The Mike Piazza book, Long Shot, was released recently. He, along with the help of Lonnie Wheeler, goes through his childhood and career in Baseball while tackling all the issues (bacne, steroids, sexual orientation, etc). Really, he was trying to validate his Hall of Fame credentials and explain his side of all the issues.
But this isn’t a book review. There have been plenty written, and probably much better than I could do. I wanted to bring up one small, mostly forgettable incident during his season with the Padres. In August of 2006, the Padres visited Shea in his first trip back to New York. This is an excerpt from that chapter….
Before the first game, the scoreboard guys played another video of me, to the tune of the Beatles song “In My Life,” which was nice but a little schmaltzy, and the fans did a singsongy “Mike Pee-OTS-a” cheer when I got to the on-deck circle for the first time, which was also nice and not too schmaltzy. Then the Mets swiped four bases on me and beat us, 3–2. The next night, I threw out Endy Chavez trying to steal second in the second inning and he immediately jumped all over the umpire, as though there was no conceivable way the call could be right. His body language said, “What the hell? Are you kidding me?” I’m thinking, come on, I can’t throw anybody out? Get the fuck off the field.
Nothing too important. He’s just defending his throwing arm, which was pretty bad in his final year behind the plate. But since the internet is a wonderful thing, and mlb.com has released a bunch of old clips, I decided to see if I could find the video. Sure enough, mlb.com had the exact play…..
The first thing I notice, and you probably do as well, is that Chavez shows very little emotion after being thrown out. Granted, the video cuts away from Endy and there are a few seconds that we don’t see. But there is no way that he can “jump all over the umpire” in that time. He even slaps at his helmet, looking more disappointed in himself than the call.
Like I mentioned earlier, this play (and his account of the play), are of little importance. My problem is that this type of thing happens a lot in these types of autobiographies. For some reason, I continue to be surprised whenever I spot them. In an era of retrosheet, baseball-reference, mlb.com and the abundance of available data, how could the author/editor/fact checker not spot these before publication? I suppose it’s because a lot of these don’t cause much uproar, even when they are spotted. No one is going to care that Piazza either misremembered or used a little artistic license, except for maybe Endy Chavez himself.
Rob Neyer goes through a number of these stories in his book “Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends”. It opened my eyes to how often stories can be embellished and the ease that they can be verified.
As for Piazza, it’s not surprising, since he seemed to paint a lot of people as an enemy in order to make himself the protagonist. I just think it was unnecessary, because we all know how good he was. If I had a vote, I would have put him in the Hall, and I imagine he’ll get in at some point in the next few years.
Yeah, Piazza is not good at making you root for him. He’s clearly one of those people who’s trying too hard to tell you how great he is – which is really off-putting, especially when people KNOW he’s great. Frankly, why defend your throwing arm? It wasn’t great. Saying it was just makes everything else you say ludicrous. You were a great hitter, who had a lot of weaknesses.
As for the larger question of the editors allowing faux facts into books, I have two answers. First, why fact-check something you KNOW to be true? The player just told you it happened; you KNOW it happened. I’ve actually worked fact-checking sports books for a children’s book publisher (they were team histories. I did all of MLB and half of the NBA books); I used the sports-reference pages, and verified everything I needed. It was easy and pretty fun. But for anecdotes, the checking is harder, and people often don’t know how to go about doing it. Second of all, and this is the post-modernist in me talking, is that, in a sense, the story with the incorrect “facts” is the truer story. At least, it’s the truer story to the person telling it. If you actually correct things, while you may be presenting facts, you are mis-representing the person’s memory. And in one’s own autobiography, one has a right to have one’s own memories represented. So I don’t really have a problem with it, although in an ideal world, I think one would fact-check and add it in a footnote or something. But that’s just my take.
You’ve got a great point about it being a “truer” story in Piazza’s view. And now, the reader is able to make their own judgement about some of these anecdotes, like Vin Scully “grilling” him for example.
If I were representing Piazza and had his best interests in mind, I’d go over some of these stories and make sure they couldn’t backfire against him. But on the other hand, maybe more controversy leads to higher sales.