Miami ? The numbers get your attention. They shout. This one above all: 462 home runs, a figure that should need no PR agency, no salesman. But the numbers what Jose Canseco accomplished on a baseball field keep getting drowned out by all of the noise, all of the static, all of the bitter paranoia emanating from the man himself.

What a sad story.

Pathetic might not be too strong a word.

The sorrow you feel for Canseco segues from a sadness his career had to end this way, against his will, to a concern that he’ll be able to handle this.

Here is a player whose productivity stands among the greatest of all-time. Your credentials for Cooperstown consideration ought to be self-evident when only 21 men, ever, have slugged more home runs, and when your career RBI total is virtually identical to that of your ex-Bash Brother and Hall of Fame shoo-in Mark McGwire.

Canseco’s case for Cooperstown might still be a possible thing, against odds, if only he would, well . . . be quiet.

Get out with a little class.

Retire right.

Instead, inadvertently, Canseco is giving a public seminar on how not to make that ego-defying leap from star to ex/former/used-to-be.

Tuesday, a day after announcing his reluctant retirement, the kid born in Havana but raised in Miami kept showing his dark side. The side that hears whispers and imagines people conspiring against him. The side that makes you sort of shake your head.

He kept ranting vaguely about having been “blackballed” from the game. Then, asked for specifics on a national ESPN Radio interview, Canseco transmogrified from alleged victim to self-serving pitchman. He said wait for the book.

“It’s gonna be a tell-all book, about other athletes, about the politics involved, about a lot of exterior things that basically forced me out of baseball,” he said. “It’s probably going to be the most interesting book in baseball history I have ever seen.”

Canseco said he’d tell-all about women, racism, steroids, everything. And all, presumably, to explain why a 37-year-old guy batting .172 in Triple A couldn’t get one last shot in the bigs, one last stab at 500 homers.

The interview might have been almost comical if it didn’t make you wince. Interviewer Dan Patrick kept trying to talk Canseco out of writing the book, as if he were an attorney representing Bud Selig. I’m not sure which was sadder: Patrick playing Canseco’s on-air shrink, or the player imagining that a ghost-written bio that names names (and which they hope to rush out by the World Series, by the way) will do anything but further sully Canseco’s already damaged name.

Picture the reaction of Hall of Fame voters, who are very much a part of the Baseball Establishment. These guys are still sticking voodoo pins in Jim Bouton dolls.

But Canseco magnifies his own image as a pitiable figure which isn’t easy when you’ve hit 462 homers.

Canseco played in 1,887 major-league games. In 1,886 of them, no baseball bounced off his head and over the fence for a home run. It happened once, in 1993 in Cleveland.

Tuesday, though, a CNN-SI website poll asked fans what was most memorable about Canseco’s career, and that ball bouncing off his head trounced four other choices. Distant second? The fact Canseco made history as the first man ever to slug 40 homers and steal 40 bases in the same season.

This represents the guy’s problem quite neatly. Everybody discounts his chances to be voted into the Hall of Fame because nobody seems able to stay focused on the talent that otherwise would make Cooperstown a logical destination.