" RANDY Johnson and Gary Sheffield were teammates on the 2004-05 Yankees, glum and glummer.

Johnson was a Yankee, essentially, because he was the organization's white whale. They had begun pursuing him earnestly in the late 1990s, thought they were on the brink of obtaining him on a few occasions and had become so blind with lust to eventually obtain him that they failed to notice he was not Randy Johnson any more. He was a 41-year-old with diminished skills, entrenched unhappiness and a long-standing inability to mix well with the other children.

Sheffield and Manny Ramirez have been the white whales of the Mets and GM Omar Minaya for what feels like a baseball lifetime. The Mets nearly nabbed Sheffield in the early 2000s from the Dodgers and again a few years back from the Yanks in what would have been a swap for Mike Cameron.

Now -- with Ramirez beyond the Mets' price range in the offseason -- Minaya finally has landed Sheffield, a minimum-wage slugger not worth the cost. Because this 40-year-old version of Sheffield has all of the worst qualities of his past without enough of the stuff that made him tolerable, namely a Jose Reyes-fast bat.

"The ball just was not making a good sound off his bat this spring," a scout said.

Sheffield's old team, the financially distressed Tigers, reacted by deciding to pay Sheffield $14 million not to play. They had determined he was not viable in the field at all and his bat was no longer worth using a DH-only roster spot. And it is not like Sheffield ever kept a roster spot anywhere by winning the congeniality portion of the program. The Mets are his eighth organization on demerit.

Of course, Sheffield will enter the Mets world now speaking of a willingness to accept any role, desperation has a way of humbling. Still, because this is Sheffield, that attitude should last all the way to Opening Day. Sheffield is a tough guy who is forever talking about his injuries in an attempt for self-glory and tells everyone he is a team guy in the midst of running down his latest organization.

The positive is that at $400,000 -- all the Mets had to commit to sign him -- Sheffield is even more disposable than Livan Hernandez. If he proves incapable at the plate, in the field or as a human, the Mets simply can toss him out. They can only hope he does not destroy the clubhouse before then. "