Mike Piazza’s autobiography is called Long Shot, and reviewer Rob Neyer thinks it’s a long shot that anyone will really like the book. Neyer does admit that the book “semi-obsessed” him for a week. He claims to be unsure of the reason, despite the well-written nature of the piece, but suspects that it has something to do with the book being “a case study in narcissism.”
Neyer writes of Piazza’s book, before saying that he “can’t really recommend [it] to readers”:
He really wants you to think he was a great hitter. Piazza hit 427 home runs in his career, and he mentions something like a hundred of them. He’s got the record for the most home runs by a catcher. And right after the section where he talks about breaking the old record, he launches into an extended discourse about what a great player he was. Like he’s trying to convince us, yes … but also as if maybe he’s trying to convince himself.
He really wants us to think…that beautiful women — Playboy models mostly, and Baywatch actresses — find him incredibly appealing. I wish the otherwise-estimable index listed mentions of “Playmate”, “Baywatch”, and “actress”. But there are a lot of them in there. And when relating how he met his future wife Alicia, he simply describes her as “a Baywatch actress, and a former playmate, to boot.”
I know why Neyer finds Mike Piazza’s “case study in narcissism” uncomfortable and impossible to recommend: Rob Neyer is a narcissist! Now, I don’t say that because I know Rob Neyer, or because I’ve found Neyer’s work to be narcissistic. In fact, far from it. For any baseball fans out there, Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends: The Truth, the Lies, and Everything Else is a fascinating (and non-narcissistic) read. I know that Rob Neyer is a narcissist because I am a narcissist. And so are you.
The estimable Paul Zahl once scoffed in a seminary class at the idea that there should be such a thing as “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” His claim was that, if such a thing did exist, every human being should be immediately diagnosed with it. If I discovered that Playmates and Baywatch actresses found me attractive, I’d rent ad space on the side of Mt. Everest to announce it to the world. If I’d hit 427 home runs in a successful major league career, I might write an autobiography for each one of them. Of course, these things haven’t happened to me. But that doesn’t stop me from desperately wanting you to think that I’m a good writer, a deep thinker, funny, and, you know…maybe at least a little attractive? No? Not even a little? Okay, let’s move on.
We find the narcissism of others uncomfortable because we fear that it might shine a light on our own, like Ed Norton in Fight Club, who worries that Helena Bonham Carter’s support-group fakery will out him as a faker, too. Underneath (but not too far underneath!) it all, we have a caustic narcissist who champs at the bit of social convention. We know it’s not okay to appear narcissistic, so we keep the little guy chained up.
Better, though, to call a thing what it is. We desperately search for the affirmation of others (whether for our athletic prowess, physical attractiveness (still nothing?), or devastating wit) due to our (usually appropriate) fear that our weakness, ugliness, and banality are obvious to all. In other words, we are sinners looking for someone — anyone! — to tell us that we’re not. We’re looking for someone to save us without our having to die. As billionaire and amateur theologian Dan Gilbert once noted, it doesn’t work that way. For resurrection to occur, there must first be a death. We must admit to our faults, allow Jesus to put the narcissist inside us beside him on the cross, and be raised to a new life of peace.
You know, maybe it’s in that new life that a Playmate will find me attractive.
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5 responses to “Don’t Hate Mike Piazza, You Are Mike Piazza”
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It’s this kind of statement that makes you guys at Mockingbird interesting:
“You know, maybe it’s in that new life that a Playmate will find me attractive.”
I cringed when I first read it, then I thought about it. Heck, this may become a litmus test for me to see if I’m bearing fruit!
PZ’s statement on Narcissistic Personality Disorder = sooooo true! Also…
“We find the narcissism of others uncomfortable because we fear that it might shine a light on our own…”
Also soooo true (and uncomfortable!). But I think we also find it uncomfortable because narcissism is ugly and wrong. Because it’s blatantly not the way humans were meant to live. And so, in that sense, it disgusts us because it is, in itself, disgusting. I know that’s maybe obvious to some, but it’s also becoming less obvious to many of us. For example, it’s becoming commonplace to point out the ways in which people who take moral stands against certain things are really just “projecting” issues of their own (and in many cases, certainly, they are). But the moral question remains, even after the ad hominem attacks have faded.
I don’t mean to be the guy that’s always drawing these kinds of distinctions (perhaps in a way it comes out of a narcissistic tendency of my own!), but I wonder if we are beginning to live in a time when it is much easier for Christians to acknowledge human solidarity in “sin” than to acknowledge how tragic sin actually is in our lives. And in many ways I wonder if we have taken the fact of our solidarity in sin (i.e. that I am not alone in my self-worship and rejection of God) as a source of comfort, when in reality it is the greatest of tragedies – the reason God was sorry that he made the earth and subsequently flooded it. I wonder if we as Christians are becoming more and more susceptible to a kind of, say, spiritual Schadenfreude–finding comfort in our common curse rather than in the hope of deliverance from it.
And inasmuch as we do become comfortable with our common curse, it may also become possible that we no longer actually dread our sin or the judgment/condemnation of God, but instead begin to resent all those sources of judgment/condemnation in the world (or even, possibly, in the Bible). And then we begin to seek a gospel that delivers us from judgement/condemnation rather than from our sin itself, which is the real enemy.
Dang it. I will stop there. It seems I have gotten carried away and have dropped a bomb on you, Nick, which I was not meaning to do. None of this was meant as a criticism of your writing. Your insightful post just made me think of those issues, and this was as good a venue as any to try and articulate that thought. My bad if it’s out of place.
I’ll read the new autobio of Mike. I understand your point about narcissism and its ubiquity. We all do it; if not for our physical looks, for our kids accomplishments etc. In sports, there are the stats to back up accomplishments. Mike has his. As far as women go; there used to be rumors around him that he was gay; even when he died his hair blonde, that was brought up. Who cares; he was a great player, he was exciting, he energized he Mets when he came to NYC.