that the owners were actually planning to open the regular season without us. At the very end of March, we sought an injunction to stop them. The National Labor Relations Board had asked a federal district court to support its petition charging the owners with unfair labor practices, and the players had voted to go back to work if the court came through. The judge was Sonia Sotomayor, and it took her about twenty minutes to rule in our favor and restore all the terms of our previous collective bargaining agreement. Fourteen years later, when she was nominated for the Supreme Court and was getting crushed by conservatives—whom
I generally count myself among—I thought, Hmm, Sotomayor . . . she’s not that bad a lady.

Her decision cleared the way for the 1995 season to start about three weeks late, even though a new labor agreement wouldn’t be reached for another couple of years.

• • •

For me, the silver lining of the strike was the chance to spend some time on the beach. Not that I made a beeline for it. In the beginning, we figured the season would pick back up anytime, so Eric and Billy Ashley and I worked out every day at the gym. I wouldn’t let myself believe we were done for the year because, for one thing, we had a great shot at making the playoffs, and for another, my whole deal, as far as an annual goal, was thirty homers, a .300 batting average, and a hundred RBIs. I had the batting average, but was still six home runs and eight RBIs short. By pumping weights every day, I was trying to
will
the strike to end.

We stayed with our regimen for two or three weeks, but finally one day, in the middle of our workout, Karros said, “Dude, we’re not going back.” I kept lifting on a regular basis—it extended into the longest stretch of weight training I’d ever been through—but the urgency wasn’t there anymore. With the sun and sand in mind, I turned to beefing up my bird legs.

I got into volleyball games whenever I could and became friends with Gabrielle Reece through Nike promotions, which were always a day at the beach. We staged our own goofy Olympics. They were sort of like a Southern California citizenship test. I once threw a Frisbee into a bucket from thirty feet, thirty consecutive times. Another time, there was a televised spot in which I dove into the sand and guided the volleyball just over the net into the corner, as if I knew what I was doing. Truthfully, I wasn’t bad at volleyball—a hell of a lot better than I was at basketball. It might have been Gabrielle who was teaming with Holly McPeak when I played against them with football star Jerome Bettis—the Bus—as my partner. I believe we actually won. Gabrielle tended to come at things from the athlete perspective, but I had some good discussions with her about my dating habits. From those, she was the one who came up with the term “season girlfriend.”

My girlfriend for that season was an actress and stuntwoman named Anita Hart. During the strike, she was doing an episode of
Baywatch
, and I guess that’s how I got involved in it. Season five. “Deep Trouble.” Anita was the girl I saved. I’m swinging a baseball bat on the beach, in full uniform—yeah, whatever—and Pamela Anderson walks up to me and says, as I remember it, “What are you doing?”

I say, “I’m a baseball player.”

Pamela: “Why are you swinging a bat on the beach?”

Me: “I’m working on my swing while we’re on strike.”

Right then, Anita starts yelling “Help!” and I run out into the bay with Pamela to save her. When we pulled her in, Anita looked at me and said something like “You’re cute,” and my response made it pretty clear that we’d be hooking up. It was a tough assignment for me, playing myself. I went Method.

There
was
method, though, to my silliness. I hoped it would show that I could lighten up a little bit and didn’t take myself too seriously. For that gig, the only thing I was serious about was meeting Pamela Anderson. Took one for the boys back home.

And then, for the
girls
back home, I struck up a friendship with Fabio.

I’m a high-end audio geek and happened to see an article about the stuff Fabio collected, which was the same kind of stuff I collected, mostly from a company called Krell. The article said that Fabio had spent about a million dollars on amplifiers, preamplifiers, speakers, digital-to-audio converters and such, and he had a full mixing board in his house. Not long after, I met him at a Super Bowl party in California that my stuntman friend Eddie Braun had gotten me and my dad into. We started talking about audio and Krell and before you know it, lo and behold, I’m at Fabio’s house. I walk in and there are three Great Danes and about thirty motorcycles. His kitchen was stuffed with dirt bikes. In the living room, where he kept the stereo equipment, he had a big-ass, three-gun projector—some incredibly cool stuff.

We hung out a few times. Nice guy. Fabio told me he was one of only three people in the world who had an American Express card with a single name on it. The other two were Cher and Madonna. He pulls out his wallet and says—he’s from Milan, you know—“Mike-a, here it is, a-my American Express-a card. It has-a my one a-name: Fabio.” One time he calls me, and he goes, “Hey-a, Mike-a. Let’s-a go get-a some a-breakfast, and then we’ll-a listen to some-a stereo.” He always ate breakfast at this little café on Sunset Boulevard; so I meet him there, and as we’re eating, a tourist bus pulls up. The driver slows down and I can hear the guy saying, “There’s Fabio . . . There’s Fabio eating breakfast with Mike Piazza.” All the tourists are snapping pictures and I’m thinking, is this really happening? I was on the tourist tour.

Needless to say, it was an off-season like no other. I also appeared on
Married with Children
and
The Bold and the Beautiful
. I was a presenter for the MTV awards show. I met Eddie Van Halen and played golf with Charles Barkley. Tommy took Eric and me down to the Doral Open in Miami and
made Jack Nicklaus feel my forearms. A woman in Bakersfield named her horse after me (and I’ll resist the corresponding joke).

But I was still in my batting cage on New Year’s Eve, still obsessed with crushing the baseball.

• • •

It was April by the time we got to spring training. Most of the replacement players had already left, but enough remained to make it contentious.

For that matter, it was contentious before we even showed up. Karros had taken some heat about disparaging remarks he made in the press concerning the scabs. He felt terrible about it, so I said, all right, dude, I’ll get you off the hook. I was ready to let it rip, because some of the replacement players—mainly, a pitcher named Rafael Montalvo, who had pitched one inning for the Astros back in 1986 and hadn’t played organized ball in the States for three years—were saying things like they were going to have us five games in first place by the time we got back and we’d probably want to thank them. Bob Nightengale of the
Los Angeles Times
got hold of me and I said, “Who’s going to care if we have a five-game lead in scab games? That’s ridiculous. Does someone really think we’ll be rooting for these guys? What do they think we’ll do if we win it, give them a playoff share? Do they want rings? We’ll give them rings, all right—made of tin.”

When the season finally started, there were no replacement players on the roster. There was, however, an import who helped us into first place. A year after reeling in Chan Ho Park out of Korea, the Dodgers had turned to Japan and snatched-up Hideo Nomo, a pitcher more accomplished and much readier to contribute. The signing showed some impressive enterprise on the organization’s part. In Japan, Nomo had been involved in an unusual contract squabble that resulted in him being declared a free agent prematurely. Peter O’Malley was on the prowl for international players, and when the opportunity presented itself, the Dodgers made Nomo the first native of Japan to come over from the Japanese major leagues and play in ours. O’Malley may not have struck many people as a pioneer, but he was ahead of the game when it came to finding players in foreign countries. It was a structured philosophy on his part. At times, I suspected that O’Malley’s appetite for international talent—especially as an alternative to free agency—was so strong that it took precedence over winning. But the organization deserved nothing but credit for this acquisition. Nomo—the Tornado—turned out to be the leading edge of a wave of excellent Japanese players to bring their skills to America. He became the Dodgers’ fourth straight Rookie of the Year. Plus, a good friend.

As it happened, the Tornado wasn’t the only one who relocated that year. When I arrived back at Eric’s condo from spring training, I found that Billy Ashley had been staying in my room. I was a little peeved about that, and decided it was time to get my own place. I bought a small town house close by, still in Manhattan Beach, on the edge of both the village and the golf course. As the first order of business—I knew my limitations—I brought in an interior designer and asked her if she knew anybody who could run errands and do laundry and basically hold the place together. She recommended her niece, Teri O’Toole, who happened also to be an artist. So Teri took care of not only the housekeeping but the paintings for the walls, as well.

Of course, Dodger Stadium was my second home in Los Angeles; but it had been so long since we’d played that I’d actually forgotten the combination to my locker. For a while that year, everything was just a little out of whack, in fact.

I tugged a hamstring in our second game and had to miss a few, including the home opener. But I came back whaling and was hitting .537 on May 10 when I smoked a ball to the right-field wall in San Diego and thought it was gone. Out of the box, I Cadillac’d a little bit, and when I saw the ball hit the wall I had to accelerate. Then I realized I’d missed first base, hit the brakes to go back, slipped, put my hand down to get my balance, and landed clumsily on my left thumb. Tore the ulnar collateral ligament, an injury known as gamekeeper’s thumb (named for the affliction that was common to Scottish gamekeepers when they killed rabbits and such by pushing down really hard to break their necks). Reggie Smith was coaching first base at the time, and I looked at him and said, “I just fucked up my thumb.” He told me to yank it out. When I did, I wanted very badly to scream, which of course, like crying, is not allowed in baseball. In denial, I caught another inning. Ramon Martinez was pitching, and his ball moved a lot, so my hand was getting pummeled. When I got back to the dugout, it was badly swollen. I told our physical therapist, Pat Screnar, that I couldn’t handle any more. My batting average would have to hold at .537 for a while.