"Japan's been very, very good to me," New York Mets center fielder Jay Payton says with a laugh, doing his best impression of Chico Esquela of Saturday Night Live fame. "It's nice because I started the season here and I'm finishing up here."

The 2000 season was truly a breakout year for the injury-plagued Zanesville, Ohio, native, who turns 28 in two weeks. For a change, Payton was able to play a full season injury-free for virtually the first time in his pro career.

And, to cap it off, a campaign that started for Payton and the Mets with a couple of regular-season games here in Tokyo last March against the Chicago Cubs culminated in a trip to the World Series.

"They were all well-played games, but we just came up a little short," Payton says of the Subway Series, won by the crosstown New York Yankees in five games. "Basically, it was good baseball, just a pitch here or a hit there and it could have gone either way. The Yankees played a little more fundamentally sound than we did, and they got a couple of breaks."

Payton, who finished third in National League Rookie of the Year voting after hitting .291 with 17 home runs and 62 RBIs this season, made his first trip to Japan with a major-league squad in 1998 when he was a guest of former Georgia Tech teammate and current Boston Red Sox star Nomar Garciaparra. Payton is now back in Japan -- this time as a player -- with a team of touring MLB All-Stars for an eight-game series against their Japanese counterparts. "Just being able to play every day, knowing I'd be playing every day, helped me get my confidence back where I could go out and play like I wanted to," explains Payton, who played in 149 games this past season. As for the team's success, Payton gives a lot of the credit for taking an NL wildcard winner all the way to the World Series to manager Bobby Valentine.

"He did a great job," says Payton of Bobby V, who also piloted the Chiba Lotte Marines back to respectability in 1995 before being unceremoniously dumped by the Pacific League club. "He doesn't get much credit -- he gets more criticism than anything. He has a certain way of doing things that a lot of people don't like, but for our ballclub it seems to work fine.

"Whenever we have controversy or something's brought up about Bobby, we seem to step up our game and play better."

Valentine's antics over the last few years have included a comical episode where he returned to the dugout wearing a fake nose and mustache after being ejected from a game and not-so-funny dustups with players, fellow managers and team management. Still, Payton is glad that his skipper just signed a new pact to manage the Mets for the next three years. "It's nice to have him back because Bobby knows what we can do and we know what to expect of Bobby," Payton says. "When your team is trying to constantly get to the playoffs every year, you can't be changing things too much.

"Bobby is a very smart man. A lot of people don't realize how intelligent he is. If Bobby does something, it's probably on purpose. People might look at it and say, 'That's kind of weird,' but with him, there's definitely a reason behind what he does."

One person Payton's not quite so fond of is Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens, who was fined $50,000 by Major League Baseball for throwing the barrel of a broken bat at Mets catcher Mike Piazza -- who he had nearly killed earlier in the season with a fastball to the head -- during Game 2 of the World Series. Clemens is appealing the fine.

"But what can you do?" asks Payton, who hit a three-run homer late in that game, won 6-5 by the Yankees. "You either suspend the guy or fine him. They weren't going to suspend him and a $50,000 fine to him is like $50 to the average guy. It's bygones now and you can't really do much about it." When asked if maybe Piazza should have been a little more aggressive in going after the "Rocket," Payton sides with his catcher.

"It's the World Series and you don't really want to have a brawl in the World Series."