Piazza rounded the bases with tears in his eyes. Amid the grieving, Piazza gave Mets fans something to cheer about at Shea Stadium. May 5, : On this day, Piazza surpassed Carlton Fisk for the most home runs by a catcher, launching his nd blast while playing catcher over the foot marker in right-center field at the former home of the Mets, Shea Stadium.
Yes, you can. It will be returned to Cooperstown on Aug. The ceremony will begin at p. Additionally, there will be Piazza-themed giveaways on July 29 replica jersey , July 30 baseball card placard and July 31 bobblehead. By Melissa Kramer 0. Lucie, Fla. Johnson didn't hit much with the Dodgers. The Dodgers traded him in that offseason in a three-team deal for Todd Hundley. Rational arguments are all well and good, but all benefit of the doubt flies out the window when a Cooperstown-bound franchise favorite gets traded.
Especially when after consecutive playoff appearances in and a near-miss in , the Dodgers went six years without a postseason appearance under the Fox ownership. Though the trade was finalized on May 15, , the news of the deal broke the night before, which coincidentally was also the day Frank Sinatra died, making that arguably one of the worst days ever for Lasorda.
As the saying goes, time heals all wounds, and for the most part that has been the case with the Piazza trade, though there are still a couple nagging points that keep the wound fresh. One is that Piazza will be enshrined in Cooperstown wearing a Mets cap. This was not a surprise, as it was Piazza's clear choice, the team for whom he played in his only World Series, with Piazza playing more games as a Met than as a Dodger, with 43 more home runs with New York than LA.
There is an argument to be made that Piazza deserves to go in the Hall of Fame as a Dodger. He hit. But it's understandable that Piazza goes in as a Met, especially when that is his preference.
However, that brings us to the second point. Piazza needs to be recognized, formally, as a Hall of Famer by the Dodgers. The club has a policy of only retiring the numbers of Hall of Famers with the team , with the lone exception Jim Gilliam, who was with the club for a quarter century as a player and coach before dying suddenly before the World Series. Piazza was drafted and developed as a Dodger, made five All-Star teams in his five years with Los Angeles.
Despite the limited time with the Dodgers, Piazza ranks ninth in franchise history with home runs, the fifth-most since the club moved to Los Angeles. While the experiment was abandoned, allowing him to return to catching, a hairline fracture in his left hand cost him time in Despite playing half his games in Petco Park, he hit. While teams expressed interest in his services in , he announced his retirement in May.
Piazza has a strong case as the best-hitting catcher of all time. His homers as a catcher the other 31 came as a DH, first baseman or pinch-hitter are a record. Among such players with at least 5, plate appearances, his. He led NL catchers in errors four times in his first 10 full seasons, and in passed balls twice, with plenty of other top five finishes in both categories.
Most glaring was his inability to control the running game. He yielded more stolen bases than any catcher in the league a whopping 10 times, allowing more than in eight separate seasons; meanwhile, he threw out just 23 percent of would-be base thieves, seven percentage points below the league average during that time. Prorated to 1, innings nine-inning games per year , Carter allowed steals with 63 kills per year, Piazza steals with 42 kills per year.
Roughly speaking, a caught stealing is twice as valuable in the wrong direction More recent research suggests that Piazza was very good at some of the less easily measured aspects of catching. Obviously, not all of the difference in a given batter-pitcher outcome is owed to the catcher due to things like what happens on balls in play including those that the catcher fields , but over a large enough sample size in this type of study, the trends became clear.
Teams and pitchers did better at preventing runs with certain catchers behind the plate than without them, whether that meant on days when the backups played, or when either player had moved on to a new team.
In that study, Piazza cracked the top five, just ahead of Carlton Fisk, the only one among the top 10 already enshrined in Cooperstown:. For the — period combined, Piazza ranked as the ninth-best catcher, above average by a value of 78 runs. Marchi further observed that only in ——when Piazza caught a combined games due to injury and the first base experiment—was he below average. The rankings:. Instead, Piazza stands to be punished because of terrible timing on his part to enter the ballot when steroid talk controls all baseball discussion.
Is there any proof linking to Piazza to any performance-enhancing drugs? Is there even any reasonable connection that causes people to link him with cheating? The only crime Piazza committed is hitting baseballs really hard and really far at a time where other players were using PEDs to obtain those same results.
That's ridiculous. That's the equivalent of assuming that every sports writer is an insensitive jerk because Rob Parker is a sports writer who made some stupid remarks on ESPN.
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