Though his sage words might well have been tonic for Maurice Clarett or Marcus Vick, Darryl Strawberry was in Port St. Lucie yesterday speaking with Mets’ prospects. From Newsday’s Jim Baumbach.

“I’m not ashamed of who I am,” said Strawberry, who turns 44 in March. “Of course I’m ashamed of the things that have happened. But with life experiences, you’re able to give back and help others.”

“I’m a living testimony of what happens to someone who had a great deal of talent and made a lot of wrong choices in his life,” he said without hesitation.

Strawberry still fights his demons. His wife, Charisse, who stood by through so many of his failings, filed for divorce in October, saying in a statement that the marriage was “past the point of reconciliation.” Not long before that, Delray Beach, Fla., police charged him with filing a fake police report for making up a story about a stolen SUV.

“You can all sit around and say I wouldn’t want to go through that,” he said, “but there’s millions of people who suffer in all aspects of life who need people like me to say, ‘Hey, look, this is what happened, but you know what? I came back and I fought through it and overcame it and got a lot of victories. Not just playing baseball.’I have a lot of victories in life. I have a lot of failures. But the victories are greater than the failures.”

The LA Times’ Steve Henson is reporting that Eddie Murray is mulling over an offer to join Grady Little’s staff as the Dodgers’ hitting coach. I have no idea how advice to “pretend the ball is Dick Young’s head” will play with the younger generation, but I suppose it’s worth a try.

The Marlins’ Miguel Cabrera was reportedly in some kind of nightclub scuffle in his hometown of Maracay, Venezuela over the weekend. Cabrera is accused of accosting and verbally accusing a teenager who’d asked for his autograph, a story that’s even sadder when you learn the boy in question is supposed to be hitting in front of Miguel on Opening Day.