‘I won’t lie and say I wasn’t heartbroken’

Two and a half hours until his first game in Florida as a member of the Marlins on Wednesday night, and Mike Piazza began climbing the dugout steps, his eyes finding the National League scoreboard deep in left field before anything else, and admitting later, yes he had noticed the day’s only posted score: LA 0, CHI 5.

No, he said, his gaze had not dawdled on the big “0,” and no, he insisted, there was not even a momentary rush of exhilaration that maybe his former team missed him dearly now, even if only for one afternoon in Chicago.

“Very bizarre, yeah,” said Piazza, grinning at the irony. “You see the Dodgers up there and it really hits you--I’m not with them anymore.”

No, he’s here in this humid hell hole, playing for baseball’s big joke, the Florida Marlins. When Piazza stepped into the batting cage for his first swings in front of the hometown fans, there were 23 in attendance--two fewer than the banners flying overhead around Pro Player Stadium.

After depositing eight balls into the unused outfield seats, which will go unclaimed until the Dolphins begin playing football later this summer, Piazza returned to his locker to find faxed copies of his roughly $18,000 ad in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times thanking Dodger fans for their support.

“Unfortunately, there’s going to be this perception about me chasing the money,” Piazza said. “You don’t see this in other sports. Baseball has become sort of the whipping boy of professional sports. There’s such an emphasis on money.

“This happens in every sport. Guys change teams all the time. Look at Shaq; he’s a hero going to the Lakers, and I’m a villain for leaving the Dodgers. Why is his situation any different than mine? It’s not; we’re all the same and just trying to make the most of the time that we’re here.”

The image lingers, however: Piazza rejecting about $80 million . . . is he some kind of nut . . . for $100 million.

“I can honestly say that was not the sticking point with the Dodgers,” Piazza said. “That wasn’t my pure incentive; it was not my goal, only a desire to be the first $100-million player. It just so happened the figures were close to that and it was this big benchmark for people and now people associate me with that. I hope any label like that is not permanent, because this is not strictly a financial matter.”

There were reports recently that Piazza had rejected a new Dodger offer of more than $80 million as recently as three weeks ago, but Piazza said he wanted to make one thing very clear: “That’s a fabrication. We have had no contact with the Dodgers since my statement in early April.”

Piazza, asked if it was accurate to say he wanted $100 million to sign with the Dodgers, reacted like a student who had failed to study the night before a final exam, stammering, and pausing and then stopping as he searched for an answer.

“Hum, well, ah, it . . . no comment,” he said.

Will it take $100 million for his next employer to sign him after the Marlins deal him sometime before the July 31 trading deadline?

“We will have to reevaluate the whole situation,” Piazza said. “First it will be a matter of finding a team that wants Mike Piazza,” he said, then laughing out loud. “Cross that out--that’s the last time I will talk about myself in the third person. Don’t tell Eric Karros that I said that, he’ll get me on that one.”

Surrounded by Florida-area media waiting for him to snap like a Gator and take a bite out of the Dodgers, Piazza continued to disappoint.

“I don’t live life with a heavy heart wanting to lash out and be vindictive,” Piazza said. “I won’t lie and say I wasn’t heartbroken leaving and disappointed the way it ended.

“I’m not going to deny that the money wasn’t a significant thing, but there are a lot more personal issues. There were obviously a lot of personal issues I felt were at stake, a lot of professional issues, team issues that now looking back, this was probably the best thing.

“It’s just obvious that they had their minds made up and this was the direction they were going to go in. When I really get the time to lay things out for everybody, I think they’re going to realize this whole thing was in my best interest. I can’t explain it in a couple of sentences. I don’t want to make it a mudslinging contest; there are no positives in getting involved in something like that, but there will come a time if anyone is still interested when I present my reasoning for what happened.”

In the meantime, Piazza is enjoying a homecoming of sorts. He has maintained a home for the last 10 years at Boynton Beach, a little more than an hour drive from here, and played one year of baseball at Miami-Dade North Community College.

“There was no need for any hotel here, and I just took in Todd Zeile with me and we have two golf courses and two Jet Skis and I really can’t complain. In fact, I was trying to figure out what Gary [Sheffield] was all upset about.”

Sheffield, Bobby Bonilla, Charles Johnson. Jim Eisenreich and Manuel Barrios were traded for Piazza and Zeile on Friday.

Piazza, comfortable enough to joke in his new surroundings, said the transition from Dodger to Marlin has been a strange one.

“I start talking and these guys stop to listen,” he said. “I get on the bus and they get up to give me their seat. I don’t want to imply anything about the Dodgers because I had a lot of friends there, but this is just different.”

He said he is going to keep all of his Dodger paraphernalia because there’s “no need for a funeral pyre,” and as far as Los Angeles getting the better of the deal with Florida, “that’s debatable,” he said.

Piazza, who will undoubtedly be the Marlins’ lone representative in the All-Star game if he remains with the team that long, picked his first hit for the hometown fans in his third trip to the plate--a single to right.

“Initially, it might look like a negative what’s happened, but I’m going to turn it into a positive,” he said, a standard line he uttered through countless interviews marking his Florida debut. “I’m not bitter; I’m still playing the game and obviously I was wanted.”

Marlin Manager Jim Leyland, obviously grumpy and at first dismissing any questions about the trade with the Dodgers, said, “I don’t think they [Piazza and Zeile] will be here too long, but that’s up to [the front office], and that’s the name of that tune.”

Piazza, meanwhile, went about the business of preparing for competition against the Arizona Diamondbacks, who looked like World Series champions compared to the triple A-looking Marlins. It began to rain as Piazza took the field for the first time, and the man who made extra money doing shampoo commercials will have plenty of bad hair days in this climate.

But while trying to make nice with the people of Florida, Piazza could not escape his glory days in Los Angeles. Asked about the fans’ reaction as they have come to embrace the new Dodgers, Piazza’s stiff upper lip quivered for the first time all evening.

“No question, I’m truly human and you get hurt a little bit,” he said. “But what can you say? Dodger fans have traditionally been supportive of their team no matter who is there, and if Fernando Valenzuela or Orel Hershiser had been let go earlier in their careers, it would have been a traumatic change and then everyone would have moved on.

“The one thing I’ve learned is that there’s nobody bigger than the game. I don’t care who you are.”

Or worth $100 million?

“That’s the myth in this whole mix,” said Piazza. “That was obviously embellished, but again I can’t explain it now. I’ll just say this, that’s not a goal I had to achieve.

“I really have to cut this kind of talk off; I have to put all this behind me. Listen, I look back and I have no regrets the way everything worked out. Let me just say this also: Unfortunately it’s going to appear to some people that this could have been avoided, but now I think the way certain things developed, it just wasn’t meant to be and it never was purely a money issue.

“The fans were the best, and my only regret at leaving. I have no animosity for being booed or the whole negative reaction. You just never know where life is going to take you, and I’m not sure it’s all settled in yet. I feel like I’m on some kind of ride.

“You go through every emotion when something like this happens, but then you finally hit bottom and then come up and you realize you’re going to be OK.”

Zeile, jokingly calling himself now “a pawn in Piazza’s life,” like Piazza, should probably not buy any green bananas, considering that both players are expected to go elsewhere.

“I’ve been through things like this before, but for Mike there have to be times when he sits backs and goes into sort of a catatonic state wondering just what the heck has happened.

“The rationale with Fox, or whomever you want to put the emphasis on for making the trade, was that they could not sign him. Mike may not believe that’s true, but if they truly felt that, they had to do it.”

Zeile and Piazza said they stood in the tunnel before the game listening to pregame introductions and took delight in the positive reaction, although it had to be an adjustment being greeted by less than 17,000 fans rather than the customary large Dodger following.

As for Piazza, trying to say all the right things, he took extra time when asked if this trade would still have happened had Peter O’Malley not sold his baseball team.

“In my opinion, no, it wouldn’t have happened,” Piazza said. “Something would have happened to get it done. It would have been settled. You can look back and say they should have signed me three years ago, or I should have signed last year, but it’s done. Time to move on.”