Mike Piazza is on the college trail now, a 55-year-old dad visiting schools on the East Coast with his oldest daughter, Nicoletta, who is 17. She wants no special help from her father, no good word to an administrator. Piazza is relishing the family time while realizing, as all parents do, that it’s their life, not yours.
“Everyone has their own standards,” Piazza said by phone the other day. “I’m a firm believer that you’re going to end up where you’re supposed to be.”
Piazza spends most of the year in northern Italy with his wife, two daughters and son. They’ve been renting in Parma but plan to build in Rimini, on the east coast along the Adriatic Sea. Their daughters go to school in Switzerland, and the children are fluent in multiple languages. Citizens of the world.
For Piazza, broad horizons have been a way of life. Raised outside Philadelphia, he played anywhere he could — the Dominican Republic, Mexico — after getting his professional chance as a token draft choice of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1988. Ten years later, a contract dispute led him, via the Marlins, to the Mets, the team he represents in the Hall of Fame.
The Dodgers bungled their chance to keep Piazza, trading him in May 1998 only to sign free-agent Kevin Brown to baseball’s first $100…
