There is a sweet piece of furniture in the home clubhouse at Shea, but it belongs to John Franco, old man of the Mets, in case his dinosaur bones give out. The black leather chair with steel chrome sits grandly in front of Franco's locker. Three doors over, Mike Piazza gets a little folding chair to rest on, same as all the other guys. He often doesn't use it. George Steinbrenner apparently turned his nose up at the standard stools down the hall, in the visitor's clubhouse. No precious Yankee rear end would touch these, he declared, and so yesterday a truck pulled up to Shea, filled with lush furniture from the Stadium in the Bronx. The Mets rolled their collective eyes at this move, just as they did when they later heard that the Boss had forbade his players from signing any paraphernalia, a pregame tradition in all clubhouses that's as old as the wood. When word reached them about a supposed flood that forced the Yankees from their home away from home, the Mets were collectively skeptical. Did a pipe in the visitors' clubhouse really break, one Met asked me. That was the story we had been told, I replied, and the Met snickered. What, he said, did Roger Clemens burst it with a bat? Mike Piazza scores after hitting a two-run homer in the third inning. The Mets, staring at the subway tracks after losing 3-2 to the Yankees last night to go down 3-1 in the World Series, could still find some levity when it came to the Yankees. All four games but Sunday's 4-2 Met win were decided by one measly run, not exactly a reason to pull the emergency cord. On the table in the middle of the Met clubhouse were nine commemorative bottles of Tattinger, bubbly that the Mets had put their names on earlier, before the pipes burst. Hours later, they were still talking with a quiet confidence that sometime on Sunday, at the Stadium, they would be popping the corks. "We haven't done things easily all season," noted Todd Zeile. "All four games literally could have gone either way. I think we'll take that as a good sign and go from there." Piazza, leaning against his rinky dink chair, was in no mood to joke, about the Yankees' plight, or his own. The attention in this series has been on Piazza for all the wrong reasons, and it's beginning to take its toll. First Piazza was unwillingly roped into a controversy when he became a moving target for Clemens and a shattered bat, then his gaudy postseason statistics began to slip. Coincidence? Probably. Then again, conspiracy theorists that we are, we couldn't help but wonder if the Yankee clubhouse was "seriously flooded," as we had been told, to the point where nobody could walk on the floors, how did the Yankees all manage to dress in street clothes before emerging to do interviews on the grass? And will the Mets get the dry cleaning bill?
It was Jeter who cranked the first pitch of the game over the center-field fence. The Baja Men were barely off the field, and already the dogs were out. Now if only we could find a way to muzzle them. Piazza nearly hit one out in his first at-bat, but again a Met ball found a way to veer foul by nary an inch. "I don't think you can point fingers at anything. Baseball's just a frustrating game sometimes," said Piazza, 4-for-17 in the series with four RBI and two home runs. He used the word "frustration" more than he used the word "dude," which should tell you something about his foul mood. Someone wondered about how he would feel if the Yankees celebrate today in the house of Shea. Piazza looked ready to break a few pipes of his own, but he bit his tongue and gave a sound bite, nice guy that he is. "We're not thinking three in a row. Just one. If we win (today), who knows?" he said. In the fifth inning, Denny Neagle got the first two Mets to fly out on moonballs, as he does. Piazza came to bat, looking to do what Jeter had done earlier. But all the way from the visitors' dugout, where rats scurried behind the bat rack, Joe Torre threw Piazza a curve. He brought in David Cone from the bullpen to face Piazza. Ex-Met against Mr. Met; New York baseball's wily past vs. its muscled future. Cone's career has already been well-defined. Piazza is still coloring in the lines. He took a bad swing at a slider away, then came up under a cutter that flew meekly to Luis Sojo at second base. Inning over, showdown complete. "Another 'what if?'" said Piazza. In the eighth, with Mariano Rivera throwing cutters before his usual time, Piazza hit a grounder that might have got past Jeter if only he weren't shading toward second. Again, foiled by inches. Again, what if? You can send Al Leiter to the mound today and hope that he is able to hand the baton to Mike Hampton tomorrow, one lefty to another. You can repeat after Piazza — one game at a time, one game at a time — and watch him lean wearily on the folding chair and hope it doesn't break. "You know what? Stranger things have happened," said Piazza. He meant in the game of baseball, not in the ballpark that the Yankees swear is about to fall down on them. "You see something new every day," continued Piazza, brightening for just a moment.
Courtesy of the New York Daily News 10/26/00