A YEAR LATER, WHO GOT BEST OF PIAZZA DEAL?

Byline: KAREN CROUSE

The modern traditionalist is advised to give clocks for first anniversaries. So it says in our etiquette book. Maybe it has something to do with time flying, we don't know.

But what of contractual relationships that are severed, ripped at the heart? It's one of the hitches in the human condition that the anniversary of a union can pass like seconds on a clock, without us hardly noticing, but the end date, should there be one, will chime in our minds, pealing at the top of every year.

The internal clock struck one Saturday for Mike Piazza and the Dodgers. A match made in heaven (or at least Hollywood) ended badly on May 15, 1998, when one of major-league baseball's most glamorous teams sent its most charismatic player packing to Florida with Todd Zeile for Gary Sheffield, Charles Johnson, Bobby Bonilla, Jim Eisenreich and Manuel Barrios.

``It's the end of a marriage,'' Piazza, the reputed godson of Dodger don Tommy Lasorda said at the time.

Predictably, a stab at reconciliation would follow, with Lasorda in his role as interim general manager trying to lure Piazza back to L.A. before the July trading deadline. It didn't happen, of course.

Money had torn the two sides apart and money remained the great divide that ultimately kept Piazza and the Dodgers on separate coasts. The catcher re-signed with the New York Mets, who had picked him up from Florida a week after he was traded to the Marlins, for seven years and $91 million.

For one month Piazza had the title he so desperately desired. Not The Artful Dodger, not Lord of Los Angeles, but Baseball's Highest-Paid Player.

He held that title for all of a month before the Angels wrenched it from him to give to Mo Vaughn. The Dodgers then pretty much rubbed it in Piazza's face by signing pitcher Kevin Brown to the mother of all deals, $105 million spread out over seven years.

On a bitter anniversary such as this, the inclination is to revise history, each side massaging the truth so that its own pain is kneaded away.

That's why we hear Piazza saying ``I wound up where I should be'' in a tone that suggests he absolutely means it.

That's why the Dodgers say they are better off having Sheffield and Brown around, as well as Mr. Consistent, Eric Karros, who would have been another team's metronome if anybody had been able to convince the prideful Piazza that it would be prudent for him to save his knees and switch to first base.

The truth is, Piazza and the Dodgers both changed during their seven-year union in ways that made them ultimately incompatible. It was best that they part, lest they stay together to keep up appearances and end up destroying each other.

Piazza is the best-hitting catcher in baseball, but he never has forgotten that he once was a 62nd-round draft pick of the Dodgers. It says something about Piazza's fortitude that he got here from there. Once slighted, twice intransigent and that was Piazza, demanding that the respect that once eluded him be repaid (with interest) in the form of cold currency and brooding when his salary dollars and his playing numbers didn't, in his mind, add up.

He seethed - SEETHED - when outfielder Raul Mondesi was signed to a four-year, $60 million contract extension in January of 1998. Why? Because at the same point in his Dodgers career, Piazza had to scratch and claw for a two-year, $15 million deal.

Never mind that a bachelor can live in L.A. like a modern-day Gatsby on $7.5 million a year, Piazza couldn't appreciate his wealth as long as there was somebody in the clubhouse making more. And so we heard him say of an $80 million offer from the Dodgers that he scornfully rejected, ``If I had taken their offer I would have never been able to look myself in the mirror.''

Reflecting on it, Piazza got caught in the same trap that snags many people, dwelling so much on life's little injustices that he couldn't fully enjoy his many great blessings.

If Piazza had been able to not worry and be happy, who knows? Perhaps his joie de vivre would have been contagious and all of the Dodgers could have caught playoff fever. As it was, the chemistry never was great in the Dodgers clubhouse that Piazza filled as completely as he did his expensive tailored wool suits.

Piazza has the kind of presence, he walks into a room and all the air molecules attach themselves to him, leaving little room for anyone else to breathe. The Dodgers clubhouse without him is a veritable oxygen bar. Maybe it's a coincidence, but hasn't Mondesi looked reinvigorated since Piazza left?

It's amazing how much players can get accomplished when they're not standing around waiting for their star to deliver them.

Piazza improved every year he was with the Dodgers, but did he make his teammates better? A great player can win a game by himself; a great leader knows it's infinitely better if he can get all of his teammates into the act. God help the Mets' opponents if Piazza ever makes the distinction.

Sure, Brown is so competitive he can be downright scary (that's especially true if you're an inanimate object). But he already has taught Chan Ho Park and Co. more than Piazza ever could about getting batters out long after your best stuff is gone and grinding out an extra inning or three on guts and guile.

It worries us that Park's representative Steve Kim has been pressuring the Dodgers to get Park re-signed, as if his contract expired tomorrow and not at the season's end. That was the path that Piazza's agent Dan Lozano traveled down on the way to splitsville.

We'd like to think everyone involved in the Dodgers-Piazza divorce came away from the experience a little smarter than that.

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PHOTO Mike Piazza says ``I wound up where I should be'' in New York after the Dodgers sent him to Florida a year ago.

Matt York/Associated Press