Piazza's Memoir

[Edgy MD]

Oh, no, you di'n't!!

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

No interview scheduled with Soledad O'Brien because of the latin mafia.

[Guest themetfairy]

I'm about halfway through.

Not only does he seem to lack insight, but he seems to revel in keeping a huge chip on his shoulder. Considering all that went right for him, you'd think that he'd have a bit more gratitude and a bit less bitterness.

[Guest sharpie]

Not only all of that, now he's picking on an old Band member:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/garth-hudsons-belongings-sold-off-at-garage-sale-20130225

[Guest themetfairy]

The more I read of this, the more I appreciate R.A. Dickey's bio.

At least I'm up to 1999 now, which is inherently more interesting material (only because I'm a Mets fan).

[metirish]

sharpie wrote: Not only all of that, now he's picking on an old Band member: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/garth-hudsons-belongings-sold-off-at-garage-sale-20130225

what an interesting story....

[Farmer Ted]

Mike Piazza is a ruthless landlord. Oh wait...

http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110111/COMM/101110309&cid=sitesearch

[Frayed Knot]

As athlete-penned (or dictated) bios go, I've certainly read worse.
Not that I mean that to be a glowing tribute or anything because that genre represents some pretty low-hanging fruit for the most part. This one, coming as it does five+ years after his last game and with the bit of perspective that gives, at least avoids the usual trap of sounding like an "as told to" type of book that is thrown together right on the heels of said athlete's big moment for the sole purpose of cashing in while the fervor is still running high.

What this does come off as is someone who, because he remembers every doubt and slight (real or imagined) that's ever come his way, is genuinely concerned with his legacy as a ballplayer and is therefore determined to get his side of the story out into the public. In doing so he comes off like the comedian who gets roaring reviews at a packed house but then goes home obsessing about the one stone-faced guy he saw in the third row; as a bit of an entitled whiner and frankly a little paranoid at times. That method of seeing every slight as both a personal insult and challenge is most likely part of what made him the player he became; it's a trait that gets celebrated by the Michael Jordan worshippers of the world for the fuel to his fire (if he couldn't find detractors he was known to invent them) but it doesn't make it a particularly attractive one. On the plus side he doesn't paint himself only in a glowing light as the standard type of athlete auto-bio tends to do. He admits that those traits didn't always make him the best teammate or a press favorite. He seems to have some regrets that he didn't enjoy his career a little more while it was in progress but doesn't know if he could have succeeded any other way.


On the various hot-button issues:

- he makes a good case that the charges of him "coming out of nowhere" and therefore his success could only have been due to steroids are off base. He was always strong due to being a weightlifting & nutrition junkie from childhood, and could always hit on account of being obsessed at doing so from a young age. The reasons for the late draft pick (and a favor at that) were due more to being from a small HS in the northeast plus his overall lack of athleticism and a position. Not that any of that stopped him from seeing it all as a personal insult.

- he admits to taking various supplements common to the gym-rat crowd including the now-banned Andro but flatly denies the always illegal stronger stuff. Looked into HGH when it was first becoming known but was steered off of it by Dodgers trainers.
The "bacne" he says was a family trait that frequently lasted well beyond just the teenage years. Plausible? - yes ... Accurate -- ???, although I think Murray Chass at minimum needs something else to harp on.
Overall he pretty much makes the same case I'd make on the whole steroids generation in general: that the players were as ill-informed about it as most GMs, owners, trainers, and journalists were; that it's both impossible and unfair to throw a blanket over the whole thing and pronounce everyone guilty or that you can somehow retroactively fix things by pretending you can pick and choose which records or players were clean or tainted.

- had his better overall seasons in LA but felt very mis-treated by them and has much fonder memories of New York

- touches only briefly into his father's supposed crime connections. He claims that the rumors that shot down Vince Piazza's attempt to buy the SF Giants to be totally the result of some crooked guy with whom dad had invested money which got him tainted by nothing more than association. And of course he sees it all as a slight that no one can see a successful Italian without also accusing him of being in organized crime. Vince Piazza comes off as a real piece of work btw.

[Edgy MD]

I keep coming back to the entourage he's entering the book store with in the photo above. And maybe hanging out with a bunch of yes-men toadies has brought out an uglier part of Piazza's personality --- more reckless, defiant, entitled. He always seemed a little phony as a ballplayer, but he also was mostly a careful, thoughtful, reserved (except when it came to Guillermo Mota) gentleman.

John Dowd really made an impression on me when I saw him speak about the Rose investigations during a presentation at a SABR meeting. People were telling him "You can get to him through his teammates --- he won't listen to you but they'll make clear the gravity of the situation he's in." But Dowd responded that none of Rose's teammates were friends with him anymore, and his crew was buncha hangers on from Gold's Gym. And I wonder if Mike's in a similar situation, and he's no longer making choices to please management and teammates and fans, but to please the porn-star-chasing, chip-on-their-shoulder, overgrown wannabe-rocker, toadie guys he's surrounded by now.

[Vic Sage]

i loved having Piazza on my team, but i never connected with him as a player. He always seemed like a jock jerk to me, sort of the hitter's version of Clemens. So the fact that he may come off as a race-baiting right-winger in his book, arrogant, sullen and paranoid, doesn't shock me or change my view very much. He's still the best catcher in the history of a franchise that has had some pretty good catchers over the years. And given the absence of a failed drug test or any evidence that he took illegal drugs, or even legal drugs that were banned when he took them, the fact that hypocritical sports writers kept him out of the HOF is frankly an obscene kind of McCarthyism. And if they do it again, i may have to kill one of them.. just to, you know, send a message.

[Guest themetfairy]

OK - I finally finished this. And it felt like a chore.

BTW, last night D-Dad and I were watching video from the 2000 season, including interview clips from Piazza. He was personable, charismatic, and animated. These qualities aren't apparent in the book. As FK said, by the end Piazza at least had enough self-awareness to recognize that he was moody and didn't enjoy his playing days as much as he should have.

Piazza comments that the book was a cathartic experience for him, and I believe it. But I think he should have kept the catharsis to his diary. The book didn't do anything to gain him any supporters, and it did a lot to dissuade people from supporting him in the future (dissing people like Vin Scully, Jay Horwitz and Tommy Lasorda is risky business). It did little to humanize him, and it contains a lot of ammunition for those who didn't like him in the first place.

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

I just listened to his Fresh Air interview and Piazza comes across as engaging, insightful, and humble. Too bad that the book doesn't seem to be that way.

[Guest themetfairy]

I know, right? He has always seemed that way.

But the book has a real Festivus quality to it....