Long Shot (29 page)

That little sequence might well have cost me the MVP award. As Tom Verducci wrote in
Sports Illustrated:
“Either way you slice it—that Piazza should have scored [on the single] or that he should have been replaced—the episode is a black mark against the Dodgers’ catcher in a contest so close that the smallest of blemishes is scrutinized.” In the same article, Verducci laid it on thick for Walker: “Larry Walker of the Colorado Rockies had a season that, were it an oil painting, would be immediately hung in the Louvre. In some ways, it was a season that comes along once every two generations . . . . Except . . . Didn’t Walker play his home games in a hitter’s paradise, and didn’t his team fail to contend for a playoff spot? True enough, but Walker overcame both understandable prejudices.”

Returning home, we dropped the first two games against the Rockies, to fall one behind San Francisco. In the finale of that series, I got hold of a changeup from Frank Castillo and it landed on the pavilion roof, then caromed into the parking lot—the first time a ball had ever left Dodger Stadium via left field. A headline in the next day’s
Los Angeles Times
read,
PIAZZA’S HOMER DENTS SOME CARS
. The home run was my thirty-seventh, a career high, and, at 478 feet, matched the distance of the one I’d hit in Miami three years before. Two batters later, Mondesi added another blast to give us a 5–1 lead in the third inning. Ramon Martinez couldn’t hold it. Meanwhile, the Giants were winning in San Diego.

We went down swinging, at least. My next home run came five days later in Colorado, against a right-hander named Darren Holmes, and was recorded as the longest ever hit at Coors Field—somewhere around five hundred feet. I’ve seen it listed as 504, but more often as 496. According to the records, it was also the farthest I ever hit a baseball, although I suspect that the Colorado air played a part in that; it didn’t
feel
like my longest shot.

I can’t say for certain which of my home runs
did
feel that way, but there’s definitely a different sensation involved with the ones that are truly crushed—when you catch a pitch out in front of the plate and meet it square with all the leverage of a perfect swing. The homer off Holmes came on another changeup, which was no coincidence; an off-speed pitch allows a hitter to maximize his bat velocity and complete his transfer of weight. When you can wade into the ball and lift it right out of your wheelhouse, the mechanics are almost like a punt. Practically every muscle in your body is working toward the same purpose, which is where the hours and hours in the batting cage come in. I was a grinder. All my life, I hit and hit and hit, and in that way developed and refined the relationships between my feet and hands, my hips and head, my forearms and eyes. Leverage—in effect, power, when you factor in physiology—results from the harmony of all those parts. If a pitch you anticipate happens to sit on a tee in front of the plate, and you see it well and time it right and bring enough strength to bear, your bat becomes a catapult. The bat will actually
bend
an inch or so when you address the ball with the full force of a sublimely coordinated rip. I’ve felt that. The visceral response is close to euphoria. It’s a power hitter’s sense of perfect.

Of course, it lasts only for a moment. A season lasts half the year, and for the Dodgers in 1997 that was just a little too long. It didn’t matter that we won four of our last six games, because the Giants matched us and closed out their division title. We were five days late and two games short.

Our failure was blamed, predictably, on an absence of leadership. References
were made in the media to Kirk Gibson and 1988. I guess I was supposed to play the Gibson role. Batting .362 with 201 hits, forty homers, and 124 RBIs wasn’t sufficient; I should have set the tone in spring training by reaming out the ball club in four languages. It would have also helped if I’d talked one of our pitchers—presumably Nomo or Park, who led us in victories with fourteen—into winning twenty-three games like Orel Hershiser did in ’88. Maybe I could have been a better leader by picking up a little speed in San Francisco.

The Florida Marlins, who went on to beat Cleveland in the World Series, were the wildcard winners that year, which meant that we had nothing to show for a pretty damn good season. Nor did I personally, even though my batting average tied Bill Dickey (1936) for the highest mark a catcher had ever produced. (If you’ll indulge me, I’ll point out that Dickey caught 107 games that year; I caught 139.) Tony Gwynn won his eighth batting title by hitting .372, with Walker second and me third. I would never come that close again.

The record I shared with Dickey was broken in 2009 by Joe Mauer, who batted .365 while starting 105 games as Minnesota’s catcher. Since I’m a member of the catchers fraternity, it does my heart good that Mauer has won three batting titles. It’s a remarkable accomplishment that stamps him as a great hitter. That said—and without taking anything away from Mauer—I didn’t have the DH position available to me once a week, and he didn’t have to beat out Tony Gwynn.

In the matter of stats and records and the like, I can’t deny a certain measure of selfishness. It was an acquired quality, I think, brought on by equal parts ambition and pressure. Even in a season like 1997, when my teammates were flashing around the bases and banging the ball out of the park, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, if we were going to get where we all wanted to be, I was the guy who would have to put up the big numbers and deliver the big hits. A lot of that burden was probably self-imposed, but not all of it. To some degree, the Dodgers put it on me, inadvertently, when they kept me in the lineup at a rate well beyond what was required of most catchers, and when they rushed me back from an injury, like they did in 1995. I was good with all of that, and wouldn’t have had it any other way, but it did turn up the pressure. I especially felt the heat when we struggled. I knew that if we weren’t successful at the end of the season, my critics would attribute it to the fact that I didn’t carry us like the superstar I was supposed to be. To a certain extent, that went with the territory. But I also knew that if we
were
successful and I
did
carry the club, I wasn’t likely to be acknowledged with an MVP award. Blame seemed a lot easier to come by than credit.

Of course, some might say that the slights were imagined on my part, or at least exaggerated. Maybe so. Maybe I
needed
to feel disrespected, because that was what fed the beast inside me. Maybe I
needed
the extra pressure, because that was just the right current for my kind of wiring. I can’t complain about a burden that I actually craved. If, under the weight of that burden, I carried myself in a way that made me seem self-absorbed to my teammates, I regret that part of it. But I can’t apologize for the way I had to play; for the way I
chose
to play. I subscribed to what Joe Morgan told me: winning is the product of players playing well. It was in everybody’s best interest—not just mine—that I perform at a high level. The way I saw it, the more I hit, the better chance we had of winning, which I coveted. And the more I failed, the better chance we had of losing, which I couldn’t stand. That year, I didn’t fail often, but we lost when we could least afford to.

In the tally for MVP, my grand total was three, one of which came from Kevin Acee, then of the
Los Angeles Daily News
, who was kind enough to stop by my locker one day in September and say, “I voted for you, because I watched you every day. I witnessed it. You’re the MVP of this league, and I don’t give a shit what anybody says.” Jeff Bagwell had three votes also. Walker had twenty-two. With all respect to Larry, who was a great all-around player and whose raw numbers were admittedly better than mine (409 total bases? are you kidding me?), I can sincerely say that I felt cheated—more so than in 1995 or 1996. In those years, the rap against me was that I faded down the stretch. This time, I took the Triple Crown for the second half of the season, batting .367 with twenty-four home runs and seventy-three RBIs after the all-star break. It made no difference.

But at least there was a distinction attached: Bagwell and I are the only players ever to lose an MVP award to a guy who played at Coors Field.

• • •

By the time of our season’s premature conclusion, Peter O’Malley had found a buyer. The sale hadn’t been approved and consummated, but Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation—effectively, the Fox Group—had won the sweepstakes by meeting the highest price a professional sports franchise had ever been sold for, a figure reported to be as large as $350 million.

Meanwhile, I had my own business to take care of. There was one year remaining on my contract, but it was my last year before free agency and I didn’t want to play it while trading punches with Fred Claire and Sam Fernandez (the Dodgers’ negotiator) over a long-term deal. So, at the end of October, Danny Lozano and I established a signing deadline of February 15. If we didn’t have an agreement by then—by spring training, in other words—we’d
shut down the discussions and file for free agency after the season. In the accompanying story in the
Los Angeles Times
, Danny said that if I signed a multiyear deal by the deadline, it would be my intention to finish my career with the Dodgers. If not, the same would apply to whatever team I signed with as a free agent.

No sooner had we set our deadline than Fernandez called to say that we’d have to hold off on that because they expected Fox to be approved around the first week of spring training. We understood that O’Malley might be reluctant to put such a large obligation on the books—I was looking for a package of seven years at approximately $15 million a year, over $100 million total—at the very moment he was trying to complete a sale. Without saying so publicly, we agreed to relax the deadline. In retrospect, that was a mistake. I think the Dodgers detected it as a sign of weakness, which it wasn’t. I was firm and confident about my asking price, and certainly not of a mind to cut the club any slack. I felt that they’d missed chance after chance to do right by me, and the time had finally come.

As recently as July, they’d had an opportunity to sign me for considerably less. The Texas Rangers had completed a contract with their catcher, Ivan Rodriguez, for five years at just over $8 million each. Pudge was the best in the game defensively, but his offensive numbers didn’t compare to mine. I couldn’t understand why the Dodgers didn’t come to me the very next day and say, okay, we’ll give you five years at
nine
million each. It would have been a hell of a bargain: less than half what I wanted by the end of the season, after batting for the highest average in Los Angeles history and finishing off the best five-year stretch of hitting that a catcher had ever racked up. I’d have probably taken the deal. But they had made no effort in that direction.

It didn’t escape my notice, furthermore, that they’d signed Karros through his first three years of free agency. Then, in January, they signed Mondesi for $36 million over four years, which would cover his first two years of free agency, with a club option for the next two at $12 million each. It appeared that I was their lowest priority. Lozano described it to me as a slap in the face. At the same time, though, I was picking up interesting signals from the Fox people—indications that signing me would be their first order of business. I wondered if perhaps the O’Malley administration was delaying the deal as a favor to Fox, to allow the new owners to kick off their regime by announcing the biggest contract in the history of the game.

The whole thing made my head hurt. I could hardly keep track of all the angles and personalities involved. There was O’Malley representing
the old organizational style: we’re the Dodgers, and you should be happy to play for us; we’ll pay you well, but not Yankee-well; we’re not getting into those stratospheric salaries, no matter who you are. It was because of the modern economics that O’Malley was getting out of the game, so he certainly wasn’t looking to violate that philosophy on his way out. Meanwhile, with Fox about to take over as the new sheriff in town, maybe, rather than making a splash by trotting me out in front of the cameras all signed and sealed, the team president, Bob Graziano—who had been a longtime aide to O’Malley—was eager to draw his six-gun and demonstrate just who was in charge now. Then there was the personal war playing out between Danny and Sam Fernandez, who was a two-time loser in their previous skirmishes. On the periphery, of course, there was also Tommy in his new management role, sorting through his deep-seated interest in me, his professional loyalty to O’Malley, and his working role with the new ownership group. And finally, there was my father, torn between his allegiance to the Dodgers, the possibility of bringing me closer to home, and his highly developed instinct for deal making.

Over the winter, I worked through my funk in the usual way—went to the gym and wore myself out. Because of the negotiations, I spent more of the off-season in Los Angeles than usual, and devoted it to getting stronger. I hired a nutritionist, who made me six meals a day, high in protein; lots of eggs, pancakes, tuna, chicken, steak, and creatine shakes. A trainer named Mike Ryan, who works with a lot of Hollywood and high-profile types—his client history includes Karros, John Elway, Mark Wahlberg, and the Rock, among others—took a look at my diet and recommended a supplement regimen.

In March, the steroids issue was brought into the spotlight when Tom Verducci wrote about it in
Sports Illustrated.
He reported that I had put on twenty pounds and gotten up to 240 over the winter, which may have been a bit exaggerated since my weight generally remained steady around 230 to 235, and quoted me saying, “Let’s face it, guys get paid for home runs. If you hit 30 home runs, nobody cares if you hit .250 doing it. That extra strength may be the difference of five to 10 feet—the difference between a ball being caught or going over the wall. Why wouldn’t you lift and take supplements? You’ve got one time in your life to get it right. I want to get it right.” I stand by that, and point out that I didn’t say
illegal
supplements. I played by the rules, as hard as I could.