COMMENTARY : L.A. No Field of Dreams for Strawberry

The trail of broken hearts reaches from Roosevelt Avenue to Elysian Park Avenue, from area code 718 to 213. Darryl Strawberry always leaves ‘em weeping.

What are the Mets without him? What is he without the Mets?

He remains most clearly a mixed bag -- a puzzle wrapped in an enigma. Why should it be any different that he broke so many hearts when he chose to leave the Mets, when he broke so many hearts while he was here?

Whether he understands it or not, he takes his baggage with him to Los Angeles. The fields are always more elysian in the other fellow’s ballpark, especially through the eyes of an agent.

I don’t see anything that suggests life will be any better for Strawberry with the Dodgers.

Strawberry’s psyche is as firm as the bog under Shea Stadium. Playing for the Dodgers was his childhood dream but not playing there may have been his adult blessing.

When he played in Los Angeles as a visitor it may have been a reunion with his family; it was hardly a celebration on the field. The enormous pressures to satisfy his own ego needs as well as the needs of mother, family and friends was a curse. Sometimes he appeared frozen.

Over eight seasons Strawberry hit .225 in Los Angeles (39-for-173) with six home runs and 20 runs batted in. That’s not what the Dodgers think they bought.

Strawberry thrived this season after his crisis of alcohol rehab because of a bounty of aftercare. A divorce action is reported close -- perhaps awaiting only the input of his new contract.

He gave credit for this summer’s well-being to Dr. Allan Lans, the emotion coach for the Mets. Strawberry got support from the presence of Dwight Good-en and from the fact that Strawberry had earned status and respect from teammates who had learned what to hear and what to ignore. They know when “Darryl is just being Darryl.” It’s Strawberry’s makeup that he needs love when teammates most wanted to kill him.

Tommy Lasorda will have to blow a lot of smoke to replace Lans. Strawberry, on his own, has to form a whole new alliance with teammates who have to be shown. Maybe there is a useful link with Hubie Brooks that is left from their Mets days together, but both Brooks and Strawberry are right fielders -- unless the Dodgers are foolish enough to take up Strawberry’s offer to play the minefield of center field.

If he was eager to leave the critical New York media, he’ll find that the Los Angeles media is not the docile housecat it used to be. In effect, New York became his home; this is where he grew up. People are much more tolerant of their own children than they are of outsiders.

But what are the Mets to do without him? If they continue to harrumph at the free-agent marketplace, Cashen, Harazin, Wilpon and Doubleday will join M.Donald Grant on the list of one-way thinkers. M. Donald Grant, remember, lost Tom Seaver and then declared that he had a wonderful team.

This is really a two-sided failure. One is that the Mets lost Strawberry not out of intention -- there doesn’t seem to be any plan to guide them -- but by default. The other is that Strawberry is leaving not by intention so much as by spite.

However much Strawberry hates the word “potential,” that’s what the Dodgers bought. They offered the king’s ransom not for what he did in 1989 but for the two enchanting five-week segments of 1990. Ten weeks out of 25 isn’t bad in this day and age.

The Mets’ failure was a failure to understand and cope with the nature of the man and his day and age. It didn’t do any good for Frank Cashen to hold up Strawberry’s statistics against Stan Musial’s and see that Musial’s production was virtually identical against lefties and righties, at home and on the road. So then Cashen evaluated Strawberry in public as a “.260 hitter with 30 homers and 80 RBI.”

The fact that it was a valid observation is what keeps this from being a civic tragedy. Strawberry has never had a Mickey Mantle Triple Crown year and never will. But Cashen’s comments scarred Strawberry’s touchy psyche.

There was good reason not to renegotiate too hard for Strawberry after he came out of rehab because nobody knew what he would be. But for the Mets to make what amounted to a low-ball offer during the season and then break off talks was a mistake of arrogance. Strawberry suggested that the Mets could have kept him with an offer comparable to $15 million for four years, which bought Kevin Mitchell, or $19.8 million for five years, which bought Don Mattingly.

Maybe, or maybe not. The Mets’ negotiators didn’t grasp that Strawberry was free to walk away and the market was signaling the Mets’ limit of three years was a deception. Wilpon and Doubleday should have been emphatic that this should not happen.

The agent, Eric Goldschmidt, has given Strawberry bad advice before, notably when he took him out of training camp two springs ago, but the team treated Goldschmidt like a twirp. That may be about right, but hell hath no fury like an agent scorned, and Strawberry was not one to make an independent decision.

Strawberry is not a great player. He is too erratic and too one-dimensional. He was, however, the most compelling player in New York. Without him the Mets have no real punch. Without him the Mets are not a contender.

The real failing is not that they lost Strawberry but that they have no way to replace him. They needed him more than they understood. They have all that investment in pitchers who are now at the crest of their careers. They have all that meat but no potatoes.

Perhaps they could restructure around pitching with speed and defense, but they have no speed and not much defense. Any argument that the Mets -- after six years of more than 3 million tickets sold, and a big TV contract -- were acting out of fiscal responsibility is self-serving wind.

The wind just blew Darryl out of town.