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Tuesday, March 01, 2005 |
Does The Piazza Man Cometh?
Oh, the itch to find a snappy pun, or some kind of putdown about Fox. Tim Brown at the Times brings up the gory possibility of a return of Mike Piazza to the Dodgers.
"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."Maybe he was thinking about the kinds of things that discourage the great players from lighting in Queens, little things like the constant carping by the media: something Al Leiter might know a thing or two about.
Leiter is quoted as saying, "Who better to discourage him from going to New York?" He then describes what happens when things go poorly in the media capital of the world. "It just chip, chip, chip, chips away at your resolve, cracking away your protective toughness," he said. "Every bad game it's like, 'Are you worried? ... The manager says this ... Are you worried?' You begin to doubt yourself. That's why slumps in New York are so elongated.So Leiter knows losing. So does Piazza, there with him. Piazza's one -- and so far, only -- chance for a ring came in 2000, when the Mets went toe-to-toe with the Yanks, and only won a single game. It grates:"Then the guys on [talk radio] get on you, move it up another notch, and everyone driving to the game listens. You get to the park and your home fans are booing you and after the game you say something stupid."
Mets officials were surprised that Leiter might have been the secret weapon for the Marlins in winning the Delgado sweepstakes, and Leiter denied that he specifically ripped his former team during the negotiations.
"I don't know if I said exactly that, but it sounds like that actually happens to players from time to time," Leiter said yesterday in an e-mail exchange. "I wasn't ripping New York. I was telling him how sometimes it is more difficult to get out of slumps and it is when a player slumps that he is most vulnerable."
"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."Would the Dodgers be such a team? He says he'd be happy with the Angels, too, at a DH position he has needed to play for the last two years or so; Scioscia, he says, is "his kind of guy". Unable to play first base, Piazza will probably move to another team, probably in the AL, after this year, Hall or no Hall. The Angels are backed up at DH, and the Dodgers have a serviceable first baseman. My inclination is to say Piazza, who can still hit, won't be out of the majors anytime soon -- but neither will he appear in either Los Angeles uniform.
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