This talk of Jenrry Mejia starting the season as the setup man for K-Rod is ridiculous. If the season starts today, Mejia’s my closer.

Oh, if talent only made it so.

It won’t happen that way, but Jenrry is looking inevitable. It will take a bad case of evitablity — or yet another wave of Prevention & Recovery — to keep him off this team, assuming the way Mejia’s pitches move isn’t a mirage. Only an OutKast among Mets wouldn’t say, “I like the way they move.”

I sure hope I’m not seeing Julio Machado or Josias Manzanillo or Ju-ever  out there when I look at Jenrry Mejia. I penciled those fellows in as oughta-be closers in their day based on larger samples. Alas, their day never really came. Jenrry Mejia Day is coming, though, and April 5 is as good a date as any to hold it.

Frankie Rodriguez needs to work the pink out of his eye. Let him set up Mejia like he set up Troy Percival long ago, back when K-Rod was unhittable (back when K-Rod was Jen-Mej). Let Parnell work the seventh. Let Sean Green park cars.

Welcome to Flashback Friday: Take Me Out to 34 Ballparks, a celebration, critique and countdown of every major league ballpark one baseball fan has been fortunate enough to visit in a lifetime of going to ballgames.

BALLPARK: Jack Murphy Stadium
LATER KNOWN AS: Qualcomm Stadium
HOME TEAM: San Diego Padres
VISITS: 1
VISITED: June 20, 1996
CHRONOLOGY: 16th of 34
RANKING: 33rd of 34

I think it would be pleasant to go to a public park, find something to eat, watch some guys play ball and maybe wander around a bit. It was pleasant, actually. Stephanie and I did that at Jack Murphy Stadium.

Pleasant beats unpleasant every time. But pleasant’s not the same thing as big league, and there was something about seeing a Padres game in their original home that felt less than major. It wasn’t bad — pleasant can’t be bad — but it didn’t fill me with anything approaching awe.

Did I mention the pleasant factor was off the charts?

In my travels, I’ve had my expectations unmet and I’ve had my expectations exceeded. At the Murph (which it was still called in 1996, thankfully), I had few expectations. I’d had only one strong image of the place from all those years of staying up late to watch the Mets on the unglamorous stop of their West Coast road trips. It was the night in 1986 when Kevin McReynolds, then a Padre, was batting and he fouled a ball straight back into a square cutout in the backstop. I think it was there for a camera, but it appeared empty, much like the Murph all those late nights. Channel 9 played the disappearing foul over and over again to much McCarver and Zabriskie laughter. McReynolds remained stoic, hinting at the vibrant personality he’d bring to the Mets a year later.

Jack Murphy Stadium was that black, square-shaped hole to me. A mystery, and not one on which I’d expended much concentration as soon as the Mets would leave town. When I formed a squishy goal of someday seeing every major league ballpark, I wondered what on earth I’d be doing in San Diego to get Jack Murphy taken care of. It would have to be part of something bigger.

And it was. The previous December, as an all-encompassing birthday/holiday present to Stephanie and me, my sister and brother-in-law thoughtfully favored us with some of their frequent-flier miles and use of their Los Angeles-area apartment (a.k.a. their de facto West Coast office). They even threw in a few gift certificates to some local restaurants. Truly they are sweethearts that way. Natch, as non-fans, they’d been camping out in Southern California a few times a year for several years by then, and it’s fair to say they never particularly noticed there were three baseball teams operating in the general vicinity.

For us, that was the attraction. It never even occurred to them that was the only reason we graciously accepted their generous gesture. I mean, really, is there something else to do in Southern California?

I studied schedules, found a week when the Angels, the Padres and Dodgers would all be home and put in for vacation time. We flew out in the middle of June for the only reason I can think of spending more than a couple of days anywhere: to visit three ballparks.

San Diego was the middle of the itinerary, a Thursday afternoon against the Cubs. We started out from L.A. in the morning, in unusually fine driving fettle. It looked a little dreary on the way down. Rain in San Diego? Unpossible, as Ralph Wiggum would affirm. That was the notorious Marine Layer we were facing. Ralph Kiner — who is no Ralph Wiggum — informed us that was a staple of San Diego existence, and that it burns off by noon.

Ralph Kiner, former GM of the old Pacific Coast League Padres, was absolutely right. It was sunny and warm in Mission Valley. The stadium was kind of tucked away, but we found it with little ordeal. Security said I couldn’t keep my bottle of water, an accessory I’d begun to carry as a matter of course. I grumbled but dutifully tossed it. Concessions said they couldn’t rustle up a program. I grumbled some more, as I always bought a program in a new ballpark. There were a couple of glitches, but we were in the place with the square hole.

Per usual, I was wearing my Mets cap, which drew the attention of an usher who said something mildly disparaging but harmless, like “Mets? Why?” I explained we were New Yorkers on a baseball tour, that we had been in Anaheim the day before. “It would be nice if the Cowboy could win one of these years,” the usher volunteered. Nice of him to worry about Gene Autry, I thought. Nothing, he said, was going well for the Padres. Indeed, San Diego had gotten off to a fast start in 1996, but losing had set in: the Pads had lost 15 of its last 17 as a 6½-game lead in the West had become fourth place, two games out. Same old Padres.

But it was all new to us. I feigned concern to the usher and we went about our usual stance of rooting for the home team as long as it had no adverse impact on the Mets.

There was some color to the Padres now, and it wasn’t the drab brown that had been their trademark in the McReynolds days. They had a guy walking around dressed as a Friar, and we cheered his appearance. A couple more guys wore skinhead wigs to approximate Wally Joyner’s pate. Wally World had taken his act down the coast in ‘96 and was batting .321 before his recent injury (which coincided with the 2-15 skid). We cheered for them, too. We got behind Tony Gwynn (.326 at the start of play) and Rickey Henderson (16 steals in his first year as a National Leaguer) and Chris Gomez (someone I kind of adopted a few years earlier in Toronto, but I’ll save that for the SkyDome entry). We were temp Padre fans.

It was all good fun. After a while, though, it just fell…flat. You know, like watching Kevin McReynolds for too long. Palm Trees had recently been potted over the outfield fence, which was the one architectural distinction to the venue. After a while, you stared at the palm trees and they seemed out of place at a baseball game. That’s when it began to feel like a public park. That’s when we decided to get up and seek out a snack bar.

I’d prepared for this trip as I usually did, with a ballpark guide of some sort. The one I had in 1996 said you’ve gotta try the fist tacos at Jack Murphy Stadium, they’re a local specialty. I try to do the When In Rome things, so off we went in search of fish tacos.

To reel in fish tacos, you went to a special stand, Rubio’s. You could buy ‘em and bring ‘em back to your seats, but there was a patio full of tables and chairs at which you could enjoy ‘em. I’d read about that in the guide book as well. It was rather unorthodox to be at a baseball game and sit somewhere that wasn’t facing the field — the tables and chairs offered a view of the parking lot, with monitors for game action — but we tried it. I didn’t care for not watching the game. And I didn’t really like fish tacos.

Back at our seats, I noticed two more things I’d never before seen at a ballgame. One was a pitch count on the scoreboard. Very big letters and numbers telling us just how many balls and strikes Tim Worrell, Jaime Navarro and the relievers who succeeded them had thrown. At first I was mesmerized. Then I was distracted. I could live without knowing pitch counts.

The other thing was the out-of-town scoreboard which, during the latter stages of the game, began posting notes about the Mets’ game in Cincinnati. The hell with the Padres and Cubs. What were the Mets doing? It wasn’t the first time I eyed an out-of-town scoreboard to keep up with the Mets, but it was the first time I had done so at three time zones’ remove. I was so incredibly confused. The Mets are playing a night game, but it’s bright and sunny and the middle of the afternoon here in San Diego. It’s 4 o’clock? How can that be, when my internal alarm is set to Met Standard? And why won’t they tell me anything beyond the fact that Bobby Jones is facing Dave Burba?

My attention wandered to the banks of the Ohio River, but we still rooted for the Padres, but with less and less conviction. Joynerless and punchless, the locals didn’t score until the eighth, pulling to 3-2 on an eighth-inning two-run blast by pinch-hitter Marc Newfield. The Friar and the Joyners and we applauded heartily. Gwynn led off the bottom of the ninth with a single, stirring things further, but the Cubs brought in that crazy Turk Wendell and he retired the final three Padres. Chicago held on 3-2. San Diego had lost 16 of 18.

We filed out, counterintuitively bought a program by the exit, got in our rental car, checked into the nearby Holiday Inn, grabbed some Chinese Food at the strip mall next door and sprung for The Birdcage on hotel pay-per-view. Next day, we visited the world-famous San Diego Zoo and, in the immortal words of Lobo, motored stately into big L.A.

It was all very pleasant. It was Jack Murphy Stadium.

Jose Reyes is not running. He’s not swinging. He’s not fielding or throwing. He’s not functioning as a baseball player. We understand today he’s resting. With any luck, he’s healing.

But he’s a Met, so I wouldn’t go that far.

Reyes’s thyroid condition has sidelined him for a truly Metsian prognosis of two to eight weeks. Nobody is sidelined from two to eight weeks. Nobody is projected as out from doing anything — not just playing — within a range of 14 days to 56 days. What this means, I’m going to guess, is nobody really knows what exactly is wrong with Jose Reyes or, more pertinently, what it will take to get him back to being a fulltime Met.

Right now, he’s a ghost, hovering over this organization. He and Carlos Beltran, both still on the roster, neither by any means active, each allegedly en route at some point. When 2009 became 2010, we were told this team would be better than the team before it because we’d have, once again, two of our three indispensable men in the lineup every day. “Don’t count on it,” the little Met voice in my head said. “Don’t necessarily count on guys who played 81 games and 36 games the season before.” I wasn’t ready to count on anybody who missed significant time due to injury, including Santana, Niese, Nieve, whoever. In Beltran’s case, it was the knee then, it’s the knee now. In Reyes’s case, nobody could have seen the thyroid coming. We were worried about hamstrings. The hammies are supposedly fine. The thyroid?

The thyroid?

My mother had a thyroid condition. I don’t think it was overactive; quite the opposite, actually. Reyes is a damn sight more athletic than most people’s moms (and dads). Jose Reyes is as athletic a Met as we’ve ever seen. We look forward to seeing him again, on the run, turning the DP, lashing one into the gap that was theoretically created for him. We look forward to him being as healthy a human being as he can be and, because we’re Mets fans, we’d like that to translate into a permanent return that begins to shape up 14 days from now rather than 56…or never.

In the meantime, I looked at the early innings of today’s exhibition game. Cora was at short, just like a lot of last year. Pagan was in the outifield, just like a lot of last year. Castillo…to be fair, he’s supposed to be at second this year, but he reminded me of 2009, too. It was raining and it was 2009 on SNY. Then the rain got to be too much and they put a tarp on the field and the 1963 Yearbook on the air. It cheered me up. That team won 51 games and was a signpost of progress relative to 1962. Then the rain ended, and 2010 is back on the screen, and it’s just minor league scrubs per Spring Training usual, yet I can’t escape the sense that 2009 is in the clubhouse, getting ready for Opening Day.

It’s a lot closer than Jose Reyes is right now.

What are you doing Sunday, March 21 and Saturday, March 27? You ought to be getting to better know New York’s baseball heritage. And you can, thanks to our friend historian Peter Laskowich starting up his truly marvelous tours once more.

As we’ve mentioned on several occasions, Peter will bring you directly into the DNA of New York with intertwined journeys into its baseball and into its history. You show up, you take a walk, you take a train — and you end up going places you didn’t know exist.

It’s well worth the time (a few hours that fly by) and the investment (25 bucks — a fair price in general and a bargain by Citi Field standards) to learn where we came from as New York baseball fans and Mets fans.

Peter is an engaging educator and excellent companion (and a Mets fan from the New Breed days). “Tour guide” does not do him justice. He will take you on a tour all right, but it goes beyond “…and on your right, you see a bridge.”

You will see a bridge. And you will see where it leads. And you will follow the trails beyond that. You will understand as you never have before why things are where they are and how they are. You’ll get a good bit of why answered as well.

You’re a Mets fan. You read Faith and Fear. I know you’re ball-curious. Feed that curiosity. Get together with Peter Laskowich over the course of a couple of weekends — the 21st in Brooklyn, the 27th in Manhattan. You’ll be glad you did.

Visit New York Dynamic for more information.

The 2010 Citi Field promotional date that has me most excited? It’s gotta be the retiring of 76 and 78.

Sure, we’ll be disappointed to learn that Ike Davis and Jenrry Mejia have bowed to the world-wide clamor and agreed to curtail their electrifying rookie seasons and report for immediate induction to Cooperstown, but we’ve known since about mid-May that they already belonged to the ages, and we were merely borrowing them for the briefest of times.

Ike Davis is 11 for 21 with two very long home runs and an increasingly Paul Bunyanesque legend. (I saw him with the Cyclones a couple of years back and he looked huge and immobile. I’m no scout.) Jenrry Mejia has thrown 33 Grapefruit League pitches and watched 27 of them get recorded as strikes. Small sample size? Pssht. Take it somewhere else, Bill James. You can stack our young heroes’ ages one atop the other and not get one El Duque? Age and experience hasn’t gotten us anywhere except the DL. We’re ready for a summer of ESPN riffs on Mets fans declaring I LIKE IKE and copy editors and play-by-play guys driven to drink by the first name of a pitcher who’s not old enough to join them. Besides, if we weren’t talking about Ike and Jenrry we’d be exchanging hosannas about a suddenly resurgent Fernando Martinez or the supernatural Chris Carter, he of the two home runs in one inning. Or how about that Hisanori Takahashi, who may not be young but is Japanese, which has been the only faster ticket to Met disaster for a decade or so.

You’d think those who live by small sample size would also die by small sample size, but the happy hypocrisy of spring training doesn’t abide such logic. A good couple of days is enough to vault a prospect to “promising,” “eye-opening” or “major-league ready,” but a veteran hitting a bump or two or four is inevitably focusing on his basics, knows to take it slow, or will be ready when the bell rings. Witness Johan Santana today — his pitches were up, he got cuffed around, and everything’s fine.

I’m just trying to enjoy it. It’s what March is for, ideally: kids with quick bats and lightning arms, second- and third-year guys who’ve turned corners, veterans with things to prove, and all the other gleeful cliches of the Grapefruit League. I like my glasses when they’re not just half-full but the products of a pause in pouring. Besides, like we want to talk about pink eye or wrecked shoulders or overenthusiastic thyroids, or the fact that it’s a good stretch when Oliver Perez spreads 27 strikes over 33 batters, or anything that happened in 2009.

It’s March, man. Don’t be a bringdown. That’s what April’s for.

Remember: Amazin’ Tuesdays will return on March 23 at 7 p.m., at Two Boots. Details here.

Mark your calendars, your Blackberries and your whatever ya got for March 23 at 7 PM and the return of AMAZIN’ TUESDAYS to Two Boots Tavern, the Lower East Side’s foremost bastion of Metsdom.

The Mets-themed reading and venting series that was infinitely more successful in 2009 than the team on which it focused makes its 2010 debut just as Spring Training will be growing interminable and the wait for Opening Day will be passing intolerable. We — that’s Jon Springer of Mets By The Numbers and I — are pleased to reignite our regular Metsfests by welcoming two distinctly Metsian voices to the Two Boots stage: the Mets Poet, Frank Messina, author of Full Count; and Edward Hoyt, a major contributor to the must-have 1969 tribute volume, The Miracle Has Landed. Both are gifted Met writers and sincere Met thinkers. You’ll enjoy hearing from them both.

In addition to bringing a Met baseball card and having Two Boots proprietor Phil Hartman buy you a beer, you will have the opportunity to purchase a copy of the brand new paperback edition of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, signed by the author (me again), for 10 bucks. All proceeds from FAFIF sales at Two Boots on March 23 will go to Sharon Chapman’s marathon fundraising efforts on behalf of the Tug McGraw Foundation and its fight against brain cancer — more about which you can learn here. The paperback edition includes an epilogue on the first season at Citi Field, in case you were wondering if it’s the same exact book you already read.

(I’m not 100% sure right now how many copies I’ll have on hand, but you can contribute to Sharon’s and Tug’s cause that night and I’ll be sure to mail you out a book, inscribed any way you like, shortly thereafter.)

Great pizza, fine beverages and an evening of Mets talk while they’re still 0-0. Who can ask for anything more? We look forward to seeing you in two weeks.

Two Boots Tavern is at 384 Grand St., between Norfolk and Suffolk. You can take the F to Delancey; the J, M or Z to Essex; or the B or D to Grand. Phone: 212/228-8685.

The Academy would like to pause for a moment to remember those Mets who have left us in the past year…

Casey Fossum, 2009
Who says the Mets don’t honor their heritage? Tuesday night they went to St. Louis, where they played their first National League game just over 47 years ago, and paid homage to the 1962 Mets by dropping a game below .500 and appearing en route to 40-120. [...] A feller named Casey was right in the middle of it…looking approximately 71 years old.
—April 22, 2009

Emil Brown, 2009
When you think back over the first third of this season and the way Mets have regularly fallen down in the outfield, stepped gingerly around third base and not slid into home, the only surprising part of Luis Castillo going this-a-way and Emil Brown going that-a-way in their “morning, Sam…morning Ralph” homage is that something like it hadn’t happened sooner…and perhaps that Daniel Murphy wasn’t involved.
—June 7, 2009

Lance Broadway, 2009
By entering in the sixth and pitching three meaningless and not particularly effective innings, Lance Broadway became the 51st different player to play for the New York Mets in 2009. This means we’re three players away from tying the record for most Mets in one season. For that you can thank whatever voodoo takes down three different shortstops, 60% of a rotation and…well, mostly everybody.
—August 30, 2009

Brandon Knight, 2008
I saw a pitcher I’d never heard of until like a week ago throw the kind of first inning generally reserved for Hall of Famers when their teams need them most: a horrible one. But Brandon Knight, unlike he who shall not be named, pulled himself together after throwing a number of pitches (39) higher than the number on his uniform (28).
—July 27, 2008

Jon Switzer, 2009
Jon Switzer made an instantly persuasive case that he is not the answer to the search for that other lefty in the pen.
—June 12, 2009

Angel Berroa, 2009
“Fellas, forget it. You can’t shut down an Angel Berroa in clutch situations.”
—July 30, 2009

Darren O’Day, 2009
Darren O’Day looked stunned; I was not. No, I was numb, waiting with the dull, sour expectation I imagine (though this is unconfirmable) is shared by veteran skydivers when the reserve chute doesn’t open either.
—April 10, 2009

Ken Takahashi, 2009
Ken Takahashi welcom[ed] himself to the big leagues with a custom-made 1-2-6 DP (FYI, Jerry Manuel thinks his name is Takahishi).
—May 2, 2009

Cory Sullivan, 2009
For posterity: Mike Pelfrey was bad. Cory Sullivan was briefly good. Mets lost in Florida. None of this matters.
—August 27, 2009

Tony Armas, 2008
Pitched OK in winning his first start against the Cardinals, threw a scoreless inning against the Phillies, then got bombed in the 10-9 win the Mets recorded against the Phils in homage to Bob Murphy’s “They win the damn thing” call. And that was his year. U&H card, God knows why.
—November 22, 2008

Wilson Valdez, 2009
Wilson Valdez seeks a new assignment, having been designated for exactly that.
—June 22, 2009

Robinson Cancel, 2008-2009
Most of our 2008 grace notes have been delivered by the likes of Nelson Figueroa and Nick Evans and Fernando Tatis. Why shouldn’t Robinson Cancel join the parade of Mets who will never adorn the cover of the pocket schedule but can at least claim to have attached themselves to one of its squares? Or in Robinson Cancel’s case, the unscheduled half of one.
—June 16, 2008

Ramon Martinez, 2008-2009
[T]he steady veteran hand of Ramon Martinez plugged the hole and wisely, calmly threw to first for the ballgame, while callow youths Jose Coronado, Ruben Tejada and Jonathan Malo each gained valuable experience on the farm.
—May 24, 2009

Jeremy Reed, 2009
Except the first baseman is a leftfielder whose literal lack of a glove has been a running storyline for days and he’s not terribly accustomed to his surroundings. Jeremy Reed makes like it’s stoopball except without a stoop. He throws the Spaldeen as hard as he can, well out of Ramon Castro’s range, Loretta scores, the night and the morning are over, the misery lingers. Whoa. What a tragicomic event.
—May 19, 2009

J.J. Putz, 2009
Intimidating AC/DC fanfare notwithstanding, J.J. Putz failed to leave the Marlins thunderstruck.
—April 29, 2009

Tim Redding, 2009
Could Tim Redding throw the Mets’ first no-hitter? No, I soon found out…
—September 20, 2009

Argenis Reyes, 2008-09
But here’s the thing you’ve got to know: Argenis Reyes’s team won the first ten games in which he played. I can find no evidence of any other Met in 48 seasons being able to say the same thing. I looked.
—January 12, 2010

Liván Hernandez, 2009
First, you gotta start with how it ended, which was with Liván Hernandez, the human petrol pump, dispensing every last pitch the Mets’ tank would require. How many? I heard 127. Did it matter? Not really. Honestly, what does Liván Hernandez have to do but pitch? Everybody else’s arm is always being saved for a next start. Liván’s not about conservation. Liván’s about mileage.
—May 27, 2009

Duaner Sanchez, 2006; 2008
[W]hat the fudge is up with Duaner Sanchez? Last year we discovered Duaner, Duaner discovered Queens and all was good with the world until Cecil Wiggins discovered his car keys. We enter these seasons taking several things for granted based on widely held assumptions. One of them was that Sanchez overcame the car wreck, the surgery, the winter and now he’d be ready for Opening Day. It appears very much that he won’t be. And that’s cool, because who the hell are we to tell a guy who’s been through that kind of trauma to get his body in gear exactly when we want it? But Duaner, you can get to camp on time every morning. That’s big with managers and coaches.
—March 10, 2007

Brian Stokes, 2008-2009
Brian Stokes [was recognized as] August Pitcher of the Month — and ponder, if you will, what kind of month rates as its flagship pitcher Brian Stokes…
—September 23, 2009

Gary Sheffield, 2009
Maybe Gary Sheffield isn’t a 2009 Met come the middle of 2009. Maybe. But on April 17, he was. His 500th homer as a Met in black felt fair. Maybe he should have been here all along. Maybe he and Doc should have played together as Mets; maybe, in the mythology we fans like to construct for our would-be heroes, they would have kept each other on their respective straights and narrows.
—April 18, 2009

Ryan Church, 2008-2009
Will Ryan Church be the Mets’ regular starting rightfielder in 2009? Jerry Manuel says yes. Recent and even distant history say absolutely not. He probably won’t even be here come 2010. Why so fatalistic where Churchy is concerned? Because after carefully studying the relevant pages of baseball-reference, I have concluded there is no such thing as a regular starting rightfielder on the New York Mets.
—February 24, 2009

Brian Schneider, 2008-2009
By dialing up his first dinger, BriSchnei killed my private statistical notation in which every individual Met’s home run total could be expressed as Schneider Plus, as in, “That was Gary Sheffield’s eighth home run of the year, or Schneider Plus Eight.” Oh well, I imagine I’ll find something else to carp about with him.
—June 20, 2009

Marlon Anderson, 2005; 2007-2009
Yet there’s the ball, not being picked up. And there’s Marlon, running hard every gosh darn step of the way. He easily has a triple. Easily. If he can get to third, he’ll be there with one out…and right, he better keep going. No way a Met brings a runner home from third. I sure hope Manny Acta is thinking the same thing. He is! Marlon has this look on his face that says “Really? Well, if you insist.” And his unremarkable body keeps chugging. Finley has the ball. He hits the cutoff man. Marlon’s run 340 feet…350 feet…357…358…he slides…another Molina awaits. Here’s the throw, there’s the play at the plate…Holy cow, I think he’s gonna make it!
—June 12, 2005

Ramon Castro, 2005-2009
Ramon Castro’s blast off Ugueth Urbina will surely stand the test of time as a touchstone in Mets history. It was a game-, season- and life-altering event. Unless we lose the next two.
—August 31, 2005

Billy Wagner, 2006-2009
In the top of the ninth, I realized the season could very well be over in a matter of seconds — and no wonder. We suck! We can’t get anybody out! Why didn’t we score more runs? Why did we sign this guy for…how many MORE years are we STUCK with him? COME ON BILLY!!! I never stood eight innings at Shea Stadium only to end the ninth slumped in my seat as a Met win was secured. I couldn’t stand and I couldn’t cheer. After spending the preceding 24 hours doing my Metsian best to Believe, I couldn’t believe we actually won.
—October 19, 2006

Carlos Delgado, 2006-2009
Amid the hand slaps, fist knocks and hip bumps the victorious first place Mets exchanged with one another after the final out of this afternoon’s game, there was an embrace. David Wright hugged Carlos Delgado. David was hugging Carlos for all of us. There isn’t a Mets fan I know of who doesn’t owe Delgado a hug. Hindsight being what it is, the time for the hug was a couple of months ago when Delgado was dragging and taking the team, we were sure, down with him. We’re not that pure of heart. We are, bottom line, results-oriented. We are often not as smart as we think we are. We saw a washed-up ex-power hitter who couldn’t or wouldn’t move around first and we were ready to trade him, release him, place him in the blue and orange bin that goes by the curb. We sure like him now.
—July 24, 2008

Next week the clocks spring ahead. Silly clocks — we’re already there. We’re running on Jenrry Mejia Daylight Savings Time. Mejia was so lights out in his exhibition debut Friday that the umps called the game on account of darkness.

This is a great time to be a Mets fan if you ignore thyroids, pink eyes and god knows what else is being prevented or recovered from. Veterans who are out have time to come back. Rookies who aren’t ready look pretty darn good right now. Guys who we may never hear of again — Mike Hessman is batting every time I turn around — are helping to rack up the runs.

It’s the hour of Mejia, the day of Hessman, the weeks of Ike Davis and Kirk Nieuwenhis and Jason Pridie and Mike Cervenak and old man Fernando Martinez, 21 years old and slugging his way across the comeback trail. It would be surprising if any of them is lining up for an Opening Day apple. A few will probably see us later in the season or in their careers. Some will be “Mike Hessman…why does that name sound familiar? Was he in Spring Training with us one year?”

In one sense, that’s all the season preview I need on March 6. It’s fun to contemplate these names, bookmarking some for later, knowing we’ll forget a few when they don’t stick around. The only thing anybody is able to tell me for sure about the 2010 Mets is that they’ll be 0-0 on April 5. I don’t know how much I derive from these much enjoyed spring broadcasts is going to enhance my understanding or appreciation of a bunch of games that don’t count. But I am enjoying them.

In another sense, I am mainlining anticipation. I need to be immersed in who’s on these Mets, who will be on these Mets, who has been on these Mets. I need to keep getting stoked. That’s why I read blogs. That’s why I write blogs. That’s why I’m excited about two excellent products that I think you’ll enjoy as well.

First, there’s the Maple Street Press Mets Annual, full of great perspectives on everything Met. It’s got this year, it’s got the years to come, it’s got — because it has to — last year and it’s got the years from before that bring us our present and future. This is the third year MSP has published Mets Annual, and it keeps getting better. You can find it on New York-area newsstands, or you can order it here.

Then, there’s a new entry in the preview category, and it will knock your virtual socks off. It’s the Amazin’ Avenue Annual, which brings the concept of “labor of love” to a whole new level. Perhaps you read AA on a regular basis. If you don’t, you should. It’s written by a team of Mets fans who take nothing at face value and aren’t shy about drilling right past the superficial deep into the Metropolitan brain. They decided the world needed a publication that just wouldn’t quit. The AAA never ceases — instead, it keeps amazing, it keeps delighting and it keeps informing. It makes you think plenty, with a forecast for 2010, an autopsy on 2009, a sense of 2011 and a satisfying trip into the time before. The book — and it is a book — is available for free downloading here; a printed and bound copy for those who take their baseball library literally will be made obtainable at cost shortly.

I should point out Jason and I contributed* to both publications, and we’re each excited to have been a part of them. But that’s not the only reason I strongly recommend both previews. They were conceived and edited by Mets fans, they contain the insights of Mets fans, they were published with the best interests of Mets fans at heart and they will have you, my fellow Mets fans, roaring right past March into April.

*Jason covered the world of Mets blogging, and I offered a fan’s eye view of  living with Citi Field as well as a tenth-anniversary appreciation of the 2000 National League Champion Mets for the Maple Street Press book; my partner and I collaborated on an examination of “When the Mets Got Good Again,” the four seasons in which the Mets rose from 90+ losses to a winning record, for the Amazin’ Avenue preview.

Welcome to Flashback Friday: Take Me Out to 34 Ballparks, a celebration, critique and countdown of every major league ballpark one baseball fan has been fortunate enough to visit in a lifetime of going to ballgames.

BALLPARK: Olympic Stadium
HOME TEAM: Montreal Expos
VISITS: 1
VISITED: June 16, 1987
CHRONOLOGY: 5th of 34
RANKING: 34th of 34

Two things strike me as I consider the ballpark that is technically my least favorite of those I’ve visited:

1) Despite considering Olympic Stadium the worst place I ever saw a major league baseball game, I had a marvelous, memorable time there and would not want to have not experienced it.

2) Despite having had a marvelous, memorable time at Olympic Stadium, I consider it the worst place I ever saw a major league baseball game.

I think these conclusions say less about Olympic Stadium and more about baseball. Stade Olympique really was a lousy place for a game, and it didn’t matter one bit. Perhaps if I had been a Montreal Expos fan it might have gotten to me in the long term, but I was just a traveler on a pilgrimage, and I came away highly satisfied at the results of my journey. Clearly, the least impressive ballpark available is better than just about any place in the world that isn’t a ballpark.

Olympic Stadium’s No. 34 on my ballpark list — and, I don’t know, No. 36 on my life list. Where else would you rather be than at the ballpark? Even the lousiest of ballparks?

Which is what Olympic Stadium was. Lousy…yet gloriously so.

Its main drawback was it was less like a ballpark than a basement, and not the National League East kind (the Expos were doing pretty well in 1987). Or maybe it was more like a warehouse, but I don’t mean in the fun Camden Yards sense. More like those refrigerated warehouses I’d visit when I was covering beverages fulltime. It was cold, there were forklifts and there was plenty of beer. Beer’s not a drawback at the ballgame, but, as you probably saw if you watched Mets @ Expos games on TV, it never looked finished.

This brings to mind one of the great things about going to a ballpark you’ve only seen on television. It’s like taking the Universal Studios tour. Look! It’s the shark from Jaws! To a great degree, you feel like you’re visiting a movie set, except everything is real, yet more so. The orange roof: really orange. The long dugouts: really long. The French: really foreign.

It was my first bilingual game (more French than English) and my first indoors game; the roof had just gotten sealed in 1987. I never got used to indoor baseball, but I can see why they planned it that way in Montreal. My friend and I were there in the middle of June, and it was not a little chilly at night.

Still, it’s unnatural. Olympic Stadium was a science experiment gone awry. If a kid could grow enough mold on a piece of bread, the result would be the same. It was just that charming.

And yet…I loved being there. I loved seeing the Olympic Stadium set. I loved baseball in two languages. I loved wandering through an indoor plaza filled with smoking Quebecers and smoked meat (even if didn’t particularly want to be singed by either). Though the attendance was middling (20,000) and the environs were dank, the scene was as festive as Olympic Stadium could be. It probably helped that the Mets were there. Mets fans liven up any scenario — we built a 7-0 lead — but Expos fans, once their team began scoring a few meaningless runs, went nuts. Or maybe those were the forklifts I heard. Whatever it was, it wasn’t sad. It was fun.

It just wasn’t as good as the other 33 ballparks I’ve attended. It was Olympic Stadium.

***

At the risk of repeating myself, I have written about this trip before in a slightly different context. For those who have somehow not committed every Flashback Friday to memory, what follows is that entry of June 8, 2007.

***

No fictional character in the popular culture — not Sidd Finch, not Chico Escuela, not Oscar Madison — has done more to enhance the Metropolitan legend than Keith Hernandez. That Keith Hernandez is technically real shouldn’t detract from his contribution to the canon one bit.

I would think that every Mets fan knows what I’m talking about, though I could be wrong. On DiamondVision during the Delgado-Benitez balk game last week, Keith appeared to ask some lucky fan which Met appeared as himself on Seinfeld. The hint couldn’t have been any plainer than the questioner’s face.

The guy they picked to answer said Tom Seaver. He still won the Uncle Jack’s prize package. I wished they’d have given it to me so I could have poured that steak sauce on his head.

The answer was Keith Hernandez. Of course it was Keith Hernandez! Who doesn’t know that? Did they find one of those people who “doesn’t look at television”? Geez!

On February 12, 1992, Keith Hernandez, his playing days not two years over, made Mets and television history by guest-starring as Keith Hernandez on the then-cult sitcom Seinfeld. He was very convincing in the role. Jerry met him at a health club and developed what we would today call a man crush on him. Elaine dated him until his smoking turned her off. And Kramer? Well he and Newman said they didn’t care for Keith Hernandez.

KRAMER: I hate KEITH HERNANDEZ — hate him!

NEWMAN: I despise him.

ELAINE: Why?

What follows is one of the great moments television has ever beamed, a dead-on parody of the film JFK in which Jerry’s neighbors explain in Zapruderish detail why they so loathe the first baseman New Yorkers so loved.

NEWMAN: June 14, 1987…Mets-Phillies. We’re enjoying a beautiful afternoon in the right field stands when a crucial Hernandez error to a five-run Phillies ninth. Cost the Mets the game.

KRAMER: Our day was ruined. There were a lot of people, you know, they were waiting by the players’ parking lot. Now we’re coming down the ramp. Newman was in front of me. Keith was coming toward us, as he passes Newman turns and says, ”Nice game, pretty boy.” Keith continued past us up the ramp.

NEWMAN: A second later, something happened that changed us in a deep and profound way from that day forward.

ELAINE: What was it?

KRAMER: He spit on us. And I screamed out, ”I’m hit!”

NEWMAN: Then I turned and the spit ricochet of him and it hit me.

ELAINE: Wow! What a story.

JERRY: Unfortunately the immutable laws of physics contradict the whole premise of your account.

Yes, Jerry would prove beyond all reasonable doubt there was no magic loogie — and Keith would come along in the second half of the hourlong episode to reveal the true culprit.

KEITH: Well lookit, the way I remember it I was 
walking up the ramp. I was upset about the game. That’s when you called me pretty boy. It ticked me off. I started to turn around to say something and as I turned around I saw Roger McDowell behind the bushes over by that gravelly road. Anyway he was talking to someone and they were talking to you. I tried to scream out but it was too late. It was already on its way.

JERRY: I told you!

NEWMAN: Wow, it was McDowell.

JERRY: But why? Why McDowell?

KRAMER: Well, maybe because we were sitting in the right field stands cursing at him in the bullpen all game.

NEWMAN: He must have caught a glimpse of us when I poured that beer on his head.

Wraps it up nicely, no? Except for one nagging detail:

The Mets were not at Shea on June 14, 1987 losing to the Phillies. They were in Pittsburgh beating the Pirates. An immutable law of physics — the one that would specify you can’t be in two places at one time — contradicts the whole premise of everybody’s account.

It’s still a funny episode, but it’s always bugged me that Seinfeld chose this particular date to portray this fanciful incident. I remember June 14, 1987 very well. It was twenty years ago next week and it represented a milestone in a spring full of them.

June 14, a Sunday, was the day Stephanie left town. Not forever but, save for a few visits, for three years. She was in New York to go to plays and museums to earn college credits over six weeks. Her six weeks were up on June 14. We spent the last five of them together, but now it was time for her to go, damn it.

Now what do I do with myself? First thing I did after putting her on a train south to Florida was grab a seat at a bar in Penn Station, order a drink and ask the bartender how the Mets did today. He didn’t know, which I thought was highly irresponsible. The Celtics and Lakers were playing for the NBA championship on his TV. I think the Lakers won the title that day. I’m not sure. I didn’t much care. It was left to Sports Phone to inform me the Mets beat the Pirates 7-3, Sisk going 4-2/3 for the win, Darryl and, yup, Keith homering. We were still floundering in the N.L. East, 7½ in back of the Cardinals and behind the Cubs and Expos for bad measure. But it was something.

Now what else do I do with myself?

Stephanie and I met on May 11. Our first date, the Mets and Giants, was on May 15. We were spending most available waking hours together by the end of May. Our first fait accompli discussion of marriage was June 4. It was whirlwind, but it was real. Now it was hurry up and wait while she finished her sophomore, junior and senior years of college (she was only 19, for goodness sake) and I did whatever it was I had to do to become a viable member of society by the time she was done at USF.

So what do I do after getting the Mets-Pirates score? I take off to Montreal.

I had a very good friend who facilitated my meeting Stephanie. If he wasn’t in New York on that same arts program (trying to forget his old girlfriend) then I would never have been in the lobby of the hotel where my future wife was staying in May. Now it was June and not only was she riding the rails home but so was her roommate who happened to be the girl my friend got involved with that same spring (got that?). At that very moment, actually, they were broken up and he was all “let’s drink and forget her!” It was his idea to go to the bar in Penn Station.

It was my idea to go to Montreal and see the Mets play the Expos.

My friend had a whole family psychodrama playing out, culminating in his parents flying into Newark the following Friday. From there he and they would drive back to Miami. Or Philadelphia where they were from originally. Or something. I forget what the deal was exactly except he kind of invited himself to stay over at my house between Sunday and Friday, which was fine with me, not such a popular idea with my mother who really didn’t like having houseguests (despite a plenty big enough house to accommodate several). I needed to get me and my friend out of town. And plan a future. But first get out of town for the week.

I know, I said. Let’s drive to Montreal! The Mets will be there! My friend wasn’t a big baseball fan but had this accommodating habit of being into whatever you were into at the precise moment you brought it up. Like Zelig, if you ever saw the Woody Allen movie in which the title character of yore morphs right into the prevailing situation. In my friend’s case, it occasionally seemed insincere and a little desperate, but this time it was very convenient. He was totally into this impromptu sojourn into another country.

I was 24 and sporadically employed. He was 21 and had nothing to do for five days. The loves of our lives had just split. What better remedy than ROAD TRIP!?

So we did it. On Monday the 15th, three of us — me, my friend and another summer-semester castaway who just happened to need a ride to her grandmother’s in Burlington, Vt., piled into my 1981 Corolla and headed north. I barely drive round the block these days if I don’t have to, but kill time in Montreal? Sure! Drop off a virtual stranger in Vermont along the way? Why not?

As is my custom, I didn’t hit the road until late in the day Monday. In those days, I took pride in being a nocturnal animal, and driving at night didn’t bother me a bit. Besides, the summer solstice was fast approaching. It was staying light late and we were going in the general direction of the Arctic Circle. The immediate future was so bright, we had to wear…well, you know.

Day became night and New York became Vermont. The Mets on WHN faded in and out. The first of the four-game series pitted Doc Gooden, recently back from drug rehab versus Dennis Martinez, a recovering alcoholic getting a final shot. It was on Monday Night Baseball. It was also going badly: Martinez pitched a shutout (infer what you will about their respective addictions). Our third wheel guided us over the river and through the woods — or at least across Lake Champlain — to Grandma’s house. We let her out on a quiet Burlington street probably after 10 P.M. We spent maybe six hours together, the three of us, after being casually acquainted since mid-May. We shared an adventure, or part of one. And then I never saw her again.

Montreal lay ahead, but the Canadian border was of more immediate concern. This was my first trip to Canada and I didn’t know what to expect. I was told I didn’t need a passport but I had conflicting reports on whether I needed a special insurance card to drive there (Mom said yes, the Vermont girl said no; KBS Insurance mootly mailed one to the house that arrived after I returned, so I guess no). What I did understand was I was getting tired. My friend and I switched seats and he drove.

Well after midnight, we made it to Canada. A border guard greeted us with a smile. Welcome to Canada, what is your business here? My friend, at the wheel, told him, “We’re here to see a couple of ballgames.” Another smile from the guard. With almost no hesitation, he waved us through. I’m glad the Mets-Expos rivalry carried such weight.

Just like that, another country. It was still another hour and some to Montreal. Unlike in later years, I planned this not at all. Today, I research hotels and transportation and baseball tickets. Then, I figured, we’ll get there when we get there and we’ll find our way. I was quite spunky then or just became more fretful as I grew older.

As Montreal approaches, you reach a toll bridge. A Canadian toll bridge that wants a Canadian toll. A quarter, at least then. I panicked. Because I panicked, my friend panicked. Who had Canadian change? In fact, back in Vermont when we gassed up, the attendant gave me back Canadian change and I politely asked for real money. The funny thing is I seemed to believe I was the first American who ever entered Canada with only American money. I explained all this to the tolltaker at the bridge at probably two in the morning. He waved us on through. What a country!

We found downtown Montreal in the dead of night. A well-lit dead of night, I should point out, replete with restaurants advertising smoked meat sandwiches. Within downtown, we found a Holiday Inn. Looked good to us. Disheveled, unshaven and dressed nothing like businessmen, the desk clerk, who seemed mildly suspicious of our business in Canada, offered us the businessman’s rate if we could produce some proof that we had some. Business, I mean. My “Freelance Writer” card only confused him. My friend had an expired press credential from a defunct newspaper. That did the trick; we got a room and by 3:45 A.M., we saw it getting light out. I think the rate sounded absurdly high anyway, but that was in Canadian dollars. As I was catching on (and had been clued in ahead of time), it translated to like five bucks American.

That became the running joke the next morning. My friend got up and exchanged some of our money at a nearby bank and ya gotta see the prices. Everything costs like five bucks because, well, it’s Canadian.

We did what any two American guys would do in a bilingual city filled with mystery and intrigue. We went to McDonald’s. Sticking with my weird insistence on not being a stranger in a strange land, I tried to order a Quart de Livre. The girl behind the counter said, “Quarter-Pounder, what else?” Ah, the hell with it. Yes, plus fries and a diet Coke please.

It was all prelude to our business in Canada, the ballgame. The one piece of information I had cobbled together was there was subway service between downtown (which is where I assumed we were staying — it could have been midtown for all I know) and The Big O. In Montreal, you took the Metro to the games. They even talked about it on the Mets’ broadcasts from there. Our hotel was near the line that would take us to Pie IX, the local version of Willets Point. Man, I thought, this is not bad. I’m in some foreign country and I know how to get to the ballpark.

Unlike the way it was painted in the dying years of the franchise, there were Expos fans in Montreal in 1987. Enough of them so they populated a subway car. We followed them the way tourists on the 7 follow me so they don’t get lost. (At least a couple times a year that happens; I kinda dig it.)

It worked. We got off at Pie IX and never had to go outside. Just that season, the Expos finally managed to get a roof on Olympic Stadium. It wasn’t retractable as advertised 10 years earlier when it opened for baseball, but it shielded you from the elements — not a huge concern in June — and kept with the general Canadian ethos of avoiding the great outdoors. The walk from the subway to the ballpark was all indoors.

It included a pass through a lively plaza. People milled and ate and smoked and a band played “Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone),” a hit by Glass Tiger from the previous fall. My friend and I looked at each other and laughed out loud. Glass Tiger, we both knew, was a Canadian group and this cover band doing their song played into our concept of Canada as a country with a complex. Listen! It’s the No. 2 hit in the States! And it’s Canadian!

Tickets were easy to get. We produced Canadian money but, again, that wasn’t necessary, just cost-effective. Other Mets fans on their own sabbaticals were here, some buying tickets with U.S. currency. Somehow I felt a little offended that they didn’t make the effort to use Canadian money. (Hmmm…maybe I was the one with the Zeligaffliction.)

Box seats were maybe 15 bucks (or like five bucks American). Good deal. We sat on the first base side. I looked around and, gads, what an ugly place! Don’t get me wrong. I was happy to be there. It was exciting. It was a ballpark and the Mets were going to play. But this was everything it was said to be and less. Just because it was half in French didn’t make it slightly charming. So much space, so much of it useless. There was a veritable lumber yard behind the centerfield fence — some wood that had been left over from a construction project that ran out of funding. In the next phase of my career, I’d visit cold warehouses stacked with 24-packs of beer or soda and be reminded of Olympic Stadium.

That’s the critique in a nutshell. Too big for its own good. Too deep, too hollow. Too artificially loud thanks to the cheers that echoed all out of proportion to their actual heft. Too bad. This was the fifth ballpark I visited and I immediately decided it was No. 5 among my favorites. That pattern continued right up to the Expos’ death. At this writing, I’ve been to 30 ballparks and Le Stade Olympique is secure at No. 30 — until the 31st park gets visited. Tropicana Field or the Metrodome, long buried on my to-do list, will have to be awfully awful to undercut it.

But I’m not recollecting here to be mean to Montreal. I had a nice time. And if I had a nice time, I’m pretty sure my friend did, too. First off, the Mets took a 4-0 lead by the third and won easily, 7-3. Terry Leach, who was a godsend that season by filling in for all our injured starters, went eight innings for the victory. He was 5-0 at the end of the night. What a bon lanceur he was. I squinted down to the end of the Mets’ long dugout bench to pick out Tom Seaver who was on the comeback trail (it never took; he retired the following week) and may have seen him.

I know I saw No. 25 in the lineup, batting second and playing second. It wasn’t Backman and it wasn’t Teufel. It was Keith Miller, making his Major League debut right there in Montreal with me on hand. Because of that, I always felt proprietary of his career which didn’t amount to much, sad to say (at least before taking up agenting), but he did hustle. In the private baseball lingo another friend and I occasionally chatted in for fun, Stephanie became known as Keith Miller for coming out of nowhere and providing a spark to my life; I was Darryl Strawberry mostly ’cause I wanted to be.

Mets caps dotted the O. I was wearing one plus a Giants Big Blue Wrecking Crew sweatshirt, trying to stretch that City of Champions vibe a little longer (the Mets and Giants would both defend titles ineptly in 1987). Ran into a fellow in the men’s room who was also up from the Metropolitan area, also liked the Mets and Giants. We chatted briefly about both teams and concluded that we had had it pretty good lately in New York.

That was the only game we went to, at least the only Mets-Expos game. My friend and I walked along Rue Ste. Catherine, past the various Smoked Meat signs, and found a park near McGill University the next afternoon where we played Wiffle Ball. We’d had a Wiffle Ball game in progress since November ’85, my first post-college visit to Tampa. We played a few innings in the Albertson’s parking lot then and picked it up every time I came down. I don’t think we did much Wiffle Ball in New York, but made up for it with three innings in the park that day. We concluded the game the following March on the main baseball diamond at USF when I came down for Stephanie’s spring break. I seem to recall the final collective score winding up 43-33 in my favor, but I could be making that up.

We left Montreal Thursday morning, initially following the same path we took, back through Vermont. We got to the border, me driving this time. The United States guard wasn’t smiling when he asked what we were up to. I smiled and said we’d gone to Montreal to see the Mets play the Expos.

He looked us over. Young guys. Florida plates that I still hadn’t switched to New York. Hadn’t shaved. My friend was wearing one of his trademark Hawaiian shirts. Miami Vice was still on the air.

“Please get out of the car.”

The border guard decided were drug smugglers. He didn’t say it, but that was the strong impression he gave. He searched the car, searched our luggage, searched our pockets. He got excited twice, once when he found an empty baggy in my suitcase, once when he found pills in aluminum foil in my jeans. He actually cracked the foil open. Tylenol, I said. I get headaches.

He let us go.

The rest of the trip was uneventful except for me being pulled over for speeding on the Massachusetts Turnpike. I was doing 77 in a 55 zone. Gosh, that makes me smile today. The Mets salvaged a series split while we were in Connecticut. The next day, I drove my friend to Newark Airport (in record time from Long Island, I might add) and he hooked up with his parents. I turned around and went home.

That was it for me and Montreal and for me and grand, unplanned ROAD TRIP!s. I would have assumed this was the sort of thing I’d do from time to time for the rest of my life, but no, that was the only truly impulsive one I ever took off on. As for me and my friend, it was kind of a final flourish for our post-college friendship at least on the scale it existed in the mid-’80s. He and Stephanie’s roommate got back together in Florida and actually beat us to punch marriagewise (neither of them being sticklers about bothering to graduate). We all kind of stayed in touch, on and off, for several years thereafter. For reasons I don’t quite grasp, they and their daughter, born in December 1989, fell off our radar for good in 1996 and us off theirs. Wouldn’t have guessed that could possibly happen in June 1987, but it did.

The Mets arrived home from Montreal as well. They swept a weekend series at Shea from the Phillies in what was judged to be a great pivotal turning point to that frustrating season. No record exists on which player spit on which fans in real life.

Jason Bay once was Lost. But now he’s Found. A four-year contract has saved a wretch like him.

No offense to JB (does he have a nickname yet?). I just can’t help but notice that unless he falls victim to Prevention & Recovery between now and April 5, he will become the 13th verifiable member of the Lost Boys Found Society: Met minor leaguers who had to leave home to make the majors, yet somehow discovered the Amazin’ grace to make it all the way back home to become real, live New York Mets.

You probably know that in the summer of 2002, as general manager Steve Phillips struggled with his twin addictions (sex and the mindless dispatching of useful outfielders), Jason Bay was traded by the Mets to the San Diego Padres. The Mets’ big prize in that deal was middle reliever Steve Reed, who Phillips just had to have to shore up the ‘02 Wild Card drive…you know, the one that ended in a ditch filled with bong water and regret. Bay’s big prize was the Rookie of the Year award he earned with the Pirates in 2004. Yes, San Diego was dopey enough to let him go, same as us, same as Omar Minaya’s Montreal Expos before us. The Mets were not alone in misunderestimating Jason Bay.

But that doesn’t make Steve Phillips a visionary for telling a future three-time All-Star to get Lost.

Steve Reed’s unforgettable contributions to a non-playoff hunt notwithstanding (to be fair, Reed was pretty decent in his 24 Met appearances, no matter that the last 20 or so came after the Mets fell out of contention), how must have Jason Bay felt? There he was, a Binghamton Met, batting .290, walking teenaged Jose Reyes from the hotel to the ballpark, close enough to Shea to dream…and then?

Boom — he’s a Padre.

We’re Mets fans. Who among us hasn’t dreamed of becoming a Met at some point in our lives? Imagine if it was you. You’re a Met minor leaguer, your lifelong goal of playing for the Mets appears within reach, and then it’s snatched away because Steve Phillips was presumably too busy indulging his extramarital libido to dissect scouting reports. Granted, Jason Bay may not have grown up a Mets fan in British Columbia, but we don’t take that into account. In our lives, being a Met is the highest calling there is. When he was sent to San Diego, then Pittsburgh, then Boston, Bay’s call seemed forever put on hold.

Now he’s been called back. An expensive call, but one for which we’ve accepted the charges. Come April 5, Jason Bay’s destiny gets back on track. He was a Lost Boy in those other uniforms. He’s Found himself a Met.

It’s happened before. It’s happened, as far as I can reckon, a dozen times. A Met minor leaguer has to leave the Met organization to become a major leaguer but then, somehow, he receives a reprieve and becomes a Met. With the help of my friends at the Crane Pool Forum, I’ve counted twelve different Lost Boys Who Found Themselves. Like Jason Bay, they appeared consigned to the wilderness of playing only for opposition. But circumstances led them, at last, to Queens and earned them the fruits of true Metdom:

• a listing on Ultimate Mets Database;
• a notation in Mets By The Numbers;
• a card in The Holy Books.

Surely they are thrilled.

Let’s get to know those Mets who blazed the path Jason Bay will follow when he becomes the first Lost Boy to Find himself at Citi Field.

The earliest known example of a Lost Boy Found is Jerry Morales, a 1966 signee who was Metnapped by the pesky Padres in the 1968 expansion draft. Poor kid didn’t even have time to rise beyond Single-A when he was taken. Alas, Morales became a big leaguer in San Diego in ‘69, gave the Cubs several solid seasons in the mid-’70s (earning a 1977 All-Star berth) and made his way back to where it should have all started, Shea Stadium, in 1980. He came “home” from Detroit, in the company of the severely mortal Phil Mankowski, in a trade that was a winner for the Mets, because they pawned off on the Tigers one Richie Hebner. If the Mets couldn’t have sent their Sixth-Circle Mets Hellion to Motown, they would have had to have shipped him to Love Canal. That was where toxic waste went back then. Morales did essentially nothing in his one-year Met tenure. Mankowski was actually harmful to ground balls. And I still say it was a great trade. Anything that rids the environment of Richie Hebner is a good thing.

The ’80s progressed with no more Lost Boy action until Lou Thornton came around to score at the end of the decade. Thornton was a 19th-round choice in the same 1981 draft that saw the Mets select Terry Blocker in the first round, Lenny Dykstra in the thirteenth, Roger Clemens (yup) in the twelfth and Steve Phillips (double yup) in the fifth. Lou’s future career as a Met pinch-runner was derailed when the Blue Jays plucked him in the 1984 Rule 5 draft. That meant they had to keep him on the big club, which wasn’t so bad for Lou, because he got to pinch-run his way onto Toronto’s playoff roster. Lou pinch-ran twice in the ‘85 ALCS, which the Jays lost. Serving again as a pinch-runner, he scored the winning run in a huge Toronto victory over Detroit down the stretch in ‘87, right before the Blue Jays reverted to Blow Jays form and blew the A.L. East to the Tigers. The Mets picked him up from the Pirates in the middle of 1989, and he was on the roster in September, scoring another winning pinch-run in a pennant race showdown, at Shea against the Cubs. Once again, however, Thornton’s speed was for naught as the Mets, like the Jays, did not win on the wings of Sweet Lou’s wheels. He’d be lost to the Met mists of time by 1990.

Bill Murray used to do a very funny bit on Weekend Update in which, as film critic in residence, he’d go through the Oscar nominees and dismiss several Best Picture candidates because “I didn’t see it.” Bill Murray meet Mickey Weston, a righthanded hurler Mets fans saw only four times. Better yet, Dave Murray, meet Mickey Weston. Our Mets Guy In Michigan blolleague has a nice story about meeting the pitcher and becoming his “personal biographer”. I have no story about Flint-native Weston, a Mets’ draft choice in 1982 who wrapped in the same bounty that yielded us Dwight Gooden, Roger McDowell, Steve Springer (Dave and I share him) and — had we signed him — Rafael Palmeiro. Seven years beating the Met bushes got Weston no further than Tidewater. He left as a minor league free agent and ultimately made the show with the ‘89 Orioles. He rematerialized as a Met in 1993, which made him a 1993 Met, which is guilt by association, but Dave seems to think he’s all right, so we’ll give him a pass.

There was Leon “Goose” Goslin. There was Rich “Goose” Gossage. It was inevitable, then, that Mauro Gozzo’s nickname would be avian in nature even if he wouldn’t make it three Geese in the Hall of Fame. This Goose’s professional career took flight as a Met draft pick in 1984. The righty’s tour from Little Falls to Columbia to Lynchburg was rerouted in the spring of ‘87 when he was a throw-in (and have you ever tried to throw a goose?) in what the Royals hoped would be the Ed Hearn trade but turned out, thankfully, to be the David Cone trade. Goose flocked to the Blue Jays for his 1989 big league debut and later landed briefly in Cleveland and Minnesota. By ‘93, he was a Norfolk Tide and, as was often the case with the Tides of ‘93, a full-fledged Met. After 1994, however, Gozzo was gonzo.

Fernando Viña was another Rule 5 (or is that Rule V?) loss by the Mets. The Mets signed him in 1990, lost him in 1992, watched from afar as he made his debut as a Mariner in 1993…but got him back before that benighted campaign completed. While Seattle built the foundation of the Refuse to Lose A.L. West champs, Fernando continued to attempt to get his Met on in Norfolk. He impressed in camp in ‘94 and at last answered his Met calling, primarily backing up Jeff Kent and Bobby Bonilla, two of the most popular Flushingites of the era. While players and owners engaged in mutually assured labor-management destruction that December, the Mets shipped Viña to Milwaukee for Doug Henry. Doug Henry, like Jeff Kent, had two first names. Fernando Viña, like Jeff Kent, went on to greater things as an ex-Met, including two Gold Gloves, one All-Star appearance, a gig on Baseball Tonight and a supporting role in the Mitchell Report.

How good were the 2000 Mets? They were so good that they made the World Series despite misguidedly deploying Rich Rodriguez in 32 separate games. It was likely the stopping of using Rich Rodriguez that catapulted them to the pennant. Rodriguez’s route to Metdom began as a 1984 ninth-round draft pick. His left arm got as far as Double-A Jackson in ‘88 before it was dealt to the Padres for the proverbial bag of balls. Next thing you know, ol’ Rich is a lefthanded specialist for four different major league clubs across the ’90s. His specialty turned not so special when he returned to the Mets in 2000 and allowed as many batters to become baserunners as humanly possible. The fans took note. Before Game Three of the NLDS, the Mets did the classy thing and introduced their non-roster players, the guys who came up or back in September but wouldn’t be used in the postseason. Only one of them was booed by the discerning Shea faithful. That was Rich Rodriguez and his 7.78 ERA. Yes, the Mets did the classy thing, but also the smart thing by not letting him do anything more that October than glumly tip his cap. Steve Phillips let him go after 2000, clearing much-needed space for his next lefty specialist find, Tom Martin (2001 ERA: 10.06).

In seven minor league seasons from 1990 through 1996 — encompassing stints with Gulf Coast, Kingsport, Pittsfield, Capital City, St Lucie, Binghamton and Norfolk — the closest first baseman Brian Daubach got to New York was 1995, when the Mets were featuring at Thomas J. White Stadium anybody who didn’t mind being labeled a replacement player. Future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor made that particularly embarrassing baseball spring moot when she told the clubs to cut that stuff out, and Daubach’s first chance to be a Met of any kind went by the wayside. He emerged as a 1998 Marlin, then as a pretty solid Red Sock for a few years after that. In a 2000 Interleague series, Daubach overcame Todd Pratt’s calling him a “scab” and homered off Mike Hampton to beat the Mets at Fenway. Five years later, Daubach wasn’t quite as solid and found himself again in Norfolk. That June, he was called up to replace a disabled Miguel Cairo. Fifteen mushy games later, he’d find himself replaced by a reinstated Doug Mientkiewicz.

Perhaps we’ll one day think of Jason Bay as an all-time Met. The first seven Lost Boys Found don’t really strike us that way, do they? But the eighth man to leave the Met minors, make the majors as something less desirable and the finally become a Met in toto…he’s pretty damn all-time. He’s Endy Chavez. We know who he became as a Met. Why was he allowed to become a major leaguer somewhere else? He spent four years in our minor leagues, cresting in high A (batting .298, stealing 38 bases) in 2000 and attracting the attention of the Royals’ front office, if not genius Steve Phillips. Kansas City took him as Rule V (or 5) selection. They tried to give him back to the Mets at the end of Spring Training, but Phillips brilliantly said, no, that’s all right, you keep him, why would the Mets ever need an Endy Chavez? Endy would be a nondescript Royal, then a promising Expo — torching the Mets a lot — before GM Omar Minaya grabbed him in advance of 2006. Endy did the grabbing from there, as we all know.

An ordinary infield prospect for the Mets became an effective relief pitcher for the Expos and, a couple of years after that, a villain to Mets fans. Such was the sojourn of Guillermo Mota, an early ’90s Met minor league shortstop/third baseman who had to find a whole other position to make it relatively big. Mota’s mistake as a pitcher was throwing too close to Mike Piazza in consecutive  Spring Trainings, 2002 and 2003 incurring the big man’s — and our — wrath. The feud culminated when Piazza entered the Dodger clubhouse looking to settle the score. Wow, did we ever hate Guillermo Mota. Then, in the summer of 2006, as Omar Minaya groped around to fill the gap left behind by the Midnight Ride of Duaner Sanchez, he picked up a struggling Guillermo Mota. Given no choice, we reluctantly cheered on our new and not so bad righty reliever, until he contributed to our losing the NLCS, tested positive for a banned substance and sucked out loud through 2007. He was little good for us in the long run, but at least Mota left us feeling validated about despising him in the first place.

Being an Original Cyclone didn’t help Angel Pagan make the majors as a Met. The onetime Brooklynite (as well as Kingsporter, Capital Citizen and so on) climbed the Met minor league ladder for six seasons, only to be knocked off short of the big leagues. He landed as a part-time Cub in 2006, but then alit at Shea at last in early 2008. Pagan was greeted warmly — anybody remember the flapping Angel wings that April? — if briefly. A torn labrum grounded Angel in May, and he battled bad health luck as almost every Met would in 2009. Finally, he mended while so many of his teammates’ seasons ended. Pagan would run the wrong way a lot when given the chance, but he also hit pretty well at times. He now gets another opportunity to impress…alongside his Lost Boy soulmate, Jason Bay.

If anyone seemed destined to become a Met, it was Nelson Figueroa. He grew up rooting for them in Brooklyn, he was drafted by them out of Brandeis, he had pitched his way to Binghamton…and then, in 1998, it was off to Arizona in what was either the Bernard Gilkey deal or the Willie Blair deal. The deal for Figueroa was a lot more traveling by the time he got to Phoenix in 2000. He went to Philly (for Curt Schilling) and then three more organizations. Figgy missed an entire season due to rotator cuff surgery and wandered his way from town to town, up and down the dial. Eventually, the town that welcomed the righty home was New York, New York. He made his long-delayed debut as a Met starter in April 2008, on a foggy night when his entire family and everybody they ever knew packed a Shea DiamondView suite to cheer him to victory. There have been ups and downs since — sniping at the Nationals for acting like “softball girls” when he couldn’t get them out was rather inane — but when you scan the practice fields of Port St. Lucie, you’ll see Nelson Figueroa, still working to make his destiny permanent.

Raul Casanova…talk about a Lost Boy. Drafted by the Mets in 1990 (same June as Viña — and Daubach). Traded to the Padres for Tony Fernandez in 1992. A major league catcher for the first time as a Tiger in 1996. Professional relationships between 1999 and 2007 with the Rockies, the Brewers, the Orioles, the Devil Rays, the Orioles again, the Red Sox, the Royals, the White Sox, the Athletics, the Devil Rays again. Then, in April 2008, directly on the heels of Pagan and Figueroa, he became a Met at last. It only took him 18 years. And he only lasted 20 games. Still, better Found late than to remain Lost forever.

And now, it is time for Jason Bay to Find himself with the Mets.

If the 2010 Mets get off to a bad start on the field or once again demonstrate that they’re incompetent and/or tone-deaf about treating injuries, building ballclubs or relating to fans, we’re going to get typecast. We’ll be fans of the Big Team That Can’t, the grizzled, paranoid saps who trudge around accompanied by our own personal blue-and-orange storm clouds, anvils suspended by frayed strings above our much-abused noggins. And there will be some truth to it.

This thought crept into unhappy view yesterday, at the beginning of what should have been a gleeful couple of hours. At 1 p.m. sharp I made my way from the office to the bedroom (I’m not sure but I may have even skipped), turned on the TV, and told the Cartoon Network its winter of animated hegemony was now over. There was SNY, and Gary, Keith and Ron, and green grass and baseball and Mets.

All good. All wonderful, in fact. But then came that moment.

Nelson Figueroa is on the mound, backed by scrubs and kids and retreads. There have been a bunch of scratches from the regular lineup. There is nothing to play for.

We were, I realized, pretty much exactly where I last saw the New York Mets getting statistics recorded for playing baseball. Was there any way this immediate reminder of 2009 could that possibly be good luck?

And then the moment passed, and I was able to sink gratefully into the old routine, by now so familiar that it’s practically muscle memory. There were some old Mets and some new Mets and some ex-Mets and some impossibly young Mets. There was a sideline interview with Jose Reyes, who looked cheerful enough giving Kevin Burkhardt vaguely considered answers beneath various objects perched on his head, like the tops of out-of-order Russian dolls. There was big Ike Davis, who got two hits and muffed a somewhat-tricky pop fly, providing us with three opportunities to overreact in various ways to March doings. There was the inevitable terrifying new Braves prospect, one Jason Heyward, to admire and then worry about. There were lousy calls and a minor injury to a not terribly important player and Keith talking about his dog and finally a Mets win, which I had long since stopped paying very much attention to.

During the winter it always seems faintly crazy that this could happen. Are you there, God? It’s me, Jason. If You’d only give me a spring-training game, I’d spend three hours watching it with laser-beam intensity and then be a better person. Thanks. Oh yeah, and amen. But it is always like this: By the 20th minute of the first Grapefruit League game I’ve got half an eye on the game and half an eye on something else, and am thoroughly used to having baseball back.

We talk about baseball fever a lot. But maybe we’ve been misdiagnosing it all these years. Because, honestly, doesn’t baseball fever come in the winter? That’s when I’m irritable (OK, more irritable than usual) and fidgety and can’t shake the feeling that the world is deplorably out of kilter. When baseball does return, within 20 minutes I relax and feel well again. Baseball fever — endure it.

* * *

I’m with Greg in giving the Mets kudos of a minor sort for finally admitting what we’ve all been complaining about for nearly a year: There are outfield seats in Citi Field from which you can’t see one and sometimes two outfielders, and now you’ll at least know it when you go to buy a ticket. If the Mets want me to shut up about this they should also discount those tickets — perhaps they should cost 7.5/9 of a ticket with full views? — but yes, it’s progress. I’ll also join my partner with a tip of the cap to the ever-vigilant Mets Police for walking this beat on behalf of fans.

Truth in advertising creeps into Metspeak, according to the Times‘ Bats blog:

Mets fans had a tough time feeling comfortable in Citi Field ast season, mainly because the team performed so poorly. But some fans were also irked that they could not see parts of the field from their seats, especially in left field.

In the third deck there, for instance, fans often cannot see the left fielder, and occasionally the center fielder drops out of view.

Mets executives said the obscured views were the trade-off for putting fans closer to the action in Citi Field, which is cozier than Shea Stadium. That explanation did not placate some people who felt the team should have affixed warnings to the tickets.

The Mets appear to be correcting that lapse. When ordering tickets for certain seats online, fans receive a warning that reads, “View: Limited portions of the playing field may not be visible from this seat location.” The disclaimer, in bright orange, was attached to seats in 300, 400 and 500 level seats in left field.

Don’t be fooled by the Times‘ subtlety, for, in the context of Citi Field’s growing pains, this is worthy of screaming Post hyperbole. It’s really quite substantial: an acknowledgment by the typically admit-nothing Mets that what they’re selling isn’t close to perfect, even if took them a year to nod toward the reality that everyone else discovered upon trying to take in the entire outfield from any given seat in Promenade. I assumed the Mets would instead dig their heels in deeper and insist that these were actually the best tickets you could purchase; my wife came up with a fantastically Metsian term for the areas from which you couldn’t clearly make out the left fielder: Vantage Point Seating. We expected to receive a brochure hyping it as New For 2010.

Admitting imperfection in bright orange represents a sea change — or Bay change, since we’re talking left — from deny, deny, deny, as Dave Howard did last April on WFAN when he was asked to respond to the rising tide of complaints from ticket buyers who could not see all for which they had paid (transcript courtesy of Mets Today):

“Here is the issue, this is with regard to seating in fair territory in the outfield, which is something different that we have at Citi Field, that we really did not have much of at Shea Stadium. … the reality is … a little seating we had in fair territory in the outfield at Shea Stadium did have some blind spots on the field, it is NOT obstructed. The way we characterize “obstructed” is if you have an obstruction, something in front of you — a beam, a pillar, something that’s blocking your view. That’s not the case here. It is a function of the geometry of the building. And it is a conscious decision that we made along with the designers and the architects, that we wanted people to be lower and closer to the field, and have great views, and great views of the action. By doing that in fair territory, you are going to have situations where you are going to lose certain blind spots in the deep outfield of those sections. That is something we understood to be a factor. It is true in every new ballpark that has seating in the outfield …”

I barely passed ninth-grade geometry, yet I think if there had been a question on the Regents Exam about something blocking my view, I probably would have chosen “obstruction” over “blind spot” if the question was multiple-choice…and, in the “show your work portion,” I wouldn’t have tried to explain how not being able to follow the track of the ball or the fielder(s) chasing it is an asset at a baseball game (even a 2009 Mets baseball game). I’m still confused over how seeing less of the action was supposed to give me “great views” of the action. But again, geometry was never my strong suit.

The “conscious” decision to build a baseball stadium in which significant swaths of the baseball game would not be readily visible to a critical mass of baseball fans would be tough to square with the logic statements inherent in geometry. Rebuilding is something the Mets do clumsily when it comes to their roster, so I guess it’s not surprising that building a grandstand (and a case for its drawbacks) would befuddle them. At the very least, they can label the tickets with a proper warning. And they’ve done that.

They’ve done the very least.

Blue Cap tip to Mets Police for being on this well ahead of the Times. If there’s a Paper of Record for recording Mets fan indignities, surely it’s MP.

Continuing the recent theme of leaning forward into the schedule of meaningless exhibitions until we are so close to Tradition Field that we’ll be called out for fan’s interference, there’s a game today.

Today has a game. A baseball game. A Mets game.

It’s Today’s Game.

Today’s Game is scheduled to start at 1:10.

Today’s Game will air on SNY.

Pitching in Today’s Game will be whoever. Same for the catcher. Same for the batting order.

Whoever, whatever…we’re not picky. We’re starving. We’ll be sated by Today’s Game. Just the thought of Today’s Game fills us up.

Today has a game. A baseball game. A Mets game.

Can’t wait for Today’s Game.

So what else is new?

The building that contains the Fry manse has had a tough winter. First the heat was kaput for several days. Now, following the season’s 242nd blizzard, the roof is leaking. Through a quirk of intrabuilding geography that I find less than delightful, the water’s chosen route was to descend three floors and pool atop our bathroom ceiling. Cue a leak and, after two days of soaked sheetrock, the inevitable. Which came at 4:15 a.m., as these things do.

WHAM!

Emily (groggily): What the hell was that?

Me: I’m gonna assume the bathroom ceiling.

Correct. Which at the time seemed like a good thing: The water had eliminated that pesky sheetrock from its path, we had a bucket, etc. But no. Now the water is descending an additional floor and pooling atop our downstairs bathroom ceiling.

Being a Mets fan here is somewhat helpful in making predictions: The upstairs bathroom ceiling is done collapsing; the downstairs ceiling is up 3 1/2 with 17 games to play.

And yet, as I sit here in the bowels of my snowbound, falling-apart house, I’m … happy.

And why is that? Because tomorrow the Mets play the Braves, and things like 1:10 and 7:10 and Ws and Ls and SNY return to my lexicon. It’ll just be a small step closer to spring, but it’ll feel like a giant leap. And while ceilings may still be falling, I’ll no longer feel like the sky is, too. Hang in there, everybody. We’ve almost made it.

The Department of Sudden Realization is reporting the New York Mets will play the Atlanta Braves in two days. Well, it’ll essentially be random fellows wearing Mets uniforms versus unknown guys wearing Braves uniforms after the third or so inning, and it won’t count in any serious standings, and the outcome will be forgotten minutes after it is registered.

But the New York Mets will play the Atlanta Braves in two days.

Professional baseball players under contract to our favorite team will pitch against and hit against and maybe even field against professional baseball players under contract to another recognizably branded organization. People will pay money to sit inside a stadium and witness it. A score will be kept and displayed. Shouts of encouragement and bites of frankfurters and purchases of programs…all those pleasing signs of spring will, for the first time in an eternity, be sprung.

Baseball! It’s February 28, it’s freezing, half the world remains snow-encrusted, yet in two days, there will be baseball. New York Mets baseball is coming to a life near you.

We can start living ours again any hour now.

Billy Heller of the New York Post says Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets – available soon in paperback, with a brand new epilogue exploring the first season of Citi Field — is Required Reading. Read all about it here.

On October 28, 1961, eight dignitaries in suits — including Mayor Bob Wagner, master builder Bob Moses and future villain Don Grant — plunged spades into the ground and touched off the beginning of construction on a project tentatively titled Flushing Meadow(s) Stadium. It took 902 days to get from ceremonial shovels to the first official pitch thrown on that site, one fired by Jack Fisher of the New York Mets to Ducky Schofield of the Pittsburgh Pirates. By then, April 17, 1964, the structure in question would be called Shea Stadium…and the pitch from Fisher would be called a strike by home plate umpire Tom Gorman.

On September 28, 2008, Ryan Church would lift a deep fly ball to centerfield in the same place. Deep, but not deep enough. Cameron Maybin caught it and, in essence, ended the life of the stadium. A ballpark can’t be a ballpark unless it’s got some ball in it, and dratted Maybin made off with the last one. Nevertheless, Shea stuck around after the final out, first for another ceremony — one in which Fisher, followed by 42 other former Mets, would bid adieu to the stadium’s last assemblage — and then for the gruesome business of the building’s disassembly.

Breeze Demolition, a subcontractor from Red Hook, dug its hooks into Shea Stadium within hours of Fisher’s fond farewell. It took 143 days to pull apart what required 902 days to put together. For those of us who couldn’t help but monitor its methodical deconstruction, it seemed like it took forever for Shea to come down, yet in actuality, erasing it took less than one-sixth the time it took to create it.

The disappearance of Shea from the New York cityscape, save for the dust and debris that would linger into May, was completed just over a year ago, when on the morning of February 18, 2009, the last immediately discernible sign of its existence vanished from the Queens skyline. Save for four brass bases and an accurately if curiously named pitcher’s plate in a parking lot, it’s now like Shea Stadium was never there.

Shea, of course, lives on anyway. It lives on in our memories, our souls, our imaginations and our Mets fan DNA. It also, thankfully, continues to exist in print, most notably in the pages of several recent and terrific books. One of them — Bottom of the Ninth by Michael Shapiro — tells thoroughly if almost incidentally of Shea’s conception as part of a larger story of baseball’s late ’50s and early ’60s evolution. Two others whose reach is closer to home — Dana Brand’s The Last Days of Shea and Shea Good-Bye by Keith Hernandez and Matthew Silverman — offer loving encomia crafted on the eve of the park’s passing. Each of them is a worthy companion to the way you remember Shea, whether from its beginning, its middle or its end.

I’ve only recently gotten automatically used to the idea that there is no longer a Shea Stadium. No wonder: 2010 is the first calendar year in 50 during which there has been no immediately discernible sign of Shea Stadium. Still, the slow realization that it’s not around and that it’s not coming back goes beyond the longevity of an entity that began to stir in 1961 and ceased to exist in 2009. It goes beyond what Brand’s textured eloquence or Shapiro’s fresh history or Silverman’s expert editing of Hernandez’s occasionally random recollections can capture, too. It’s gets to the simple fact that Shea Stadium was my idea of what a ballpark was. It couldn’t help but be. It was my first ballpark.

It was my first park on TV. It was my first park in person. It was the park that defined what it meant to watch baseball for me. Shea shaded my view of every other park I’d ever visit, particularly the one I now technically call home.

I’ve been lucky enough to have attended Major League Baseball games in 34 different parks, 10 of which, like Shea, have either left the face of the earth or have stopped functioning in the MLB realm. On some level, that means I’ve been to…

• Shea Stadium;
• 9 parks that weren’t Shea Stadium;
• and 24 parks that are not Shea Stadium.

It won’t surprise you a bit that Shea defines my perspective on ballparks. It may surprise you, however, to learn I don’t consider Shea my favorite ballpark. Most beloved and most resonant to me, absolutely. But there are some I hold in what I guess you’d call higher esteem.

Oh, there’s none I hold as dear as Shea, but I’ve got the ability to delineate. I know when I’ve been somewhere that’s…I don’t know if “better” is the word I would use here, but I’ve been to parks that transcended Shea for me — which is no small feat. That’s the litmus test I wound up applying once I began visiting other parks and ranking them. If I really felt that, all things being equal (though all things rarely are), I was having a Shea-plus time at a ballgame elsewhere, I had to be honest with myself. I had to say, y’know what? I have to rank this place ahead of Shea.

Not many ballparks made it over that hurdle. The uninitiated — anybody’s who’s not a Mets fan, probably — would not get that. But I imagine most of you who are Mets fans do.

Over the next several months, I plan to devote Flashback Friday to ballpark talk in a series ambitiously dubbed Take Me Out to 34 Ballparks. Starting Friday, March 5, I will revisit my 34th-favorite ballpark. The week after, we’ll go to my 33rd-favorite ballpark. Then…well, you get the idea. It’s a countdown because I like to count things down, but it’s less about my immensely subjective rankings than a chance for me to explore with you what these places mean to us as baseball fans.

It’s also an attempt on my part to place Citi Field in some kind of context besides it not being what Pedro Martinez memorably called my beloved Shea. With Shea Stadium off the map, I hope to begin to view Citi Field apart from the ghost hovering over its third base shoulder. Figuring out where it stands for me is an unfinished assignment. Take Me Out to 34 Ballparks might provide me with some guidance.

I tend to rank my ballparks as soon as I see them. Most of them I’ve seen only once, and I know I’ll likely never see again. Citi Field is different in that respect. I didn’t rank it right away. In fact, I kept it unranked until I’d finished a full season there, and even now I view its status as provisional. I have a hunch Citi Field will always be a work in progress for me, which is fine. Shea was always going to be the static standard by which I measured every other ballpark. Citi’s place in my head (and maybe, eventually, my heart) can’t help but be more dynamic. My thoughts on it will be more subject to change than the other 33 parks combined.

But it does have a ranking, so it will show up where it shows up —  same for Shea, same for the other 32 where I’ve been fortunate enough to experience big league baseball.

I like some parks more than I like other parks. It’s no secret that I like Shea more than I like Citi. But (again with all things being equal) I’d take being in a ballpark — any ballpark — over being anywhere else just about any day. So I’m pretty excited about going to one every Friday for the next 34 Fridays.

I hope you’ll find it a worthwhile trip.

Unless you’re soaking up the pleasures of practice fields in Florida or Arizona this weekend, consider spending an inning of more at the 24 Hour Talk-a-Thon to benefit Operation Homefront, a joint production of Baseball Digest, FantasyPros911.com and BlogTalkRadio.com. Details on this impressive undertaking for a worthy cause here.

Pity Mike Francesa. He’s a very insecure man. Today he interviewed James Hirsch, the author of the wonderful Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, and turned the conversation as well as the remainder of his show into a referendum (with his vote the only one that counts) on Mickey Mantle being better or more clutch or more forthcoming or a nicer person than Willie Mays. Even in begrudgingly acknowledging Mays’ unsurpassed all-around greatness, Francesa had to keep injecting Mantle, Mantle and more Mantle into the program.

I found this fascinating, not for the content, but for what it reveals yet again about Francesa, New York’s most listened-to sports talk host and highest-profile über Yankees fan. He couldn’t stand the idea that his childhood idol Mantle wasn’t being celebrated. The book, mind you, covers Mays’ entire life and career. It’s not a comparison of centerfielders at whom New Yorkers and baseball fans were fortunate enough to marvel during the same era. Mantle is not disrespected in this book. He’s just one character in a sweeping biography. Hirsch wrote about Mays, not Mantle. There are plenty of books about Mantle. This simply isn’t one of them.

Not good enough for Francesa, who immediately told Hirsch  — because it mattered to Francesa — that he’s “pro-Mickey Mantle” and, therefore, “anti-Willie Mays”.

This is a delineation a six-year-old makes.

It also fits the pattern of Francesa endlessly dismissing the Mets, the Jets and just about anything that isn’t the Yankees or that he can’t somehow connect to the Yankees. The football Giants, since they used to play in Yankee Stadium (and employ a coach who once served under his onetime BFF Bill Parcells), seem exempt from such condescension. I noticed on his performance art showcase that aired on Channel 4 the Sunday night after the Jets clinched their playoff spot that Francesa had to lead with an observation on how badly the Giants had played that afternoon, but we’ll get to them later…oh yeah, the Jets made the playoffs.

This was obviously the fault of the Jets for rhyming with Mets, which automatically devalues them to Francesa, the six-year-old who can’t stand attention being paid to anything that doesn’t smack of pinstripes.

Willie Mays? An all-time great? The subject of a new book, which is why you have on the guest you have on? So what? WAAAH! I WANNA TALK ABOUT MICKEY MANTLE! HE WAS MY FAVORITE PLAYER WHEN I WAS LITTLE! Reminded me of another misguided listening adventure many years ago when I tuned in to hear Francesa and his erstwhile brain-free partner speak to actor and Mets fan Tim Robbins. First thing Francesa said to Robbins was, hey, we should get you together with Chazz Palminteri, he’s an actor and a big Yankees fan!

Robbins was too polite to ask what I would have in that situation:

“What the fuck does Chazz Palminteri have to do with me at this moment?”

I don’t recall the impetus for Tim Robbins appearing, but I do know it wasn’t Subway Series Smack Talk or anything like that. Alas, Robbins was a Mets fan, and that couldn’t be taken at face value. Francesa had to make it about the Yankees, because that’s what a preternaturally insecure, hopelessly childish Yankees fan does.

Perhaps you’ve encountered examples of such behavior in your own life, off the air.

I have a hunch Mike Silva’s interview with Hirsch this Sunday evening at 9:00 on NY Baseball Digest will be far more focused on the subject matter at hand.

Ignore, this will be gone soon.

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Back in 2007, the Mets brought up a young man named Carlos Gomez. Gomez could burn — he and Jose Reyes used to race each other out to their positions, which I thought was adorable. He was just 21, but pretty big — the kind of guy you see as a doubles and triples hitter who might mature into a slugger. Meanwhile, the incumbent in right field was Shawn Green. Green was 34 and looked to my eyes like he was 54, particularly in the field, where ball after ball seemed to strike earth and take one gentle hop into his glove. Let’s all pause and remember Scott Speizio’s ball just eluding Green’s grasp, though it was really Guillermo Mota’s fault. Ugh that sucked.

Anyway, I loved Carlos Gomez. He was young. He had promise. He was not Shawn Green.

Greg, stuck sitting beside me on multiple occasions while I yelled at Shawn Green for not being someone else, was more cautious than this. Too many Benny Ayalas and Jay Paytons and Alex Escobars have done too much damage to his psyche for him to get overly excited about callow youth. It wasn’t so much that he was a Shawn Green fan as it was that he wanted to be sure we had a better answer before consigning existing ones to the scrap heap. He’s logical that way. It’s kind of infuriating.

As it turned out, neither one of us can claim much in the way of bragging rights there, not that that’s what we do anyway. Green was done after 2007; Gomez proved periodically talented but mostly maddening as a Minnesota Twin and is now a Milwaukee Brewer.

I know it’s spring training because in recent days I can feel myself coming down with another case of Rookie Fever. Josh Thole, he of the curious inside-out swing and stuff to learn on defense? Well, did you read this awesome New York Times story about him by David Waldstein? He spent the offseason playing for Leones del Caracas and hit .381! The Caracas fans nicknamed him el Infierno — the Inferno! He played in Caracas, which most things you read portray like it’s Grand Theft Auto with better graphics! And he didn’t bat an eye despite growing up in a town the Times called “an Illinois hamlet”! (Though the Times being the Times, that could be anything that isn’t St. Louis.) [Withdrawn. First of all, St. Louis ain't in Illinois, genius. Second, a pointless, cheap shot about a terrific story and a good get. Not my proudest moment.] And his fiancee sounds like a badass too! After reading Waldstein’s profile, I was not only demanding that Thole be the opening-day catcher but also inclined to suggest that Kathryn Poe immediately replace Luis Castillo.

Or take Ike Davis. He’s an above-average defensively first baseman who says modestly that he has a lot to learn. He’s being respectful of David Wright, who’s taken him under his wing, recalling that Ty Wigginton treated him wonderfully when he might have resented the rookie’s arrival. He can hit! He can field! He’s well-mannered! He’s got a big-league pedigree! He was a Cyclone! I’m getting more and more excited!

We will love Thole and Davis. I’m sure of it. Well, I’m certain we’ll love them … until.

What’s that? You want me to define until? OK, that can be tricky. It might be “until we expire on our deathbeds, thinking of numbers on walls and World Series trophies and trips to Cooperstown.” Seriously, it could happen. But yes, I’ll admit that most of the time until arrives a little more quickly.

We might love Thole and Davis until they commit the sin of revealing themselves to be better than only 99.925% of people on Earth who play baseball instead of 99.975% of those folks. We might love them until they get hurt and are never quite the same. We might love them until they’re traded or seek professional homes closer to their real ones for more money than the Mets feel like offering. We might love them until they get old a little too early for our tastes.

And, yeah, we might love them until they’re competing for jobs with someone just a little bit younger and less defined by reality than they have been. Throughout this discussion Daniel Murphy has been jumping up and down yelling “I’m 24 years old! I was born in freaking 1985!” Quiet down, old man.

That’s the way it goes. But for now, it’s February. Which means Rookie Fever is loose. Just try not to catch it.

In a post to Twitter, Rick Coutinho of ESPN Radio says RHP Sean Green has modified his delivery, and his sidearm motion is even more pronounced than it was last year.
—A leading indicator (via MetsBlog) that Spring Training is already too long

Anybody who was caught up in the peer pressure of seventh grade in the winter and spring of 1976 will remember dutifully watching Happy Days every Tuesday night at 8 o’clock on Channel 7. Between the aaays and the whoas of Henry Winkler as the Fonz, there was Pat Morita as the eponymous proprietor of Arnold’s Drive-In (and — when “Fearless Fonzarelli” attempted to jump 14 garbage cans on You Wanted To See It — Milwaukee Fried Chicken Stand). Arnold was generally taciturn toward the kids who frequented his establishment, but when something tickled his fancy, he’d let out a cackle that sounded, I swear, something like this:

BA-RA-HA-HA!!

So that’s basically all I know and all I’ve known or thought of when it comes to our prospective new catcher, Rod BA-RA-HA-HA!!s…I mean Barajas. That and he hit seven more home runs than any Met in 2009 without being particularly noted for his slugging prowess. Boy, did the Mets not hit home runs in 2009, and boy, despite the crowd in the clubhouse on the day they and pitchers reported, did the Mets apparently suddenly realize they need an experienced, but hopefully not overripe starting backstop.

All that stands in the way of Barajas squatting as a Met now is a passed physical and a firm contract. Given that these are the Mets we’re talking about — helmed by an owner who called the just completed offseason “torture,” though one presumes he had a say in its composition — nothing’s a done deal until it’s a done deal, but all signs point to yes, Rod Barajas will be catching and batting anywhere from first to ninth come Opening Day.

First to ninth? Remember, these are the Mets, where even leadoff hitters aren’t leadoff hitters.

Oh, rats. I swore I wasn’t going to get sucked into the Great Batting Order Kerfuffle of February 2010. These are the most pointless kerfuffles of any season, kerfuffling as they do six weeks before any manager has to submit any batting order that counts for anything. Didn’t Jerry Manuel make some noise about batting Jose Reyes third last year? Did Jose Reyes ever bat third? The answers are yes and no, respectively. In our first spring of blogging, a spitstorm erupted over Willie Randolph suggesting David Wright might bat eighth once the season started. Care to guess how often Wright batted eighth? Hint: His next time will be his first time.

Once Pitchers & Catchers are in place, it’s only a matter of time before Pollyannas & Cynics follow. Like most fans, I will veer between the two as the footage from St. Lucie grows repetitive and the novelty that somewhere on this continent there are Mets stretching wears off. For example, I caught a moment of Frankie Rodriguez talking up his physical and mental well-being and I imagined one 1-2-3 ninth after another, with “Sandungueoso” blaring, high-fives flying and magic numbers dwindling in our favor. Then, with images of the two walkoff grand slams he surrendered in 2009 slithering through my head, I realized, what the hell else is he going to say? “I really seemed to be losing something off my fastball there by the end, don’tcha think?” What are any of them going to say? Is Johan Santana going to choose anybody besides himself as the N.L. East’s best pitcher? Is the Daveotronic 5000 going to pick anybody besides the Mets to win the division? Is anybody going to take seriously anything Jerry Manuel says right now?

Among the rites of spring is the right to grow quickly jaded, to slide from yayI to yawn without notice. Or as Fonzie’s ABC Thursday night doppelgänger Vinnie Barbarino of Welcome Back Kotter put it when he went on to play Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, “I’m bored with it, all right?” Honest to god, how can anybody get worked up over Sean Green modifying his delivery on February 21?

If you don’t get bored with it, you’ll get immersed in nonsense and drown in it long before the games that don’t count are finished (and just wait and see how bored you’ll be with those). The classic case of Spring Training folderol that meant nothing in the long run occurred five years ago when Carlos Delgado wasn’t a Met.

He was going to be. It looked good, in that way you want it to look good when a free agent is left dangling in the marketplace for a long while. Delgado hadn’t signed with anybody entering the fourth week of January 2005. The Mets were very interested. Omar had picked off Pedro Martinez, then Carlos Beltran…by gum, can you believe they might get Delgado, too? Too good to be true, it turned out. Delgado signed with the Marlins during one of the rare offseasons when they were adding rather than shedding players and we summered instead with Doug Mientkiewicz.

It was vastly nothing from nothing as Spring Training commenced until Delgado’s agent David Sloane spread the word that his client was turned off by what Delgado felt was an overemphasis on Omar Minaya’s and Tony Bernazard’s part regarding the Latin heritage they each shared. Sloane was also busy that spring letting it be known Recidivist Marlin Al Leiter had helped lure Carlos to Miami by saying not so kind things about Al’s old club. What made Sloane’s contretemps du jour memorable were less the content than how, after engaging the New York baseball media, he expressed horror that a reporter had the nerve to call him on his cell for comment while he was off enjoying a Joe Cocker concert.

All at once, every Mets fan had the same thought: Joe Cocker in concert? 2005? As Jason asked, “Is David Sloane marching against Vietnam, too?”

It was nonsense, but — no disrespect to Sean Green’s awesome arm angle — at least it was different nonsense.

Whatever misgivings Carlos Delgado felt toward how he was courted as a free agent were rendered meaningless the following November when the Marlins traded his massively backloaded contract to the Mets for latent ‘05 wunderkind Mike Jacobs (and Yusmeiro Petit, one of the myriad pitching prospects the Mets have given up who didn’t turn into Scott Kazmir). Jacobs, of course, is a Met again, which is nice for those of us who retain a touch of romanticism about this game. On September 18, 2005, the Mets fielded, from left to right, David Wright at third, Jose Reyes at short, Anderson Hernandez at second and Mike Jacobs at first. It was, by my reckoning, the first all 1980s-born infield in Mets history, the blossoming Met youth movement in microcosm.

Two out of four weren’t bad…literally. Fortunately, the two who were indisputably good stayed. Somehow, because of injuries last year and provisional suspicion of Daniel Murphy this year, Hernandez and Jacobs have found their way home. If they join Reyes and Wright to compose the infield for significant swaths of 2010, it’s probably not the future we were hoping for in late 2005, but once or twice won’t necessarily hurt us.

Delgado? He hurts now, sadly. After spending most of 2009 out with a bad right hip, he’s had it operated on once more and he’s going to be sidelined anywhere from four months to for good as a baseball player. Carlos is approaching 38 years old and will have been inactive at the major league level for more than a year when he’s projected as fully recovered. David Sloane has taken off his earbuds long enough to let one and all know this isn’t stopping Delgado from planning on playing again, but planning and playing are two different things.

Adding Delgado when we did, even if meant parting with young Jacobs just as Jacobs was finding his home run stroke (the only stroke he ever maintained), surely didn’t hurt. No, I’d say it helped a great deal. Even though he wasn’t quite the Carlos Delgado at whom we’d marveled on SportsCenter and in fleeting American League glimpses — seems we use that type of description a lot — he was the right man at the right time for the 2006 Mets.

Willie Randolph didn’t much screw around with the batting order then. Carlos Delgado was his cleanup hitter 124 times. Reyes led off 148 times (missing his only significant time when Jacobs the Fish stepped on his hand and cost him his All-Star start); Paul Lo Duca batted second 118 times; Carlos Beltran was in the three hole 137 times; and Wright hit fifth 117 times. David took a few turns at cleanup, usually moving Delgado to third. Otherwise, it was all very stable from one through five, and the Mets were generally unstoppable.

Is this an endorsement of stability in batting orders? If you have five guys performing at or near their respective peaks, sure. It rarely works that way (which may provide a hint as to why 2006 has been so difficult to replicate). Otherwise, Jerry Manuel will — like any manager — juggle, improvise, pick names out of a hat. The best batting order is the one that works. The trial and error involved tends to bury everybody’s Spring Training quotes.

Still, it sure is nice when you have those first few names regularly present and accounted for. It’s even better when you have eight, but that’s rarely the case. Recall 2008, the last great year of Carlos Delgado. Last great half-year, really, since CD was plagued by the hip through ‘07 and the early months of ‘08. Then he turned it on, MVP-style, and seemed to carry the Mets into first place for stretches of summer. His hip may have been sore, but his back was strong, his shoulders were broad and oh my, was his swing lethal.

It wasn’t really Carlos Delgado by himself recasting the 2008 Mets from irritating, addled chumps to invigorating, almost champs. Reyes, Beltran and Wright were playing every single day, too. You knew Jose would lead off (159 times) and David would bat third (158 times). Beltran was often fourth (118 times) and sometimes fifth (36 times). Delgado was dropped to sixth 32 times in an effort to let him find himself. Once he did, he was generally entrusted with the five-hole (74 times) or cleanup now and then (40 times).

Batting second? Everybody. Luis Castillo, Endy Chavez, Ryan Church, Nick Evans, Argenis Reyes, Daniel Murphy, Damion Easley, Marlon Anderson, Angel Pagan…whoever worked. As Manuel discovered, none of them did for more than a few games here or a few games there. Perhaps it was telling that with everything on the line in the final weekend of the season, Jerry crafted a front four that may have been the most top-heavy half-lineup in the history of Shea Stadium:

Reyes SS
Beltran CF
Delgado 1B
Wright 3B

One pure leadoff hitter and three sluggers, no muss, no fuss. Not a Millan, a Backman or even a surprisingly powerful Alfonzo in the bunch — just punch.

Batting Beltran second — two hits in the final win, a homer in the final game — wasn’t unprecedented. That’s where he generated his power during his legendary 2004 postseason salary drive and that’s where callers to WFAN have intermittently demanded he be inserted regularly since 2005. The alignment was by no means insane, but it did strike me that Saturday and Sunday as incredibly desperate. Jerry Manuel was down to four offensive players he thought he could trust against any pitcher the Marlins threw at the Mets. Screw it, he seemed to say, I’ll just bat ‘em all at the top of the order and hope for the best. A Church who wasn’t slumping, a Castillo who wasn’t hopeless or a Ramon Martinez who might have revealed himself just a touch sooner as untapped dynamite and the lineup wouldn’t have looked so top-heavy. But nobody south of Wright inspired any confidence, thus the makeshift philosophy of Inflict Some Pain, Then Pray For Rain.

Would it have made the difference in how 2008 wound up had Jerry been able to effectively spread the wealth at the end? Who the hell knows? Given a few more games, maybe Manuel would have found the right combination. Unfortunately, you only get 162 games to sort it all out.

I was thinking of that particular lineup construction because of some admittedly esoteric research I recently undertook for another article slated to appear soon in another venue. It started with the foggy recollection that the 1997 Mets, befitting their never-say-die feistiness, were particularly compelling in the eighth inning. It rang a bell considering there’s no better inning than the eighth to decide to not say die. Well, OK, the first through seventh are fine innings on paper, and the ninth is technically not too late, but the eighth is properly dramatic and reasonably pragmatic. You don’t have to win it in the eighth. If you tie it up, you’re doin’ good.

Y’know what? I wasn’t crazy, at least not where my image of the ‘97 Mets was concerned. Bobby Valentine’s first club did indeed make the most of their eighth innings. They were, essentially, the best eighth-inning club in baseball that season. They scored in 57 of 162 eighth innings, totaling 114 runs in the process. Only the Indians scored more often in the eighth (58 games) and only the Mariners (124 runs) crossed home plate more. Those were playoff teams. The 88-74 Mets felt like they might be, which, after six consecutive losing seasons, was plenty.

Anyway, as long as I was looking up eighth innings, I decided to see if there was anything to be divined from other innings in Mets history. I found a dozen or so nuggets that I found far more fascinating than Sean Green’s arm angle, but this one item in particular, in light of Manuel’s musings about Reyes batting third and the de facto end of Delgado’s Met tenure, struck me:

The most prolific inning any Mets team has ever enjoyed across a single season was the first inning in 2008.

The 2008 Mets scored 139 runs in first innings two years ago. Not only that, they scored in 74 different first innings, also a Met record for any inning in any year. With Reyes just about invariably leading off, Wright consistently batting third and a Delgado-Beltran combo cleaning up, the Mets went out and put points on the board right away in 46% of their games. That was with nobody in particular batting second, mind you.

Next best inning in Mets history for total runs as well as frequency of scoring? The third inning of…2008. Manuel, when he was a genius, had a batting order that exploded in the first, took a breather in the second and created more noise in the third: 135 runs in 63 games. The Mets would fairly regularly turn over the lineup and produce like it was the first inning once more.

I don’t know that there’s a pattern to be gleaned here. What I’m fond of is the metaphor it presents for the most recent Met club to post a winning record: they were fast starters but dismal finishers. Met pitching — the dreaded 2008 bullpen — was giving up a ton of runs in the seventh, eighth and ninth innings, certainly more than they were scoring. The simplistic view (though I don’t know that it’s altogether inaccurate) is great first- and third-inning production got them 89 wins. It was the rest of the game kept them out of the playoffs. I find it some combination of telling, characteristic and vaguely damning that the 38th of Delgado’s 38 home runs in 2008, cracked in the 158th game of that ultimately unsatisfying season…

a) was a grand slam;
b) was blasted in the third inning;
c) capped a five-run onslaught;
d) was rendered a footnote when Wright couldn’t bring home Murphy from third with nobody out and the score tied in the ninth, as the Mets went on to lose in ten;
e) and represented the final time the 2008 Mets, even with their Big Four intact, scored more than two runs in any one inning — a span covering the last 43 innings of 2008.

Start fast. Finish dismal.

You can read as much as you choose into this sort of thing and you probably wouldn’t be wrong either way. For instance, the most productive ninth-inning team in Mets lore was the 2007 Mets, a unit we tend to consider the quittingest bunch of quitters in the history of quitting. It actually kind of makes sense when you realize the Mets were a distinctly bad home club (41-40) for a technically good overall club (88-74). Losing at home means you’re batting quite a bit in the bottom of the ninth. Know which Mets team scored the most ninth-inning runs in the first quarter-century that there were Mets? The 1962 club, the one that lost 58 games in the Polo Grounds and 62 more elsewhere. Were they never-say-die or just granted ample opportunity to score not quite enough to win very often?

I don’t know. I also don’t know if Delgado will play again. I don’t know if Jacobs will actually be here come April. I don’t know if Reyes batting third in Beltran’s absence is necessarily an unspeakable idea. I don’t know that Barajas will fundamentally alter the Met dynamic. I don’t know how a local greaser is supposed to guide his motorcycle over 14 garbage cans. I don’t know what to make of Sean Green’s pronounced sidearm motion.

It’s the first week of Spring Training. It’s hard to know anything. But it’s tough not to wonder about everything.