Next for Coleman: Malibu Cleanup : Baseball: Court accepts negotiated settlement that includes 200 hours of community service.

While his baseball future remains uncertain, Vince Coleman was scheduled to join the lineup of volunteers assisting the cleanup in the Malibu fire area Friday afternoon.

“The jeans and shovels are in the car,” attorney Robert Shapiro said after Municipal Court Commissioner Abraham Kahn accepted a negotiated settlement of the felony charge brought against the New York Met outfielder for throwing an explosive device that injured three people in the Dodger Stadium parking lot on July 24.

By pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge, Coleman received a one-year suspended jail sentence and was placed on three years’ probation. He will be required to pay a $1,000 fine and negotiated restitution to the three injured people, while providing 200 hours of community service, at least 80 with fire, graffiti or Caltrans freeway cleanup. Coleman said he would begin by spending the weekend in the Malibu area.

He added that he was saddened by the experience and relieved that he can, he hopes, put it behind him. He said that he felt the incident had been magnified to the point that he has been “lynched by the New York media.”

“What I want to do now is prove I’m not a monster,” he said.

In approving the agreement, Kahn said he accepted the apologetic sincerity Coleman has demonstrated from the start but reminded the outfielder he is a role model who made an immature mistake.

Coleman was charged with throwing an M-100, a device used by the military to simulate grenades, from a car driven by former Dodger outfielder Eric Davis after a game between the Mets and Dodgers. Davis was not charged. Nor was Met outfielder Bobby Bonilla, a passenger in the car.

The resulting explosion injured Amanda Santos, then 2 1/2, who suffered second-degree burns to her cheek and damage to an eye and finger; Marshall Savoy, 11, who suffered a bruised leg, and Cindy Mayhew, 33, who was treated for an ear injury.

The Santos family filed suit against Coleman and Davis on Oct. 18, seeking unspecified general, special and punitive damages.

Shapiro said Friday he has yet to see the suit but that his client wants to apologize personally to the three injured people.

William Hodgman, the district attorney’s director of central operations, said the Santos family supported the negotiated settlement and that he viewed it as an opportunity to send a positive message through Coleman’s community service.

“If even one child is saved from harm, justice will have been served,” he said. “The keys to the jail are still in Vince Coleman’s hands.”

Coleman, for the first time, said he bought the M-100 and others like it for $1.50 each in New York on July 4. He said he was not the first and only Met to have exploded one and that he had also used them on July 4 in closer vicinity to his two children, 5 and 3, than he was to the injured people on July 24.

“The facts have been distorted,” he said. “Everyone said I threw it into the crowd, and that’s far from the truth. It was in an enclosed area with the people 30 feet away, and I only dropped it out of the car. I was just having fun. We’d done it all the time.”

Coleman said he was not dismissing the “harmful and unpredictable” nature of the device.

“I’m hopeful everybody learned a lesson not to use them,” he said. “It’s a bizarre situation to have occurred over $1.50.”

The ultimate price may be the scar on his career, though Coleman said: “I’m not the first to be issued a misdemeanor. It’s not as if I’m a convicted murderer.”

The Mets terminated Coleman’s season after 92 games--he was batting .279 with 38 stolen bases--and said he would never play for them again, though he is under contract through 1994 at $2.4 million. Club counsel David Howard issued a statement Friday that seemed to imply the Mets are still considering releasing Coleman under the conduct clause in his contract, which would erase their financial responsibility if not challenged.

The “relevant provision” pertains strictly to the conduct, Howard said, and “not how the conduct is labeled through negotiated plea bargaining.”

Coleman, who has been working out with martial arts expert Mike Newton in Phoenix and taking batting practice in his backyard cage, acknowledged that it was doubtful any club would pick up his salary through a trade. He said he hoped that the Mets would simply release him, meaning an interested club would have to pay only the minimum of $109,000.

He also said he is the “perfect guy” to replace Luis Polonia in left field for the Angels and has no doubt Whitey Herzog, his former St. Louis manager, was serious when he recently expressed interest.

Herzog, however, denied saying that Friday .

“The only thing I said was that Vince Coleman is not as bad a person as he is being portrayed,” he said. “He did a foolish thing. He knows it; I know it.”

Herzog added that the Angels intend to replace Polonia by moving Eduardo Perez from third base to left field and seeking a second baseman or third baseman in a trade to play the position Damion Easley doesn’t. Anaheim is out for Coleman, apparently.

“I just want to get back to playing baseball,” Coleman said.