So I’m walking across Mets Plaza in front of Citi Field the other day, quietest place you’d ever encounter late on a Tuesday morning in December. Nobody around for miles as far as I could tell. What a shame, I thought. I’m going to the holiday party the team holds for kids inside. To me it’s just another thing to cover. It should feel bigger, somehow.

A Mets fan's view of December.

But then the silence was broken. There was this “thwack!” sound. Over and over again: “Thwack! … Thwack! … Thwack!” I figured it was coming from somewhere deep inside the chop shops. I sure didn’t see anybody or anything out of the ordinary until I looked down at my feet and saw a pink rubber ball rolled to a dead stop. It was a Spaldeen, as Pete Hamill would be quick to remind you.

Out of nowhere there’s a kid with a Mets cap, maybe 11 going on 12. It was his Spaldeen.

“Hey mister,” he said. “Can I have my ball?”
“This is yours?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”

He took the ball and returned to his business of bouncing it against the side of the stadium and catching it. Bouncing it and catching it. Bouncing it and catching it. It was almost hypnotic.

The ball got away from him again. He’s not really that good at this, I thought, but I admire his persistence. As it was rolling, I grabbed it and tossed it to him.

“Hey kid,” I say. “What are you doing out here? They don’t let people bounce balls off the side of Citi Field. Do they?”
“I dunno,” he said, though I got the feeling he did.
“Well, you should be careful. There’s security and stuff.” But there wasn’t any security. There wasn’t anybody. “Besides, it’s a Tuesday morning and it isn’t summer. You should be in school…shouldn’t you?”

“I dunno,” he said again.

I shrugged and let him be and started walking toward my appointment. I heard two more “thwack!”s and then his voice.

“Hey mister,” he says. “You going in there?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I go with you?”
“Go with me?”
“See, I’m like the biggest Mets fan I know, and I’m here ’cause I heard something was going on today. I thought maybe I’d see some ballplayers or something, but I haven’t seen anybody.”
“Well, yeah, they’re in there. At this party.”
“So can you take me inside?”

I started to explain that I was here in the role of quasi-media, that my job today is to be a dispassionate observer, maybe ask a few professional questions and not make a big deal out of it. He didn’t seem to be listening, though.

“So can you take me inside?”
“Well, I don’t know if the rules would allow that. I mean this is a kids’ thing…” I thought about how odd it sounded telling a kid that. “I don’t know if you can just walk in and get a present.”
“I don’t care about any of that stuff,” he insisted. “I just want to see the ballplayers. I just want to be around baseball in the middle of December.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

I thought I’d have to make my case for him at media check-in, but nobody asked me anything about the kid I brought with me. The guard inside didn’t say anything, either. Same thing when they opened the door to the Acela Club. It was like nobody saw this kid except me. Still, I figured I’d lay low on his account.

“Sorry I can’t let you line up for a present or a picture with Santa Claus or anything,” I told him. “I’m just worried they’ll see you and throw both of us out.”
“I told you I don’t care about presents or Christmas,” he reassured me.
“Do you celebrate some other holiday?” I asked so as to cover my multicultural bases.
“The only holiday I like is Opening Day,” he said. “The quicker Christmas is over, the sooner baseball season gets here.”

I liked the way this kid thought.

“What are you doing here again?” he asked me.
“Well, I write about the Mets and sometimes the Mets do these things they let me get a close-up look at. It’s mostly a bunch of PR jazz designed to help make the team seem more appealing when you get right down to it. Like last month, they had this thing where I got to talk to David Wright and Ike Davis…”
“YOU TALKED TO DAVID WRIGHT AND IKE DAVIS?”

When the kid said it like that, it sounded a lot more amazing than I thought it was at first.

“Yeah. See, I’m a blogger, which is kind of like a reporter or a columnist. So I have to maintain a veneer of professionalism and objectivity…”
“YOU TALKED TO DAVID WRIGHT AND IKE DAVIS?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How much money is involved for something like that?”
“Well, I don’t get paid. The blog is something my friend and I started because we like the Mets and all…”
“No. I mean how much do you have to pay to get to talk to Mets players?”
“Oh. Um, nothing. It doesn’t work that way.”
“THEY LET YOU TALK TO DAVID WRIGHT AND IKE DAVIS FOR FREE?”

Again, it sounded way cooler when he said it.

“So,” he asked, “what’s gonna happen here today?”
“Assuming I don’t get caught for letting some kid sneak in here with me, I’m going to stand behind a curtain with a bunch of other bloggers and writers and reporters and at some point, after the Santa stuff, the PR people will shuttle a few Mets in.”
“You’re going to talk to MORE Mets?”
“Uh-huh. Daniel Murphy, Justin Turner and Jon Niese, I think.”
“Murphy, Turner and Niese?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess they couldn’t get any bigger names up here for this.”
“THOSE ARE THREE OF MY FAVORITE PLAYERS!”
“They are?”

The kid looked at me like I was on the wrong planet.

“Of course! They’re on the Mets! The Mets are my favorite players! Murphy! Turner! Niese! They play for my favorite team! And you get to talk to them?”
“I guess. I don’t expect to learn a whole lot. They’re not much older than you and, besides, they aren’t going to say anything substantive to a dozen bloggers all pointing tape recorders in their face for five minutes. It’s all a big dog and pony show, to be honest.”
“WOW! YOU GET TO TALK TO DANIEL MURPHY AND JUSTIN TURNER AND JON NIESE!”

Maybe this kid should go into PR when he grows up, I thought. He has a real talent for spinning.

I told him we have to play it cool for a few minutes until they’re ready for us. We followed the media crowd behind a black curtain while the players, dressed as Santa (Murphy) and elves (Turner, Niese), handed out presents to Queens schoolchildren who got into the building by more legitimate means. After I nodded hello to a few acquaintances — none of whom noticed the kid who was with me — we wandered to the back of the room and looked out on the still and empty field.

“I see they’re working on bringing the fences in,” I said. “About time. What a badly conceived dimensional nightmare Citi Field has been.”
“WOW!” the kid answered. “THERE’S THE FIELD THE METS PLAY ON! IT’S RIGHT THERE BELOW US!”
“Yeah. It was too deep and high in left and that silly notch in right was too artificial to be taken seriously.”
“WOW! THAT’S WHERE JASON BAY IS GONNA BE! AND ANDRES TORRES WILL BE OVER THERE! AND LUCAS DUDA!”
“Of course maybe if you have a seat over there in the Left Field Landing, maybe you’ll get a better view of fly balls if the wall isn’t so far back. What a missed opportunity this whole place has been.”
“THIS IS WHERE THE METS PLAY AND I GET TO STAND HERE IN THE OFFSEASON AND JUST STARE AT IT! THIS IS THE GREATEST FEELING I CAN IMAGINE IN DECEMBER!”

Eventually the sanctioned festivities on the other side of the curtain broke up and the PR people began to bring the players in for the group interviews. I told the kid to stay quiet and out of the picture. I had work — or something like it — to do.

First they gave us Turner. Bubbly sort. Taking nothing for granted after several years in the minors.

Then Murphy. More of a firecracker than I would have guessed. I asked him about being one of the de facto veterans on this ever younger ballclub, at least in terms of Met tenure: he’s fourth, by my reckoning, behind Wright, Pelfrey and Santana. Murph said he didn’t know he was so far up the food chain. “That’s bold,” he proclaimed, which I found charming.

Niese…didn’t have much to say. Maybe he was tired.

All in all, a pleasant enough round of exchanges, most of it rather predictable. They’re all gonna work hard, they all want to win, they all said the kind of stuff they’ve probably been saying since people started asking them questions based on their athletic ability. Perfectly decent but nothing groundbreaking.

When we were done and back outside, and he was sure nobody would see or hear him, the kid with me all but squealed.

“THAT WAS FANTASTIC! JUSTIN TURNER TALKED TO YOU!”
“I wouldn’t say he talked to me. I was just one of a dozen faces, just another part of his job.”
“AND DANIEL MURPHY ANSWERED YOUR QUESTION! HE LOOKED AT YOU AND ANSWERED YOUR QUESTION! HE EVEN PATTED YOU ON THE BACK AS HE WALKED AWAY!”
“Well, he’s supposed to answer my question. As for the back-patting, I wasn’t expecting that, but it’s not that big a deal.”
“A MET TOUCHED YOU!”
“I’m in the communications business. I can’t make a big deal out of anything like that.”

The kid seemed confused by my nonchalance.

“But didn’t you say you’re a Mets fan?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So how can you not be excited by getting to talk, even a little bit, to guys who are on the Mets?”
“I am. I just have to, you know, keep it in check.”
“Really? Why?”
“I dunno. I just have to.”
“So you don’t cheer at the games or yell at the TV when they’re playing?”
“No, I do. That’s different.”
“It is?”
“It is…I guess.”

The kid didn’t seem any less confused by my lack of clarity, but he forgot about it soon enough. I told him that I should have asked somebody about bridge loans or other important issues — I did come face to face with one of the owners of the team for the fleetingest of moments — and that the goodwill of the party didn’t mean the Mets were actually going to be any better this season. But he wasn’t listening to me as I droned on cynically. The kid who was with me but who nobody else saw had his own agenda.

“Wow,” he said. “Turner and Murphy and Niese all up close. Just being inside Citi Field for an hour was great enough, but players, too? Hey mister, how did that happen?”

“I’m not sure, kid. But I guess I’m glad it did.”

In observance of today’s Mets kids’ holiday party at Citi Field (an on-the-scene report from which will be coming later), I thought I’d dig out of the archives a little ditty I penned on Christmas Day 2002 and first published on Faith and Fear just prior to Christmas 2005. Many of the contemporary 2002 references are as dated as a good Jung Bong joke, but the overall vibe feels appropriate here in 2011 given that nine years ago I was trying to convince myself how much I still liked the Mets despite the Mets in those dreary days doing so many things I didn’t like.

After a spell of writing, I noticed I was no longer convincing myself, but celebrating all the things — the good, the bad, the Huskey — that made the Mets the Mets in my eyes and, really, all our eyes. Plenty more verses could have been added since to reflect the follies and foibles of the intervening decade (and, boy, do they keep on comin’), but I think the point is made pretty well by having mined the first forty-one years of Mets baseball.

So with that introduction, and requisite apologies to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, ladies and gentlemen, I give you a Metsopotamian take on the old chestnut, “My Favorite Things”.

***

Apples in top hats
That rise to occasion
Fran Healy announcing
A summer vacation

Steve Phillips’ cell phone
When it doesn’t ring
These are a few of my favorite things

Extra Dry Rheingold
And Carvel in helmets
Four-fifty pretzels
And three-dollar peanuts

Durocher’s black cat
And the dogs we let out
These are the things that I sing about

Eleven-game win streaks
And two ten-run innings
A happy recap
Born of humble beginnings

High fives and low fives
And Steve Henderson
These are what bring me back time and again

When Fred Wilpon
Pays Tom Gl@v!ne
While Fonzie goes unsigned
I simply remember I root for the Mets
And it’s much too late
For me to resign

Field level boxes
From corporate connections
Changing at Woodside
And catching the Seven

Liza Minnelli
And Jay Payton hug
These are the things that I dig and I’ve dug

Shipping Puleo
And bringing back Seaver
Since Seventy-Three
Saying I’m a believer

Olerud’s hard hat
And Shinjo’s wrist bands
These are some reasons I’m one of the fans

Serenading Chipper
By given name Larry
Exchanging Harry Chiti
For Chiti, yes, Harry

Takeoffs and landings
O’er everyone’s head
These must be why I’m loyal ’til I’m dead

When the GM
Gets Matt Lawton
And casts off Rick Reed
I simply remember the Mets are my team
That must be all I need

‘Rock and Roll Part Two’
As Mike circles bases
Shock and dismay
On the Rocket’s two faces

David Mlicki
Picking his spot
Makes me glad the Mets won and the Yankees did not

Len-ee! and Ben-ee!
And that Theodore stork
The National League
Returns to New York

Alex Ochoa
Hits for the cycle
These are the things that still make me smile

Banners and placards
And the original sign man
Agee making catches
That nobody else can

Swoboda’s dive
Cleon’s shoe polish
Miracles Orioles had to acknowledge

When Ordoñez
Learns some English
And calls us all stupid
I simply remember I’ve been a Mets fan
Ever since I was a kid

Throneberry, Strawberry
Koosman comma Jerry
A Todd Worrell fastball
For HoJo to bury

Corners of K’s
And Ojeda’s dead fish
Make summer’s arrival my next birthday wish

Davey’s short in the outfield
So uses Orosco
Joe Orsulak’s swing
Which was sweeter than Bosco

Hernandez on bunts
And Kranepool in a pinch
When it comes to the Mets, I won’t give an inch

Not sitting in front of
A loud, drunken yeller
Wes Westrum proclaiming
Another cliffdweller

Lindsey tells me
Shamsky’s around in right
These are what I recall by day and by night

When Grant Roberts
Is caught toking
In Newsday or the News
I simply remember that nobody’s perfect
And don’t let the Mets give me the blues

Ventura’s grand
But Tank stops him from scoring
Bobby V wore disguises
But never was boring

Mora crossed home on a pitch
That was wild
Things that make me cry like some kind of child

Grote going back
And grabbing a pop-up
Sisk coming in
But, relax, just to mop up

Mookie Wilson’s nubber
Trickling fair down the line
What happened next will always blow my mind

Not yet a no-hitter
But anticipation
Gregg Jefferies for five weeks
A rookie sensation

Knight against Davis
And Buddy v. Pete
These are the things, I admit, I find neat

When Armando
Blows his next save
As he inevitably will
I simply remember the leads he held onto
And then I don’t feel so ill

Number twenty-four
Staying mostly retired
Thanking the Good Lord
When Torborg got fired

Kingman’s second stay
When he handed out pens
Ralph breaking it down right after the end

‘Lazy Mary’ plays
And we keep on stretching
Mel Rojas would pitch
And he’d get us all kvetching

Mettle the Mule, DeRoulet
Richie Hebner
Seventy-Nine I can’t help but remember

Gary Carter’s knees
All wrapped up like a mummy
DiPoto made butterflies
Float in my tummy

Thinking we’re set
Because we’ve got Mike Vail
Yet I stick with the Mets, succeed or fail

When Burnitz and
Alomar crash
When Cedeño and Mo go down
I simply remember they all had bad luck
And convince myself they’ll turn it around

Calvin Schiraldi
Preceding Bob Stanley
A superstar catcher
Explains that he’s manly

Franco plays Santa
And Rusty serves ribs
The Mets speak to me in my second language

M. Donald Grant
Burning in hell
Knowing AY
Can’t be charged with an L

Clearing the clubhouse
Of sparklers and bleach
And knowing the Wild Card’s still within reach

A general manager
Who knows what he’s doing
Every position
Manned by McEwing

Best infield ever
Or so said SI
They’re all gone now, though I don’t know why

When the Mets are
Labeled quitters
And demand apologies
I simply remember they’re sensitive people
And then I don’t go, ‘oh geez’

Casey could choose from
A pair of Bob Miller
Al Jackson, pre-Michael
Original Thriller

¡Yo la tengo! Ashburn
Called out to Chacon
With the Mets on the West Coast, I don’t sleep alone

Part of ‘Men In Black’
And a scene from ‘Odd Couple’
Scrappy platoons
Like Backman and Teufel

Staiger, Mankowski
A parade of third basemen
When the Cubs finished sixth, we stayed out of the basement

Shea in the daytime
Enjoying it all
Gil Hodges eventually
Making the Hall

Clendenon and Brogna
And even Todd Zeile
Glad tidings to Mets is the feeling I feel

When Steve Trachsel’s
Paid by the hour
Or works as if that’s his deal
I simply remember his good Earned Run Average
And he’s practically a steal

Al Leiter’s cutter
And buddy Mike Bloomberg
A mayor to whom our team
Is more than a rumor

Dave Magadan speeds to
A deliberate crawl
Gosh I hope that the Mets are around in the fall

Prospects from Norfolk
And before that Visalia
Jane Jarvis’s organ
Would never assail ya

Chief Noc-A-Homa
Taking knocks from The Dude
If only Mets ushers weren’t nearly as rude

Old Timers Day inspiring
Terry Cashman
A less uptight version
Of bowtied Frank Cashen

Pretending Nolan Ryan
Had stayed his career
Wishing Sojo had been kicked in the rear

When the Mets win
None in August
And I’m there for every loss
I simply remember things can only get better
And then my cookies don’t go for a toss

Brent as in Mayne
Not the Maine of Ed Muskie
Schofield who’s skinny
And Butch who is Huskey

Piling on Rocker
A surfeit of malice
Sunny Frank Howard, the tart tongue of Dallas

Dependable backstops
The Gonders, the Dyers
The weight-lifting antics
Of Randall K. Myers

‘Bring on Ron Gaspar’
A gaffe of F. Robby
Waiting for Reyes becoming a hobby

Clipping coupons
From a Dairylea carton
The serendipitous wrist
Of the great J.C. Martin

McCarver says triples
Are better than sex
Just call Five Oh Seven T-I-X-X

When team meetings
Are more frequent
Than team victories
I simply remember when they’d shut up and play
And then I don’t feel unease

Bring your kids to see our kids
Said with a straight face
Beating the Expos
And entering first place

It not being over
When it hadn’t expired
Trading Bonilla when his act grew tired

McReynolds bolting
To beat city traffic
Rickey drawing walks
And then wreaking havoc

Debating Gerry Moses’s
Lifetime Met status
Responding when Bill Hands was throwing right at us

Don Bosch and Don Hahn
And good old Don Cardwell
Suddenly recalling
The right fielder’s Gus Bell

Topps, Upper Deck
Pinnacle, Fleer
Each pack should include at least two Bruce Boisclair

When one player
Accosts another
About his rookie card
I simply remember we’re talking grown men here
And then I don’t take it nearly as hard

Revising the yearbook
To include Lenny Randle
A roller toward Schmidt
And Schmidt losing the handle

Removing the tarp
To scattered applause
A call to the bullpen, back after this pause

Hypothetical swaps
Causing Howie to go nuts
A roster of players
Not twenty-five robots

The grass all torn up
Irritating Pete Flynn
Who cares if he’s angry, so long as we win?

A fortunate bounce
From a top-of-the-fence shot
Overcoming the scuffwork
Of devious Mike Scott

Dave Liddell disappearing
After one plate appearance
Not losing an out on lame interference

When Tarasco
And Mark Corey
Are found dabbling in drugs
I simply decide that it’s none of my business
And then I don’t blame those lugs

Carl Everett’s slam
Off of Uggie Urbina
Tomatoes by Piggy
And not Contadina

An unlikely dinger
By speedy Esix
Shortstops like Elster not committing e-six

Darryl Hamilton
Is served his release
Rich Rodriguez
Packs his valise

Counting on phenoms
Like Pulse and Tim Leary
Forgiving Hank Webb, he must’ve been weary

Happy birthday to dads
Kiner’s Father’s Day greeting
The occasional smart move
At some winter meeting

Nineteen-inning games
Won by dawn’s early light
Followed by fireworks, oh what a sight!

When our rivals
From across town
Win on our own field
I simply remember to turn off the TV
And then my venom might yield

Applauding old heroes
When they first come back
A Baltimore fly ball
That’s caught at the track

Bobby Jones beats the Giants
A Fresno one-hitter
Making Baker and Jeff Kent both act kinda bitter

Rain delay anecdotes
That never grow moldy
The Polo Grounds forever
A goody if oldie

Greg Goossen projected
To some day turn thirty
Finding no cork when Whitey played dirty

Game Three leadoff batters
Each hitting one out
Scoring twenty-three runs
En route to a rout

Two-dozen straight games
With hits by Hubie Brooks
The rosin was Wendell’s, the tantrums were Cook’s

When the playoffs
Elude the Mets
Thanks to five straight defeats
I simply remember to wait ’til next year
And then I go buy my seats

Bass and Barrett strike out
Sending gloves in the air
Our new stadium
Outdraws the World’s Fair

During those first years
No hint of a rise
Then by Eckert’s lot, we draw The Franchise

Simons and Walter
And southpaws of woe
They didn’t get saves
But at least were let go

Payson seemed generous
Doubleday dotty
Mazzilli’s a traitor but once was a hottie

Pitchers who’d battle
Throughout a run dearth
Decreeing D’Amico’d
Inherit the earth

Shawn Estes took aim
No way he could miss
All he hit was a homer, but that blast was bliss

When Mike Scioscia
Got to Gooden
And turned Game Four around
I simply remember results two years prior
And my mental state’s more sound

Hampton before
He worried ’bout schools
Escobar when the hype
Said he had tools

Dan Norman’s aborted
Switch-hitting trial
After Montañez tailed off, he still had style

With nobody out
Taking a pitch
Learning to spell
Gary Rajsich

Rally caps topping noggins
When contests get tight
That arm-twirling lady, her hex worked all right

Spahn and the Duke
And surly Eddie Murray
Immortals perhaps
Gone from here in a hurry

Four pennants waving
From the outfield flag pole
Terry Leach coming through in almost any role

When Pendleton
Hit that home run
And stopped us in that race
I simply remember something else would’ve gone wrong
And then I don’t feel disgrace

Promotional items
Handed to adults
Jumping on Nen
And on Hoffman and Smoltz

Picking up the FAN
In any location
Our runners not running from station to station

Gary and Murph
Broadcasting in sync
Sweeping the Pirates
When pushed to the brink

Sasser’s throw to the mound
Arrives on the fly
Twelve years of Ron Hodges, that seems rather high

A lineup that featured
Youngblood and Taveras
Showing Oil Can Boyd
That he didn’t scare us

A new media guide
Its cover so glossy
Ends with Don Zimmer, begins with Don Aase

When Atlanta
Beats the Mets out
Every time it counts
I simply ignore their stellar track record
And cheer for our boys in greater amounts

Sadecki, McAndrew
And every fifth starter
Timo except when
He could’ve run harder

Roger McDowell
Wearing mask after mask
The answer’s the Mets, you don’t have to ask

Salty and Cubbage
And interim skippers
Todd Hundley’s record
For receiver round-trippers

Lance Johnson never
Getting thrown out at third
Never mind ‘Grease,’ the Mets are the word

Teddy Martinez
Waved home by Eddie Yost
St. Lucie datelines
In the Times and the Post

The Magic Is Back
‘Ball Like It Oughta Be
Printing World Series tickets in Two Thousand Three

When they make bad trades
And guys lose their skills here
Amazing but it’s true
I simply remember the phrase, ‘Let’s Go Mets!’
And there’s not much more that I can tell you

A friend and I were discussing recent Met developments over the weekend. He referred to “Gil and Reyes,” as in he perceives an anti-New York bias inherent in Gil Hodges not making the generally worthless National Baseball Hall of Fame and Jose Reyes not finishing in the Top Ten of the National League MVP voting. What struck me in his communiqué was Gil was dependably “Gil” yet Jose had been relegated to last-name status.

No way, I said.

Yeah, he retorted. Jose’s a Miamian now, thus he’s Reyes.

Nah, I fired back. Argenis Reyes, if he’s around anywhere in 2012, he can be Reyes. Jose is Jose. Jose will always be Jose to me.

I didn’t high-hat Fonzie into Alfonzo. Darryl didn’t become Strawberry. Doc in his darkest pinstriped hours never became Gooden. Rico was always Rico. Melvin was always Melvin. And Tom Seaver never stopped being my favorite Met.

I’ll allow Jose a little latitude when the Marlins come to Citi Field for the first of their forty or fifty annual games against the Mets on April 24. He’s granted a leadoff base hit; what’s one more night without a no-hitter? He’s permitted to steal second and take third on the throw. I’m undecided on whether he may score.

Then he can go into a six-year slump against Met pitching. He can tear up the rest of the National League the rest of the time as long as it doesn’t do the Marlins much good. The Marlins can beat the Phillies, Braves and Nationals just as the Phillies, Braves and Nationals can beat the Marlins. They can all beat each other up while the Mets sweep the whole lot of them into oblivion.

That’s the plan, though I suspect it doesn’t have much fiber to it.

I also suspect that the longer Jose Reyes is an actively competitive ex-Met — not just a West Coast rumor along the lines of John Olerud in Seattle — I’ll decrease my simmering sentimentality bit by bit. Forty or fifty games a year against the same team will do that. But unlike Olerud (another free agent whose departure left me groping for my December bearings), Jose grew up on my watch. It’s one thing to wave goodbye to the professionals when you previously knew them as something else. Gary Carter the Dodger or Rusty Staub the Tiger were essentially returns to form from when they were Expos. But the guys I never knew as anything but Mets…that’s tough. Rico Brogna morphed into a Phillie and a Brave yet I never didn’t applaud him when he swung by Shea. He was always a Met to me.

Tug McGraw was always a Met before he was traded, thus his Phillie incarnation — a pretty significant phase of his career and their history — never really seemed demonic in my eyes. Same for Lenny Dykstra when he wore a Phillie uniform instead of an orange jumpsuit. I wanted the Mets who faced them as rivals to prevail against them but I couldn’t root against them in any substantive “enemy” sense. Same for Wally Backman as a Pirate/Phillie when both identities were rather nauseating to a Mets fan of that era.

I’d have preferred some Met who broke in as a Met and blossomed as a Met had remained a Met for an entire enjoyable career and then tipped his cap on his last day as a Met. But that’s never happened. I mean never — neither Ed Kranepool nor Ron Hodges went out on their own terms, and they’re the only Mets of length to not sign somewhere else at some point.

Why I expected homegrown multitime All-Star Jose Reyes would be that Met I’m not sure. Cap-tipping lifetime one-franchise players are pretty rare to begin with these days. The best I can hope for is the Mets won’t pretend for years on end that Jose Reyes didn’t exist as an essential part of them for nine seasons; that his image won’t be erased from every 50th anniversary montage; that his pictures aren’t all shoved in storage; that bloggers of 2023 or whenever aren’t forced to demand to know when he’ll be inducted into the club’s Hall of Fame. The Mets can be chillingly Soviet that way.

Meanwhile, the Marlins of Miami are no more tenable as a taste than the Marlins of Florida, and a pox on Loria and the lot of them, but Jose is going to be Jose to me for a very long time. That much I know. When the Mets and Marlins are playing for low stakes, I’ll veer toward the Met on the mound, but a tiny bit of me won’t ever be not at least a smidgen happy when Jose gets the better of an isolated confrontation. Should they play for high stakes — meaningful games in September or a no-hitter on the line — that will almost certainly be a different story.

Right now, it’s all speculative and rather unknown. I’ve had to deal with beloved ex-Mets regularly but not at this level in a very long time. Not at the “he’s my favorite” tier. That’s a tough tier to negotiate. I regularly rooted for Fonzie to take the measure of the Gl@v!nes and Trachsels when he was a Giant and they were boring.

If you could convince me all this was part of a master strategic plan to improve the franchise, OK. Sometimes players have to go so as to bring in better or different players. I was in mad love with Melvin Mora in 2000 yet understood the need for a dependable defensive shortstop (even if what we got was Mike Bordick). If someday a champagne-soaked Sandy Alderson can trace a championship to the meeting he had with his braintrust in the fall of 2011 when they knew letting Jose Reyes go would be painful but ultimately baseball-beneficial, I’ll gather all the hindsight at my disposal and retroactively praise the thought process to the high heavens.

But this is about ownership not having the money to keep their best player in his prime because they figured out a way to lose it. It’s not about roster maximization and I don’t believe it’s about not giving six years to a dicey hamstring risk. No way Jose would have gone had Bernie Madoff not come along. This used to be a large-market, big-league operation. For the time being, we’re condemned to Bisonmania.

You’re welcome to your spin. Mine is our franchise, the one to which we pledge our fealty, has been diminished. Jose Reyes’s departure isn’t the cause of that but a symptom of it. I don’t have any idea when this trend will be reversed. I hope it won’t be too long.

I do a lot of hoping as a Mets fan.

An event and an image, each presented in the name of warmth…

Event: The Mets’ annual “Warm Up” Holiday Coat Drive, Wednesday, December 14, between 9 AM and 5 PM. Bring one or more coats to Citi Field’s Seaver entrance and receive a voucher redeemable for two tickets to a select April 2012 game and a 15%-off coupon for stuff at the Mets Team Store (valid December 14 only). If you’re a season ticket holder, you’ll get 20% off regularly priced items when you show your supersecret Season Ticket Holder ID card. The coat drive is thoughtfully presented in conjunction with SNY and New York Cares. And if you’re thoughtful enough to donate a coat, wear whatever you like while doing so.

Image: Discovered through the satisfyingly curious mind of Matthew Callan at Amazin’ Avenue.

 

Mets win, Giants winning, all was calm, all was bright.

October 27, 1986 was one of the great nights in the history of Western Civilization even before taking into account the extracurricular activities occurring at the Meadowlands. You didn’t need to be a total Bluenatic to appreciate the Met-Giant symmetry that Monday night, though allegiances to both teams probably helped. I remember it like it was yesterday despite it being too many yesterdays ago.

Sigh…

Anyway, donate a coat on Wednesday if you can and read Matthew’s piece and enjoy its attendant YouTube clip attesting to better times here.

Monday night at 9, Tom Seaver is Bob Costas’s guest on MLB Network’s Studio 42. That’s an hour of Tom Seaver being interviewed about pitching…his own included, presumably. That looms as the best hour a Mets fan will have all December.

Your DVR has been warned.

So yesterday afternoon I tried to sum up my feelings about Jose Reyes leaving the sad, broken Mets for the temporarily nouveau riche Marlins. I wasn’t happy when I started writing that post, and I wasn’t any happier when I finished. I gave it a final read, posted it and promoted it.

But let me tell you what I did after that. It’s a little thing and a personal thing, but I think you’ll see why I’m sharing it, and maybe derive some comfort from it.

It was time to get my kid from school. I changed my shirt, settling after not particularly conscious thought on my orange ’69 Series Game 3 shirt, the one with a Nixon-era Mr. Met on it. Walking across my neighborhood, I pulled out my phone, put in my headphones and cranked a song I love — “Romance” by Wild Flag. This would be an awesome song to play at Citi Field, I thought idly — a conclusion that probably has to do with the line “sound is the blood between me and you” reminding me of the bond that develops, in good times, between a confident team and its hometown fans.

(This is a mildly insane idea. “Romance” is way too indie to work in the vast space of Citi Field. But that’s not the point. Bear with me.)

I listened to the song again, my footsteps drifting along the well-worn route, and found myself thinking of Ike Davis and Lucas Duda and Ruben Tejada in their new, much improved uniforms, of balls landing fair and clearing walls in walkoff victories yet to be. I thought about being at Shea for the Grand Slam Single and for Piazza lining a laser beam off Mulholland and how the stands had moved and flexed as we all bayed at the sky. I thought about getting your errands done early for that first weekend spring-training telecast and settling happily onto the couch, knowing that even though it was still vile outside, those players in mesh tops were a promise that kinder weather would be soon at hand. I thought about my family’s calendar defaulting to 1:10 and 7:10 and adjusting to the occasional 4:05 or 8:05 or enduring a hard week of 10:15s.

I walked along in my Mets shirt with all these thoughts playing tag in my head and the music in my ears, and I realized I was happy. I honestly was. I wasn’t thinking about Jose Reyes, or the Miami Marlins, or Bernie Madoff, or any of it. Not by a conscious act of will, but because my mind had wandered off somewhere better.

That’s my story. But if you read this blog, you’re not so different from me, or from Greg. And that’s why this will all be OK.

I’m not going to tell you exactly how it will be OK, or when. Because there’s more uncertainty and dismay and anger to work through before this star-crossed, scar-marked period in Mets’ history ends.

But it will end. There will be new players who we watch grow and learn before our eyes, going from coltish prospects to incandescent rookies to sturdy veterans, and we will love them all the more for having urged them through their early maybes. And even amid the gloom before they arrive, there will be gritty come-from-behind wins and unexpected laughers. There will be rising apples and Let’s Go Mets chants and hunches proved true and statistical glasses that all of a sudden you’re damn sure are half-full.

And even when you don’t feel that way, there will be Mets Classics and DVDs and just reliving the highlight reels in our own heads. There will be reconnections with old Mets fans and meetings with new ones, excited exchanges about first games seen and classics witnessed. There will be new fans drawn to impossible dreams and wise old heads who remember when those dreams came true.

There will even be nights when a little thing happens like a song proving evocative enough to lift you above the gloom and bad news, until you realize you’re happy not despite the fact that you’re a Mets fan, but because of it.

And that’s something nobody can take away from you. Bernie Madoff can’t steal it, Irving Picard can’t repossess it and Jeffrey Loria can’t buy it.

There is something beyond the reach of all these troubles, something that’s the Mets’ greatest strength — and it’s you. You, and me, and Greg, and all the rest of us. We’re the ones who define this franchise, who weave the thread of identity and life and hope even as the uniforms get tweaked and the stadiums go up and come down and the players arrive and depart and the win-loss records wax and wane. No matter how long you’ve been here, you’ve seen bright days of the baseball soul alongside dark nights. On the bright days, we add to the glitter and the gleam. In the dark nights, we are the only source of light. Either way, we’re there. And despite these recent trials and amid these current woes, we’re not going anywhere.

We are the silver lining.

Back in May I wondered what it would feel like when the number of Jose Reyes Mets highlights remaining were reduced to zero. Now we know.

It sucks.

Jose Reyes is no longer a Met. That’s awful enough right there, but of course it’s worse.

Jose Reyes is a Miami Marlin. Eighteen times a year, starting in late April, we’ll have to watch him take his accustomed spot on the field in an awful uniform next to the awful Hanley Ramirez. With the Mets of the foreseeable future put together from whatever can be scooped up from the factory floor, the Marlins are a good bet to win more of those games than they lose. Jose will beat us in some of them. He will drag his feet across third at the end of a head-first triple like a jet fighter getting arrested by the hook on the carrier deck. And then he’ll throw his arms out in joyous cruciform and do whatever the 2012 Marlins’ version of The Claw/Spotlight is, only this time David Wright will be standing there with a useless baseball looking glum.

It is going to suck. It sucks right now. Whatever you are — angry, sad, depressed, downhearted, blue, adrift — I’m feeling some pretty large measure of the same.

This is where the “yeah, but” comes in. You probably guessed that. But this isn’t your typical “yeah, but.”

I love Ruben Tejada — think he’ll be a star, even, and feel very sorry for him given all the stupid questions he’ll have to answer in Port St. Lucie. But he’s not Jose Reyes and I heartily wish he were going to become a star one defensive position to the right.

I trust Sandy Alderson and his front-office crew, but they’ve got a lot of desert to cross with nary an oasis in sight.

I do not trust the Wilpons, not one little bit. They give every indication of sticking around, with their worries and their lawyers and a commissioner to protect them. This protection comes at the expense of the rest of us.

Not much of a silver lining, is it? At the heart of these gray clouds you’ll find a bunch of black.

And yet here it is: The Marlins are going to give Jose Reyes six years and $106 million. In Sandy Alderson’s shoes, would you have done that even if you had the money? Thinking with your head instead of your broken heart, would you have done that?

I wouldn’t have.

The $106 million isn’t the problem as much as the sixth year. Five years for Jose is frankly scary. Six is insane. That makes this different from the Midnight Massacre, an indefensible trade driven by a culture clash and human pettiness. It makes it more like Darryl Strawberry heading west in the winter of 1990. It doesn’t make us feel any better, but that’s the fairer comparison here.

We cannot forget, on this day of misery, that every time Jose rounded first we held our breath a little. We asked the baseball gods to please not have him grab at his hamstring again. It happened way too often — in Jose’s stats we see a glorious four-year run, sandwiched by an uncertain beginning plagued by hamstring woes, a 2009 season lost to them, a merely OK 2010 season and then last year. And last year, we must remember, was really a tale of two seasons. Reyes I was the stuff of clapping your hand to your head and turning to hug your neighbor while screaming “Didja see THAT???!!!” But then Jose hurt his hamstring again, and when he came back for Reyes II, he was cautious and tentative and merely OK.

So how many years of Reyes I do the Marlins get, and how many years of Reyes II? In the last year of his new deal, he’ll be 34 years old. If he’s still a Marlin, it’s a good bet they’ll wish he weren’t. This is the Marlins’ Pedro contract, a premium paid by way of apology to their fans and as a beacon for other free agents. That Pedro contract didn’t work out so well. Worse, it was followed by other Omar Minaya specials that didn’t work out too well either. Those contracts are one of the reasons the current Mets are in their current mess.

But I’ve overcomplicated it. Again: Would you have given Jose Reyes six years and $106 million? If you would have, fine. I wouldn’t have. I thought that and said that, and being this sad and pissed and everything else won’t allow me to forget that that’s where I stood.

And given that, I’m not upset about some of the other things tormenting Mets fans. I don’t care that the Mets didn’t make a counteroffer, because there was no genuine counteroffer to be made. The Mets weren’t going to go six years, so they didn’t. The Mets probably weren’t going to go above $100 million, so they didn’t. Hearing that they’d offered four years and incentives to get Jose to $90 million wouldn’t have made Jose reconsider, or let me sleep any more soundly. The fewer lame gestures to paper over unpleasant truths, the better.

And forget the fact that under the new CBA, the draft-pick compensation is lousy. I didn’t want the Mets to trade Jose Reyes in July and neither did you and no one seriously advocated that they should, so no one is allowed to pretend otherwise.

Beyond that, well, lots of people think the Wilpons should sell the team. That’s an interesting one. The contrast between baseball’s treatment of the McCourts and the Wilpons is certainly thought-provoking, yes. But here, I’m torn. For one thing, it’s not a small thing to say people should be stripped of their property after a generation of being pretty good stewards overall. But I distrust the Wilpons enough to be willing to explore that. The real problem for me — and perhaps for Bud Selig — is not knowing whether the Wilpons’ current financial woes are the stuff of another year, or a few years, or forever.

If the Wilpons can settle the Madoff mess sometime this spring for somewhere north of $100 million, presumably the team’s payrolls can return to more-accustomed levels relatively soon, with a much smarter crew in charge of the checkbook. In that case, our crying for them to sell is raw emotion and strikes me as unfair, and no doubt strikes the commissioner’s office as chum for generations of very expensive lawyers.

If these penurious ways are to be the Mets’ fate forever, that makes me want to lie down in the road. I can’t stand the idea of Grant-De Roulet II. The thought of trying to raise Joshua as a Mets fan amid that level of pain makes me want to walk away from everything, and that idea terrifies me. I doubt Bud Selig’s feelings on the subject are quite that intense, but I’m sure he doesn’t want that either. Having New York’s National League franchise be a charity ward is not in the best interests of the game.

But what if the future of the Mets is somewhere in the messy middle between those two extremes? Well, then what the hell do you do?

But sadly, we have plenty of time to explore that one further. I’ll set a reminder for June, when the Mets’ latest losing streak is playing second fiddle to scenarios about what the inevitable trade of David Wright will bring. For now, I’m left with this: How will I greet Jose Reyes, Miami Marlin?

No, not when I first see him against us — when that happens, I’m going to cheer myself hoarse, giving him the ovation he deserved and didn’t get because of Terry Collins’ final-day pooch-screwing. I mean after that. I wish Jose the best, but the best for Jose means our task is even harder for the next six years. And yet I don’t want Jose to be Darryl Strawberry, though I think that’s more likely than six years of mid-Aughtsian glory. If the Marlins’ deal winds up looking wise, we are embittered. If it winds up looking dumb, Jose and baseball and all of us are diminished.

Like I said, today sucks.

“When I’m finished, I’ll get the best seat to see him play. I’ll pay whatever price to see him play.”
—Pedro Martinez on Jose Reyes, July 23, 2005

Somewhere in the midst of the conference call Sandy Alderson held with some of us bloggers last Thursday night, the Mets’ general manager used an unremarkable phrase that caught my ear nonetheless. His front office, the GM said, was out to put a “better product on the field — better and more entertaining”  in 2012.

I was instantly reminded of Mike “Meathead” Stivic’s reaction to a grocery item label that promised “NEW AND IMPROVED!” on All In The Family. What, he asked, were we using before: old and lousy? Whatever the Mets’ missteps over the years, it never occurred to me they were intentionally going for worse and more torpid.

What got me was the use of the word “entertaining,” as if it was a disparate competency from “better”. If winning is colorless, sign me up for the Monochromatic Pack at once. If the Mets are winning consistently, the fun generally reveals itself therein.

But embedded in Sandy’s well-chosen words, I supposed then (and feel certain of now), was a cushion of warning for Mets fans…as if we hadn’t figured where things were inevitably heading for ourselves. The Mets, he seemed to be saying, will strive to be entertaining next year, even if it doesn’t involve a ton of winning, let alone the presence of the most entertaining player we’ve ever employed.

No matter how drab the Mets turned post-2008, one colorful character leapt out from their tedious tableau. No matter what kind of film with which you metaphorically shot him in these digital days, there’s no way Jose Reyes would print in black and white.

I’ll miss that sense of dazzle. I’ll miss the runs, triples and stolen bases, of which he collected more than any Met in franchise history. I’ll miss the production at the plate and the prevention in the field (whatever your defensive metric of choice indicates). I’ll miss not having to wonder who would bat leadoff. I’ll miss the 1,300 hits and how somebody was finally going to catch Eddie Kranepool while wearing Eddie Kranepool’s number. I’ll miss that the last of the 2003 Mets was the one 2003 Met whose sudden presence and instant impact in 2003 cheered me up when I was as down as I’d ever been about the state of the Mets.

But that doesn’t even get to what I’ll miss most. Call it entertainment value if you like, though when you’re a fan of a team, you don’t worry about being entertained. You’re far too engaged for such superficial concerns. You want to be entertained? Download Adele. Go see George Clooney. Subscribe to the MLB package and watch the Miami Marlins. That’s dispassionate entertainment.

What it was to me was Jose being Jose. Jose lashing. Jose dashing. Jose gunning. Jose grinning. Jose and the Mets winning, Maybe not as much as they had been when they were an annual 89-win proposition (on average) for four straight years and he was leading off virtually every day, but enough so you could put together his legs and his arm and his bat and their fortunes. Gosh, it was fun to be in your seat by the start of the bottom of the first if you were going to the game or at your TV no later than 7:11 if they were on the road. Gosh, it was comforting crossed with exhilarating knowing the game couldn’t commence until Jose had the first of his ups. Gosh, he relished being a baseball player, and he did it as a New York Met.

Who else ever made us sing not just his praises but his name? Repeatedly? To say Jose was the most fun Met ever doesn’t quite get to his essence. It was more like he was funnest. You felt like a kid watching him play, so it’s only fitting to express yourself that way, too.

I joined in a knot of media last month at the event the Mets held to unveil their altered uniforms so I could hear what Ike Davis and David Wright each had to say about Jose Reyes. Ike was almost bubbly talking about how “excited” he was to have been Jose’s teammate. I asked David to share his thoughts on Ruben Tejada, noting he’d probably been asked plenty about Jose. I have to admit I wondered how much of a company man he’d be if given the opportunity to move on to the next shortstop. But David, bless his Metsian heart, didn’t bite. Jose was “one of a kind,” David said (before adding some respectful boilerplate about Ruben).

These tidbits occur to me because one of my favorite images from Jose Reyes’s nine years as a Met come from a game he didn’t play, the final Saturday night of last season, the second half of a day-nighter against the Phillies. The Mets won it with Jose on the bench, yet after the final out was made and the SNY cameras captured the lads funneling toward their clubhouse, the guy leading the charge — and the guy more ebullient than anybody else at having won an allegedly meaningless game — was Jose Reyes. You would have thought it was the Mets, not the Phillies, getting ready for the playoffs. In that moment, the notion that somebody was “just happy to be here” shone through as it rarely does. And this was no scrub. This was our star.

The Mets are fun to us because they’re the Mets; it’s the same reason the Mets are a pain to us. But some guys are just more fun and more meaningful than the rest. That was Jose. Jose made leading off a happening. Jose made his staying through the trade deadline a cause, even if it turned out to be a reprieve more than a pardon from the governor. Jose was a sunshine rod. If things were working even a little for him, you were having a better day because of it. You might not have trekked to Shea Stadium or Citi Field specifically to see him, but he was the one who drew you in once you were there.

It’s good to have that. It’s good to have someone to depend upon as a constant in your life as a fan. It’s a more sacred sensation than “entertainment”. If you’re caught up in the development and evolution of a player from the beginning of his career in your midst to the end, the entertainment takes care of itself. Your equity with your team tends to be tied up predominantly in a few special players at any one time. If you’re lucky enough, you have those players with you 100%, from hotly anticipated callup to final tip of the cap. Their ride is your ride.

Of course we never, ever have that over the long term, save for the aforementioned Kranepool and maybe Ron Hodges, depending on your definition of special player. I would have loved to have had it with Seaver, with Strawberry, with Alfonzo…but I didn’t get it. I won’t get it with Reyes, either. There are reasonable explanations for why this has come to pass, whether you count them to 70 million or 106 million, but it doesn’t make them feel any more legitimate.

I feel, on the most basic of levels, as if my trust in my team has been violated. For whatever reason I became a Mets fan at the age of six, it wasn’t to be calmly understanding of ownership when it led the club down a path of competitive ruin. And it wasn’t to make rationalizations on behalf of vague nods toward a better, more entertaining day after tomorrow. I’m pretty sure it was to root for a whole lot of players who played for my team and to fall in baseball love with one or two of them in every Met generation. Reyes was that guy for most of the past decade.

I have no idea who will be the next one or when/if it will happen again.

A little more recommended reading…

Last week’s Sandy Alderson conference call, still instructive despite being a little dated by now, was courteously transcribed by Amazin’ Avenue here.

Marvelous encomium to Jose Reyes from Patrick Flood, here.

The big picture, broken down stroke by insightful stroke by Metstradamus, here.

And one of my favorite Faith and Fear pieces, wherein Jason eavesdrops on a contentious conversation between scout and sabermetician as regards a young shortstop on the rise, here from 2005.

I’d take a reported $106 million for six years, even if it meant having to become a Miami Marlin through 2017 to do so. If that was Jose Reyes’s choice — as opposed to nothing for no years, which is what the Mets apparently offered him — it was an easy choice.

So congratulations to the New York Mets for not setting the market. That was important to them. Good luck setting the market for ticket sales in 2012. Good luck filling second base alongside neophyte shortstop Ruben Tejada. Good luck with the next few years. Good luck waiting for Mejia and Harvey and Wheeler and whoever to blossom. Good luck riding Pelfrey and Pagan. Good luck with the dynamic pricing and all that. Good luck in court and with selling those minority stakes, while we’re at it.

And congratulations to the Mets for however many fans you have who will rally to your side on this, that it was smart business to not pursue one of your best players ever, 28 years old this coming Opening Day, hard. Because, worst-case scenario, you might have lured Reyes back or, more likely, made the Marlins pay more. But this is better, I’m sure.

Maybe the Mets should switch from blue caps to teal. They have become the new Marlins.

Bobby Valentine’s imminent hiring as manager of the Boston Red Sox is the best Mets thing to happen this offseason, even better than the overdue reinstatement of Banner Day. Banner Day’s date is TBD, whereas we get Bobby Valentine right now, and by “get Bobby Valentine,” I mean every time we turn on SNY or ESPN or MLB Network, we are treated to a loop of Bobby Valentine-era Mets highlights.

To me, the entire Valentine administration was a highlight, and I’ll even accept 2002 as part of the package if it means I receive extended glances of 1997 to 2001. The denser the Bobby V rumors became, the longer the loops grew. When the dispatches beamed forth that Bobby V was the choice, he was practically video wallpaper.

Fantastic, I thought — let me watch the Mets as I knew them best and loved them most, even if that was a while ago and anything he does next he’ll be doing for someone else.

Ah, those highlights…the Mets in the hunt when they weren’t supposed to be…the Mets overcoming obstacles, whether imposed by others or themselves…the Mets as postseason regulars…the Mets not knowing from quitting…the Mets never quite ultimately triumphant but coming oh so close, making us oh so proud.

And leading the charge, turning the ignition, masterminding the process, Bobby Valentine. He wore a lot of black back then, but make no mistake: to a Mets fan thirsting for a sip of success after a half-dozen drought-laden years, he was the good guy. More than that, he was The Man. He was Bobby V, the only Mets manager I’d follow into figurative battle, maybe even a real one if I was heavily armed.

Under Bobby V’s command, I know I’d be prepared. After a few years, I might be prepared to go AWOL, but I can’t think of any skipper who wasn’t thought to have “lost the clubhouse” or “let the game pass him by” on account of time’s march. Maybe Bobby Cox, but I couldn’t stand Bobby Cox.

Bobby Cox couldn’t stand Bobby Valentine. He has company. Lots of people can’t stand Bobby Valentine. It’s sort of thrilling absorbing the complaints of his detractors. The more the detractors complain, the better he looks to me. It’s a sensation born of hearing what a lousy strategist/communicator/human being he was when he managed the Mets…managed them clear into the NLCS one year and the World Series the next. Managed them out of obscurity, he did. Managed them like every game mattered. Every game did matter when Bobby V was here. Other men have managed the Mets. Bobby V was the Mets Manager.

Aside from the late ’90s/early ’00s Mets highlights currently airing somewhere, I’m happy about this because it restores in me some semblance of faith that somebody in baseball recognizes skill and passion. The Red Sox decided they needed a new manager. They went out and hired the best one available, the one who breathed life into an American League franchise in the 1980s, a National League franchise in the 1990s and a Pacific League franchise in the 2000s. I didn’t much care what he did in Arlington or Chiba City, but I sure got a contact high off everything he did in Flushing (up to and including his press conference illustration of how marijuana “is not a performance enhancer”). Bobby argued umpires out of bad calls. He knocked down orthodoxies and played capable players with whom other managers couldn’t be bothered. He defeated alleged geniuses in three October series. He honestly made me proud to be a Mets fan. No smack talked by anybody, no matter how authentically it is come by, can shake me loose of my affection for Bobby Valentine.

The most fascinating manager the Mets ever employed is managing in the major leagues again. As long as it’s not against us, that’s a win.

Neither of us posts for days, then we both inadvertently post on the same topic at virtually the same time. Oh well, more for you guys — read Jason’s take here.

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.
– Don DeLillo, White Noise

In all likelihood this will be the offseason in which we face the grim reality that our broke, troubled, outclassed team has become the Baltimore Orioles of the National League. We have been told that the Mets are enduring a temporary rebuilding phase, but it increasingly looks more like the start of semi-permanent downsizing, during which our franchise’s fortunes will be decided by accountants and lawyers instead of by a smart front office assembled to preside over very little.

Thank goodness, then, for distractions, such as much improved uniforms and the return of Banner Day. I actually don’t mean that to be cynical. Seriously — thank goodness for distractions. If we’re going to have to suffer Grant/de Roulet II, let’s at least do it without drop shadows and two-tone hats.

And thank goodness for the return of Bobby Valentine.

No, not to the Mets. As you’ve no doubt heard by now, he’s the new manager of the Boston Red Sox, sometimes known as the team with the second-most-visible baseball cap in New York. I don’t particularly regret that Bobby’s commute will take him north of Connecticut instead of south — baseball reunions tend to be bad ideas, and I always thought calls for Bobby’s return to Flushing were based more on revanchism than reality. Even if you disagree with me on that point, this is the next best thing: Given the endless soap opera that is Yankees-Red Sox, he’ll be a near-daily presence in this town, and tasked with doing harm to our enemies. That’s pretty good.

Why was he gone so long? Blame baseball’s Pleistocene worldview, the same one that packs the ownership ranks with undead moguls and interchangeable corporate weasels while the likes of Mark Cuban are barred from the door. Bobby Valentine’s greatest sin has been that he’s too interesting. Like most successful organizations, baseball teams are built by renegades and risk-takers but come to abhor such people once their focus shifts to self-perpetuation. It’s chiefly by accident that people like Valentine wind up getting second chances in such places.

But what a happy accident.

Because Bobby Valentine is certainly interesting. Many pixels have been lit up in praise of his knowledge of baseball and tactical experiments, but saying he’s an interesting baseball manager isn’t really such a compliment. By all accounts Valentine is an interesting person — intellectually restless and curious, approaching new challenges with arms wide open, and monomaniacal in pursuit of his goals. His tenure in Japan is a remarkable story that deserves more examination than it gets: Rather than treat the Japanese leagues as an Elba from which to brood and cash checks, Valentine taught himself the language, patiently reformed some of the etched-in-stone basics of the Japanese game and its associated trappings, turned a sad-sack team into champions, and left as a folk hero. Closer to home, of course, he was tireless and dogged in the awful days after 9/11, central to the effort to turn Shea into a mustering point for supplies sent to Ground Zero and seemingly everywhere helping people, whether anyone was watching or not. When leadership and sacrifice and caring were needed most, Valentine showed he had ample reserves of all three.

Does Valentine have faults? Of course he does. He loves the spotlight, he plays favorites, he nurses grudges and he shoots off his mouth while aiming at his own feet. And like many a manager before him, his tactical brilliance seems driven in part by paranoia, the middle-of-the-night anxiety that someone, somewhere is plotting against him.

But so what if he has faults? Most interesting people do.

I can’t wait to see him flash those pearly whites after the writers realize some unorthodox move he made has beaten the Yankees with everyone watching. I can’t wait to hear that he’s eviscerated Dan Shaughnessy in response to some manufactured controversy. And I really can’t wait to hear him say things that make Joe Girardi squirm and the Yankees brass sputter fatuously. Joe Torre was the perfect foil for Valentine: Bobby tended to look wounded and frantic when measured against Joe’s motionless, ironclad dignity. Girardi, by comparison, is a faintly pitiable mix of egotistical, needy and deeply boring. He has no chance in this fight. None.

Come February, pass the popcorn. I don’t know how it’s all going to turn out, but I’ll guarantee this: It will be interesting. Bobby Valentine always is.

Double your pleasure by reading Greg’s take on Bobby V.’s new gig.

In practice, I might not notice the Houston Astros’ disappearance from the National League all that much. With 162 games and oodles of non-divisional opponents on your dance card, what’s one home series and one road series in the scheme of things? But in theory and sentiment, I will surely miss our fraternal twins when they are snatched from our midst and set down in some foreign land.

The Mets and the Astros came into this world together. They have the commemorative patches to prove it. Their strongest bonds of commonality are their 1962 birthdate and their bloody 1986 civil war pitting expansion brother against expansion brother, but their paths have crossed 561 times besides. In the mind’s eye, the Mets and Astros are forever enmeshed, perhaps inside the Astrodome where each team is trying to push one lousy run across the plate as the innings pass through the teens and meander into the twenties…

Or the Astros are trotting by the Mets so relentlessly in the second game of a futile doubleheader at Shea Stadium that Cleon Jones loses interest, which isn’t a good idea when Gil Hodges is around…

Or Tom Seaver is flying out Art Howe to deep left before catching the next flight himself to Cincinnati…

Or Mike Piazza and Todd Hundley are making you wonder what might have been had they managed to stay in the same lineup through September…

Or Pedro Martinez is taming every Astro save for Chris Burke…

Or David Cone is doing the same, except the role of Chris Burke is being played by Brooklyn’s own Benny DiStefano…

Or Brooklyn’s own Nelson Figueroa is pitching the game of his life for the team of his (and Benny DiStefano’s) childhood, which turns out to be the last real chance the Mets will give him…

Or Dwight Gooden is climbing a fence so he can get on with the business of his major league debut…

Or Carlos Beltran is climbing a hill as he silences catcalls…

Or Ron Darling, Bobby Ojeda, Rick Aguilera and Tim Teufel are getting sprung on bail after a misguided trip to Cooter’s.

Or Lindsey Nelson is speaking into a microphone while embedded in a gondola…

Or Ralph Kiner is noting the thickness and blackness of the mosquitoes infesting Colt Stadium just in case he needs something to talk about on a future trip to town…

Or Casey Stengel, after a harrowing night of travel and 71-plus years on earth, is issuing orders to his traveling secretary that that if anybody at the hotel is looking for him, Lou Niss can “tell ’em I’m being embalmed.”

Or whatever private Met-Astro/Met-Colt .45 memory you carry with you from the Mets’ 50-year, 260-win, 306-loss, 1-tie relationship with the team that got on the field one day before the Mets did (it rained on the Mets in St. Louis, while it stayed dry if buggy in Houston), stayed out of the cellar on account of the Mets’ iron grip there (Colts’ first-year record: 64-96, two places and 24 games ahead of the maiden Mets) and have yet to be remotely as transcendent as the Mets have been (Championships: Mets 2, Astros 0; Myths: Mets countless, Astros fewer). To say it’s a rivalry might be pushing it, yet they are siblings in a way the Mets aren’t with any of their longtime National League East compatriots. Together they made the Senior Circuit modern.

From eight ancient franchises to a nice, round ten, the two newest were soon playing in pens that were harbingers of a slick, sleek future just up the road if you squinted purposefully enough. Shea Stadium gleamed with nary a pillar or post to block your vision of tomorrow. The Astrodome made the atmosphere outside irrelevant, except when the sun couldn’t shine through the glass ceiling to sufficiently grow the grass. The heck with that, Judge Roy Hofheinz said. The roof got painted and a carpet was laid down.

Indoor baseball! Astroturf! All the colors of the rainbow populating every stitch of polyester the Astros wore! The Houstonian version of tomorrow died out prematurely — except as nostalgia — and a franchise that paid homage to the space program moved into a throwback facility built on the site of an old train station. Maybe identities were destined to morph a little too easily in Houston. They, like us, were conceived in the Continental League. They, unlike us, could have started in the American League.

George Kirksey, their rough approximation of Bill Shea, “never stopped looking for wealthy men who could help him bring a major league team to Houston,” according to Michael Shapiro in Bottom of the Ninth, the illuminating tale of how baseball came to expand in the early 1960s. Kirksey and his conspirators weren’t necessarily picky about where they wound up. During the 1960 World Series, with matters still unresolved, Kirksey ran into Yankee co-owner Del Webb, chairman of the A.L. expansion committee. “I thought for a minute he was going to invite us to join the American League,” Kirksey recounted, but Webb kept mum.

Too bad, George thought, since the Yankees would be a swell draw in Houston. But major league was major league to Texas, so Kirksey reached out to Walter O’Malley. After telling the N.L.’s grand poobah that “Houston was prepared to commit to the National League, if the league would commit to him,” Shapiro wrote, O’Malley “looked at him for ‘what seemed like hours’ before he finally replied, ‘All right.’”

And with those words, Houston became what New York had been in spirit and was waiting to become again in fact: a National League town. That lasted 50 years — 51 counting next year. Then, per whatever sweet nothings Bud Selig whispered in Jim Crane’s ear, Houston flips. The Astros will set up camp in the American League West starting in 2013. They’ll get their visits from the Yankees. They’ll get their visits from the Mets in due time, too, as the 15-on-15 realignment scheme will likely allow for more Interleague play and definitely unleash more regular Interleague play. It has to, once you do the 30-team math.

One more barrier between the leagues has been knocked down. Nobody really talks about National League towns anymore. There are no more league offices. If Fall Classic combatants are unfamiliar to one another, as Texas and St. Louis were after not facing off since 2004, it’s a fluke, not the norm. Sooner or later, Selig’s successor will probably infect Citi Field and 14 other proper shrines to the game with the DHV, or Designated Hitter Virus.

On paper, it’s nice and logical that everybody playing baseball plays by the same rules and under the same tent. It goes on in the NFL all the time. Nobody blinks when the Giants draw the Bills or the Jets take on the Redskins. It goes on in the NBA all the time as long as they have their usual 82 games. East meets West as a matter of course. Baseball is on its way to becoming just another sport in that regard. Larger playoff fields, common jurisdiction, cross-pollination of the schedule just like they have in football, and the Houston and Dallas franchises in the same division, just like they have in basketball.

Yup, just another sport. We who were created by modernization as it was defined in 1962 maybe shouldn’t throw stones at the contemporary house it has wrought on the eve of 2012. Baseball didn’t freeze in 1952 with eight teams competing for one pennant in two leagues, anchoring the Braves in Boston, the Browns in St. Louis, the A’s in Philadelphia or the Giants and Dodgers forever in the five boroughs. If the last pair doesn’t leave, we don’t arrive with Houston in tow. Then there are no Mets, no Astros, no certifiable classic NLCS in 1986.

For which, unless the descendants of those participants — slated to play their final National League HOU-NYM game on August 26 in Flushing — effect a sharp turnaround immediately, there will never be a rematch…unless it’s in a Mets-Astros World Series in an extremely distant future.

“Commitment, Abby, commitment. There are only two creatures of value on the face of this earth — those with a commitment and those who require the commitment of others.”
—Abigail Adams, comforting husband John by quoting his own words back to him when he doubts the cause he holds dear can endure, 1776

It’s a Friday night in the middle of August 1991. I’m meeting my fiancée and a couple of people from her job at a theater on the Upper East Side for an early evening showing of The Commitments, the new movie about this scrappy band of Dublin North Siders who pull together to play Sixties American soul until they necessarily fall apart. I was running late and entered the theater just as the movie was starting, thus it wasn’t until it was over that I received a proper introduction to two of my fiancée’s co-workers.

“So we finally get to meet the boyfriend,” one of them said, which irked me a bit since I had graduated from “boyfriend” status nearly two years before when I ponied up for an engagement ring. Then again, I realized, it had been two years. There were reasons our engagement had grown into a long engagement (pending college graduation for her; lingering illness and eventual passing of my mother; we moved in together, so what was the rush?), and we’d looked on and off for a wedding site, albeit with no sense of urgency, but maybe enough was enough with the inadvertent stall tactics. Maybe we should just set a date already — the sooner the better. Say, in the fall.

Say, November. Definitely November. As opposed to October.

Why not October? Because that was when the playoffs and World Series would take place. By the middle of August 1991, I knew the Mets wouldn’t be in them that year, but that wasn’t my major concern. I wanted to make certain that down the road, as soon as 1992 but also hopefully for many autumns to come, our wedding anniversary would brush up against a ticker-tape parade, but never conflict with a postseason Mets game.

Ever.

That was the extent of my prenup: Let’s get married late enough in the fall so that even if television someday forces baseball into November, we’ll never have a conflict. We can celebrate our love without me being distracted by my, uh, other love. That’s all I asked for: no distractions. It wasn’t like I was inflexible. I did, after all, agree to go see The Commitments during a Mets game (as the Mets rode a seven-game losing streak).

My fiancée became my wife on November 10, 1991, two weeks after the Twins and Braves played Game Seven of that autumn’s Fall Classic and eight years before another Mets postseason game materialized. As of November 10, 2011, the Mets had only intruded on our married Octobers three times in twenty years.

Yet just as I’d marry Stephanie all over again, I’d make the same insistence all over again…except I wouldn’t have to insist very much, because Stephanie’s been married to me for twenty years and knows I’d prefer not to prioritize between wedding anniversaries and Mets playoff appearances.

But two things you should know:

1) She didn’t object or even question my one condition of wedding date determination two decades ago, because she knew me four-and-a-half years by then. I was in my 19th season as a Mets fan when we met in 1987, and that commitment had already predated every non-familial relationship in my life and was on pace to do no worse than last as long as any others that were in progress by 1991. So yeah, of course the Mets were going to involve themselves in my thinking, whatever the occasion. She knew that.

2) I’m almost fully certain that if MLB allowed the postseason to crawl into the second week of November and my team was still playing, that she would view a Mets game at that time of year not as a cause of “you wanna watch WHAT?” conflict but as a reason for enhanced anniversary celebration.

That’s because it’s not only my team. It’s our team. Want proof? Consider what my wife gave me — gave us — very recently for our 20th wedding anniversary.

A Mets comforter. It drapes our bed presently. It’s like we sleep in an on-deck circle.

It was her idea, mind you. Hers, not mine. And it’s for us, not me. Because the team in question, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health is ours.

Yes, I’m very lucky to have a Mets comforter, and I’m not talking about some blanket.

To take this topic out of the bedroom and onto a broader playing field, the Mets are all of ours to have and to hold, however we do it, with whomever we do it. We made that commitment at probably some early stage of life — some of us earlier than others — and count it, most likely, as one of the most enduring relationships we’ve ever known. That’s the commitment we love and we cherish, no matter how old it gets, no matter that each of us at some point winds up bickering with our team in our minds (and maybe on our blogs) like the proverbial old married couple.

It’s true. We fume at the Mets. We turn a cold shoulder and a deaf ear toward them. We don’t want to hear any more of their excuses. We need some time apart from them. We need to vent at how they’re driving us certifiably mad.

But no matter how much we might anger at their actions or their attitude, we never really stop loving them. We always come back to them. We made a commitment and we don’t know how not to stick by it. We sometimes literally wrap ourselves up in them, even as we sleep.

Let me put it more specifically: I’d been brooding and boiling all about the impending state of the 2012 Mets from the moment the 2011 Mets disbanded after their 162nd game. They were a lousy team this year, they were likely to be a lousy team next year, they weren’t going to be able to keep their best/my favorite player, I was supposed to sit tight with a batch of mediocrities until maybe a few minor league pitchers blossomed, assuming they didn’t hurt their arms or some other body part as every Mets minor league pitcher seems to do as if required by law. My Met mood fell somewhere between disengaged and disenchanted, not altogether unlike I’ve been much of the past five Met seasons.

A comforting presence in our lives.

Then my wife presents me/us with a comforter with a Mets logo smack in the middle and I’m in heaven. Part of that was Stephanie’s thoughtfulness and her impulse to indulge me but, honestly, a bigger part of that was the instinctive “A METS COMFORTER! I’VE NEVER HAD A METS COMFORTER! OH MAN, THAT IS SO GREAT! IT’S A METS LOGO ON A BLANKET RIGHT HERE ON OUR BED! IT’S ORANGE! IT’S BLUE! I WOULD HAVE LOVED ONE OF THESE WHEN I WAS 12! I LOVE IT NOW!” I completely forgot how much I’d been hating the Mets lately because I was reminded how much I love the Mets always.

That’s the commitment each of us makes. And that’s why, with both our 20th anniversary still fresh in my mind and the Mets’ 50th anniversary prominently on our radar, Faith and Fear in Flushing chooses as its 2011 Nikon Camera Player of the Year — the award bestowed to the entity or concept that best symbolizes the year in Metsdom — Commitment.

The commitment we make to the Mets. The commitment we keep to the Mets. And, once in a while, the commitment the Mets make to us.

Pretty heavy stuff when you’re talking about a baseball team, but let’s be real here. We’re not just baseball fans. We’re Mets fans and all that implies. I don’t have to tell you what it means. I didn’t even have to explain my reservations about having an October wedding, 3-for-20 batting average on theoretical Mets’ postseason appointments from 1992 forward notwithstanding. For us, giving the Mets thought in relation to something like that isn’t at all aberrant behavior. If anything, the aberration would be setting a wedding date and not, on at least some level of consciousness, taking into account where the Mets’  schedule fits in.

But put aside stuff of that momentous ilk. Just consider the day-to-day, and how, even in a season like 2011, we remain wedded to this team. We may skip a few games here and there, we may even accept invitations that force us to follow scores from afar (or, horror of horrors, not at all), but the commitment never wavers. Not in the face of three consecutive losing seasons piled on top of back-to-back last-day debacles which followed an excruciating Game Seven heartbreak. Not amid piles of injuries and a taster’s menu of ineptitude. Not even when you spend months trying to wrap your head around how a team playing in the biggest market in the nation finds itself unable to pay its best player or think about replacing him in kind.

It’s too late to untangle the commitment. Not after all we’ve been through together. All it takes is the slightest of act of kindness or competence from them to us, and all (or much) is right with our world again. Conversely, all it takes is a stray thought like “Angel Pagan is the best they can come up with for center field next year?” to cast a black cloud on an otherwise lovely day, but the likely tendering of Pagan (or Pelfrey) bothering me only proves to me once again how goddamn invested I am in this team.

Either that, or I have a rooting disorder.

The Mets matter to us because they matter to us. It’s not worth deconstructing such a statement, not for those who instantly get what that means, and not to those whom we’re never going to get it across anyway. I come back in my mind to one of the signature Citi Field moments of my 2011, the Saturday in August when the Brewers beat the Mets in dreadful fashion, 11-9 (as if an 11-9 loss could be invigorating). Lousy result from an entertaining process, but mostly, for me, an uncommon exercise in cognitive dissonance. This was the game Stephanie and I decided to unleash on my sister and brother-in-law, two people whose many fine qualities do not include the vaguest appreciation for baseball’s ability to touch the human heart.

The entire afternoon was chronicled here, but the moment that sticks harder than any other occurred in the bottom of the eighth. The Mets had appeared comatose early, trailed 7-1, pushed back to 7-6 in the seventh and were now about to achieve the seemingly impossible. Josh Thole doubled home the tying run off expatriate Frankie Rodriguez and Pagan homered toward where we set up temporary camp on the Pepsi Porch.

I was elated. Stephanie was elated. My brother-in-law wanted to know when we could get out of the sun. My sister stood in the shadows to avoid the glare. Overcoming a 7-1 deficit to lead 9-7 did not penetrate their consciousness whatsoever. It was just some inexplicable event taking place in their sensory airspace, one whose noise was getting on their nerves. It didn’t represent a personal triumph or provide a callback to a half-dozen other charges from behind that I (or most of you) could pluck from a mental Met filing cabinet. It was, in the moment, everything to us. It was, forever, nothing to them.

As Pagan crossed the plate, my brother-in-law and I were each thinking some version of “man, this guy has weird priorities” in each other’s direction.

So be it. The investment is one you make or you don’t. We do. We step back from it a little now and then, maybe out of frustration with 11-9 losses or 77-85 campaigns, possibly to keep our brain fresh for when the investment has a chance to pay off big time. We’ll go to movies or other people’s weddings in Augusts when our team has checked out on us. We’ll find non-SNY channels or avert our gaze from the screen in Septembers when it’s not the glare but the dullness gets in our eyes. We’ll strive to fit somebody else’s definition of normal when we can’t tell ourselves that the Mets vs. Nationals isn’t actually the most important item on anybody’s agenda on a given night, and that would likely include the agendas of the Mets and the Nationals.

But just try to get between us and our investment when the faintest wisp of perceived relevance tickles our nose. That would include anything from the increasingly mythical postseason date that will validate our long-term anniversary planning to keeping an eye on a 7-1 game versus the mighty Brewers just in case the Mets get their act together and put the tying runs on.

Honestly, it doesn’t take much to confirm our commitment.

***

We need
To get back
To the old religion
Back on track
—The Rainmakers, “Given Time”

Saturday Night Live underwent a drastic makeover in 1980: new executive producer, new cast, whole new look. By 1981, the show was in desperate straits. NBC fired almost everybody it could and sought to fix the show. How? By reminding lapsed viewers how good the show used to be. When Dick Ebersol took over for the luckless (and humorless) Jean Doumanian, he reached out to anybody who had a connection to the early, funny Lorne Michaels years. Didn’t matter if he didn’t really want Michael O’Donoghue or Franken & Davis back. He wanted a connection to the way it was when it was good. He wanted the perception that the show wouldn’t suck anymore to gather momentum.

What really saved the SNL franchise was the presence of rookie sensation Eddie Murphy, but that wasn’t readily apparent in the spring of 1981. Ebersol had to make the show seem watchable before it actually got watchable.

In other words, Dick had to pass out the blue caps.

Three decades later, the same strategy is winning rave reviews in Flushing even if it’s not going to net the Mets a single ballgame… even if there’s no rookie sensation in sight…even if it’s as likely as not (to put it generously) that the only Mets fan who is going to see his beloved Jose up close and personal in 2012 will be Jerry Seinfeld, and that’s because his wife suggested naming their new Dachshund after Jose Reyes.

It’s a potentially grim scene developing at Citi Field, but how about those caps? How about those uniforms? How about those patches? How about those bobbleheads they’ll be handing out? How about those outfield fences they’re already bringing in? How about those banners fluttering along the warning tracks? How about those five-game plans that start at $50 per pack? How about the gesture of not issuing No. 50 to a player next year because it will be dedicated to the fans? How about the Mets bursting with the opposite of shame — sources report it’s a sensation known as “pride” — at turning 50 next year?

Yeah, how about it?

I was fairly wowed last week when I attended the Mets’ press conference that introduced or elaborated on most of these goodies and I’m still willing to be wowed by the snatching of low-hanging fruit. Goodness knows the Mets have let it go unpicked in the past, so, yes, as long as all the fans are true to the orange and blue, bless those who decided to re-emphasize the orange and especially the blue in the color-scheme of things.

That only took too long.

To be fair, I was never overly bothered by presence of the now-discredited black in Mets uniforms and on Mets caps. I would have avoided the drop shadow on the front of the pinstripes on the grounds that it was clunky, and I surely believe the whole gimmick wore out its aesthetic welcome by the time Art Howe got around to lighting up rooms, but it didn’t offend me. Sometimes it looked pretty sharp. Sometimes it looked like the Grand Slam Single.

But I’m as willing as anybody south of Shannon Shark to kick it to the curb because the kicking represents such a psychic victory for most everyone who cares about the Mets. That “true to the orange and blue” jazz really resonates approximately a generation after few even remembered there was a second verse to “Meet The Mets”. The idea that the Mets stand for something beyond a given number of wins and losses is powerful stuff. We who use our keyboards to occasionally cajole, berate and harp have been flying that particular banner for quite a while. Our parade wasn’t so much virtual as it was invisible where it counted. The Mets gave maybe half a damn as to what their hardcore fans were yelping about.

Wasn’t it enough to create a thoroughly Mets-free main entrance, crank the escalator up toward the Ebbets Club, direct Mets fans past generic concourses and tell them how much fun triples would be every time a deep fly ball from the home team turned into another out?

Y’know, those well-worn complaints about life at Citi Field feel so very 2009, and good riddance to them. Nevertheless, just as I’m doomed to now and then give Trottin’ Timo Perez a phantom shove so he’ll start running hard eleven years ago, I can’t help but wonder “WTF?” where the Mets’ thinking was concerned. We got what we the loyalists asked for — and we asked for it because we were convinced it served the Mets’ interests best — but we were kept waiting a period of time that felt more unfathomable than interminable. How crucial was it, anyway, that Cory Sullivan or Hisanori Takahashi or Jason Pridie get to wear black like it was 1999?

I guess we can look at it this way: If the Mets had never taken a shot at black wardrobes in the late ’90s, or hadn’t clung so illogically to them in the early ’10s, we wouldn’t be tickled by their fade into history right now. Not knowing what you got ’til it’s gone isn’t limited to parking lots and municipal stadiums.

Seriously, did anybody really fondle their blue and orange Mets cap in 1996, the last year the Mets wore nothing but blue and orange Mets caps, and swear a blood oath to its colors? Was there a stampede on what was then known as the Tropicana Pre-Game Banner Parade & Contest on August 4, 1996? Where the hell was everybody else at 11:45 in the morning of July 24, 1994, when my friend Joe and I made sure we were in our seats for the beginning of Old Timers Day festivities? There had to be at least 5,000 of us in the stands intent on honoring the 25th anniversary of the 1969 Mets that day, the last Old Timers Day that wasn’t packaged as something else.

The Mets could have reacted a few different ways to the downturns of their traditional favorites. They could have sought to inject new energy into them. They could have re-emphasized what fun they’d always been instead of just lobbing them out onto the schedule and hoping people would show up. They could have realized that a poor on-field product was going to result in a hit on certain iconic items and understood that when the team got better, enthusiasm for everything surrounding the team would rebound as well.

Or they could muddle their uniforms, forget about Banner Day and pretend their fans didn’t enjoy connecting with their favorite players of all-time. We know what path the Mets chose.

Can’t say they don’t eventually come around on most things, however mysteriously drawn out the journey. Eternally AWOL Old Timers Day is still at large, and its absence sadly deprives us of one effective, concentrated dose of Alumni Fever, but as Mets fans, I suppose we’re practiced at the art of You Can’t Have Everything. We have a pretty good replica of most things now, and it’s genuinely exciting to me, a hard-bitten hardcore fan who sort of just wants to know my team is aware of itself. As soon as they kicked off their flurry of “Happy Anniversary!” announcements inside the Caesars Club by noting it was exactly 50 years to the day since Ray Gatto’s Mets skyline logo was unveiled, I felt more Mets-awareness coming at me from the Mets than at any time since somebody thought to invite Doug Flynn to Shea Goodbye.

You might say they had me at Gatto.

But I guess they didn’t have everybody. Last week, at the press conference that served to spotlight so many elements of the Mets’ past that are tumbling into the Mets’ immediate future, the first question asked of Dave Howard was, to paraphrase, “all this is just a distraction from your lousy team, right?”

Howard gave a politic but pointed answer that this isn’t a distraction, it’s a celebration. My response would have been “Yeah, it’s a distraction but an outstanding distraction! And beyond that, look at the calendar. Fifty years is fifty years…don’t Mets fans deserve a golden anniversary?”

Cripes, why not ask if the Mets’ scheduling of day games is part of a nefarious anti-night initiative?

So not everybody’s won over or going to be won over. Media’s job is to be cynical. Fans come by it on their own dime. There’s always going to be a strain of fan who Doesn’t Care. That is, he or she Doesn’t Care about blue caps or 50th birthdays or whether there’s a museum or how good or bad the broadcasts are. That fan just wants the Mets to win and he or she Doesn’t Care about the rest. I find that partly reasonable and totally boorish. Winning trumps all, but it doesn’t overwhelm everything. A rude usher, a cold pretzel, a Tom McCarthy, a lack of appreciation by the organization for its own heritage — even in the last indisputably good regular season, I noticed those things. But they didn’t blot out the sun. When Jose Reyes led off Game Six of the 2006 NLCS with a home run while wearing the pinstripes, I didn’t think “Sure, we’re ahead 1-0, but dadburn it all to heck, that drop shadow just ruins everything.”

There’s a balance to be attained. Ideally, you have a World Series trophy on one side of the scale and everything else pleasant and thoughtful on the other side. We probably won’t get the World Series trophy in 2012, but that doesn’t take away from that which is pleasant and thoughtful.

The best brand equity possible in an endeavor like professional baseball is that of consistent winner. The next best, and not behind by much, is that of something that inspires stubborn devotion during those spells when the winning isn’t so consistent…not just by force of habit but because you can make yourself believe your devotion is somehow returned in kind.

Blue caps, broad banners and a yearlong birthday party for our franchise signifies that kind of return. It is a celebration. We are pleased to R.S.V.P. that we’ll be there for yet another season.

We can always send our regrets later.

FAITH AND FEAR’S PREVIOUS NIKON CAMERA PLAYERS OF THE YEAR

2005: The WFAN broadcast team of Gary Cohen and Howie Rose

2006: Shea Stadium

2007: Uncertainty

2008: The 162-Game Schedule

2009: Two Hands

2010: Realization

Five months from now, I look forward to seeing you, listening to you and learning from you at the Hofstra Cultural Center’s conference honoring The 50th Anniversary of the New York Mets. The event that’s been a half-century in the making is coming to the Hempstead, Long Island, campus, Thursday April 26 through Saturday April 28.

As many of you no doubt know, Hofstra professor Dana Brand — the author of two indispensable volumes on Mets fandom, a blogger of great warmth and passion, and a friend to so many of us — had envisioned this conference for several years and had put a ton of preliminary work into it before his passing last May. I’m happy to report the conference is proceeding in Dana’s memory and is in some very good Hofstra hands. I’m also proud to be working with the organizers on editorial and historical matters and whatever else comes along. I told Dana I’d pitch in in any way I could, and I’m glad I can keep that pledge.

Details continue to coalesce. Key takeaways for the moment are that it is indeed happening (wrapping up on the 50th anniversary of the Mets’ first home win, FYI); that you should spread the word by any means at your disposal; and that if you are so inclined, you should submit your ideas for papers and/or presentations to the folks at Hofstra by January 10. If that interests you, please get in touch with me via e-mail at faithandfear@gmail.com. You can see the working list of topics here (click on image to enlarge).

The aim of this conference is to treat the New York Mets as the cultural institution they have become across 50 endlessly Amazin’ years. Implicit in this framing is recognizing the importance of those who have made the Mets a surpassing presence in so many lives: the fans. Us, in other words. That’s what inspired Dana as much as anything, and that’s the force that will guide this conference into becoming a singular milestone commemoration. Professionals, academics and other interested parties will play a significant role in all of this, but it’s the Mets fan who is at the heart of everything Metsian. That includes the conference. Dana wouldn’t have had it any other way. So please, if you have ideas or questions, do get in touch.

And there will definitely be more to come.

OK, let’s get the whining out of the way first: I want to unreservedly love the new pinstripes, but they annoy me a little.

The Mets were born in the Jet Age. Fatherly Eisenhower had given way to hip, stylish JFK, soon to announce we were going to the Moon. The Mets set up shop in the Polo Grounds, squashed into a grid of urban streets and thick with the ghosts of Giants past, but that was a temporary arrangement. They were headed for Shea, then a standard bearer for futuristic ovals equally suited for football and baseball and even mop-topped British invaders. Shea was located right by the wonders of the World’s Fair, ringed by parkways fit for bearing Robert Moses’ sojourners from the suburbs in their sleek new automobiles.

We’d change our mind about how much we liked some of that new world, but that’s not the point. The point is that the uniforms should be white. The Mets’ blue and orange caps were nods to the departed Dodgers and Giants, but beyond that, the team wasn’t a sepia-tinged nostalgia exercise. They were the team of the future, and their uniforms were as bright as that future was deemed to be. Don’t be fooled by vintage uniforms on display — they’ve yellowed with age, just like old letters do. Look at old photos, or at Topps baseball cards. The Mets’ uniforms should be white, not off-white or cream or beige or ivory or buff or vanilla or what-have-you. (If Paul Lukas wants to tell me I’m wrong, I’ll listen. Otherwise, I’m not.)

But I’m done whining. Because everything else the Mets unveiled Wednesday, with the other half of Faith and Fear in attendance, was great. The glass, for once, is 95% full.

The Mets and I might argue about the proper Pantones for those pinstripes, but the most important thing is that they’re back in heavy rotation, which is baseball like it oughta be. Shorn of those trying-too-hard black drop shadows, the script Mets looks properly bright and lively, unfussy and optimistic. (I’m equally glad that they lack the racing stripe. If the Mets hadn’t won a championship wearing those things, they’d be understood as the sartorial equivalent of disfiguring “Meet the Mets” with the roll call for “Long Island, New Jersey….”)

The rest of the news was good too. The pinstripes will be joined by the home whites, also boasting additional impact thanks to the subtraction of shadows, and the solid black tops, which I don’t mind for cameos. The road uniforms shown yesterday are similarly classic: gray with blue piping and the simple, shadowless stenciled NEW YORK. On top of that, word is that those the hideous two-toned black-and-blue caps have gone down the memory hole, joining ice cream caps, Bicentennial pillboxes and Mercury Mets lids in never being discussed again. The caps will be solid blue (with orange buttons — a change I actually liked) or solid black.

All of this isn’t just encouraging or a step forward or great — it’s smart, respectful and fan-friendly.

Kudos, too, for the Mets’ 50th anniversary logo. (But wait a minute, wasn’t last year the 50th anniversary season? Whatever. I never could do math.) Not so long ago, the Mets moved into Citi Field with an inaugural-season patch that looked like a Citibank intern had slapped it together using Microsoft Paint before a smoke break. This is so much better — a respectful update of the skyline logo.

Oh, and the Mets did all this without a single shot fired at their own feet. The announcement came on the 50th anniversary of the unveiling of the original logo, the kind of anniversary that has too often has been noticed by fans instead of by the front office. And it came with another fan-friendly gesture — Banner Day is returning.

Banner Day began as New Breed samizdat and flourished as a very Metsian holiday before being sadly banished. It’s great to have it back. The Mets of recent years have often seemed so hypersensitive to the possibility of bad PR or media scoffing that they’ve ignored their own history and muzzled their own fans; resurrecting Banner Day is a welcome sign that the team wants to rebuild that connection. Here’s hoping fans respond in kind, ignoring the current dark clouds. Let’s get this established right now: It would be rude, graceless and self-destructive for fans to make Banner Day 2012 an Occupy Citi Field parade of Wilponzi sloganeering, I’m Calling It Shea revanchism and howls for Reyes revenge, should the worst come to pass.

Heck, the Mets even brought out Ike Davis as one of the uniform models — a crutch- and boot-free Ike Davis who sounded like he was ready to play two.

Could yesterday have been better? Sure, I guess — the Mets could have made the pinstripes white and the home “whites” cream, then trotted out Jose Reyes as a surprise addition as one of the models, with Greg texting me excitedly that Jose Jose Jose was holding a press release about a Madoff settlement in one hand and a new contract in the other. But by those standards you’ll always want more. When a big day is 95% of what you would have asked for, that’s pretty good. In fact, it’s better than pretty good. You might even call it amazin’, amazin’, amazin’.

Taking a brief pause from celebrating the Mets’ welcome decision to celebrate their heritage here to wish the Met of Mets, George Thomas Seaver, a happiest of birthdays. 41 is the new 67 today. We should all wear a commemorative patch.

Seaver, it was announced yesterday amid a flood of upbeat, non-field announcements, is the lead bobblehead of the five the Mets plan to give out next year, each one commemorating a different decade in Mets history (no foolin’). Aside from that being a most understandable and appropriate choice — even if they did a Seaver bobble in 2000 and even if Casey Stengel would be an even more apt subject for the fiftieth anniversary — it’s a reminder that Franchise players can come home again. Seaver has at least three times: in 1983, when he returned to pitch six years after somebody thought he should be traded; in 1987, three years after somebody pulled the clerical boner of the decade; and in 1999, after various post-retirement snits and slights were cleared away. At last check, Tom Seaver is a Mets Ambassador and legend-on-call when he’s not back in California getting his grape on.

As David Gates sang in a song that rode high on the charts as Tom Seaver participated in his first major league Spring Training that wasn’t conducted in blue and orange, baby, goodbye doesn’t mean forever. In March 1978, Seaver was a Red and the Mets were out of the Seaver business. They promoted Craig Swan and Pat Zachry and Nino Espiñosa as the kinds of pitchers you should be excited about. Life went on that way for an overly long and terribly unpleasant interval.

Then Tommy came marching home again (hurrah! hurrah!) and it was like he was never gone…three times. The Mets could sell shirts emblazoned with 41 on them, safe in the knowledge that they weren’t taking their eye off the marketing ball. They could fire up film clips from 1969 and 1973 and not inadvertently advertise that things were indisputably better when Tom Seaver wore their 41, and not somebody else’s. The memory of Seaver as Met merged forever more with the enduring reality of Seaver as Met. Today, on his 67th birthday, you can almost forget Seaver spent nearly nine of his twenty big league seasons as not a Met.

Something in which to take long-term comfort, perhaps, in case the closest thing the Mets have to a franchise player stops being a Met himself in the coming weeks.

I’ve heard it said by fans within my chronological demographic that “I survived Tom Seaver being traded, I can survive anything.” I can identify with that sentiment, yet I also wonder why I’d want to test Jose Reyes’s potential departure against the baseline for Worst Happenstance Imaginable in the realm of Mets exits. There’s only one Seaver, but that’s hardly the issue. Reyes isn’t Seaver. But he’s close enough. He’s as Seaver as we’ve had lately (David Wright notwithstanding). The Mets of 2012 without Reyes will be close enough to the Mets of 1978 without Seaver. They’ll still be the Mets, but less so. Putting aside the reconstruction of the small-f franchise and ever present financial considerations, it will be incredibly weird having the Mets and not having Jose Reyes on them.

I was 14 when Tom Seaver was traded. I survived and all that, but I’m still stunned that it happened. I had never known a Mets team without Tom Seaver. A Mets fan who is 14 now has never known a Mets team without Jose Reyes. I won’t speak to the potential stunnage of current 14-year-olds, but I can tell you that when the Mets played a marvelous montage of  1962-2011 highlights at their press conference yesterday and topped it off with all the players we can expect to see in their 50th Anniversary season, and there was no discernible sign of Jose Reyes anywhere, I was stunned. I all but knew there wouldn’t be any Jose as soon as the video started to roll, yet it was still still stunning. As stunning as it is, to me, that Tom Seaver, 67 today, was traded when he was 32 and I was 14.

But on the bright side, should Jose wind up elsewhere, there’s quite possibly a 75th anniversary bobblehead with his name and partial likeness on it come 2037. May Gold’s Horseradish and I live so long.

To be uncommonly brief about it (and trust me, I plan to be more expansive on the topic in the very near future), congratulations to the New York Mets for getting it. They get that their 50th anniversary is a big deal, and they are making a big deal out of it. You can read the official details here and visit their dedicated site here, but for bringing Banner Day down from the attic, for offering up a literal handful of decade-themed bobbleheads and for working blue in their coming golden anniversary season, this historically minded Mets fan says way to go.

I remember in the early ’40s, back there, when I was a kid working on the city desk in the Detroit Free Press. It was Sunday, four o’clock in the morning, somebody phoned in a story, and I had no way to check it out.

It was either print the biggest story of the century and beat every paper in the city by hours — or kill it. I was a gutsy kid, so I decided to print it.

You want to know what that story was? I’ll tell you what that story was. The Japanese had just bombed…San Diego.

—Lou Grant, “WJM Tries Harder,” The Mary Tyler Moore Show

If Jose Reyes becomes a Miami Marlin, we’ll know for sure. We’ll know because multiple reliable sources will report it and we’ll know because you’ll hear me yowling in agony.

But until then, take with a pound of salt any breathless bulletins that exclusively confirm “a done deal,” considering Jose’s only just begun to shop his services — no matter what protective headgear he may don when visiting construction sites.

Caution: Falling Rumor Zone.

Which doesn’t make this process and its array of unfavorable potential outcomes any less of a nightmare.

Thanks a lot, Wilpons.

“I saw him play.”
“Yeah? What do you think?”
“He was the best. Run, hit, throw…he was the best.”
—Buck Weaver on Shoeless Joe Jackson, Eight Men Out

Listen, I’m supposed to present this award to you: Faith and Fear’s Most Valuable Met for 2011. It’s not a real award, so don’t clear space for it or anything. It’s just something I do every year to put a wrap on the season.

You won the award easy. You won it in June. Now and again it would occur to me that come November I’d have to compose an essay to make it “official,” if you will. I looked forward to it. I always look forward to doing Most Valuable Met, especially in the overall bad years, because it’s something positive to look back on.

I have to admit I’ve been waiting to present this “award” to you ever since I invented it in 2005. You were one of the “finalists” every year the first few years, but there was always someone who embodied the season just a little more. I considered it a great exercise in self-control that I didn’t give it to you in 2006. I wanted to, but Beltran had the big numbers, and since I’d been boosting him for league MVP, I thought I had to honor that.

But that was OK. It wasn’t really a thing in my mind back then. The first couple of MVMs were sort of off the cuff. I didn’t make a thing of it until 2008, really, and that one had to be Johan’s. You understand, I’m sure.

Then you disappeared for most of a year, and weren’t more than 80% yourself the next year. You weren’t really top of mind. You understand that, too, I’m sure.

Finally 2011. You owned it. You owned the heart of it. I can’t imagine your agent doesn’t have all kinds of statistics revealing just how much you accomplished this year and every year — and how much you’re likely to do in the years ahead — but I have to share what I divined anyway, courtesy of Baseball Reference.

From May 24 to July 2, you batted .413. Your OPS was 1.074. You scored 37 runs in 34 games. You collected 62 hits. You stole 13 bases. You tripled 9 times.

And you transcended your numbers. You ascended to that level where nobody wanted to miss a single thing you did on the field. For six weeks, you were the greatest show on turf. You managed to maintain that J. Pierrepont Finch grin of impetuous youth, yet there you were, unquestionably a man in full. You may have been the best Met not named Seaver or Gooden I ever saw. For one of those rare moments across a half-century in the sport, we had the best player in baseball.

Honestly, I don’t think we ever had a better position player over an extended period. I could rattle off a few names and dates, but that wouldn’t help anybody else’s case or dilute yours. Nobody was as exciting as you. Nobody started games the way you did and nobody kept them going the way you would. Nobody was a better advertisement for staying tuned and sticking to one’s seat. Whatever else your teammates were doing — and they did what they could — you were why I wanted to watch the Mets in 2011.

Who am I kidding? You were why I wanted to watch the Mets from 2003 on. You played with a division champion. You played with eight lost souls. It didn’t matter. In my soul, you were the draw for me. You hitting. You running. You not stopping. You until you were a blur…a happy and peppy and bursting with love of the game blur, blazing from home to third and then ninety feet more.

A blur…that was you and that was time, it now occurs to me. How did it get to be nine seasons so soon? How did you get to be our all-time leader in runs scored? How did you land suddenly second to indefatigable compiler Eddie Kranepool in hits? How did June 10, 2003, become more than eight years ago so fast?

This year your blur was epic. Then it receded into injury. Why that keeps happening I don’t know. I was envisioning a 2011 that was going to keep growing in stature until it was the stuff of legend. The year you broke Olerud’s record for batting average. The year you broke Lance’s record for hits. The year you made yourself inarguably indispensable to the fortunes of the franchise. You were going to create a masterpiece so dazzling that the commissioner would have been forced to invoke the “best interests of baseball” clause to keep you from going anywhere else, because how could the Mets — whatever their financial foibles — function without you?

You came back from the first hammy calamity, you groped to find your footing…and it happened again. Another injury. There went the blur. There went the fun. Your teammates had run out of gas by then and you weren’t around to fuel them anymore. So we just waited for you to return a second time, sort of like we did all through and then after 2009…a lot like we did all through and after 2004 and even 2003, come to think of it. A little like we had to do in spots during 2010.

I really wish you hadn’t missed all those games. You’d be ahead of Kranepool by now. More importantly, you’d have had no doubters in high places. You’d have been courted and signed for the long haul. You’d be the Met for life you couldn’t not be. There’d be no questions from a front office that didn’t know what it had in you when it got here. I could hear it in Alderson’s tone a year ago when they asked what he planned to do about his shortstop’s expiring contract. “Who? Him? We’ll see.”

Yeah, he saw. We all saw. We saw the upside. We were reminded of the outside — the trademark, toothsome explosion of joy you effortlessly evinced. You were still that kid from 2003 and 2005 and 2006 and 2007 before it kind of went to hell on you. Yet you were somehow more mature, too. You were 28: timeless and ageless. And, in the heart of 2011, you were as healthy as you were vibrant.

Except there’s a portrait of your hamstrings in a storage facility somewhere in Corona and those suckers got old fast. Hearing about them did, at any rate. Nobody here wanted to think about the parts of you that weren’t indestructible. We preferred your smile. Your flying dreadlocks. Your facefirst slide into whatever base came next. Your infectious clapping from the dugout. Your blur. Your June. All of that felt impervious to danger.

Your hamstrings were another story. They were a story we chose to put aside as you wrote a new lede in the final weeks of 2011. You weren’t in Olerud/One Dog territory anymore, but son of a gun, you were still the hittingest hitter in all the National League. You were leading in batting average. We all agreed to suspend our cynicism toward a statistic that proves more and more hollow the deeper one drills into it because, quite frankly, it was the neatest title any Met had ever pursued. It may not have been complex or sophisticated, but when we were growing up, it had it own baseball card and its own listing in the papers — the leaders every day, and everybody on Sunday. No Met had ever headed that listing. But you were going to.

And you did. You did it with an uncharacteristically klutzy flourish on the final day, but I’ve already pretended to forget about that. The point is you won the title. You were the National League Batting Champion of 2011. You hit .337 the year after you hit .282. You did it in less than ideal physical condition. You didn’t triple after July 21 (yet tied for the league lead with 16). You tried to steal only once between August 31 and September 22 (but still finished sixth in the N.L. with 39). Your legs…your business partners…didn’t cooperate, but you overcame.

Which brings us to the presentation of this award, usually a pleasant distraction from the gaping maw of November and the fact that the Mets tend to come up empty where real awards are concerned. Like I said, I was looking forward to this little annual ritual of mine, but honestly, it’s been difficult getting to this point. I can’t think of what you’ve done without thinking of what your next move might be, and whether the Mets will cooperate with you any more amenably than your legs did in the second half of the season. And, to be perfectly frank, I can’t swear to just how much cooperation in the form of a lucrative multiyear contract is reasonable.

If money were no object…never mind that fantasy. Money is an object, one that likely eludes the grasp of the owners of this franchise (thanks to their most infamous business partner). I don’t know how New York City became Kansas City, but it apparently has. Nobody really believes you’ll be back to defend your batting title or run out more triples or give us something we can’t take our eyes off in 2012 and beyond. I don’t really believe it anymore, though I’d be happy to be wrong very soon.

If they don’t sign you, there will be moments, perhaps lots of them, when it will make all the sense in the world, but there will be at least as many moments — unquantifiable yet emotionally tangible — when it will be the worst idea in the world. The thought of the Mets without you is why this award presentation has been difficult for me to pull off. I can’t even bring myself to inject your name into this discussion. It’s like if I put it out there, forces will align to take it away from me.

I didn’t become a Mets fan to endure indeterminate stretches of being less happy than I’ve been previously. I’ve put up with those inevitable downturns on principle; or out of loyalty; or maybe just because I have too many clothes featuring too many Mets logos to start over. But these days I’m having a tough time reconciling my diehard tendencies with the notion of the Mets plodding along without you. I don’t look forward to rooting for a Mets team that doesn’t have you. It wasn’t much fun doing it when you were on the DL, but at least then we knew you were coming back.

By the way, you can decide to take less money to stay here. That is if you like it as much in these parts and in this dead-end organization as you’ve indicated you do. I wouldn’t necessarily do it if I were in your position. I don’t plan on becoming one of those creepy fans who writes to 29 strange teams declaring he’s a free agent, but except for habit and a lifetime of devotion, I can’t think of a good, rational reason to get squarely behind this team if you’re not on it.

You, on the other hand, were the best, most rational such reason for nine seasons, especially last season. That’s why I’m going through the formality of informing you that you’re Faith and Fear’s Most Valuable Met for 2011, from when “valuable” didn’t need to be assessed with a dollar sign.

We experienced it for ourselves day after day. If we don’t experience it anymore, I am going to miss it too much for words.

FAITH AND FEAR’S PREVIOUS MOST VALUABLE METS

2005: Pedro Martinez

2006: Carlos Beltran

2007: David Wright

2008: Johan Santana

2009: Pedro Feliciano

2010: R.A. Dickey

Still to come: The Nikon Camera Player of the Year for 2011.

For once the actual weather matched the spiritual forecast: A day after a thoroughly entertaining World Series that featured a Game 6 for the ages, the East Coast got walloped by a blast of snow, slush and mess. The mess is gone but it’s still cold, and on some essential level it will stay that way until mid-February or the beginning of March or Wednesday, April 4 or Thursday, April 5.

By the end of 2011 I was tired, and it wasn’t so bad to have the Mets go away for a little while. It had been a tiring conclusion to the season, and I think we all sense it will be a tiring off-season, full of dispiriting talk about Jose Reyes and payrolls and most likely a slow-dawning acceptance that the Mets’ salvation will need to either come from within or await a change in ownership. Yet during the league championship series I found myself wrestling with a different cross for us to bear.

I’m referring, of course, to the disfigurement of The Holy Books by horizontal baseball cards.

For the uninitiated: I have a trio of binders, long ago dubbed The Holy Books (THB) by Greg, that contain a baseball card for every Met on the all-time roster. They’re ordered by year, with a card for each player who made his Met debut: Tom Seaver is Class of ’67, Mike Piazza is Class of ’98, Jose Reyes is Class of ’03, etc. There are extra pages for the rosters of the two World Series winners, including managers, and one for the 1961 Expansion Draft. That includes the infamous Lee Walls, the only THB resident who neither played for nor managed the Mets.

If a player gets a Topps card as a Met, I use that unless it’s truly horrible — Topps was here a decade before there were Mets, so they get to be the card of record. (Though now there’s an exception to this rule. Read on.) No Mets card by Topps? Then I look for a Bisons card, a non-Topps Mets card, a Topps non-Mets card, or anything else. Topps had a baseball-card monopoly until 1981, and minor-league cards only really began in the mid-1970s, so cup-of-coffee guys from before ’75 or so are tough. Companies such as TCMA and Renata Galasso made odd sets with players from the 1960s — the likes of Jim Bethke, Bob Moorhead and Dave Eilers are immortalized through their efforts. And a card dealer named Larry Fritsch put out sets of “One Year Winners” spotlighting blink-and-you-missed-them guys such as Ted Schreiber and Joe Moock.

Then there are the legendary Lost Nine — guys who never got a regulation-sized, acceptable card from anybody. Brian Ostrosser got a 1975 minor-league card that looks like a bad Xerox. Leon Brown has a terrible 1975 minor-league card and an oversized Omaha Royals card put out as a promotional set by the police department. Tommy Moore got a 1990 Senior League card as a 42-year-old with the Bradenton Explorers. Then we have Al Schmelz, Francisco Estrada, Lute Barnes, Bob Rauch, Greg Harts and Rich Puig. They have no cards whatsoever — the oddball 1991 Nobody Beats the Wiz cards are too undersized to work. (I no longer want to talk about Schmelz, the White Whale of my Metly Ahabing.) The Lost Nine are represented in THB by DIY cards I Photoshopped and had printed on cardstock, because I am insane.

Not a horizontal in sight.

During the season I scrutinize new card sets in hopes of finding a) better cards of established Mets; b) cards to stockpile for prospects who might make the Show; and most importantly c) a card for each new big-league Met. At season’s end, the new guys get added to the binders, to be studied now and then until February. When it’s time to pull old Topps cards of the spring-training invitees and start the cycle again.

Now, about those horizontals. Periodically card companies get cute and shake things up with a horizontal card to lend their sets a certain variety. I have always hated these and replaced them as quickly as possible. Yet sometimes no replacement emerges, and a horizontal sneaks into THB.

This started to bug me this year, when Topps gave Justin Turner a much-deserved update card and it turned out to be a horizontal. Turner already had a normal Mets card from Upper Deck, but I was still annoyed — and before I could stop myself I’d launched a horizontal witch hunt. Crummy horizontals for Robert Person and Carlos Baerga were simple to ditch in favor of vertical Mets cards; ditto for Topps non-Mets horizontals of Rich Rodriguez and Jim Tatum. More problematic were Pat Mahomes, Mike Remlinger, Tony Phillips, Manny Alexander and Rodney McCray, all of whom got horizontals for their lone Mets cards. On the JV front, Chris Carter and the immortal Andy Green have horizontal Buffalo Bison cards.

Out with all of them, I decided. Better Manny Alexander right side up in an Orioles uniform than sideways looking like he’s about to make an error while wearing a Mets ice-cream hat. It took me some web searching and a few PayPal transactions, but a week later the Mets horizontals were reduced to zero, and all was briefly better about the world. Except, perhaps, for having to know that you actually are the kind of person who buys three Rich Rodriguez cards and then agonizes over which one is the best.

Anyway, previous annals of the THB roll calls are here, here, here, here, here and here. And now welcome to the first class of the Alderson regime. Are they heralds of a better era, or standard bearers for the new austerity? Ask us in a few years.

Miguel Batista: A wily veteran with a largely improvised repertoire and an professorial bent, Batista is a published author whose oeuvre includes poetry, philosophy and thrillers. Unfortunately, baseball only permits one niche per team/fanbase for “intellectual player whose reading material doesn’t prominently feature pictures of naked women,” and R.A. Dickey has that slot filled. So we pretty much ignored Batista’s off-field interests. The man pitched a two-hitter on the final day of the season, but that was the day Jose Reyes won the batting title and Terry Collins flubbed his likely Mets farewell. So we pretty much ignored Batista’s superb on-field effort, too. Unfair, but sometimes life’s like that. Batista arrives in THB with a 2008 Topps card in which he is contemplative and a Mariner.

Mike Baxter: Baxter hails from not too far east of Citi Field, and attracted a big cheering section for his Mets debut. His first at-bat was a double, albeit one given a little help from Kyle Blanks’s incompetent outfield play, and sent his friends and family into near-Citi orbit. It’s a small memory from 2011, but a nice one — one that will linger even if Baxter does not. Baxter gets an oddly martial 2009 San Antonio Missions card.

Pedro Beato: Another local boy, Beato pitched well enough at times to justify his Rule 5 status but poorly enough at other times to remind you that he’d have been sent down if not for that status. Worth it as a medium-term investment, and deserves a place in our hearts for telling reporters he hated the Yankees instead of blathering about tradition or pinstripes or the quiet leadership of Derek Jeter. Series 2 Mets card.

Blaine Boyer: Former Brave got axed early in the season after a couple of not good outings. Being a journeyman middle reliever is like being a competitive skater, only you start out with a broken shoelace, indifferent judges and nobody particularly caring that the ice is thin and/or missing in spots all over the rink. Stuck, probably forever, with a 2001 Bowman card.

Taylor Buchholz: Buchholz went on the DL at the end of May with shoulder fatigue, but stayed there because he was battling depression. Not so long ago, the Mets’ reaction to Ryan Church sustaining a concussion was basically to tell him to man up; this year, faced with something that might have seemed more ephemeral, they did far better. Kudos to the Mets for understanding that depression is real and nothing to minimize or mock, and kudos to Buchholz for being forthright about what he was facing. In some small way, that will help people trying to deal with depression know they’re not alone and don’t need to feel ashamed, just as it will encourage people who still dismiss depression as weakness or malingering to think again. Here’s hoping Buchholz gets better; in one sense, the Mets already have. If you want a lighter note, well, Buchholz gets a 2009 Topps card in which he’s apparently about to get mugged by a mascot.

Tim Byrdak: Some of Sandy Alderson’s moves worked and some didn’t. This was one of the ones that did. Byrdak proved more than capable stepping into Pedro Feliciano’s role, earning himself a one-year extension, and showed signs of a personality by videobombing reporters’ stand-ups to amuse himself. 2009 Upper Deck card in which he’s an Astro pitching in front of a sea of empty seats.

Chis Capuano: One of Alderson’s two rolls of the post-injury dice at the back of the rotation, Capuano exceeded expectations, giving the Mets a mix of mostly serviceable starts. Granted, “serviceable” isn’t a particularly exuberant accolade. Lots of Capuano’s starts followed a predictable pattern: He’d look good early, then get nicked for an unlucky run or two, then crash and burn. In late August, though, he faced one over the minimum while fanning 13 Braves. Using the Bill James Game Score metric, it was the best pitching performance in the big leagues in 2011, the best Mets performance since David Cone eviscerated the Phillies at the end of 1991 and the equal of Tom Seaver in the Jimmy Qualls Game. (You probably won’t guess who’s No. 1 in club history, though he was mentioned in a recent Happy Recap.) Still, one game does not a season make. Capuano did better than might have been expected, but the idea of asking him for more in 2012 makes me cringe. Series 2 Mets card.

D.J. Carrasco: Early in the year I decided I liked D.J. Carrasco. He wore his socks high and his utilitarian, vaguely tragic face reminded me of Jesse Orosco’s. Plus he had the guts of a burglar, as I declared after he escaped one encounter with the Marlins. Subsequent outcomes suggested Carrasco in fact had the guts of a burglar who kept wearing highlighter yellow and breaking into houses while people were there. Oh, and he’s signed for another year. A middle reliever having a bad campaign isn’t the end of the world, but ouch. Carrasco got a 2011 Bisons card, which he thoroughly earned.

Brad Emaus: Named Opening Day second baseman after a frustrating spring training in which he was essentially the tallest midget, Emaus showed so little with bat or glove that Alderson sent him packing after just 14 games. It was a weirdly hasty execution, but the Mets came out OK: Daniel Murphy, Justin Turner and Ruben Tejada all played more than capably at second. A position where the Mets had next to nothing for the last several years now has a logjam of players, yet more proof that we’ll never figure out baseball. And this is probably the first time you’ve thought of Brad Emaus since May. Got a 2011 Topps Series 2 card despite being Rockies property by then.

Scott Hairston: If Emaus demonstrated impatience can be a virtue, Hairston served the more traditional role of demonstrating the opposite. He started abysmally, but finished the year as a useful bench guy and genuine pinch-hitting threat. Will probably move on for 2012, but did his job. 2011 Topps Update card.

Willie Harris: Deprived the Mets of approximately 462 late-inning comebacks while playing for the Braves and Nationals, making the addition of his glove for 2011 a no-brainer. Unaccountably, Harris then started the year showing little flair on defense, leading to an epidemic of moaning about how these things always happen to us. (But, seriously … it’s weird, isn’t it?) As with Hairston, Harris hung in there to have a pretty good second half. Could return and we’d probably welcome him back. 2011 Topps Update card.

Daniel Herrera: The principal PTBNL in K-Rod’s trade to Milwaukee, Herrera was about four feet tall, had a Muppetesque mop of hair and pulled his cap down so low that it was a week before you could verify he had eyes. And he didn’t want to be called Danny. All that was endearing; so was the fact that he pitched pretty effectively, admittedly in garbage-time conditions. 2010 Topps Heritage card on which he’s a Cincinnati Red.

Chin-Lung Hu: His early billing as a good-glove no-bat shortstop proved half-right. Some Topps Dodgers special-issue card I got God knows where.

Mike O’Connor: Former National qualified as a warm body, didn’t merit a September call-up, and filed for free agency. Will possibly catch on somewhere and elicit an “Oh yeah, I forgot about that guy…” sometime next summer. 2011 Bisons card.

Valentino Pascucci: Last seen in the final Expos game, Pascucci earned a trip back to the big leagues after being a folk hero for stats-minded fans in recent years at Buffalo. Resembled Andre the Giant’s character in The Princess Bride, with the caveat that Fezzik seemed faster. Struck a decisive blow in a late-September game in which it looked like R.A. Dickey would lose a 1-0 non-no-hitter to Cole Hamels. Fezzik’s no-doubter of a blast into the left-field seats put an end to that talk; in the replay you can see me standing and whooping in the background while my kid races (in vain) for the HR ball. Those are reasons enough to remember Big Papa fondly in the Fry house. Trivia: Was first Met to wear No. 15 after Carlos Beltran. I still think the number was reissued with shameful speed, but that’s not Pascucci’s fault. 2011 Bisons card.

Ronny Paulino: Backup catcher. Won some plaudits for keeping Mike Pelfrey semi-focused at times. Fainter praise would actually be invisible. Sorry, I really was trying, but hey, he was the backup catcher. The backup catcher is generally a wise old veteran who briefly earns raves for straightening out some spooked-horse starter, flirts with taking the starter’s job, then proves there’s a reason he’s a backup catcher and is soon replaced. Where have you gone, Todd Pratt? 2011 Topps Update card.

Jason Pridie: Decent fourth-outfielder type, capable enough as a bench player and defensive replacement. Stunned everybody with a shot most of the way up the Pepsi Porch one night in the dregs of an otherwise anonymous game. I wonder if he’ll ever do that again, or if he just hit it perfectly that one time. Either way, I bet it was fun and at odd moments for the rest of his life Pridie will remember that one and smile. 2011 Topps Update card.

Josh Satin: No, not Josh Stinson. Might have generated more excitement if he weren’t basically Daniel Murphy, a promising hitter with no position. Emily thought he desperately needed a significant other who’d convince him of the wisdom of trimming his eyebrows. His THB card is some weird Topps issue proudly noting that he’s a Single-A All-Star.

Chris Schwinden: Watching this lumpy, sweaty pitcher with awkward mechanics and indifferent stuff, it was all I could do to keep from screaming, “ISN’T IT OBVIOUS THIS GUY IS NOT A MAJOR-LEAGUER?!!!” There are so many reasons I should shut up, including the fact that I don’t look that good even by the low standards of guys who type all day and the fact that the last player I had this kind of caveman reaction to was Heath Bell. If Chris Schwinden would like to make me look stupid for the next decade, he’s welcome to do so. 2011 Bisons card.

Josh Stinson: No, not Josh Satin. Pitched pretty well before the return to the statistical mean knocked him for a loop. Given his recent arrival, both on Earth and in the big leagues, the jury should remain out for a couple of years. 2011 Bisons card.

Dale Thayer: Porny mustache deserves some kind of praise. And so: I praise your porny mustache, Dale Thayer. 2011 Bisons card.

Chris Young: Gigantic, affable Princeton grad thrived in the early going, spinning terrific games against the Pirates and Nats before holding the Phillies at bay for seven shut-out innings in Citizens Bank Park on May 1, leading to Kevin Burkhardt staring at Young’s clavicle while the pitcher smiled pleasantly and spoke into a mike above Burkhardt’s head. Unfortunately, it was Young’s last start of the year — shoulder woes wiped out the rest, and possibly his career. 2011 Topps Series 2 card.