Mets Find Leadoff Hitter in Henderson

The New York Mets got ready to run with Rickey Henderson and the Toronto Blue Jays traded a starting pitcher--no, it wasn’t Roger Clemens.

The Mets, one of the busiest teams this off-season, made another move to improve their lineup by signing Henderson to a one-year deal worth $2.3 million.

Despite batting a career-low .236 last season for Oakland, he led the American League with 118 walks and topped the majors with 66 stolen bases, pushing his record total to 1,297. He became the first player to lead his league in walks and steals, and the oldest player to lead in either category.

The Mets, meanwhile, were last in the majors with 62 steals.

“Arguably, Rickey Henderson is the best leadoff hitter in the history of the game,” Met General Manager Steve Phillips said.

Henderson will play left field, where New York used several players last season.

“I’d say the Mets have the best team in New York now,” he said. “The Yankees have carried the crown for a while, now it’s the Mets’ turn to take over.”

Henderson will wear his favorite number--24--with the Mets. Willie Mays wore it with the Mets in 1972-73, and it has not been worn by anyone on the team since, except for a few days by infielder Kelvin Torve in the early 1990s.

“That was an oversight,” Phillips said.

In the first trade of this five-day session, the Blue Jays sent pitcher Woody Williams to San Diego for pitcher Joey Hamilton in a four-player deal. The Padres also get pitcher Carlos Almanzar and outfield prospect Peter Tucci.

The Blue Jays got an outstanding report on Hamilton from Dave Stewart--the Padres’ pitching coach last season and recently hired by Toronto as an assistant general manager.

“Being in the Padres organization, I knew there was a possibility to get Joey,” Stewart said. “In my new job, they’re leaning on me for my input from the field, and I told them I thought Joey would help us.”

Hamilton, 28, was 13-13 with a 4.27 ERA in 34 starts. Williams, 32, was 10-9 with a 4.46 ERA in 32 starts.

The Astros know that Clemens would help them, too. But the NL Central champions dropped out of the pursuit for the five-time Cy Young Award winner, though they did not go quietly.

Astro General Manager Gerry Hunsicker had harsh words for Randy and Alan Hendricks, Clemens’ agents and brokers for a potential deal.

“Quite frankly, we are stunned and outraged at the demands of the agents,” Hunsicker said. “The talent we would have to potentially give up would leave us with a team that Roger Clemens would not want to play for.”

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Joe DiMaggio must be feeling better: He told his doctors to shut up.

Two days after awakening from a coma, an irate DiMaggio ordered them Sunday to stop giving public updates on his recovery from lung cancer surgery and pneumonia.

Doctors had said Friday that the 84-year-old baseball great was very close to death. Now, he’s talking and trying to recapture the privacy he has always cherished.

“We allowed Joe to talk this morning and he was very angry,” said Dr. Earl Barron, who heads the six-person team treating the Hall of Famer. “He said, ‘No more press.’ ”

Barron said he could no longer comment on DiMaggio’s health. He refused to say whether his condition had been upgraded from critical to serious, as had been expected.

DiMaggio has guarded his privacy since his retirement from baseball in 1951, and information about his condition has been tightly controlled since he checked into Memorial Regional Hospital on Oct. 12. He had surgery two days later to remove a cancerous tumor in his right lung.

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Two men were charged with trademark counterfeiting after selling bogus Mark McGwire rookie cards to an undercover police officer at Lyndhurst, N.J., authorities said.

Jeffrey L. Bernstein, 30, of Miami Beach, Fla., and Joseph Yavetz, 28, of Woodland Hills, were targeted after a memorabilia collector who had been offered the cards contacted card-maker Topps Inc., according to Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor James Donohue.

The unnamed collector sent one of the cards to Topps Inc. to be analyzed. Once it was determined to be fake, Topps notified the Bergen County Sheriff’s Department, which set up the sting operation Thursday.

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Rene Cardenas, who pioneered the broadcast of major league baseball in Spanish in 1958, has been let go by the Dodgers after 21 seasons.

He will be replaced by Pepe Yniguez, who has hosted pregame and postgame shows on KWKW-AM (1330), the Dodgers’ Spanish-language flagship station, for five seasons.

Cardenas, 68, became the first person to regularly broadcast major league baseball in a language other than English when he joined the Dodgers after the team’s move to Los Angeles in 1958. In 1962, he moved to Houston to inaugurate Spanish-language broadcasts for the Astros and, in 1981, became the first full-time Spanish play-by-play man in the AL with the Texas Rangers.

He returned to the Dodgers, alongside Hall of Fame broadcaster Jaime Jarrin, in 1982. The Dodgers said Cardenas’ release, which has been expected for some time, “was part of a natural evolution” and that the team wanted to build the future of their broadcasts around the youthful Yniguez.