Mike Piazza will be inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame in a little over a week, and during a conference call to speak about one of the most important events of his life on Friday, the former catcher had to address an old, but familiar question.
Piazza was asked if he used steroids during his 16 seasons in the bigs by former New York Times writer Murray Chass.
"I've addressed that many times in the past sir, thank you," Piazza replied shortly.
Chass, a winner of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, the highest honor given by the Baseball Writers' Association of America, has famously alleged for a number of years that Piazza used drugs.
"Now as naive as I might have been about steroids, the one thing I knew was that use of steroids supposedly causes the user to have acne on his back. As I said, Piazza had plenty of acne on his back," Chass wrote in 2009.
"Piazza? I have been accused of being the only writer who has publicly suggested that he used steroids, but talk to any reporter who covered the Mets and they will say of course, he did," Chass scribed on his blog in 2011.
The 47-year-old Piazza, who will enter the Hall as a New York Met, denied using performance-enhancing drugs, most notably in his 2013 memoir "Long Shot."
