Mets Need to Cling to Piazza

There are maybe a dozen real baseball stars, maybe fewer less than that, and Mike Piazza is one of them. People around here act as if that is .244 sometimes, as if he has to earn his big new contract every day. Piazza even gets booed sometimes, as if each at-bat is some sort of referendum on whether the Mets should bring him back next season. Or some sort of permanent audition.

The people who didn’t want him in the first place, for whom Piazza can do nothing right, jump on every bad game and say, see, the Dodgers were right to unload him.

And the truth is, the Dodgers were crazy to unload a player like Mike Piazza. The Mets will be crazy if they don’t do everything they can to keep him. If it costs $100 million in the current baseball economy, which looks like it might turn out to be a boom economy over the next few years, then that is what you pay.

You do it because you are trying to compete with the Yankees, because you want to have a real team to put into the new designer ballpark you want to build -- and the fans are supposed to help you build -- in the parking lot at Shea Stadium. You bring Piazza here and keep him here for the same reason you brought in Keith Hernandez once and Gary Carter. The Mets have to think big here.

Has Piazza pressed since he has been here, especially over the last month before the Mets got going good this week? Sure he has. He is playing for the rest of his career. He is trying to make up his own mind about his future. He is working on his third team of the season. This is known as being human. Except in Tabloid New York and Sports Talk New York, where it often just makes you a target.

All of a sudden Piazza was supposed to be some kind of baseball version of Neil O’Donnell. Sometimes the whole city seems as jumpy as the jumpiest caller on the radio.

Is Piazza Johnny Bench behind the plate? No. And no one ever said he was. And Bench couldn’t hit the way Piazza did. No catcher in the history of the sport has ever hit the way Piazza did over his first five full seasons in the big leagues. All the people knocking him have to do is look it up. Piazzaz had 166 home runs and averaged .332. The last ballplayer of any kind to break in with numbers like those his first five big-league seasons, in those two categories, is Joe DiMaggio.

You keep a player like this, even in New York, where .344 is treated like .244 every time a runner is left on base.