The Blue-plate special

"Mike couldn't have been any more shocked than I was," Claire said.

"He never wanted to leave," Lasorda said. "He cried."

Piazza did get his record contract. The Marlins flipped him to the New York Mets, and the Mets gave him $91 million.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Peter O'Malley had told us a family could no longer afford to run a major league team. So he sold to a corporation with deep pockets, and Fox promptly sold off Piazza.

But, a few months after portraying Piazza as greedy, Fox signed Kevin Brown for $105 million.

Claire and Bill Russell, the manager, were fired one month after the trade. So were three coaches. The Dodgers are on their sixth general manager and fifth manager since then, with no pennants.

"The trade changed the whole scope of the Dodgers in the way they had been operated," Claire said.

In the various organizational purges, the Dodgers dumped Scioscia, Mickey Hatcher and Ron Roenicke from their minor league staff, Gary Sutherland and Eddie Bane from their scouting staff. They all work -- and win -- in Anaheim now.

Piazza did not win a playoff game in L.A., but he got to the World Series with the Mets. He finished his career with the most home runs of any catcher in history, one of eight to hit .300 with 30 homers in a season. He did it six times. Roy Campanella did it three times. No one else did it more than once.

"Just to put yourself in the same ballpark as Roy Campanella is saying something," Scioscia said, "and Mike belongs up there."

In his statement, Piazza thanked all the teams, managers and fans for which he played, but he singled out the Mets' fans as "the greatest fans in the world."

Lasorda, the Dodgers' chief salesman, said he was not offended. He said Piazza was stung by boos at Dodger Stadium, before and after the trade. He would try, he said, to persuade Piazza to wear a Dodgers cap on his Hall of Fame plaque.

Persuasion should not have been necessary. The late, great Times columnist Jim Murray called it, two days after the trade:

"The Dodgers always have adhered to the Branch Rickey theory of roster cutting that it's better to deal a player a year early than a year late. But in Piazza's case, 10 years early?"

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bill.shaikin@latimes.com