PITTSBURGH – Shortly after Mike Piazza had hammered the Pirates for three hits and three RBIs, including a 443-foot bomb to a land far, far away in the third deck of Three Rivers Stadium Tuesday, the Pirates were making almost absurd comments about how to pitch to Piazza.
“When we pitch him how we want, usually we’re pretty successful,” Pirates manager Gene Lamont said after the Mets’ 8-3 win.
How exactly is that?
Piazza is a career .370 hitter vs. the Pirates with 15 home runs and 56 RBIs in just 215 at-bats. Multiply that by 2.5 to getcb 537 at-bats, and that comes out to 37 home runs and 140 RBIs, great numbers even for Piazza.
So when exactly are the Pirates pitching Piazza the way they want to? When they walk him?
“He’s just a good hitter,” one National League scout said. “There’s no one way to pitch to him because he’s so smart at the plate he’ll figure it out quick enough to hurt you.”
The book on Piazza is to pitch him inside, but when he cranks an inside pitch 443 feet, pitchers get scared and start going away, and that’s when he adjusts and hits those trademark right-center field missiles.
Piazza can hit almost any pitch hard and eventually he will recognize what the pitchers are throwing to him. An example was the pitch he launched Tuesday.
Pitcher Kris Benson, who has nasty stuff, led Piazza off with a slider that he threw right at the slugger’s hip, but it broke over the plate for strike one. Nice pitch. But when he threw the next one, and granted it was hanging, Piazza had it figured out. The same pitch came right for his hip and Piazza knew what it was.
Bang!
“Pitchers try to pound him inside over and over again and eventually he’ll jerk one out,” the scout said. “So you go away to the outside of the plate and then you’re just feeding into him. This is why he’s a .330 hitter every year. He can make adjustments. The best thing you can do is to change your patterns on him so that it’s harder for him to figure it out.”
This scout – and probably most others – is very impressed with Piazza’s approach at the plate, which he calls mental rather than physical. Piazza has the talent, and he knows it. So during the inevitable periods when he struggles, he has the self-confidence not to doubt himself and make lots of changes at the plate that might screw him up.
Look at Piazza’s stance and swing now, and compare it to his rookie season of 1993 and you won’t see much difference. Piazza is generally so relaxed at the plate, because he knows that even if he is going through a rough spell like he did after coming off the disabled list in late April, he can get back to where he wants to be. He always does.
Right now Piazza is in the midst of one of his hot streaks, going 15-for-37 over his last eight games prior to last night, with five home runs and 10 RBIs. He had raised his average 52 points to .314 since it was .262 on May 7.
He was batting .325 in May and overall was hitting .316 with runners in scoring position and two outs and .343 after the seventh inning. Power, average and clutch hitting. All the people who booed him last year were slumping worse than he ever was.
Lamont even suggested that there is reason to believe Piazza will do better with the Mets than he did in Los Angeles.
“The Dodgers were always very right-handed,” he said. “But now he’s surrounded by two good left-handed hitters [John Olerud and Robin Ventura], guys who have driven in runs. That’s going to make Mike that much tougher, that much harder to pitch to.”