Mike Piazza is on the college trail now, a 55-year-old dad visiting schools on the East Coast with his oldest daughter, Nicoletta, who is 17. She wants no special help from her father, no good word to an administrator. Piazza is relishing the family time while realizing, as all parents do, that it’s their life, not yours.
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“Everyone has their own standards,” Piazza said by phone the other day. “I’m a firm believer that you’re going to end up where you’re supposed to be.”
Piazza spends most of the year in northern Italy with his wife, two daughters and son. They’ve been renting in Parma but plan to build in Rimini, on the east coast along the Adriatic Sea. Their daughters go to school in Switzerland, and the children are fluent in multiple languages. Citizens of the world.
For Piazza, broad horizons have been a way of life. Raised outside Philadelphia, he played anywhere he could — the Dominican Republic, Mexico — after getting his professional chance as a token draft choice of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1988. Ten years later, a contract dispute led him, via the Marlins, to the Mets, the team he represents in the Hall of Fame.
The Dodgers bungled their chance to keep Piazza, trading him in May 1998 only to sign free-agent Kevin Brown to baseball’s first $100 million contract that December. By then, Piazza had signed a long-term deal with the Mets, concluding an enriching but arduous process he still describes as traumatic.
Considering that history, it seems worthwhile to hear Piazza’s perspective on Pete Alonso on the eve of the first edition of this year’s Subway Series, with the Yankees visiting Flushing for a two-game series starting Tuesday. Alonso today is like Piazza in 1998: a 29-year-old slugger, former Rookie of the Year and perennial All-Star, without a new contract from his original team and facing a big payday in free agency.
As a Mets ambassador — the team named a street for Piazza at spring training and a club level for him at Citi Field — Piazza wants Alonso to stay.
“I hope they work it out,” he said, “because I do believe he means a lot here.”
But that’s the fan in Piazza speaking. The former ballplayer, who waited for the right deal and briefly set a new contract record (seven years, $91 million) in a setting where he could thrive, takes a more measured stance on Alonso.
“First and foremost, I believe that it’s totally his decision,” Piazza said. “I would never, ever get between a player and what he feels like he deserves. Everyone deserves to go out there and get what they feel they deserve. I mean, people do it in business, people do it in the workplace, and he’s no different.
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“I know emotions are high because he represents a lot to the Mets and rightfully so. He came up here and hit 50 home runs as a rookie. And on the other side, I don’t write the checks, either. I learned from being an owner that the easiest thing in the world to do is to spend someone else’s money. So I tell people, ‘Listen, man, these are big numbers and big investments, and everybody deserves, or at least expects, an ROI,’ you know what I mean?
“So with that said, I just pray for the best, and I think a player has to look inside his heart, take everything into account and then make a decision — and don’t look back. Because I just don’t think you should live life with a rearview mirror.”
Piazza’s ownership experience comes from Italian soccer and his 2016 purchase of a controlling interest of A.C. Reggiana 1919, a team in Reggio Emilia that was languishing in Serie C, the third division. It was a small-market team — 10 million euros to buy Pittsburgh, essentially — and by the summer of 2018, the team had folded.
“You know what it was?” Piazza said. “It was an impulsive thing, and maybe I should have done more due diligence in a sort of self-awareness moment. I kind of compare it to owning a racehorse. Like, I didn’t realize how that business in the lower levels is very volatile and it’s very capital-intensive and it’s very speculative. You spend money to try to go up to the higher levels.”
Piazza had hoped that the team would be promoted to Serie B after his first season, which would have meant more TV revenue. It didn’t happen. When losses swelled and partners resisted a capital call, Piazza folded the board and tried to run the team with his wife, Alicia. That didn’t work, either.
Piazza calls it “a successful failure,” a costly but instructive life chapter he does not regret.
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“I still love soccer, I watch it, but it’s kind of like the girl that broke my heart,” he said. “You have to look at things organically and realize how difficult it is to make money. Sometimes as an athlete, you think you have the magic touch and you feel like everything you touch is going to turn to gold, and then you realize that it’s not that easy. As frustrating as it was at times — because you never want to be associated with something that’s not successful — on the same note, it’s something that makes you appreciate what you have. We tried to do the right thing, obviously it didn’t work out, and you just have to lick your wounds and move on.”
For his sports fix now, Piazza said, he takes pride in his role as head coach of the national team for the Italian Baseball Softball Federation. Piazza played for Team Italy at the inaugural World Baseball Classic in 2006 and has stayed closely involved ever since. He’s hoping to help Italy qualify for the Olympics when baseball returns for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.
Stateside, Piazza remains a prominent name in Philadelphia, where any driver stuck in traffic has surely noticed his last name on a license plate frame. Mike’s late father, Vince, made a fortune in auto dealerships, and the family has dozens of locations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. Piazza does not manage the company but flies back for quarterly meetings.
Yet while Piazza’s Philly bona fides are strong — he was courtside for Dr. J’s famous “rock the baby” dunk at the Spectrum — he’s not a favorite son. The city, you may know, really hates the Mets.
“I went into the Passyunk (Avenue) bar in London, which is the Phillies bar, and people were obviously booing me because I was a Met,” said Piazza, who stopped by when the Phillies and Mets played in London this month. “A couple of people were like, ‘You’re from Philly!’ (but) I guess from a Mets fan perspective, they kind of disavowed my whole Philly-ness.”
In New York, of all places, Piazza found his people. He said he’s always appreciated the way Mets fans warmed to him, especially after his emotional homer in the first game in New York after the 9/11 attacks. The hit carried so much meaning that it is mentioned on Piazza’s plaque in Cooperstown.
That was a Mets moment with resonance for all New Yorkers, much like the Yankees’ World Series comebacks later that fall. Mostly, though, the Mets and the Yankees exist in separate spheres, except when their subway cars collide twice a year.
For Piazza — who hit .311 with 10 homers against the Yankees, including the 2000 World Series — the matchups were indelible days of an incredible career.
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“I always enjoyed the stories about the divided households, like the Civil War in New York — this family member’s a Mets fan, this family member’s a Yankees fan,” Piazza said. “As a player, that made it very intense for us and we really enjoyed it. I loved getting up for those games.”
(Top photo of Mike Piazza in London at the Mets-Phillies series earlier this month: Vera Nieuwenhuis / Associated Press)