A Hall Fellow, Well-Met

Seventeen years later, when he forgets to frown and pokes his toes absently at his leather flip-flops, when he’s asked to talk about a career that should end in the Hall of Fame, Mike Piazza becomes the 62nd-rounder again.

He will be 37 by the end of this, his 14th big-league season. His face remains that of the boy who took Mike Scioscia’s job in 1993, only tanner, and his voice still runs an octave or two high. Reaching for a name, he settles for “dude,” as he always has.

His eyes, still brown and wide, have hardened over seven years in New York, where the baseball they play in Queens can be tiresome. The Yankees have won three World Series titles during the time Piazza has spent on the other end of the Triboro Bridge, one of them against Piazza’s Mets, who seem forever trapped between spending and purging and the next big plan.

“I’ll tell you the last couple years have been very frustrating here,” he says. “Little things flare up. There are fires everywhere. It gets so off the game.”

The dominant color of the Met clubhouse, that which is slathered on seven-foot-tall lockers, is black, funereal black, because the kids who buy jerseys like black, because the Mets usually need an angle, and lately it has been black.

Outside, children, made delirious by an alliance of cotton candy and their baseball cards come to life, shout Piazza’s name. But the real commotions are for Carlos Beltran and Pedro Martinez, the new Mets, the new hope, just as Piazza was before the Mets became the Mets again, and before his mid-30s brought injuries and first-base tryouts and other organizational plans.

When the only people left are him, a few clubhouse guys folding towels and a dozing security guard with the New York Post in his lap, Piazza admits he can barely believe he’s here, still playing, regarded as the best-hitting catcher ever, in the final year of a contract that carried him through his prime. The Mets have had great players before, but usually they got them coming or going.

“Up until this point,” he says, “I have no regrets. I’ve always stood up for what I believed in. The path I’ve taken has always been interesting, and checkered, and not the easiest way.”

Thirteen, maybe fourteen years ago, he was run out of a batting cage in Vero Beach by a coach whose name he could not recall. Two prospects whose names everyone knew were hitting. Piazza asked if he could join in. The coach shook his head. He told Piazza, the 62nd-round draft pick, that this was “special” batting practice, not for him. After a moment, Piazza turned and walked away. He found an empty cage, where he hit until his arms were too heavy to hit anymore, and his hands shook as he gathered the baseballs.

“Two and a half hours,” he says. “My hands were raw.”

The story bubbles up from nowhere. And then Piazza laughs at it, dismisses it with a wave of both hands, as soon as it is out. But it lingers, that he’d once been considered less than special, an obstacle for the real prospects, just a favor to an old friend of Tom Lasorda’s.

So he has been here before. When his contract runs out, or if the Mets find reason to trade him earlier, Piazza would not mind returning to the Dodgers, and would love to play for the Angels. The criticism of his catching skills has only grown louder over the years, and the experiments at first base appear to be over. It would be best to finish his career in the American League as a designated hitter and part-time catcher, he knows, and Scioscia, he says, is his kind of guy.

“I feel like I’m at a bit of a crossroads,” he says. “But I embrace it. I don’t look at it as a bad thing. Obviously, this year is a barometer of what might lie ahead. In that way, I feel a little bit of pressure. Not to put food on the table, but for personal pride. I’d love to get back to the World Series. It would be nice to be on a team that gets there and wins it.”

He likes these Mets, and he will serve them happily, for as long as they will have him. Probably, he will go to the Hall of Fame as a Met, as the organization’s most accomplished position player, behind only Tom Seaver as the best of all. He was married in the off-season, to a Playboy Playmate and actress named Alicia Rickter. She’s studying in Manhattan to become a child psychologist, and those who knew him in Los Angeles will find a chuckle in that.

But he is grown now. He is religious without identifying it by name. He was never a great catcher, but a willing one, a proud one, and he accepts that without resentment. The years have taught him patience and maturity and moderation. He attended a Motley Crue concert recently, a reminder that he once had a drum set stashed in an extra room at Dodger Stadium, but admitted he now prefers a quiet place with sawdust on the floor and a game on the television.

“I truly believe a river runs its course,” he says. “You can’t go back and say, ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t want this.’ No matter what happens, I’m going to be where I’m supposed to be.”

Piazza smiles at his words, perhaps uncomfortable with his stab at reflection. He looks away briefly and tries again.

“I look at it,” he says, “as a liberating thing.”