Dodgers Too Quick to Ignore Piazza’s Impact

The blockbuster trade with the Florida Marlins made the Dodgers a better team.

They’ve said it. We’ve written it.

An extended lineup has more ways to score, a left-handed threat in the middle of it, and the National League’s best defensive catcher handling one of the league’s best pitching staffs.

The rub, the feeling here is, is the Dodgers have been a little too glib about it, too quick to suggest they are better because Mike Piazza is gone.

They have seemed to make him a scapegoat for everything that ailed the club before, and that’s absurd.

It ignores an offensive production that often carried an inconsistent attack and put Piazza on the road to Cooperstown.

It ignores the fact that, often battered and bruised, he appeared in 152 games last season, 148 the previous season, 149 two seasons before that.

It conveniently ignores his immense popularity in Southern California-- and reputation in the game.

Yes, the despicable Marlins never intended to keep him and were looking for any way to dump salary, but would they have traded Gary Sheffield, Bobby Bonilla, Charles Johnson and Jim Eisenreich for Juan Castro?

Would the New York Mets have given up three of their top prospects for Tom Prince?

The Mets know that Piazza can light up their offense and grab a share of the neons from the Yankees.

The Dodgers?

They have been too quick to forget what Piazza meant, too giddy in their evaluation that all happiness and confidence springs from his departure.

“I think we should be focusing on the addition rather than the subtraction,” Executive Vice President Fred Claire said. “You don’t bring in four members of a world championship team without significant change. It’s only natural that chemistry and everything that goes with it would be different.”

The trade, of course, was huge.

It will be a measuring rod for the Dodgers long into the future, but they need to move on, see how it plays out over the long seasons.

Did Piazza have defensive shortcomings? Of course.

Did he tend to be wrapped up, particularly in his early years, in his own performance rather than his team’s? Perhaps.

Was he wrong to complain about his contract situation on opening day and did it become a distraction? For sure.

Did Fox wash its hands of that situation and illustrate that no one will be bigger than the organization? Obviously.

Nevertheless, there were those 40 home runs and 124 RBIs, and there were those 36 homers and 105 RBIs, and there was much more that ailed the Dodgers than Piazza.

The proof of that is that it will take all four of the new players--and the $9-million payroll leap that Claire wasn’t allowed to make before--to cure those ailments.

I talked with Piazza after he was traded to the Mets and asked him what his reaction was to the things the Dodgers have been saying, how the pitchers prefer throwing to Johnson, how they insist the clubhouse has become this hub of happiness since he left.

“I can only say I’m sorry if they really feel I was a problem because that would make me disappointed, but I don’t look on a lot of it as pointed or malicious in nature,” he said.

“As I’ve said, I’m not the great defensive catcher in history, and C.J. is one of the best. I can’t argue with that.

“But I gave 100%, worked hard to make the most of my tools, and what I lacked behind the plate, I think I made up for with my hitting. I think I hit a lot of home runs that helped the pitchers, and I hope they recognize that.

“Ramon [Martinez], [Hideo] Nomo . . . it was an honor to catch great pitchers like that, but I have to put Los Angeles behind me. It doesn’t matter what I feel. . . . I have to look forward.”

So should the Dodgers.

They have the tools to win and they have their work cut out catching the San Diego Padres, who won’t have to worry about what the Dodgers are doing as long as Greg Vaughn continues his resurgence. He is hitting now in the manner the Padres anticipated when they acquired him from the Milwaukee Brewers for the 1996 stretch run.

He slugged 10 homers in the last two months of ’96 and 18 last year, but he batted only .206 and .216 in those respective spans, leaving the Padres so down on him last year that they traded him to the Yankees for pitcher Kenny Rogers only to have the deal voided when a Yankee physical detected a shoulder problem.

Sometimes, the best trades are the ones you don’t make.

Vaughn already has 15 homers and 39 RBIs and a .285 average, compensating for the recent absence of Ken Caminiti because of a leg injury and the ongoing struggles of Steve Finley, who is batting .207. Left field is now Vaughn’s alone. He may have simply needed time to adjust to the National League, but he is also no longer shadowed by Rickey Henderson waiting to replace him after a 0-for-4 game.

The Dodgers made the trade they had to make, and that probably will be it, although speculation about Randy Johnson continues as the Seattle Mariners wonder how long they can go with the troubled left-hander.

Johnson lasted only three innings--”He looked like he was in a fog out there,” Manager Lou Piniella said--of a 10-4 drubbing by the Texas Rangers on Tuesday.

He is 3-3 with a 6.93 earned-run average and hasn’t been able to shake his unresolved contract situation.

“My problem is not mechanical,” Johnson said in Texas. “It’s between my ears.”

Mariner General Manager Woody Woodward is believed to have talked recently to Claire about Wilton Guerrero, and is probably at a point where he might take Seattle-area native Todd Hollandsworth even up, but the Dodgers are unlikely to bite.

There’s Johnson’s salary, his suspect performances and the fact that his mere presence would be an ongoing distraction.

And the chirping Dodgers, of course, haven’t been letting us forget how they dislike distractions--even when the distraction is hitting 40 home runs.