Mike Piazza: Hitting It Home for TeenSpeak

by Shiv Sehgal

How about those amazing Mets! This team overcame setbacks and frustrations and proved baseball experts and fans wrong about their chances to make the playoffs. Who would have thought that they would come back to beat the Arizona Diamondbacks, and then, to challenge the Atlanta Braves in the National League Championship? "We came back from a lot of situations people never thought we could," said Mike Piazza in a telephone interview I did with him recently. "I personally felt very frustrated because I was injured and it was hard to play with these setbacks. We have a good team and we can do as well or better next year," Piazza confessed.

It's hard to become a talented baseball player when the world field only holds around 700 players. Therefore, if your dream is to become a baseball player, you can't go into it half heartedly. You must work at it very hard. Mike Piazza was very lucky. His role model was his dad, who inspired him to achieve anything he set his mind to. Phillies third baseman Mike Schmidt also served as an inspirational figure for Mike, who had always admired this Hall of Famer's ability, and instilled in him the desire to want to work hard so he, too, could hear people cheering for him one day.

"Never let your dreams go away," Mike said. He also told me that there was a time when he almost quit baseball because he didn't believe he was good enough to play minor league ball. But, hard work, and a shortage of catchers landed him a job with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Staying on an even keel is extremely important if you want to be a good ball player, he told me. "You can't get real happy or real depressed when you play baseball. Baseball is a great sport in that it offers a player a lot of opportunities for atonement." The way a player handles pressure is also crucial to his personal success as a player.

"You can't get real happy or real depressed when you play baseball. Baseball is a great sport in that it offers a player a lot of opportunities for atonement."