Family, fans at heart of Piazza’s Hall moment

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — For 28 minutes, Mike Piazza kept a tissue wadded in the palm of his right hand, his fingers extended in a white-knuckle grip on the Clark Sports Center’s wood-paneled podium. Behind him, roughly four dozen of baseball’s greatest players sat rapt. In front of him, one of the three largest crowds in Hall of Fame history fanned themselves with cardboard cutouts of Piazza’s face.

Thousands of them had made the four-hour trek across leafy back roads to Cooperstown, where on Sunday, Piazza and Ken Griffey Jr. officially entered the National Baseball Hall of Fame. As Piazza delivered his emotional, nearly half-hour speech, winding through his early life to his time with the Dodgers and beyond, he paused at the section regarding his Mets years. Fans began chanting his name. Out came the tissue, again, and not for the last time.

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“You have given me the greatest gift, and graciously taken me into your family,” Piazza said, directly addressing the crowd. “Looking out today at all the incredible sea of blue and orange brings back the greatest time of my life.”

For Piazza, the sun-splashed afternoon fitted the capstone onto a 16-year career that saw him develop from a 62nd-round Draft pick, the lowest in Hall of Fame history, to one of the greatest-hitting catchers of all time. Now bronzed for future generations to see, Piazza’s …

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