The induction ceremony is July 24th in Cooperstown.
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Piazza was elected to the Hall of Fame on Wednesday, powering past steroids suspicions in his fourth year on the ballot to complete an improbable journey that propelled him from amateur afterthought to the greatest hitting catcher the game has ever seen. Both men will be i…
“I’m going to go in as a New York Met”, Piazza said Thursday at his Hall of Fame news conference in Manhattan with Ken Griffey Jr. This wasn’t Griffey, the Hall of Fame inductee, this was The Kid, whose smile lit up the box of our favorite breakfast cereal.
“We are really thrilled that Mike Piazza has taken his rightful place among the other greats in Cooperstown”, Mets chief operating officer Jeff Wilpon said in a statement.
The Hall of Fame decides which cap goes on a plaque with input from the player.
Piazza – a 12-time all-star – became the top offensive catcher in big league history, hitting better than.
In a 10-year stretch from 1991-2000, he averaged 40 home runs, 113 RBI and a. 976 on-base-plus-slugging percentage, before a series of injuries hampered his play during the second half of his 22-year career, after he joined his hometown Cincinnati Reds in 2000.
In his first appearance on a crowded Hall of Fame ballot, Piazza received 57.8 percent of the vote in 2013. “I think I did most of my damage as a Mariner”.
“I felt that being 19, they gave me an opportunity to play the game that I love”. “The one time I wanted to go in there, I wanted to be a member”.
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Griffey was asked a few months ago by the Hall whether he would want his plaque to show a backward cap, the image of him in the minds of many fans. But while the last two were later directly linked to the use of performance-enhancing drugs, Griffey never aroused skepticism, which clearly helped his case with Hall voters. Piazza’s improbable meteoric rise to stardom began in Los Angeles, but in his mind his heart will always be in NY with the Mets.
