METS NEW YORK

With Mike Piazza, it is all about connecting. He connected with a pitch on his 30th birthday and sent it 485 feet over the left-centerfield bleachers at Shea Stadium. He connected on another in the ninth inning at Houston in mid-September and helped the New York Mets to their most exhilarating win in years.

He went even deeper, too. He reconnected the Mets to their fans and to their magic. He gave the club and its followers something to be excited about, something to hope for and cheer for. “It’s an ambience,” Mets co-owner Nelson Doubleday said. “It’s just something special he brings to the ballpark.”

Yet he never really did connect after the May 22 trade made him arguably the most celebrated acquisition in Mets history. He didn’t connect with all of his teammates, the fans, the city or his own future. He sure didn’t connect when it counted the most--leaving 15 runners on base in the disastrous three losses to the Braves that left the Mets out of the playoffs.

The club and its fans really feel left out now, with the city embracing the Yankees and aiming toward the World Series. For the Mets, the World Series means only one thing: after it is over, clubs have 15 days of exclusive negotiating rights to their own potential free agents.

There’s no clue whether Piazza still will be a Met after that. He never did offer a hint about how to link the Mike Piazza who walked into the Mets clubhouse silent and scowling when the club returned home from its rousing four-game series in Houston, and the Mike Piazza who, a few days later, made himself available to radio shows and pregame interviews to say New York is a pretty neat place.

He really didn’t let anyone inside his world. He gave no clue how to reconcile the intelligent, deep thinker with the vacuous Hollywood type who, when almost everyone was trying to call him about his trade from the Dodgers, ignored most of the messages but chose to talk with sports shock jock Jim Rome and male model Fabio.

And he did nothing to tie up the greatest loose end of all. “Right now there are a lot of hypotheticals involved,” Piazza said in what might have been his farewell address after the season finale. “I don’t have any sort of game plan.”

As much as the Mets want to sign him, and as much money as they’re willing to offer him, the club doesn’t know if he will be connected with it anymore.

Short of his autograph on a contract, Piazza did give the Mets just about all they asked. He finished with a .328 batting average, fourth best in the National League, and 32 home runs and 111 runs batted in. If he didn’t carry the franchise, he lifted it. Although he came up empty at the end (without much support in a slumping lineup), he hit .473 during a vital 22-game stretch in late August and early September.

He did it with all the cheerfulness of a person being dragged in front of a grand jury on his way to a root canal.

Piazza often glowered. On a joy-and-openness scale that has Sammy Sosa at one end and Albert Belle on the other, Piazza was closer to Belle. He didn’t do much to dispel the stereotype of the self-indulgent modern ballplayer. He rarely smiled when he wasn’t in front of a TV camera.

So it was among the season’s biggest upsets when he insisted toward the end that he was having a ball.

“Obviously, you’ve got to have fun with it. There are 20-something other teams out there whose games in September don’t mean anything,” he said after a late-September win. “You’ve got to enjoy it. If you don’t have any fun, you don’t go out there and relax and you’re not going to do well. I’ve just been relaxed. I’ve realized you’ve just got to take the pressure, turn it around and put it on the other team. That’s what you always try to do, but especially when it comes down to this time of year.”

Then, he added: “I’ve really got to go.” And he walked away. No forays into his emotions. No response to the standing ovations he received almost every time he came to bat at Shea in September. No measured reflections on his past. Definitely no insight on whether he is just a hired gun who will put himself up for hire somewhere else.

“He’s not that much different with me,” said Manager Bobby Valentine, who has known Piazza a long time through their mutual friend, Tom Lasorda. “That’s just the way he is. There’s nothing wrong with it. He knows exactly what he has to do and what he wants to do.

“He’s not an independent contractor,” Valentine said in his office before a stretch-drive game. “He’s a catcher, and he’s connected with the pitcher on every pitch in every conceivable way. He’s connecting with a lot of the players, and I think the situation he’s been thrown into has limited the amount of players he can connect with. He’s smart enough to know that he hasn’t had the time to connect with every player.”

Connections are what gave Michael Joseph Piazza a baseball career in the first place. His father, Vince, happened to be a lifelong friend of Lasorda, who was the Dodgers’ manager in 1988, when Mike was a first baseman at Miami-Dade Community College. In what has become a well-known story , the manager pulled strings to get scouts and management to take Piazza as a courtesy pick in the 62nd round.

A lot of hard work brought Piazza the rest of the way. He enrolled at the Dodgers’ academy in the Dominican Republic even though no one else there spoke English. Piazza made his way through the minors--despite only six home runs his first year of Class-A ball in Vero Beach--and played a winter in Mexicali, Mexico, to get experience.

He became the National League Rookie of the Year in 1993, and then one of the greatest hitters of the decade. Plus, with his good looks and bachelor status, he turned into a Hollywood celebrity. He appeared on “Baywatch” and “Married With Children.” He played drums on stage at Anthrax and Motorhead concerts. And he reportedly asked the Dodgers for movie-star money: $100 million over seven years.

Piazza was stunned and disappointed that the Dodgers’ new ownership acknowledged his demand by trading him to the Marlins, who dealt him to the Mets a week later. Mets fans were stunned and disappointed when Piazza never seemed to embrace New York--and when he repeatedly failed to produce with runners in scoring position. They booed. Then Piazza’s was stunned and disappointed some more.

“When I got here, he was kind of quiet and miserable,” said outfielder Tony Phillips, acquired by the Mets on July 31. Laughing hard, he added: “I had to tell him, ‘It ain’t that freaking bad. Smile every once in a while, will you?’ ”

You could make a link between the Mets’ announcement they would not negotiate with Piazza during the season (ending the daily speculation) and his late-summer surge. You also could connect his improvement with the fact veterans on the Mets kept ribbing him until he started ribbing back.

“Some guys are harder to understand than others,” said Phillips, who calls himself a psychiatrist after having either cajoled or needled teammates for the past 17 years. “Mike was just misunderstood. He’s a great kid. Everyone can have a perception, but at least try to get to know the guy before you voice an opinion of him. Just because he doesn’t speak doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.”

The side of Piazza’s personality the Mets organization sees is pleasant, intense and bright, said General Manager Steve Phillips, no doubt mindful the catcher beat Reggie White and actress Donna D’Errico on “Celebrity Jeopardy.” “I think it’s very important for him to be on a winning team,” the general manager said. “He’s not an outwardly emotional guy. The fact that (in Houston) he showed some emotion, I thought was remarkable, because that’s just not how he expresses himself.”

New Yorkers aren’t so reserved. They like to embrace stars. It’s an open question whether Piazza will stay around long enough for the city to make the connection between liking his performance and liking him.

“I love him,” Doubleday said. “The great thing would be to see him finish his career here as a New York Met, so when he goes to the Hall of Fame, he’ll be wearing a New York Met uniform. It’s not a question of money as much as it is a question of whether he wants to play here. Now, if he doesn’t want to sign here, money isn’t going to do it. If he wants to stay here, we’ll make sure he’s in good shape.

“Who knows whether he’s happy here or not?” the owner said. “I hope like hell he’s happy here.”