Critical Review of Long Shot, Mike Piazza’s Memoir

LONG SHOT By Mike Piazza with Lonnie Wheeler Illustrated. 374 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.

By ADA CALHOUN, NY Times, Published April 5, 2013

As a lifelong Mets fan (you can tell by a photo of me at age 10 dressed as Keith Hernandez for Halloween, and my current aura of despair), I’d hoped Mike Piazza — one of few genuine heroes on the team post-’80s — would be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame earlier this year, his first time on the ballot. Alas, he fell 98 votes short of the 75 percent required for induction, most likely passed over because of a suspicion that he, like some other power hitters of his generation, took steroids — a rumor addressed at length in his strategically timed memoir, “Long Shot.”

Piazza applies the single-minded drive he showed at the plate to making the case for his legacy. He says he didn’t do banned steroids, but doesn’t judge those who did. He confirms that growing up he did have a close relationship through his father with the Dodgers’ manager Tommy Lasorda, but says that being “a courtesy draft pick” — Los Angeles selected Piazza in the 62nd round — wasn’t the godsend people thought it was. He grants that, yes, he had trouble throwing out runners, but notes that he had a “darn good catcher’s E.R.A.” His incessant hammering of the ball has a literary echo: he relentlessly invokes variations on the phrase “best-hitting catcher in the history of the game.”

Piazza is forthright and often quite funny. On why he became a catcher: “The scouts had seen me play first base.” He says the solution for his slow base running was “to just knock the ball out of the ballpark.” He says “a drug culture in sports” keeps bodies working through 162-game seasons, despite injuries that sometimes made him “feel like a piñata.” Poignantly, he describes how his rage in the wake of 9/11 drove him to hit the most cathartic home run in Mets history on Sept. 21, 2001, in the first game played in New York after the terrorist attacks.

As he played angry, so he writes angry. He peevishly logs grudges, typically characterized by the feeling that he had been cheated or that others had compromised “pure baseball.” Among those teed up for pounding: the Dodgers, the media, the M.V.P. award, the All-Star Game and a manager who made him bunt with two strikes during spring training. A proud hothead, Piazza doesn’t regret brawls. In fact, he wishes he’d decked Roger Clemens in the 2000 World Series after Clemens threw a broken bat in his direction.

Mets fans will find insights, if not solace, in Piazza’s account of the team’s woes. (The Wilpons, who own the Mets, are apparently as awful as we thought.) He admits he wasn’t the clubhouse leader the team may have needed. He was a prickly, conservative, Catholic metalhead, and all he wanted to do after hitting those homers was lift weights, play air drums, go to Mass, date pretty actresses and be left alone. He was, he says, “too moody, too brooding, too consumed, too unlikable” to be a good teammate, much less a mentor. “I was,” he says, “more of a see-the-ball-hit-the-ball kind of guy.”

Toward the end of the book (written with Lonnie Wheeler), Piazza goes somewhat off the rails. He suggests there may have been “a Latin mafia type of thing” that kept him on the outs with Spanish-speaking teammates. (Or perhaps it was his desire that they learn “the language of the nation where the dream comes true”?) “Think,” he muses in the epilogue, “how much simpler things would be if, instead of complicated laws and ordinances, we all followed the Ten Commandments.” But how can we expect him not to stumble a bit in extra innings? He is, after all, a Hall of Fame-caliber Met.

Ada Calhoun, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is writing a history of St. Marks Place in the East Village.