Mike Piazza is in Port St. Lucie to coach the Italian National Team against a team of Mets prospects. He spoke to reporters about 20 minutes ago. It looked like this:

You’ll read a lot elsewhere, I’m certain, about how Piazza said he’s in the Wilpons’ corner, they treated him great and he believes they’ll be fine once all the dust clears. And you’ll see how he said he has considered being part of an ownership group as a way to stay in the game without committing to anything full time. Piazza says he thinks he could bring “certain intangibles” to a team.

For example: Being totally awesome and cool.

At this point, I’m rarely starstruck by baseball players. But Piazza, forget it. Mike Piazza! I wanted to ask him something, just for the sake of saying something to Mike Piazza, but I couldn’t. My voice probably would have cracked. Look at his aviator sunglasses!

Piazza mostly spoke about the Italian National Team, and I’m lucky in that I might have been the only guy in the scrum really interested in hearing about that. He said it’s important to keep the team cohesive since they’re playing in a World Cup in September, and lauded the Italians’ success winning the European championship and placing third in a recent international friendly in Taiwan.

“I’m not going to say baseball in Europe is the way soccer is now,” he said. “But the popularity of the game is increasing.”

Piazza cited a couple of Italian players in the Minor Leagues and said he hoped that Major League success for a European player could help bolster the sport’s popularity. And he said that while there were pitchers on the Italian team who threw in the low-90s, he was surprised to see starting pitchers in the European Championship lighting up the radar guns with 82 mph fastballs.