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Authors: Mike Piazza, Lonnie Wheeler
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team would find me draftable. I guess that was my first heavy dose of baseball reality. It was devastating.
For weeks, I was so depressed and distraught—pounding on my bed—that, finally, Vince and my dad bought me a brand-new Fisher stereo system, just to cheer me up. Vince said, “This is from us and the family. We love you.” I still have that stereo.
A couple of buddies of mine were going into the Marines, and that sounded okay to me. I even took the test, and scored better than I had on any high school exam. Military recruiters were calling the house. It felt like my best option. If nothing else, it would give me a chance to mature, physically and socially.
My dad said, “No way in hell.”
Then he made a phone call.
CHAPTER FIVE
The term is goombah , which is something like a godfather but not exactly. Contrary to what a lot of people thought for a long time, Tommy Lasorda is not my godfather. He’s actually the godfather to my youngest brother, Tommy. With me, he had a less formal but, thankfully, very practical relationship. As an elder, advisor, and uncle figure—my goombah—Lasorda maneuvered me, step by step, from high school to professional baseball. And always in cahoots with his friend, my father.
At least some of that might not have been so necessary if I’d been more responsible about my schoolwork and realistic about my draft status. As it was, I was in dire need of an intervention. The summer of 1986 was sailing along and I was splashing around in a life jacket, just hoping to find land in the fall. And not just any where.
Even in my predicament, I was audacious enough to dream big. In spite of their apparent indifference, I still thought I could play for the Miami Hurricanes. And I had two reasons to believe it. One was my ability to hit a baseball, which I never doubted. And the other was the clout in my corner, the one-two combination of relentless father and highly placed goombah.
Not long after the draft, my dad mentioned to Tommy that I only had eyes for Miami—it seemed more accessible than Texas, since we already had a place in Boynton Beach, and much more my style—and Tommy stuck his neck out for me. He called the Miami coach, Ron Fraser, who, like just about everybody else who mattered in baseball, was a friend of his. It was a pretty big favor Tommy was requesting. He was asking Fraser to take a chance on a slow kid from a small school in a northern state who didn’t actually have a position or the academic standing to qualify. Needless to say, Fraser didn’t leap at the opportunity.
In the meantime, I moonlighted for an adult team called the Skippack Skippers and put my sledgehammer skills to work on the land by thehouse we were building in Valley Forge, overlooking the national park that preserves the location where, in the winter of 1777, George Washington camped and trained his twelve thousand men of the Continental Army. Washington himself slept in a barn on what is now our property, which covers sixty-five acres, most of which were littered with major rocks and boulders. The ones in the vicinity of the house couldn’t stay there, so Dad designated Vince, Danny, and me as field labor, charged with pulling those suckers out of the lower ground and hauling them up to the high spot where an Italian stonemason would craft them into walls between the house and road. Vince ran the backhoe, Danny drove the truck, and my contribution was blowing up the boulders with my trusty sledgehammer.
It was a stroke of genius on my dad’s part, because the job didn’t detract from my primary occupation, which, of course, was training for baseball. Frankly, it wasn’t fair. Vince and Danny put in long hours pushing the rocks into piles, where they would sit until I came by a couple of times a week on my breaks from the batting cage. But if my brothers resented the fact that I was on a separate program, they never really showed it. It was just part of the fabric of our family.
For
For weeks, I was so depressed and distraught—pounding on my bed—that, finally, Vince and my dad bought me a brand-new Fisher stereo system, just to cheer me up. Vince said, “This is from us and the family. We love you.” I still have that stereo.
A couple of buddies of mine were going into the Marines, and that sounded okay to me. I even took the test, and scored better than I had on any high school exam. Military recruiters were calling the house. It felt like my best option. If nothing else, it would give me a chance to mature, physically and socially.
My dad said, “No way in hell.”
Then he made a phone call.
CHAPTER FIVE
The term is goombah , which is something like a godfather but not exactly. Contrary to what a lot of people thought for a long time, Tommy Lasorda is not my godfather. He’s actually the godfather to my youngest brother, Tommy. With me, he had a less formal but, thankfully, very practical relationship. As an elder, advisor, and uncle figure—my goombah—Lasorda maneuvered me, step by step, from high school to professional baseball. And always in cahoots with his friend, my father.
At least some of that might not have been so necessary if I’d been more responsible about my schoolwork and realistic about my draft status. As it was, I was in dire need of an intervention. The summer of 1986 was sailing along and I was splashing around in a life jacket, just hoping to find land in the fall. And not just any where.
Even in my predicament, I was audacious enough to dream big. In spite of their apparent indifference, I still thought I could play for the Miami Hurricanes. And I had two reasons to believe it. One was my ability to hit a baseball, which I never doubted. And the other was the clout in my corner, the one-two combination of relentless father and highly placed goombah.
Not long after the draft, my dad mentioned to Tommy that I only had eyes for Miami—it seemed more accessible than Texas, since we already had a place in Boynton Beach, and much more my style—and Tommy stuck his neck out for me. He called the Miami coach, Ron Fraser, who, like just about everybody else who mattered in baseball, was a friend of his. It was a pretty big favor Tommy was requesting. He was asking Fraser to take a chance on a slow kid from a small school in a northern state who didn’t actually have a position or the academic standing to qualify. Needless to say, Fraser didn’t leap at the opportunity.
In the meantime, I moonlighted for an adult team called the Skippack Skippers and put my sledgehammer skills to work on the land by thehouse we were building in Valley Forge, overlooking the national park that preserves the location where, in the winter of 1777, George Washington camped and trained his twelve thousand men of the Continental Army. Washington himself slept in a barn on what is now our property, which covers sixty-five acres, most of which were littered with major rocks and boulders. The ones in the vicinity of the house couldn’t stay there, so Dad designated Vince, Danny, and me as field labor, charged with pulling those suckers out of the lower ground and hauling them up to the high spot where an Italian stonemason would craft them into walls between the house and road. Vince ran the backhoe, Danny drove the truck, and my contribution was blowing up the boulders with my trusty sledgehammer.
It was a stroke of genius on my dad’s part, because the job didn’t detract from my primary occupation, which, of course, was training for baseball. Frankly, it wasn’t fair. Vince and Danny put in long hours pushing the rocks into piles, where they would sit until I came by a couple of times a week on my breaks from the batting cage. But if my brothers resented the fact that I was on a separate program, they never really showed it. It was just part of the fabric of our family.
For
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