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to have my birth certificate checked.) Our players stayed in thehomes of Palmyra players, and my guy lived on a dairy farm. When they grilled up the best steaks I’d ever torn into, I figured I now knew what the big leagues were going to taste like. It was a nice family, and I corresponded with them for a long time afterward.
    We won the first game—I hit two homers and a triple—and kept winning all the way to the championship round against Palmyra, which came up out of the losers’ bracket after being sent there by us. The title game was a circus. The Palmyra parents—who had been so hospitable to our whole team—now stood behind the backstop and heckled us from the first pitch, which was not the kind of thing that my dad was about to put up with. He tried to get a couple of our parents to walk over there with him, but he was on his own. So he joined the Palmyra people at the backstop and yelled at their kids, only louder. One of the officials asked him to quit, and he said he’d quit when they did. At least he refrained from slugging anybody. I homered to center, but we lost, 7–4.
    At thirteen, we advanced to the Babe Ruth league and the games were moved to deSanno Field, where the fences were deeper and go-kart races were usually roaring on the track next to the park. I became only the second thirteen-year-old to clear the fence at deSanno, and in the district tournament hit a home run against Coatesville that the paper described as 330 feet. When I was fourteen and fifteen, the Evening Phoenix often described my long home runs to center field, which was where most of them went. We once had an exhibition game against a really good traveling team from Puerto Rico, and I got hold of one that, honestly, might have been four-hundred-something feet. Over the road and into a field. As far as I knew, they never found the ball. After that, they started giving kids a hot dog or something if they returned a ball hit over the fence.
It was like a scene out of The Natural. The place was absolutely packed, and the clouds had started to get dark in the background. Mom was walking around with the younger kids down the right-field line, as usual—she didn’t like to watch the games with me, because I could get a little loud—and I was standing behind the backstop with Butch Nattle (one of the other parents). The bases were loaded, it was a tie game or something, or maybe we were behind, and Butch says to me, “I guarantee you, Mike’s gonna hit one out.”
Jesus Christ, he hit that ball. Against that dark background, you could see that white ball going up and over everything—thefence, the trees, everything . Straightaway center field. Then the rain and lightning started up.
—Vince Piazza
    I pitched a couple of no-hitters in Babe Ruth ball, including one—a 1–0 win—in which I walked twelve batters and threw 154 pitches. Another game, when I was sixteen, I threw 162 pitches and hit two home runs. But that summer there was a better pitcher on our team, Joe Weber, and we went all the way to the state championship game again, this time losing in extra innings to Levittown. Honestly, I wouldn’t remember all that—at least, not in detail—if the newspaper clippings weren’t pasted into my mother’s scrapbooks.
    Even though he’s two years younger, my brother Danny played on our team one year. There was an occasion in batting practice when I hit a big fly ball out to him in right field and it plunked down right on his head, just like Jose Canseco. We all had a good, long laugh about that—even Danny. It might explain why he became a lawyer. Vince started out on my team, too, then quit, came back a few years later, and quit again. His heart wasn’t in baseball. But his greatest moment is preserved in one of Mom’s scrapbooks. He once went three for three. I remembered that, but didn’t remember why. When I was home visiting not long ago, we came across the clipping and he explained it to me.
    He said, “The