There’s a video of 16-year-old Mike Piazza in the deepest corner of the internet. He’s taking cuts in a batting cage in his backyard.
Suddenly, Ted Williams enters the frame. Yes, that Ted Williams. Teddy Ballgame – 19-time All-Star, 6-time batting champion, and first-ballot Hall of Famer.
“This kid looks good, he really looks good,” Williams says in the video.
“I’m gonna tell you the truth, I don’t think I hit the ball as good as he does when I was 16.”
Before leaving the Piazza home, Williams signed a copy of his book – The Science of Hitting – with a note: “To Mike, follow this book. As good as you look now, I’ll be asking you for tickets.”
Regardless of the baseball legend’s beliefs, the teenage Piazza needed time to develop. And there was plenty of work to do.
While he hit .442 and shattered his high school’s home run record as a senior, he received little attention from major college programs or MLB scouts.
He landed at the University of Miami, where he hit just .111 as the Hurricanes’ backup first baseman. Realizing he was in over his head, Piazza transferred to Miami-Dade Community College for a better opportunity.
Despite hitting .364 at the JUCO level, he still wasn’t even a blip on a pro scout’s radar.
“They said that I couldn’t run or hit,” Piazza told Sports Illustrated in 1993.
Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, who grew up with Mike’s father, Vince, tried to pull some strings.
“I asked five different friends of mine to go out and see him play, hoping they would sign him,” Lasorda told MLB Network. “And all five came back and told me he can’t do it.”
Playing pro baseball was Mike’s one and only dream, and the lack of interest started to get to him.
“That’s when we started kicking the idea of possibly changing and converting to a catcher,” Piazza said.
Ultimately, the Dodgers took the 19-year-old in the 62nd round (1,390th overall) of the 1988 MLB Draft as a favor to Tommy Lasorda.
“I said ‘Draft this guy’, and they didn’t wanna draft him,” Lasorda remembered. “I said, ‘I want him drafted. I don’t care where you draft him, but draft him.'”
But no one in the organization took the pick seriously. In fact, they didn’t consider signing him until Mike requested a tryout.
In front of Lasorda and the Dodgers’ scouting director, Ben Wade, Piazza put on the performance of a lifetime.
“I just hammered balls into the blue seats.”
But Mike was drafted as a first baseman. And the Dodgers didn’t need another one. After all, that kind of size and power wasn’t uncommon at the position.
So Lasorda framed it differently.
“If he was a catcher who could hit balls into the seats like that, would you sign him?” Lasorda asked.
“Yes,” replied Wade.
“Then he’s a catcher,” Lasorda said.
Wade protested, asking to see Piazza make a few throws to assess his arm strength.
“I threw as hard as I could,” Piazza remembers. “I think my arm is still hurting from that day.”
After the tryout, Ben Wade offered Mike Piazza a $15,000 signing bonus.
“He could have said $15, and it wouldn’t have mattered.”
Thanks, in part, to his father’s connection with Tommy Lasorda, Mike Piazza got his foot in the door of Major League Baseball.
But he still had to learn a new position. And he still had to step in the box against some of the best pitchers in the world.
Through his first two seasons at Single-A, Piazza hit just .257 and had nearly as many strikeouts (119) as he had hits (121).
At one point during the 1990 season, he was so discouraged that he stepped away from the game and went home to Pennsylvania.
“It was so bad, I said I am out of here and I just walked away,” Piazza said.
He was tired of struggling – and being looked down upon by players and coaches in the organization.
“The manager would look at me and see how unpolished I was and say, ‘I don’t get it. I don’t think this kid can play.'”
Then, a member of the Dodgers’ brain trust, Reggie Smith, went to visit him.
“I told him there were people fighting for him,” Smith told MLB Network.
Piazza returned to baseball and played better than ever. He quickly rose through the ranks of the minors and became the Dodgers’ number one prospect.
He told himself, “I am going to go out there and play with a chip because the other way isn’t working.”
Piazza’s underdog mentality worked like a charm and carried him all the way through his big-league career.
1,912 MLB games and 427 home runs later, Mike Piazza is the lowest draft pick in history to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
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