Piazza Is the First to Take It Slowly

The dude is trying to play it cool, take it cautiously, get through another turbulent season without any more controversy.

Mike Piazza is even wearing dark glasses as he emerges from the trainer’s room and walks into the New York Mets’ clubhouse, but anonymity has never been easy for the former Dodger, who sits at his locker, discards the shades and says he is simply dealing with too many questions for which he has no answers at this point.

After all, how can he be certain what position he will play next year when he can’t be certain if his might be the next big salary jettisoned by the rebuilding Mets?

Or when he can’t be certain yet how he would feel about starting over with a team starting over if convinced that was their direction?

“It’s just that there’s been so much go on the last couple years, and there’s so many organizational and personal issues still to be resolved, there’s just no sense looking ahead at this point,” Piazza said. “There’s so many possible scenarios that I’d only be digging a hole talking about it. I’m better off taking it step by step.”

Under the tabloid microscope, Piazza’s caution is understandable.

His situation, however, is not without a degree of certainty.

Now that he has battled back from the May groin injury that team doctors initially thought would sideline him for the season, the Mets have likely shelved the concept of having him move to first base as Mo Vaughn’s successor until next spring.

“It would be a reach to think he would do anything but catch the rest of this year,” Manager Art Howe said.

Thus, the injury having sidelined him for three months, the Mets will not tamper with his assault on Carlton Fisk’s home run record for catchers. Piazza has hit two in the five games since he returned from the torn right groin and needs eight more to surpass Fisk’s career record of 351, underscoring his status as the greatest hitting catcher ever.

Conceivably, he could even do it before the end of a three-game weekend series at Dodger Stadium, underscoring the embarrassment of News Corp. executives who traded him. Piazza smiled at the thought, said he still feels a buzz, an adrenalin high, when he returns to Dodger Stadium, but that whenever and wherever he breaks Fisk’s record “it’s certainly not something I’m going to apologize for” even though some critics have painted the record as irrelevant and Piazza selfish for his acknowledged pursuit of it.

“What’s wrong with having a goal?” Piazza said. “I know it’s not the single season home run record or Hank Aaron’s home run record, but it’s kind of a cool milestone.

“I mean, it’s not something I’ve been obsessed with as some people thought, but after 10 years of catching it would be a nice footnote and something of which I can be proud.

“I’ve also always felt that having a personal goal makes you a better team player. If every player on the team wanted to be the best in the league at his position, you’d have a pretty good team.”

It is difficult to portray Piazza as selfish considering he was working out at first base just two days after the Mets turned the move into a full-blown controversy when they bungled getting the message to him before a reporter did and considering how he pushed his return from the groin injury he compared to a “guitar string snapping” even though the Mets were spiraling out of the race, the general manager was being fired and the expensive roster core was being rooted out.

“Once I started rehabbing,” Piazza said, “I was obsessed with not only coming back [this season] but coming back stronger than ever, and there’s a personal satisfaction to having done that. In some ways, the injury was a wake-up call. I had been dodging bullets for decades, avoiding a serious injury despite the position I was playing, and I was determined to make a positive out of a negative.”

Piazza turned 35 on Sept. 4. He has two years and $30 million remaining on his contract with the Mets, a package that might be difficult to move if it came to that.

On the other hand, with Roberto Alomar, Jeromy Burnitz and Armando Benitez having already been traded, and Vaughn’s career possibly over, Piazza represents a valuable cornerstone in the rebuilding process.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future,” he said. “My short-term goal was to come back healthy, and even though there’s still a lot of pressure, and it seems like I’m always under the spotlight, it’s a different clubhouse now. We’ve got some good kids, I’ve having fun, and it’s nice to get back to basics.

“People ask me if I want to be part of a rebuilding project, well how do we know if it’s going to be a complete rebuilding project? The Mets have dumped a lot of payroll. They have flexibility if they want to use it. I’m at a point in my career that I want to be part of something that’s competitive, but it’s a waste of time speculating at this point.”

Similarly, Piazza said, it’s senseless speculating about his future position.

“I’ve have never said I was unapproachable about a move to first base or totally against it,” he said. “It’s just that I heard about it kind of second hand and it took on a life of its own early in the season when I would have liked to be focused on other things. People speculated that I was being insubordinate about it when all I was trying to do is my job as a catcher, which I have always worked hard at and which I still enjoy.”

Since Piazza returned behind the plate, the Mets are 4-1 and their pitchers have given up only 11 runs in the five games.

It’s not the footnote, as Piazza put it, that Fisk’s record will be, but it’s a cautious endorsement at a time when the dude thinks caution is imperative.