THE BEST hitter in Met history was recently a fugitive in Florida and their second-best pitcher helped raise the World Series championship banner in The Bronx last week. So to lift their NL title flag yesterday at Shea, the team could not call upon Darryl Strawberry or Dwight Gooden.
Instead, a man who never played for the franchise (Ralph Kiner) performed the duty with the pomp diluted by the fact the ridiculous Mr. Met served as the assistant. It was a reminder that though they have been around four decades now, the Mets have been as star-crossed as star-filled. They have had meteors like Strawberry and Gooden fade too quickly, while soldiers like Gary Carter and Keith Hernandez were unable to sustain their excellence for as long here as they did elsewhere.
Tom Seaver, the one unquestioned great Met, did chaperone Tommie Agee’s widow, who threw out the first ball. And then the man with all the earmarks to be the second-greatest Met hitter did to the home opener what he has done for the franchise: He put his imprint all over it.
Mike Piazza changed the tenor of yesterday’s 9-4 triumph over the Braves as surely as he has changed the fate of this organization from “what we were,” John Franco said, “to what we are.” And what they are is a team forced to search its sketchy legacy to find someone to raise a pennant.
They also are now good enough to look at the Braves as no worse than equals. Atlanta fell to 1-3 against the Mets this year as Piazza did the heavy lifting. He not only generated more than 800 feet worth of homers to center – a three-run laser in the fifth and a two-run dart in the seventh – but he shepherded the Mets from a game of close call to case closed.
“There are only a few guys who can change a game like that,” Robin Ventura said. “And he is definitely at the top of the list.”
Then again, Piazza has changed everything here. Since he arrived on May 22, 1998, the Mets have a 259-192 record. Only the Braves (273-174) and the Yankees (272-179 going into last night) were better. Pedro Martinez with the Red Sox, Tim Duncan with the Spurs and Shaquille O’Neal with the Lakers stand out as the active North American team athletes whose impact has been as immediate and important to their teams as Piazza. They instantly brought championship possibilities and image upgrades to their franchises. And they leave you wondering how good their teams would be if you take away just them.
“It’s hard to know,” Mets GM Steve Phillips said when asked where his club would be had Piazza never been obtained. “But it is hard to think of another marquee player who brings as much on and off the field as he does for us.”
“He’s been our backbone,” Bobby Valentine said. “We definitely depend on him. And why not?”
Why not, indeed? When he came to bat in the fifth yesterday, Edgardo Alfonzo and Robin Ventura were aboard following RBI singles that had provided the Mets a 3-1 lead. In his previous at-bat, Piazza had singled but had difficulty catching up to Kevin Millwood’s high fastballs. So he was thinking about that pitch, playing guesswork against Millwood, against whom he was just 4-for-27 (with no homers) in his career. Against whom he always has difficulty picking up the ball.
Millwood, though, did not bring high heat. Instead, he threw slider after slider. Piazza looked awkward initially, his butt dropping away from the plate as he lunged with his bat to stay alive. But slowly Piazza educated himself. After swinging and missing twice to fall behind 1-2, Piazza would foul off four pitches and take another. Each a slider. So when pitch No. 9 in the sequence hung rather than breaking fiercely, Piazza was no longer consumed by fastballs and off-balanced. Instead, he hit one of those low liners that seems as if it will knock down a wall if it does not go over.
“There are guys who hit the ball as hard, but no one hits the ball harder,” Valentine said. “With him, you don’t talk about how far it went, you talk about how loud it was.”
It was loud in sound and fury. The Mets’ 3-1 lead was now 6-1. Piazza was lured off the bench for a curtain call just as Millwood was pitching to Todd Zeile, who, unsettled by the burst of ovation, took a strike. When Piazza ignited another low missile in the seventh for his fourth homer of the season and a 9-3 advantage, he came out quicker and Zeile stepped out to let the roar ripple throughout Shea. Again, Piazza was a quick study.
“Opening Day is always special, especially with the curtain calls,” Piazza said. “If you get tired of that, you better start doing something else.”
The Mets dread that day. They have Piazza signed for five more seasons and pray the rigors of catching do not erode that lightning swing. He is the kind of great player in prime years so infrequent to their history. They want these prime years to last the way they did not for Strawberry and Gooden due to drugs, and Carter and Hernandez due to wear.
They want it to last all the way to The Canyon of Heroes. All the way to Cooperstown. All the way to him coming out one Opening Day as a retired man to throw out a first pitch or raise a championship flag remembered as Mr. Met, not accompanied by him.