It was, as Mike Piazza puts it now, 18 years later, “a perfect storm of things coming together.” The result was the future Hall of Fame catcher getting traded twice over an eight-day period in May, 1998, dramatically changing the shape of three teams.
Including the Mets, the self-described “nice little team” who finally got the superstar it so desperately needed.
What follows is a story about the not-so-normal process of Piazza’s journey to Queens, told by some of the people who were part of it all.
For the deal to happen, some tumblers had to fall — the catcher and the new Dodger ownership at Fox had to reach an impasse on a contract extension, regardless of how much the club’s GM, Fred Claire, wanted to keep him. And the Marlins were slashing payroll to prep for their own sale, rather than focusing on repeating as World Series champs.
It all added up to a series of events that might never be duplicated — a superstar traded twice? And in May, not at the trade deadline?
But it happened, starting with Piazza going from Los Angeles to Florida with Todd Zeile on May 14 for Gary Sheffield, Bobby Bonilla, Charles Johnson, Jim Eisenreich and Manuel Barrios. On May 22, Piazza became a Met in a deal for prospects Preston Wilson, Ed Yarnall and Geoff Goetz.
MIKE PIAZZA: “They sold the team to Fox. They wanted to insert a new direction right away. It seemed like we were both digging in our heels and they wanted to step in right away and send a message and obviously I wanted to get an extension. It was coming up on my free agent year.”
FRED CLAIRE, then-Dodgers’ GM, now the chairman of Scoutables, a baseball analytics company: “I thought it was very important that we sign Mike. Here we have a great young player who had started on a road to where he ended up, the Hall of Fame. I got the news of the trade when I got a phone call from Bob Graziano (then the Dodgers’ president): Mike had been traded, there needed to be an announcement. I told Bob that there’d be two announcements — my resignation, too. After 30 years, this wasn’t the way the Dodgers did things. Derrick Hall was the PR man and he said the trade couldn’t be announced because Sheffield had a no-trade clause and that hadn’t been resolved.”
DERRICK HALL, then-senior VP of communications for the Dodgers, now the Diamondbacks’ president and CEO: “I took the phone call from our team president letting me know the trade went down. I’ll never forget it; it was the sixth or seventh inning of a game. I’m writing it down and I’m in total shock. The irony was, Piazza was on deck. I hung up and thought, ‘Wow, this is the last time he’ll be batting as Dodger.’ The dugout hadn’t been notified yet. I went down with Fred after the game and I’ll never forget his (Mike’s) reaction. He was very classy about it, but you could tell he was angry. His quote to Fred and I was, ‘It’s been a walk in the park.’ And he turned around and walked out.”
Still, Sheffield’s contract had to be resolved and Claire stayed. Sheffield and his agent flew to Los Angeles to meet with the Dodgers. Claire recalls Sheffield’s Marlins’ teammates playing in St. Louis during the meeting on the television in his office. The Dodgers ultimately gave Sheffield $6 million, a house and other considerations, according to Sheffield’s recent post on The Players Tribune website, to waive his no-trade power and the deal was done. Claire, who had dreamt of acquiring Sheffield to pair in the Dodger lineup with Piazza, was fired June 21.
JOHN FRANCO, Mets’ reliever: “I was stunned by the trade and then I was pissed it was the Marlins, because then I had to face Piazza more.”
DAVE DOMBROWSKI, then-Marlins’ GM, now president of the Boston Red Sox: “It was a financial move for the Marlins. My instructions were pretty simple, when we got the deal, we wanted to move Mike and Todd to bring our payroll down. I told that to Mike when he first got there, that he was a victim of the circumstances. He asked how long. I said, ‘Don’t buy, rent. And I don’t think I’d rent for a month.'”
The Mets were considered a team on the rise, but needed, as pitcher Al Leiter says, “a stud.” They were intrigued after Piazza was traded to the Marlins. But they were also waiting for Todd Hundley, their catcher who had hit 71 homers over the previous two seasons, to return from Tommy John surgery. Externally, there was considerable pressure on the Mets to pursue Piazza, including from sports-talk hosts Mike Francesa and Chris Russo, who were calling for the Mets to deal for the star on their “Mike and the Mad Dog” afternoon show on WFAN. Even Leiter recalls hearing it on his drives to Shea from his Upper East Side apartment. Some believed their urging pushed the Mets into exploring a deal and it at least prompted conversations inside the Mets about what the potential impact of a trade would be.
But there were other clubs interested in Piazza, too. Steve Phillips, then the Mets’ GM and now a Sirius/XM MLB Network Radio host, said he considered the Cubs and Orioles major threats. Some thought the Yankees would get involved, too.
BRIAN CASHMAN, then in his first year as Yanks GM: “We weren’t on him. We had (Jorge) Posada, so it didn’t make any sense. There was speculation about it, but it wasn’t real.”
PHILLIPS: “When the Marlins trade happened, we called Dave Dombrowski and asked, ‘Are you going to keep him or trade him?’ He said, ‘We’ll let the dust settle.’ We said if he decided to move him, call me. The next day, he called back — we decided to move him. We’re considering offers. We had been, at the behest of ownership, looking for marquee players.
“We had Hundley coming back, but we’re talking about Mike Piazza, so it was a deal we should consider. We knew we’d have to sign him at the end of the year, too.
“We had made so many deals with the Marlins, so we knew which of our players they liked. We had talked about a trade for Kevin Brown. We had made the Leiter trade.”
There was a perception at the time that the Mets’ co-owners at the time, Fred Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday, were split on whether to go for Piazza. Even executives from other clubs say they had heard that. Doubleday was more vocal, while Wilpon “wanted to be convinced,” Phillips said.
PHILLIPS: “It was an organizational decision. Nelson always wanted that star power. Fred agreed that we needed it. They both completely deserve credit for it.”
Phillips drew up three lists of players, one led by Wilson, one featuring Yarnall, a left-handed pitcher, and the other the Mets’ previous No. 1 pick, lefty Goetz. Dombrowski asked for the three headliners and a deal was quickly consummated.
JIM DUQUETTE, then-Mets farm director, now an MLB Network Radio host: “We had considerable debate over Yarnall, but there were some of us who didn’t think his stuff would play at the major league level. That turned out right, that we weren’t going to get burned by that. He had pitched well against them (the Marlins’ Double-A team) earlier in the season and I had been at that game and their pitching coordinator was, too.”
DOMBROWSKI: “It really came down to the fit with the Mets. We liked Preston Wilson a lot. We liked the pitchers as prospects. It was the obvious move for us to make at the time.”
PHILLIPS: “Talk radio didn’t turn any part of it. It was the right time to do something. People were talking about it and it helped create the environment that made the announcement that much more special. They (Mike and the Mad Dog) lathered everybody up to a point where they wanted to love Mike.”
The Mets certainly did. When the trade was completed, the celebrating began.
AL LEITER: “When we heard about the deal, I was standing near John Franco. We were like 12-year-olds, jumping up and down: ‘We got Piazza! We got Piazza!’ It was really cool stuff. He’d already established himself as a stud. We were a nice team, but we needed that, especially because we felt the swell of Yankee baseball then. They were winning all the time.”
PHILLIPS: “I think we invented the chest bump before the chest bump was en vogue.”
BOBBY VALENTINE, Mets manager: “I’m almost sure I was sitting on the pot (toilet) in my office when Steve talked through the door, ‘We just got Piazza.’ I honestly thought he was kidding. I had to get out to see his face. When I saw he was sincere, I’m not sure what I did. I don’t think I jumped for joy, but my heart sure skipped a beat.”
FRANCO: “I gave him my number (31). I was a big Tug McGraw fan growing up and this was a big chance for me to have his number (45). And as a team leader, I thought it was important to make Mike feel welcome. He stayed at my house in Staten Island the first three or four days after the trade.”
Piazza’s first game as a Met was May 23, a Saturday afternoon. He was greeted by throngs of fans and television cameras at LaGuardia Airport and hustled over to Shea. He didn’t even have time to prep for the game with Leiter, who was starting against the Brewers. There were 32,908 in the stands — estimates at the time said 13,000 tickets or so were sold after the trade — including celebrated Met fan Jerry Seinfeld. Three times in their previous four home games, the Mets had drawn fewer than 20,000 fans. Leiter threw a four-hit shutout and Piazza batted third and went 1-for-4 with an RBI double in his third at-bat.
PHILLIPS: “It was like the arrival of a rock star. We had paparazzi all of a sudden. Piazza becoming a Met made it cool to be a Met. We went from being on no-trade lists to being a place people wanted to play.”
LEITER: “Mike was penciled in the lineup, but was getting there late, so we didn’t go over any scouting reports. I said, ‘Dude, I throw a fastball, a cutter, a s—load of cutters. My changeup sucks.’ I pitched a shutout and Mike had a big hit. It was the start of knowing Mike would help us in a big way.”
Still, Piazza didn’t immediately feel comfortable and, while he batted .348 with 23 homers in 109 games for the Mets, he occasionally heard boos.
PIAZZA: “It was difficult coming to New York from L.A., it was a whole different fan base. The fans are extremely passionate and a little different than being in L.A., living on the beach. Going from the West Coast to Manhattan and the whole intensity of the New York market was a difficult transition for me.
“But I knew there was a reason I was there and there was a reason I had to see it through and eventually I was able to relax and start swinging the bat well and not press so much.
“You think you’re not subject to the same fears and insecurities and frustrations of someone else because you’re making a huge salary. But you are. You’re only a human being. So there were times in New York where I was like, ‘What am I doing here? Maybe I should’ve just stayed in L.A. and things would’ve worked out.’
“But I knew I had to see it through and I knew it was going to be a challenge. I really wanted to prove my worth.”
PHILLIPS: “He desperately wanted to perform in New York. We had taken a risk with ownership to give up the prospects and we wanted him to like New York so we could resign him.”
OMAR MINAYA, then-Mets’ assistant GM, now an advisor the MLB Players Association: “It was an early rental — we were getting him in May. Adding him on, there were discussions, ‘How does it look if you get him and don’t re-sign him?’ Big PR hit. But we knew we’d be in the hunt with this guy.”
The Mets did re-sign Piazza, giving him a seven-year, $91-million contract that made him baseball’s highest-paid player at the time. The Mets missed the postseason in 1998, but got to the NL Championship Series in 1999 and then made the World Series in 2000, all while Piazza became the club’s best-ever position player.
But it took a remarkable series of events to get him to Queens.
DOMBROWSKI: “It’s so unique that it’s never happened the rest of my career (which started in 1978). It was a very unusual situation. How often do you have a World Championship club you break up the next year? And that was the impetus for us.”
VALENTINE: “It was a little craziness for a whole lotta joy.”
