NEW YORK — If it weren’t for family ties, Mike Piazza’s final stop in baseball might have been Miami-Dade junior college.
That’s awfully far from Cooperstown — not only on a map.
Piazza was elected to the Hall of Fame on Wednesday, powering past steroids suspicions in his fourth year on the ballot to complete an improbable journey that propelled him from amateur afterthought to the greatest hitting catcher the game has ever seen.
Piazza was picked by 365 out of 440 voters (83 percent) from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, comfortably eclipsing the 75 percent needed for induction.