Saying Goodbye To a Met for the Ages
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Yesterday, barring an unexpected development that would be in the best interests of neither the team nor the player, Mike Piazza played his final game as a New York Met.
There was, fittingly, no drama associated with the end of his eight-year tenure with the team – he has seemingly accepted that he is no longer the player he once was, and that even if the Mets wanted him to return for a ninth season, it would be inappropriate.
This isn’t the end of Piazza’s career; as a powerful, disciplined right-handed designated hitter with occasional catching duties, Piazza could help any American League team win a championship next year, and he’s capable of full-time duty behind the plate, though not for a team with playoff aspirations. But it is the end of his career in the sense that anything he does from now on can neither harm nor especially add to his legacy, which is that he was the best-hitting catcher in baseball history, and the best position player in the inglorious history of the Mets.
What mattered most in his time in New York, though, was that he was the rare player capable of single-handedly altering the destiny of a franchise. Relatively few people now choose to remember that Piazza spent most of the summer and fall of 1998, during which time he racked up a .348 average and 23 home runs as a Met, being booed as lustily as nearly any player in New York history.
Still fewer choose to recall that period between the end of the season and the time his 7-year,$91 million deal was announced, when it seemed to so many Mets fans that their approval had been too little and had come too late, that Piazza was unlikely to accept any offer the Mets made him and certain to go either to the American League or to Colorado, where he probably could have hit .400.
When Piazza accepted the Mets’ offer, and said at the press conference that if he was so fortunate as to one day go into the Hall of Fame he would do so as a Met, he not only ensured that the team would have a catcher who ranked among the two or three best hitters in the league – a unique and incomparable advantage in building a winner – but that the inferiority complex that had hung over the club since the squalid demise of the Davey Johnson-led world championship teams would be lifted.
Piazza didn’t merely take a huge money offer, but in doing so he changed what it meant to be a Mets fan, and ensured that it wouldn’t always mean being consigned to rejection and the second-best offerings of the baseball banquet. It was no surprise when coveted third basemen Robin Ventura signed in 1999, or when GM Steve Phillips was able to trade for then-electric players like Armando Benitez and Roger Cedeno, or when Edgardo Alfonzo blossomed briefly into a superstar. The force of Piazza’s stardom seemed to negate the Mets’ long history of mediocrity, and to make anything possible.
This effect is what teams always seek when they sign a franchise player, and it’s much rarer than teams seem to think. Perhaps it doesn’t even exist, and without Piazza the Mets would have signed some other superstar and found their way first into the playoffs and then into the 2000 World Series. I tend to doubt it. The Bobby Valentine Mets were always on the verge of utter, ignominious collapse – whether using Benny Agbayani as a leadoff hitter, turning to Bobby Jones in a playoff series or sending Shawon Dunston to the plate for the season’s most important at-bat, it’s in retrospect obvious that they had no business being as good as they were, and that Piazza – who probably deserved the 1999 MVP, and certainly deserved the 2000 one – was what held them together in every way.
It was such an easy thing to take for granted, though. Piazza was so metronomically consistent – even his enormous hot streaks, when he carried the team for weeks on end, were so long that they ceased being hot streaks and were really just him playing baseball – and so decent and blameless in every situation in which he found himself, and so prone to delivering when everyone wanted him to, that he rarely if ever got the credit he deserved. If he never surpassed expectations, it was because they were so high to begin with. The fact that he fulfilled them was unbelievable enough.