On Umbrella Day at Citi Field, R.A. Dickey shielded Mets fans everywhere from the elements.

Let the Phillies have Roy Oswalt (the big snot). No way he’s as perfect a righthanded addition to their rotation as R.A.’s been to ours. Kudos to Omar Minaya for making the under-the-radar acquisition of the century last December. Kudos to Jerry Manuel for not pulling him from today’s game until he absolutely had to. Just let R.A. Dickey do his thing and, more often than not, good things will happen.

God, I love this guy. God, don’t we all? For two months we’ve been invoking Terry Leach and Rick Reed to explain the element of delightful surprise R.A. Dickey has brought to Met pitching, how an emergency afterthought became a life preserver and then an every-fifth-day staple. Leach went 11-1 in 1987 when nobody was counting on him. Reed went 13-9 in 1997 and made himself a cornerstone of Met success for five seasons. In the future, I get the feeling that if we’re compelled to cite Leach or Reed, we’ll be able to say, “They came out of nowhere and to our rescue — you know, like R.A. Dickey in 2010.”

In the postgame interview on SNY, Dickey told Kevin Burkhardt there should be no doubt about hard this team works, citing the dirt on the uniforms of Jose Reyes and Angel Pagan after thirteen innings the night before. It was his way of saying “we never give up” without being banal about it. Typical R.A. Isn’t that something? We have enough of a sample to frame something as typical of the journeyman whose arrival in our organization we barely noticed when it occurred. I’d also say getting to one out in the ninth with a shutout the afternoon after a late night bullpenpalooza is Typical R.A.

And as if to back up Dickey’s thoughts on Met effort, Ike Davis said not being in the lineup yesterday allowed him to spend three hours in the batting cage and get some things worked out. Three hours yesterday led to a three runs on one swing today. Another great in-season pickup (of sorts) for those diligent Mets of Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel.

I’m really glad we won this Thursday rubber game, just as I was really sorry we lost the Wednesday middle game and was happy we won the Tuesday opening game. I’m thrilled we won a series. But I have to confess I’ve almost thought not at all about the standings while we’ve been taking on the Cardinals. I’ve glanced at Brave and Phillie scores and just took a look at the daunting Wild Card alignment, but I’ve stopped actively thinking of us being in any kind of race. Maybe that’s why the Oswalt deal isn’t fazing me at the moment. Does it really have anything to do with us for 2010, at least? We’re just some .500 team trying to get back on track, I’ve kind of accepted.

Yet I haven’t accepted that every game doesn’t matter on its own merit. My own personal experience aside, last night sucked because last night sucked. The night before was great because the night before was great. This afternoon’s result fills me with jubilation because it’s a Mets win engineered by guys for whom I root very hard. Even if this Met August becomes as irrelevant to the National League playoff picture as last Met August, these Mets demand our support and our attention. Whatever you think of Minaya and Manuel, their players transcend their performance even in the wake of the horrid several weeks before this very nice bounceback set.

Mets baseball can always be better, but when you’ve got a Dickey and Davis making you happy, it can’t be beat.

Fourteen out of fifteen isn’t bad, and, considering from how far back we traveled to get as far as we did, 8-7 in 13 isn’t inexcusable.

But it still sucks to lose that way. Or lose at all. I hadn’t forgotten the feeling, no matter how unusual it had become to experience in 2010.

The Streak — the stretch of Mets baseball that produced fourteen consecutive wins at Citi Field in my previous fourteen appearances there — is over, going the route of where they say all good things eventually go. But I gotta tell ya: The Streak did not go gentle into that good night.

It was, however, plainly on its way out the Rotunda gate in the very first inning on Wednesday night. Johan Santana, who had started four of the fourteen wins that composed The Streak and had even homered in support of it, pitched without a clue for the first inning. Was he tipping his pitches? Were the Cardinals bribing Henry Blanco for the signs? Was it the spillover from the full moon of three nights earlier? I ask whether that’s a possibility because whenever the bizarre happened around our house when I was kid, my mother would write it off with, “Must be a full moon!”

There’s nothing more bizarre than Johan Santana surrendering six runs and eight hits in the first inning of a baseball game. Then again, it was pretty bizarre that I’d been on a fourteen-game winning streak. And that I’d been chatting no more than two hours earlier with Ed Kranepool.

Yeah, that’s right. Ed Kranepool, the all-time Met hit king and me, hanging out on the warning track behind the batting cage at Citi Field. And by hanging out, I mean I stood in close proximity to Ed Kranepool while he went out about the business of being Ed Kranepool — chatting up several of his successors and dispensing his signature — and I spouted an occasional inanity that was vaguely related to our surroundings.

Things I learned during my ten or so minutes intermittently bothering but mostly relishing proximity to Ed Kranepool:

• He enjoys the Hamptons.

• He agrees with my assessment that he’s probably signed more autographs than any Mets player in history — “Probably,” he confirmed.

• He thinks Ike Davis is a good, young player and had no idea why he wasn’t in the starting lineup Wednesday.

“I guess it’s a lefty-lefty thing,” I said in my desire to furnish Ed Kranepool with potentially useful background information.

“He’s looked pretty good against lefties,” Ed Kranepool, good-looking lefty himself, responded.

Ed Kranepool has 1,418 hits. I had a one-time field pass as part of a generous Mets blogger outreach program. It was hanging from a button on my shirt. All bloggers, reporters, guests, what have you had to have a pass to be on that warning track. Ed Kranepool, the only Met to play in eighteen seasons, did not require such mundane ID.

Ed Kranepool's credentials, where everybody can see them.

All the credentials Ed Kranepool needs to show appear on page 408 of the Mets Media Guide and occasionally on the Citi Field scoreboard. First in hits; first in doubles (since passed by David Wright); first in pinch-hits; first in sacrifice flies; first in multi-hit games…and first in the hearts of any countryman who watched him personally script the batting portion of the Mets record book from 1962 to 1979. If Ed Kranpeool didn’t see a reason lefty Ike Davis shouldn’t be starting against Cardinal lefty Jaime Garcia, he was right.

Probably.

When I wasn’t orbiting the surface of Ed Kranepool, I walked the track during BP, or as much of the track as our passes allowed. Mostly I joined my blolleagues in loitering in front of the Mets dugout for most of our allotted time. This gave me a good look at the righty hitter who was taking Davis’s place for the evening, Mike Hessman. Hessman stretching. Hessman taking ground balls. Hessman not being bothered by anybody the way an Ed Kranepool might, which seemed reasonable given that Ed Kranepool played first base for the Mets in 1,304 games and Mike Hessman still has that new-callup smell.

Mike Hessman isn’t without his own set of credentials. Per Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, he’s been around, ya know? He hasn’t been around the Mets before or the majors much, but if you want minor league power, Mike Hessman’s been your man for a generation. He’s slugged 329 home runs of the Triple-A and lower variety since 1996. You’d figure that would have earned him more of a shot at a higher level than he’s received (77 games in four seasons spanning 2003 to 2008 with Atlanta and Detroit). It didn’t. He’s been a Bison this year. He’s homered 18 times as such. He’s also played a lot of third, a little first and a bit of everything else since turning pro. He became a Met two days ago when Rod Barajas went on the DL. He became a Met first baseman last night, Ed Kranepool’s lack of blessing notwithstanding.

Maybe it was the recent full moon or maybe it’s just that this is what you get when you rematch the two pitchers who threw cartons of goose eggs in what became a twenty-inning test of nearly scoreless endurance in April, but Garcia didn’t look a lot better than Santana in the bottom of the first. The Mets, far from shellshocked after landing in their 6-0 hole, loaded the bases for their first baseman and five-hole hitter, Mike Hessman. And Mike Hessman creamed the third pitch he saw for a very deep drive to a very high left field wall. In Buffalo and International League points south, that’s probably a grand slam. At cutesy-poo Citi Field, that’s a two-run double.

First baseman Mike Hessman: he's never heard of me, either.

Still, a two-run double isn’t at all something at which you sneeze when it was 6-0 a second ago. Hell, I even allowed myself to think that it was just as well it didn’t go out because, sure it would be 6-4, but the bases would be empty, our momentum would be spent and Mike Hessman would do nothing but swing for the fences the rest of the night.

I didn’t sneeze at 6-2, but I must be allergic to too optimal good fortune.

Our momentum turned moot. It stayed 6-2 for a long spell. Johan settled in, I guess, but so did Jaime. It was The Twenty-Inning Game all over again, save for the tiny difference that the first inning featured eight runs. Eventually the Cards would push across another run off Santana, who left in the sixth. The Mets would answer in their half when Carlos Beltran reasserted his power by smashing a homer to left. Hearing “El Esta Aqui” again and seeing El himself circle the bases was mighty gratifying, but we still trailed by four with time running down on The Streak. Once we played seven and it was still 7-3, I surrendered to the inevitable. I knew I was going home on the proverbial “L” train for the first time in fifteen games.

And with that, a mini-miracle unfolds. Castillo leads off the bottom of the eighth with a single and Pagan rockets one to right. It’s 7-5. Hey, I reasoned silently while otherwise screaming loudly, 7-5 is doable. A home run doesn’t necessarily nip momentum in its bud. Sometimes it scatters the seeds for imminent success. Didn’t Mike Piazza reach Curt Schilling for a leadoff single and Robin Ventura follow with a two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth on May 23, 1999? Yes indeed they did. That trimmed a four-run lead to two on another day when the Mets seemed endlessly out of it and it opened a door to what soon became a five-run ninth that beat the Phillies and their often intolerable ace (all five runs were given up by Schilling) 5-4.

At 7-5, Wright reaches on an infield hit. Beltran strikes out, but Hessman — who hasn’t homered — has the decency to be nicked by a Mitchell Boggs pitch. The Tony LaRussa overmanaging carousel begins to spin: righty Jason Motte gets Jeff Francoeur to fly out with runners on first and second after an admirable ten-pitch battle on Frenchy’s part. Lefty Dennys Reyes comes in to face lefty Josh Thole, but walks him. Now the bases are loaded. The pitcher’s spot is due up. Reyes is still standing on the mound, left arm dangling as a weapon to discourage production by lefty hitters. Lefty-lefty matchups may not be what Jerry Manuel wanted when Jaime Garcia began this game, but he has no other option now.

Thus, the batter is the apple of Ed Kranepool’s eye, Ike Davis. The regular first baseman of the New York Mets, pinch-hitting for the second time in his young career (whereas Ed Kranepool pinch-hit 370 times in his old career), singles through the right side of the St. Louis infield. David Wright scores from third. Mike Hessman lumbers — and I mean lumbers — from second but scores as well. Thole can go no farther than third. Davis is on first.

And the game is tied at seven.

The Streak, one person in 35,009 thinks, is still alive. Or at least it’s not yet deceased. The Mets can win this thing they seemed destined to lose. And if that goes down as a fifteenth consecutive “W” in my Log, then everybody wins.

LaRussa continues to manage. His fourth pitcher of the eighth inning, Kyle McClellan of the righthanded persuasion, enters. Jose Reyes, worthy inheritor of No. 7 from Ed Kranepool, sees six pitches and walks. The bases are loaded yet again. Luis Castillo can drive in the run that will give us our first lead of the night, a lead that can be handed off to Frankie Rodriguez and (theoretically) put in the books.

Man, it would be great if Luis could do that. Castillo actually won the Mets a game on a walkoff single versus Trevor Hoffman his first month as a Met. Omar Minaya was so excited, he granted little Luis a lifetime personal services contract that precluded any other second baseman from ever playing the position for the New York Mets. I exaggerate slightly, but Luis wasn’t always the guy at whom you yell “bunt him over!” as I did all night. Luis can do this, we’ve all decided to decide. We came back from 0-6 to make this 7-7. It would be a shame to let our general disregard for Luis Castillo discourage us from believing it can be 8-7.

We believe (I actually muttered “faith…faith…faith” under my breath his entire at-bat) and Luis tries, but we are not rewarded for our belief. On the sixth pitch he sees, he grounds to short.

Still, 7-7 going to the ninth. We’ve been routing the Cardinals 7-1 since that pesky top of the first when Johan was abducted by aliens and injected with a serum for failure. Now it’s a clean slate. Now it’s Frankie being used in a tie game because we’re home; if we were on the road, Frankie would have to make John Candy’s bunk, but because we’re home, Jerry Manuel can actually use his ostensible best reliever to keep things tied. Which is what Frankie does. He’s so brilliant in the ninth and it’s a game whose sudden chance to become a Met win was so hard-earned, even Jason Fry of Faith and Fear in Flushing is cheering his Frankie-loathing heart out for him.

We’re all set up for a dramatic and wonderful conclusion to our long night. Very long night, I should digress. The blogging bunch has been here since four o’clock. We saw up close how much the Mets prepare for a game. We saw the stretching drills and the infield repetition (I learned Angel Pagan takes throws from Ike Davis at second and then whips them back to first — is there no end to this man’s versatility?) and the enormous home runs that are hit when the balls are grooved by batting practice pitchers. Jeff Francouer must frighten LaGuardia’s air traffic controllers late every afternoon. We saw, too, that the Mets conduct themselves like nice guys, posing for pictures with little kids, signing baseballs, answering questions from all manner of media (Jose had a Latin American contingent following him diligently). The rest of BP is a lot of standing around, but for the players, all of this is simply what you do when you come to work.

"Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go practice crushing awesome home runs."

Yet let’s not kid ourselves: you also see, when you’re privileged with a gander, how much baseball is a game. It’s not one I, at 47 and decidedly in not the best shape of my life, can play, but I recognized it as essentially the same fun activity I dived into every chance I got when I was kid. The Mets playing catch, I swear on a stack of revised yearbooks, isn’t much different from me playing catch, save for the exponentially better skill at all facets of the throwing and catching involved. Granted, you look at everything these fellows do through the prism of their megabucks salaries — who wouldn’t want to play a game for a luxurious living? — but you can’t help but notice that when they’re just going through the motions of throwing, catching, swinging and preparing for a game, they seem to be having the time of their life.

And they get to do it daily.

That’s baseball. That’s the grind. That’s what separates it from football, the scholar Earl Weaver noted: “We do this every day.” Whatever the tasks that compile an evening of Mets baseball, you can tell, when you’ve got a field pass, that it takes a lot of people doing a lot of likely the same things on a daily basis to make it all happen. In my short time around it, I admired the effort put in, whether it was from the trainers, the bullpen catcher, our friends in the PR department or even the security guard whose job it was to sneer at me slightly as I stood in the Met dugout where I technically wasn’t supposed to be (Ed Kranepool doesn’t mind me hanging around, but the guy in the yellow supervisor’s golf shirt’s got it in for me).

But ya know what? I wouldn’t want to be a part of it every day the way all those folks are. I wouldn’t want to be one of the beat writers whom I noticed waiting around for the chance to get a few minutes with Wright or Reyes or whoever. I wouldn’t want the Mets to be my job. If it were, I couldn’t have been in the stands in the eighth showing no objectivity and demonstrating no pretense of professionalism. It was fun to be around the way it works for a day. I think it would be a shame for it to be anything but fun any more than that. I want the drama and the wonder and the full moon bizarreness and the chance for joy. Everything else should be somebody else’s responsibility.

(Though I am obligated to point out I am available for consulting.)

Good thing there are people trained to deal with whatever comes up, because something very big came up in the bottom of the ninth in the section next to ours. While the Mets attempted to push across that one run that would certify Wednesday night as practically magical — Wright and Beltran singled with one out — a man had taken ill. I couldn’t tell you what it was, but he was in bad shape, and various security and EMT personnel rushed to his aid. That sort of thing may not be uncommon, yet to watch it unfold while the stadium PA did its job — blaring rallying cries and blasting upbeat music — was surreal. I swear it was something out of The Naked Gun: in the foreground, earnest medics struggle with transferring a patient onto a stretcher; in the background, tens of thousands of oblivious fans chant LET’S GO METS! It would have been funny if it hadn’t been potentially tragic.

I have to admit I sort of hoped the Mets could find a way to foul off fifty or sixty pitches in the bottom of the ninth so the emergency responders could finish their job in something less than a carinval atmosphere. It felt unseemly to root for a baseball team while a baseball fan was in what appeared to be peril. I sure hope he’s all right.

Wright and Beltran weren’t driven in. The Mets didn’t score that eighth run and it felt like the momentum had slipped away. Frankie was money in the tenth and Bobby Parnell was just as valuable in the eleventh and twelfth, but we weren’t getting anywhere versus LaRussa’s lobbers. Our only baserunner in extras, Reyes, was gunned down by Yadier Molina, who remains the only public figure upon whom I perpetually wish an onslaught of physical harm (come to think of it, he did come out before the game ended and I did read something about a sore shin…suck on it, destroyer of dreams). Second base was not a lucky bag for Mets baserunners. Prior to Beltran’s sixth-inning blast, Wright singled on what he (and I) thought would be a double. A good throw by Matt Holliday and an overslide by Wright cost us a baserunner for Beltran. Would have Carlos necessarily homered with David on and would have we won 8-7? And if Jeff Wilpon hadn’t insisted on wacky walls, would have Mike Hessman’s double been a grand slam? And what about the presence of candies and nuts replacing ifs and buts — wouldn’t that make every day Christmas?

Anyway, two key Mets were out at second base and not enough Mets crossed home plate and sooner or later, the team with Albert Pujols is going to get an opportunity to take the measure of whichever reliever the team trying to retire Albert Pujols has kept hidden until some very late inning. Pedro Feliciano was not, on this occasion, the equal of Frankie Rodriguez or Bobby Parnell and he sure as hell wasn’t up to the task of setting down Pujols with runners on first and third and two out. Prince Albert kinged Pedro with a hot grounder to left, scoring Skip Schumaker (whom Pedro hit either because Pedro hasn’t been all that effective or he was just pissed there are grown men running around calling themselves Skip**) and the long day was nearing its inevitable, unsuccessful end.

Fourteen consecutive games that I’d attended have ended with “Takin’ Care of Business” following the final pitch. This time, the Citi DJ went straight to “New York State of Mind,” the Mets’ good night music when there’s nothing good about it. There was plenty good on Wednesday, but my mood when I had to handle loss for the first time since Willie Harris snared a sinking liner on April 10, wasn’t in that category. Losing 8-7 didn’t leave me in a “New York State of Mind”. It left me in a state of dismay.

Losing at Citi Field had become so rare an occurrence as to grow seemingly nearly extinct. But I spotted, at last, a loss, right out there in the wild. It’s a thrill I could have lived without at least one game longer.

It’s worth noting in this context that on July 28, 1993, exactly seventeen years before my version of The Streak whimpered to an end, a far more famous and far less desirable Met streak snapped. Anthony Young finally won a game after losing 27 of them in a row, the most any pitcher ever lost in one ongoing string. He did it the hard way, giving up the go-ahead run in his only inning of work against the baby Marlins before being rescued by Ryan Thompson’s and Eddie Murray’s tying and winning RBI. I was really happy AY was no longer the biggest loser as of July 28, 1993, and if I had to pay for that karmically on July 28, 2010, so be it.

That’s one rationalization. Another is it had to end sooner or later, damn it, yet it wouldn’t go down without a fight, and I appreciate the Mets giving it a puncher’s chance in the eighth — and regret how their offense played pat-a-cake from the tenth through the thirteenth.

I recently found myself reluctantly rewatching Billy Crystal’s 2001 Yankee gushfest, 61*, when it appeared on one the HBOs. Late in the movie, Babe Ruth’s widow dismisses the suggestion that her late husband wouldn’t necessarily have minded Roger Maris breaking his mark since Maris, after all, was another Yankee. No, Mrs. Ruth said, she didn’t think so: “The Babe loved that record.”

That’s how I felt about The Streak, even if it existed for me and me alone (though many of you have been kind enough to wish it well). I am all but certain I will never experience this run of luck again. For three months, I considered myself the luckiest fan on the face of the earth. How do you keep going to the same ballpark to root for the same ballclub and come home every single time having gotten exactly what you rooted for?

I don’t know how it happened, but it did. I’ll always cherish that it happened.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have between now and Sunday to figure out how to vanquish a one-game losing streak.

**Or, to borrow a phrase from George Read, Tory delegate to the Continental Congress from Delaware, “in many cases”. Apologies to the good Skips out there…besides Lockwood, I mean.

To pick up on the theme of Met hesitancy turned Met happiness described so well by my partner, I was indeed running late Tuesday night. Earlier in the day, I wasn’t so much running as sitting…sitting, then standing, then pacing, then growling into a telephone at the ironically named Action Repair, a firm I’d enlisted to hopefully fix an air conditioner that was running not so much late as warm.

It was classic “hurry up and wait” stuff. Action Repair promised me a home visit by no later than 11:30 AM — “You’re their first call,” the dispatcher assured me. Then, because “The routes got screwed up,” I would see them by 3:00 PM. Then, because “The boss made them do two installations,” they’d show no later than “before” 6:00 PM.

The only two lines the dispatcher didn’t feed me were “The dog ate my Freon” and “They’re on their way right now.”

Action Repair arrived at my home at approximately 6:40 PM, more than seven hours after they were due and half-an-hour before first pitch. Despite the grand annoyance wrought by their callous disregard for other people’s time, the technician and his assistant,  who indeed appeared to have been shuttling from one demanding job to another all day — jobs so demanding they apparently couldn’t take two seconds to call the dispatcher with an updated ETA to pass their customer’s way — sprung into Action of the most effective sort. Seven hours in the waiting, thirty minutes in the fixing; they were miraculously done making my office cool just as the Mets’ bats were beginning to defrost in Flushing

That mission accomplished, my ticket, courtesy of Jason, was still in my wallet and still good for admission to the night’s baseball game. It was diminished in the sense that I wasn’t going to be able to use it to its fullest potential and see the first, second, third or probably fourth inning of said game, but it was still good. My next possible train and its various connections would land me at Citi Field’s doorstep no sooner than 8:40, which seemed unconscionably late on one level, yet a fine consolation prize on a higher level.

My day, like Action’s routes, had been screwed up, but now there was a chance to make everything cool.

I rode my rails: to Jamaica, to Woodside, to Willets Point. On the final approach to the final stop, I was genuinely surprised by what I saw to my left: Citi Field all atwinkle, its parking lot formerly known as Shea Stadium dense with cars, its sky brightened by the lights I’d never seen turned on from this perspective before.

As evidenced by my figurative (and literal) lack of worms, I’m no early bird, yet it’s become my Citi Field custom to arrive at least an hour before a game begins. In the first season of Citi, it gave me a chance to explore the new environs. Since then, it’s allowed me to purchase food and beverage and enjoy it peaceably before getting fully in the swing of baseball things. It’s just worked better for me when I can manage to get there early.

But it wasn’t going to work for me Tuesday night. I could only get there late. Very late. As late as I can recall showing up for a non-doubleheader. Circa 7:10, I had briefly thought of texting my air conditioned regrets to Jason — I’d waited so long for climate control and now I was a bit reluctant to abandon it in favor of two LIRR trains and one 7 local — but I didn’t like the idea of a valid ticket becoming a bookmark. I also didn’t want the first Phantom Game of the Citi Field era to occur so soon. A Phantom Game is a game for which I’m supposed to go but simply can’t. Those don’t get put in The Log. Those don’t get put anywhere except atop my towering pile of regrets once that game gets played without me and my unused ticket. Maybe the Mets lost, maybe the Mets won, but I always wish I could have gone after I couldn’t/haven’t.

Tuesday night was going to be a loss, I was pretty certain. The Streak had been too strong and gone too long. It was a relic of the first half of 2010, like the best of Rod Barajas and the last of John Maine. It would be too much to ask it to continue into the second half, not when runs ceased to be scored in Los Angeles, not when Adam Wainwright loomed from sixty feet, six inches away.

But The Streak, if it was to go down, was going to have to go down honorably. I didn’t like the idea of a valid ticket becoming a bookmark, sure, but I also didn’t like the message I’d be sending the baseball gods, that I had a something of an out — the pliable relationship Action Repair has with time and the way it would make rushing to Flushing something of a fool’s errand — and I took it so as to artificially preserve my winning ways.

Couldn’t do that. It would be unfair to The Streak. It would also be unfair to me because I like to go to Mets games, particularly with Jason.

So screw Adam Wainwright and the chances he’d shut us down as he had in April (to say nothing of a distant October). Screw sitting on thirteen consecutive wins. Screw the odd feeling one gets joining in progress a game that started seamlessly in your absence ninety minutes before. Delight, instead, in a ballpark all aglow with baseball, knowing you can still get in on four, maybe five innings before it’s all over.

Comprehensive testing has shown four, maybe five innings are better than none.

The Mets were losing when I left the house. They tied while I waited for my first train. They went ahead Frenchy-style between Jamaica and Woodside. And they built a definitive lead as I made my way from the Rotunda to the elevator to the Promenade. I stood with Jason and watched the Met margin increase to 6-1 on the food court big screen, messily cramming a rack of Blue Smoke ribs into my meathole in the process because I missed my leisurely pregame meal opportunity and never thought to eat while I awaited Action. The chewing and viewing continued from there as Jon Niese pitched out of his last jam in the top of the sixth. This has worked out beautifully, I thought, but there is still one problem:

I haven’t seen any of the game in person.

The code of The Log is a game counts once I’ve seen one pitch live. The rule was put in place on the occasion of a twinight doubleheader I couldn’t make until the seventh inning of the first game — the Robin Ventura two Grand Slam doubleheader from 1999, as you Mets Classics aficionados might recognize it. I only caught three innings of that twinbill opener, but I was at Shea and I witnessed a chunk of it. Witnessing any of it, even a fragment, I decided then and there, would have sufficed. And witnessing it means watching the field, not an HD monitor.

Still gnawing on those imposing yet delicious ribs, I told Jason I needed to go watch a live pitch, any live pitch. Gotta go take advantage of this unforeseen abundance of runs. Thus, at the beginning of the bottom of the sixth, I stood behind a Promenade box and observed Fernando Salas deal ball one to Jeff Francoeur. Well, now I’d seen everything…or everything I needed to see. It was, for me and The Streak, an official game.

I also would have been on the hook had the Cardinals rushed back into contention, but this wasn’t a night to think like that.

Naturally I hung around to take in more than just one pitch. Four or so innings bought me Reyes’s two-run homer to the Pepsi Porch; Billy Joel’s wistful Last Play at Shea rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on what I should refuse to refer to as  CitiVision; Mike Hessman’s low-key Met debut; and Frankie Rodriguez not blowing a six-run lead. By the time K-Rod was uneventfully finishing off those pesky Redbirds, I was wishing a little bit that I could have more baseball before saying good night to Citi Field — but more baseball when you hold an 8-2 lead with two out in the ninth is neither a viable nor desirable option.

With The Streak, the win and the air conditioner all properly serviced, everything at last looked good on Tuesday, at least until I barely missed the 10:17 at Woodside, not two hours after having transferred there in the other direction for my four or so innings of action, having lost most of the first five innings to Action. I wasn’t too happy with the LIRR not giving me an extra fifteen second’s grace as I trundled down its stairs, but honestly, what’s one more screwed up route when you’ve made it, at last, to your fourteenth win in a row?

So tonight I was on the subway, and glanced up to see Citi Field outside the windows, and thought something strange: I don’t want to go.

There were a lot of reasons. For one, I had a ton of work to do — too much, it suddenly seemed, to burn an entire night at the ballpark. For another, Greg had emailed me that he was delayed and possibly couldn’t come.

And, well, you probably guessed this third reason already: The team had just staggered home from an amazingly horrible road trip, one that seemed to have deep-sixed the season. They’d played futile, excruciating walking-in-concrete-overshoes baseball, and now were squaring off against Albert Pujols, Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright. Well, to be more accurate, the hitters had played futile, excruciating walking-in-concrete-overshoes baseball. If the various tomato cans they’d faced in Arizona and L.A. had made them look like the wrong end of Pros Vs. Joes, what would an ace riding a 26-inning scoreless streak do to them?

And why on earth would I want to sit by my lonesome in the Promenade and watch it while people booed?

So. Did I want to turn around and go home? Yes, I did.

Did I do that? No, I didn’t. And thank goodness.

The doors opened at Willets Point and I realized another beautiful night was coming, another respite from the jungle-rot weather of recent weeks. People spilled out of the 7 train, lots of them in Cardinals red, but many more in Mets blue or orange or black or white. They weren’t bearing pitchforks or torches. They weren’t even complaining. Rather, they seemed happy with the weather and each other and the prospect of baseball. So I let them carry me down the stairs and through the turnstiles and down the stairs again and across the plaza with the Apple, past the McFadden’s girls and up to the rotunda and the fanwalk, with its invocations of great Mets moments and messages of hope and joy and perseverence. And I began to feel better about things. In fact, I began to feel mildly embarrassed about my earlier moment of doubt.

Look, the Mets’ swoon was almost perfectly timed to crush our fragile hopes. They came out of the break with us mildly worried about their hungover play since Puerto Rico, then went to the West Coast and made us stay up late night after night watching them lose and hurtle out of contention. We hadn’t seen a home game in two-and-a-half weeks, during which an enormous amount had happened — there was a moment of silence before the game for George Steinbrenner, which made me do a double-take until I realized that he’d been alive when the Mets last played a home game. Carlos Beltran got a mild response from the crowd in his first at-bat, but I don’t think it was indifference so much as the fact that, well, we kind of forgot the context. It didn’t register with me that this was Beltran’s first game back at Citi Field, because by now I’m used to him being back. That’s how long the road trip was.

Anyway, yes, there’d been reasons to want to turn around and go home. But walking up the right-field stairs, I found myself smiling. It was a beautiful night, there was a baseball game, and I had a ticket to it. Plenty of nights, including some perfectly nice ones, don’t measure up to that.

It’s true that this reminder was tested almost immediately, when the Cardinals poked and jabbed and dinked Jonathon Niese for a first-inning run before I even got out of the Taqueria line. But one cheapie run wasn’t enough to mar the kind of summer night that makes you wish you had a good beer and something great to eat and a ballgame to watch, particularly since I actually had all those things. So I wandered here and lingered there, keeping tabs on the game via the ever-present monitors and letting the flow of Citi Field carry me along backstage. I texted two friends of mine who were there and visited happily with them for a while, then chatted with another friend up atop the big baseball in the Promenade food court for a time. And by now Greg was on his way, my phone buzzing with updates on his progress. On the train I’d feared being lonely, but I hadn’t been — and even if I had been by myself, baseball and the ballpark were proving good companions.

For down there on the field, the Mets were looking nothing like the team that had sleepwalked its way across a distant time zone. First they drew even on the Cards thanks in large part to a Beltran double off Wainwright, irony noted and then quickly waved away as irrelevant at this remove. Then they did some dinking and jabbing of their own, and Jeff Francoeur nailed a Wainwright offering to left-center. (Wainwright later said he was trying to walk Frenchy; irony noted again.) I thought Francoeur’s drive would be off the wall, hopefully bouncing back past the outfielders, but it was just high enough to be gone for a three-run shot. And the Mets were on their way.

When Greg arrived we scaled the Promenade and sat happily up there, jousting mildly about Mets we’d blamed everything on and talking shop and just generally catching up, as we’ve done hundreds of times before and will hopefully do hundreds of times more. Then K-Rod was in the game, and Pujols had struck out, and it was time to go home winners. 8-2 certainly helped, but it was just the capper on the night and the park and everything else. And it was a lesson — a welcome one, for once.

There are lots of times you’ll be busy and that ticket will seem less like an invitation than a burden. But push through these moments. Get up and go. Because it’s baseball.

I was no fan of Whitey Herzog’s when he was The Enemy in the middle and late 1980s. Man, did I hate those Cardinal teams, probably more than I hated the Bobby Cox Braves of the late ’90s and early 2000s, Durocher’s Cubs, Leyland’s Pirates or Charlie Manuel’s Phillies of recent vintage.

That’s a lot of hate, I tell you what.

The White Rat was the implacable face of those teams. Vince Coleman may have possessed the legs that could outrace every one of Gary Carter’s frustrating throws (if not a mechanical tarpaulin roller); Tommy Herr may have been the pre-eminent pain in the Mets’ ass; and Terry Pendleton may have become a brand name at Roger McDowell’s expense, but it was Herzog who came off as one goddamn smug son of a bitch in the opposing dugout. Ooh, did I truly despise him.

Thus, I regret to note that I loved Whitey Herzog’s Hall of Fame speech Sunday. It brimmed with the humility and awe appropriate for someone whose major league playing career was confined to spare outfield duty on second-division clubs yet whose managerial résumé eventually encompassed six division titles, three pennants and the 1982 World Series championship, all compiled across eighteen busy seasons. Didn’t like him when he was lefty-rightying the Mets to death in 1985 and 1987 and couldn’t stand him when he was demanding Howard Johnson’s bat be checked for cork, but loved him on Sunday.

Loved that speech. Loved that Herzog remembered his first minor league manager, future Mets coach Vern Hoscheit — just like HoJo (still) and Herzog, come to think of it — taking him to Sunday dinner in McAlester, Okla., before a game and permitting the young Rat to order a beer because Herzog was German and “by the time I was five…I had drank more beer than milk.

“Luckily, I got four hits that night.”

Loved Whitey’s sober scouting report on Dorrel Norman Elvert Herzog: “I was able to get nine years. Wasn’t a very good player, but I did get nine years in the big leagues and there was only sixteen teams and 50-something minor leagues, and I got my pension. I was the kind of player everyone wanted; when they got me, they didn’t know what the hell to do with me.”

And I really loved that he generously recalled his friendship with someone who hasn’t been around for a very long time — Casey Stengel. It was a mentor-protégé relationship that commenced when Herzog was just another Yankee minor leaguer who had no chance of making the big club (Herzog’s theory as to why he drew special attention in Spring Training is Stengel assumed this kid was the grandson of early 20th century Giant Buck Herzog and Whitey never corrected the misconception) and continued for the rest of the Ol’ Perfesser’s life. Their bond was particularly strong during those days in St. Petersburg when the just-retired Stengel was a very special guest and Whitey was finally getting his shot in a New York uniform as Wes Westrum’s third base coach.

“Casey told me so many things that became valuable to me,” Whitey said at Cooperstown. “He said, ‘You’re going to be a manager. You’ve got to learn how to handle the press. When I managed the Mets, you got a bad team, here is how you handle the press.’ He said, ‘You’re very nice to them.’ And then he said, ‘You feed them and you drink with them and you stay up all night with them having a few pops. Put them to bed about 4:30 and by the time their deadline comes, they won’t even put the score of the game in.’

“Well, that was the way to handle the Mets, I’ll tell you that.”

Herzog indeed impressed the press (which wasn’t Westrum’s forte) but never got the chance to handle the Mets himself, though he did have a hand in the development of the 1969 world champs. After 1966, his single season on the Met coaching lines, he was reassigned to the Met minor league system. As recounted by the Times’ Richard Sandomir — aided by an interview with ranking Mets Herzogologist/Numerologist Jon Springer — the Rat’s touch was all over the talent-laden rosters of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Herzog proudly recalled for Anthony McCarron of the News how Gil Hodges thanked him with the firmest of handshakes in the midst of the Mets’ World Series celebration for all he did to get the Mets to the mountaintop.

“’For three years now,’” Herzog quoted Hodges, “every time I called you about what I need, you have sent me the right player.’ Believe me, that went right to my heart.”

Herzog was viewed by many in the Mets sphere as a future manager, and when tragedy forced an untimely choice to be made, after Hodges died in 1972, he was considered by his acolytes in the press the logical candidate. But the man making the decision was M. Donald Grant, someone whom time would reveal wasn’t always on the same page as logic. The Shea manager’s office instead went to Yogi Berra. A year later Whitey Herzog went to Texas and was off soon enough on his Hall of Fame journey in Kansas City.

NEW YORK N.L. doesn’t show up on Herzog’s plaque because all his managing took place elsewhere — Rats, one is tempted to say; Rats that the guy who did us in a couple of times couldn’t have been the one to steer the ship away from the iceberg it didn’t have to head toward as the ’70s unfolded. When he was farm director, Herzog didn’t want to trade Amos Otis or Nolan Ryan. His advice went unheeded. Who knows where the Mets would have gone had Grant listened to him or, better yet, gotten the hell out of the way? Then again, a decade after he left New York, Herzog took a liking to Neil Allen and was more than happy to rid himself of Keith Hernandez to bring him to Busch Stadium. These things have a way of working out sometimes.

***

I don’t know that anybody gets particularly excited when a manager is inducted into the Hall of Fame, but I’m glad it happened for Herzog if just to hear the speech and find the chance to contemplate the qualities that made those who held the job he never did so Amazin’ly memorable:

• Stengel knowing exactly what he was doing when he knew there was nothing he could do with the pieces expansion dealt him;

• Hodges instilling professionalism and pride in the clubhouse when there were finally players on the premises who could play;

• Berra remaining unflappable until the storm that swirled all around him swirled itself out;

• Bobby Valentine managing full games while his opponents were stuck in whatever inning it happened to be;

• And Davey Johnson deciding it was time for his team to win big, and so they did.

That’s a little simplistic for Davey, who dueled Whitey to a 2-2 tie in their concomitant quest for N.L. East titles (the pair later teamed up to run a celebrity fishing camp — fishing with celebrities, not for celebrities). As Herzog said Sunday, without Hall of Famers like Ozzie Smith, Bruce Sutter and George Brett executing the moves he made, “I’d probably be back in Illinois digging ditches or something.” You can’t be a genius without the players to back it up. The only manager who ever seemed capable of motivating his charges by merely pointing out the necessity of winning precisely enough games (32) to clinch a playoff spot was the original sabermetrician, recently deceased Cleveland Indians skipper Lou Brown — and he was peeling off pieces of a cardboard dress when he said it.

Still, what do we think of when think of Davey Johnson now that he’s on the cusp of his ridiculously delayed induction into the Mets Hall of Fame? We think of the declaration he put forth before the start of the 1986 season: we’re not just going to win, we’re going to dominate. 108 dominating wins later, Davey Johnson was proven a prophet. It was a bit like Joe Namath guaranteeing the Super Bowl except with seven months’ lead time and delivering on his pledge nearly every day.

Johnson was never put on the same strategic pedestal as Herzog (he acknowledged he relished alternating Jesse Orosco and Roger McDowell in the outfield in one highly bizarre game because it was similar to something Whitey had done the year before) but he was no push-button manager, either. The “we’re going to dominate” theme wasn’t just bluster. Marty Noble, when he spoke to our AMAZIN’ ALL-STAR MONDAY group earlier this month, said he thought Johnson’s greatest attribute as Mets manager was making his players believe they could do anything. It wasn’t that bashful a collection of athletes to begin with, so embellish their determination with Davey’s confidence and, well, no wonder they plundered their division by 21½ games.

A signature element of Davey’s first season as Met manager, in 1984, was that he used a computer. That was particularly exotic in a year when the sport was just as happy to bask in the reflected sepia glow of The Natural as it was to hint that any of its masterminds was technologically ahead of the curve. A computer? In his office? To help him manage a baseball game? Who was this guy who swaggered so much that nobody needed to use that now overused phrase to describe his style? Davey Johnson wasn’t pushing buttons so much as he was producing keystrokes — and 90 wins from a perennial cellar-dweller.

Yet his brain combined with his gut to create a state-of-the-art operating system, as Noble pointed out when asked to share a couple of memories of Davey. The one I liked most came from the game in which the Mets passed the Phillies to take first place on the first day of summer in ’84. Bill Campbell was pitching for Philadelphia in the bottom of the seventh. Ron Hodges had just tied the score and now there were two on. Davey called on Rusty Staub to face Campbell even though Rusty had literally not gotten a hit off this reliever in eight years. From July 19, 1976 through April 22, 1984, Staub could not touch Campbell: 0-for-14 with a few walks.

Yet Davey sends up Rusty and Rusty singles in two runs and the Mets win and they’re in first place. Afterwards, reporters ask Davey what the deal was with that. You’d figure the manager with the computer would be highly cognizant that Staub never hit Campbell and would look elsewhere down his bench for alternatives. Instead, according to Noble, Johnson saw it this way:

“I figured Rusty was due.”

That’s confidence.

***

The induction of Davey Johnson into the Mets’ Hall is comically overdue, just as it is for his cohort for the occasion, Frank Cashen, Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden. Herzog said in Cooperstown that fellow Cardinal legend and Hall of Famer Enos Slaughter, after having to endure a long wait to be elected by the Veterans’ Committee, greeted his selection with, “It’s abut time. Should have happened twenty years ago.” Whitey was more gracious than that on his own big day: “You know, any time is a good time when you receive an award like this.”
I’ll buy that in general terms. Johnson should have been a Mets Hall of Famer at least a decade ago, but then again, the Mets Hall of Fame should have been up and running as an active entity between 2002 and 2010. Old story. It won’t, in the spirit of Whitey’s words, lessen one bit the thrill of attending Mets Hall of Fame Day at Citi Field this Sunday, August 1.

I sincerely hope every FAFIF reader who appreciates the Mets picking up the pace where acknowledgement of their history is concerned will be in attendance this Sunday — not just in appreciation of Johnson, Cashen, Strawberry and Gooden, but for ourselves. We deserve this.

***

• If you’ve got the scratch, there’s a super-sounding luncheon with the four Hall of Famers to be and several of their generational MHOF peers on Saturday at Citi Field. The tag is $300 for season ticket holders,  $325 for everybody else (a bit out of my league, alas). It includes a ticket to the July 31 game and proceeds benefit the Mets Foundation. More information here.

• I don’t much worry about what other teams do when it comes to honoring their greats, but Ed Leyro of Studious Metsimus sharply observed upon his visit to Dodger Stadium that Gil Hodges’s number 14 is mysteriously doing time on the back of Jamey Carroll. It’s bad enough it was allowed to linger all over Mike Scioscia in 1988, but Uncle Jamey? I hate Uncle Jamey! Anyway, a good look here by Ed at Gil’s two-team greatness, both from a Dodger first base and Met managerial perspective. To borrow from Gil’s Met colleague’s assessment of induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, any time would be a good time to award Gil Hodges his rightful place upstate…and despite his being passed over too many time, it may not be too late to maintain a realistic glimmer of hope that it will happen.

Thanks to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for transcribing Herzog’s speech.

The Mets are so far out of first place in the National League East that I woke up Sunday realizing I never bothered to check how Atlanta did on Saturday (they won, natch). They’re behind everybody you don’t want to be behind for the Wild Card, and have a few teams closing in on them that nobody would mistake for late-charging contenders. They’ve been outscored Something-Nothing more often than I care to count and have suffered through a West Coast swing pungently reminiscent of July 1991, when they went to California 15 games over .500 and came home in throes of what turned out to be a six-year slump. Worst of all from my “It’s So Much Better This Year Than Last Year” perspective, their record at this juncture of 2010 is exactly two games better than their record at this juncture of 2009.

I’m still not mad at them, but I’m becoming resigned to the likelihood that “The Best is Yet to Come” will not be this September’s version of “L.A. Woman”. We had enough problems with L.A. Dodgers these last four games. We had problems aplenty with Arizona Diamondbacks and San Francisco Giants, too, and we haven’t beaten anybody a series since we were matched up with the Minnesota Twins. Good golly, we haven’t taken a set from a single National League club since the San Diego Padres visited Citi Field the second week of June.

Nevertheless, not mad. Just resigned until I have a reason to jump on board again. If only the Mets still had all those players who were doing so well a month or so ago. You remember: Wright, Reyes, Pagan, Dickey, Santana, Davis, Niese, Feliciano, Parnell, some other dudes…why did we get rid of that bunch and bring in these clowns?

That’s not a sideswipe at Carlos Beltran, by the way. Carlos Beltran’s major drawback is his possession of a human body, one that didn’t heal quickly and one that hasn’t rounded into 100% playing shape. Give Carlos Beltran two weeks — there are ten left on the schedule — and he could very well remind us of the Carlos Beltran we know and love. Right now he reminds me of the Carlos Baerga we knew and wondered, “What the hell?” But I take Beltranism in its present state as a temporary condition.

I take the 7-17 dregs that have washed ashore since that ill-fated trip to Thunder Island commenced as impermanent, too. Not every game is destined to be like Sunday’s…even if Sunday was the perfect apotheosis of what every game of late has been like. At any rate, not every inning will necessarily be Sunday’s sixth, the frame in which Reyes singles; is caught stealing 1-3-6 ahead of a Castillo double; Wright fouls out; Beltran hits a shot that is clearly headed to left until it’s intercepted by Casey Bleeping Blake; and Dickey’s left hip — if not his fighting spirit — has to be dragged kicking, screaming and tweaked from the mound while he’s pitching an unsupported gem.

You can give yourself whiplash looking for reasons this team has crumbled like a Drake’s Cake just as you can get a lethal sunburn waiting to meet a Met as he crosses home plate at Dodger Stadium. You can do anything you like, but there’s nothing you can do.

It’s just one of those weeks that effectively ends your season until further notice.

The 8,702nd day of my life was October 27, 1986. You will almost definitely recognize that date as the last time the Mets won a World Series — and perhaps as Jon Niese’s birthday. Back then, in the aftermath of that blessed event of the blessed event of which I was cognizant, I figured the next episode of the Mets winning a World Series would come in 1987 or 1988 or soon enough. That would make it roughly 365 days until another Mets world championship was secured. Or approximately 730 days if it wasn’t done at the next available juncture. Whatever it would be, it surely wouldn’t be long.

Miscalculation on my part. The days that would pass would, by July 23, 1989, reach four digits — a thousand days. Another thousand days would go by as of April 18, 1992. And so the thousands would come and the thousands would go.

The bottom line is the next Mets world championship has yet to arrive. What’s come since October 27, 1986, instead, is, as of today, July 25, 2010, 8,703 days. That equals literally more than half of my life waiting for another Mets championship.

Though the mathematics are mine, this is not a solely personal lament. If we’re at least as old as Jon Niese, we’ve all waited 8,703 days for another title. If we’re no older than Josh Thole — born October 28, 1986, the day of the ticker-tape parade that followed the World Series — we’re waiting for just one. This is 8,703 days on the debit side of every Mets fan’s ledger.

Tomorrow will be 8,704 days. Tuesday will be 8,705 days. That’s partly a function of the baseball calendar; you can’t win a World Series in July. But we’re going to get to late October, early November, whenever it is this year and, the way things are going, we’ll be pushing 8,800 or so days since the last time the Mets won a World Series. Mets fans a little bit older than me will, by then, be able to say what I’m reluctantly able to say today:

More than half a lifetime has passed since my team reached the pinnacle for which I hold out hope daily — every day as long as I live — that I will get to see them reach again.

Other teams’ fans have waited nearly as long or even longer, but that’s for abstract consideration. In tangible terms, we don’t care about those other teams’ fans. We care about us.

And we’d sure like us to get another sooner than later.

For the record, the Mets won their first World Series on the 2,482nd day of my life, better known to you as October 16, 1969. Seeing as how I’d only found out about the Mets in earnest no more than 60 to 75 days earlier, I can’t legitimately say I was actively waiting all that long. Yet even if I am to consider myself a born Mets fan who was, on some innate level, yearning for that first World Series from the word Go (along with the words Let’s and Mets), 2,482 days is cake compared to 8,703. The personal wait for me to get to miraculous Championship No. 1 was 28.52% as long as the wait has been for hypothetical Championship No. 3.

Fast-forwarding from October 16, 1969, I’d be at 2,483 days and counting on August 3, 1976 — marking my first experience with having gone more than half a lifetime waiting for the Mets to win another World Series. From there, it would take more than a decade to luxuriate in the Promised Land. In all, it would take 6,220 days for the Mets to get from their first world championship on 10/16/1969 to their second world championship on 10/27/1986. The wait for resounding Championship No. 2 was 71.47% as long as the wait has been for unattained Championship No. 3.

The Mets equaled the wait between their first and second titles when they arrived at November 7, 2003 sans a third ring. The wait since then has piled an additional 2,483 days of yearning onto the tab. That’s one more day than I waited from birth (muttering not “papa,” not “mama,” but “Metsie! Metsie! Metsie!”) to land wide-eyed upon the wonders of October 16, 1969….which was the day I unknowingly signed a waiver declaring I was willing to be put on hold indefinitely where the Mets would be concerned.

Anyway, it’s been a while for all of us and the way things have been going lately, it figures to take a while longer. Although our hairtrigger reactions to various and sundry setbacks may indicate otherwise, I would say anybody who’s given thousands of days over to waiting for another Mets championship demonstrates a remarkably patient soul. Nevertheless, I would beseech the Mets to bestow upon us that third world title they’ve been hiding from us as soon as possible. Cats and reincarnationists notwithstanding, we each have no more than one lifetime to spend waiting for them.

Seriously, that’s it. I’m not doing this again in the next lifetime.

The Mets lost another dreary game on the Road Trip From Hell, walked off the field for the numbing, seemingly impossible 12th time this season. (The franchise record is 14, an unhappy distinction shared by the ’74 and ’78 clubs; the major-league record is an all-too-achievable 16, which befell the ’69 Giants and the ’75 Astros. Hat tip to Adam Rubin.) The immediate cause of defeat was a meatball served up by Oliver Perez in the 13th inning to James Loney, but for once let’s not be too hard on Ollie, who’d already escaped a tied-to-the-tracks jam the inning before. Someone was going to lose, and given the Mets’ utter lack of offense — no hits and just two baserunners after the sixth, 14 total pitches seen in the 11th and 12th innings — it was pretty clear it was going to be us. Mike Pelfrey’s vastly improved performance was a silver lining, but boy did it come wrapped in a lot of gray.

Around the time that Ollie was trudging off for the showers, I heard that John Maine had had surgery to remove scar tissue from his shoulder, the one that betrayed him over the last three seasons. Not surprisingly, given all that’s transpired this year, he chose to have it done by a doctor not affiliated with the Mets. The news release said Maine was expected to be ready for spring training, while politely not mentioning the certainty that he will report somewhere in Florida or Arizona as something other than a New York Met.

It’s a cruel business. Maine hasn’t been right for three years, and I think we long ago got tired of the parade of injuries and mysteries and arguments and frustrations about what was wrong inside his shoulder. So this comes as a merciful end, quickly followed by the unhappy realization that our last sight of Maine doing something reasonably active in a Mets uniform was him arguing furiously with Jerry Manuel in the Washington, D.C., visitors dugout. Ollie, for his part, has pitched on this road trip in the only games he is now allowed to pitch in — extra-inning Verduns in which the focus turns from winning to mere survival. The Mets would gladly like to be rid of Ollie while unhappily aware that the only way to be rid of him is to eat the massive contract they themselves so foolishly gave him. So there we have it. Maine is gone; Perez remains on an enormously expensive technicality.

But it was different once. In October 2006, recall, the Mets roared to the postseason, then suddenly found themselves stripped of Pedro Martinez and then Orlando Hernandez. And so the postseason plan became T#m Gl@v!ne, Steve Trachsel, then gulping desperately and hoping Maine and Perez could somehow do a job none of us thought they were ready to do. If they had failed, we would have been disappointed but borne them no particular ill will. But they didn’t fail. In Game 1 of the division series Maine pitched admirably into the fifth against the Dodgers, then followed that with an indifferent performance in Game 2 against the Cardinals, a.k.a. the Scott Spiezio Game, a.k.a. lots and lots of profanity. Perez, for his part, was successfully hidden until Game 4 against the Cardinals, and was predictably awful, giving up five runs while lasting into the sixth. But the Mets won. And we weren’t done yet.

Recall that Maine drew the do-or-die assignment in Game 6 of the NLCS, with Chris Carpenter looking to extinguish our season, and he beat the Cards’ ace with 56,000 Mets fans baying in the Shea Stadium seats, me and Greg among them at nosebleed prices. He was wonderful, a folk hero, our thin blue-and-orange against death and ruin. (As he would be again on the next-to-last day a year later.) The next night was another, even more desperate roll of the dice, for the only person available was Ollie. Ollie, who’d arrived as a throw-in when Omar was calling around looking for someone to replace Duaner Sanchez after his middle-of-the-night car accident, and been tucked away at Norfolk as an afterthought. Now, the biggest game for the franchise in six years was his to win or lose. And he somehow gave up just one run over six, matching Jeff Suppan. (The idea that Oliver Perez and Jeff Suppan would have locked horns for anything important seems hilarious in 2010, doesn’t it?)

Yes, the Mets lost and the Cardinals went on to win it all, but oh what might have been. A Jose Valentin sac fly, a Cliff Floyd bunt, a Jose Reyes liner that knuckled a bit on Jim Edmonds, Carlos Beltran looking curveball … the Mets came within a whisper of the promised land, and Maine and Perez were big reasons that they came that close.

That’s easy to forget now, with Maine finished as a Met and everybody wishing Ollie were too. But it’s our jobs to make sure it’s remembered.

The great thing about having a scapegoat is giving him up. Jason Bay, I hereby release you from all the blame for the Mets’ season having ended prematurely early two nights ago.

Unless, of course, it ends again before it’s supposed to and you seem responsible for facilitating the process.

But let’s not think like that. We’ve been thinking like that all week — all month, really, with the impetus to back it up. Let’s instead revel in the Jason Bay career rehabilitation plan:

1) Take hour upon hour of additional batting practice.

2) Slam your face and assorted body parts into the business end of a chain link fence.

One outstanding catch, two hits and three ringing runs batted in later, the Mets are winners in L.A. and Jason Bay’s bobblehead suddenly doesn’t seem quite as inane.

It was a good night all around, save for the air conditioner in my office here going on the fritz. Would I trade cool comfort for the Mets’ first win under the stars since July 6? Well, it appears I have. Never let it be said I wouldn’t schvitz for my team.

Enough about me and my sudden need to visit P.C. Richard. More about our outfielders who made, depending on your judgment calls, five or six really, really good catches Friday night. Bay’s, with his nose taking on a door handle, was the bravest. Pagan’s, where he lifted his right leg while sliding to avoid the cement under the padding along the right field side wall, may have been the smartest. Beltran giddying up and getting on his horse like he did pre-injury might very well prove the most important in the long run.

And there’s a long run ahead of us, believe it or not. One game does not reverse the results of the umpteen before it, but shovels have been known to work in reverse — they can be used to dig dirt off a presumed stiff if said stiff still has some life in it. The Mets are not a corpse, not when they have a lively left arm like Johan Santana’s and a beating heart we would not have suspected.

In the meantime, kudos to the following, as long as we’re all happy over our one-game winning streak:

• Caryn Rose for chronicling life on the West Coast with and without the Mets since the second half began. Read her travel dispatches and admire her ballpark photography at Metsgrrl here.

• Matt Artus of Always Amazin’ for his superb historical roundup on the paranoia our little old team caused a great big owner. Check out the clips and perspective here.

• Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated for a story about what a fan and a player accomplished together in the way of the NFL Hall of Fame. Check out their commitment to their cause and each other here.

• Chris Feeny for writing to Mets Police and reminding any and all of us who haven’t to buy our tickets to Mets Hall of Fame Day, August 1 for the inductions of Messrs. Cashen, Gooden, Johnson and Strawberry. Chris and I are among those who jumped on this event the day tickets went on sale because we didn’t want to get shut out. Read Chris’s convincing sales pitch here.

• The WFAN Mets production crew for being extra clever this year regarding the opening credits to its broadcasts. In past years we’d mostly hear a generally unsurprising montage of highlights before a given game: home run, nice play, strikeout, big hit, closer gets final out. Same thing over and over. But this year I’ve noticed actual attention paid to context. When the Mets played the Yankees, we heard a rollup consisting of great Subway Series moments. When the Mets visited Puerto Rico (worst trip ever…before this one), it was the Puerto Rican-born Mets whose highlights were in the spotlight. And Friday night, with the Mets needing a win very badly, we heard one dramatic 2010 PUT IT IN THE BOOKS! after another. Great, great job on a small, small detail. Note to the immortal Chris Majkowski: some of us are paying attention.

• Paul Lukas for really paying attention to Wayne Hagin and isn’t crazy about what he’s hearing. Life feels too short to promote “Fire Him!” campaigns, but as one who doesn’t stay with the radio any longer than I have to, I have to admit Paul makes a compelling case where Wayne’s limitations are concerned. I’ve reasoned for three seasons that Wayne Hagin is all right because he isn’t Tom McCarthy, but maybe the statute of limitations is running down on that particularly low-set bar. It’s Wayne’s job, but it’s our team, y’know? Decide for yourself here.

• And in memory of the great New York Giants fan Vic Ziegel, a little something that took my breath away regarding the greatest Giant of them all and one of the better Mets of our time, courtesy of the Times’s David Waldstein. Say Hey? Say David! Read here.

One of the great New York sports columnists, Vic Ziegel, has passed away at age 72 from lung cancer. You can and should read about his life and career here. He covered the early Mets as a beat writer with the Post and once told me there was no greater group of guys he came across in his professional travels than the 1969 world champs. He was also probably the most vocal of torchbearers for his childhood baseball team, the New York Giants. Vic was gracious enough to respond to my queries on a few occasions regarding the team I never saw but has always fascinated me. I was fortunate enough to meet him and, though I didn’t get to know him well, found him to be a wonderful man whose kindness matched the talent he consistently displayed whether he was writing about baseball, boxing, racing or anything. I’ll miss him.

Vic wrote a column in 2000 that was inspirational to me in my quest to understand the Giants as best I could. It appeared in the News the same morning I finally made good on a longstanding pledge to visit the site of the Polo Grounds. The timing — he had just gone there himself and rediscovered the remains of the John T. Brush Stairway — was coincidental but oh so appropriate. The whole thing is here, but I’d like to share a bit of it below:

One of the worst days in my life — I know you’ve been wondering — was a baseball afternoon in 1957 when it became indisputably clear that the Giants, the only team I would ever love, were leaving the Polo Grounds and New York.

Winters were for the Knicks and Rangers. The football Giants were more than a passing fancy. But I rooted harder for snow.

Baseball was the game and the Giants were my team. Until they left, and did the small quiet thing known as breaking hearts. It hurt then and — I made this discovery when I visited the Hall of Fame a few summers ago — it still hurts.

The New York Giants have disappeared. Which may not surprise anyone who has gotten off the subway at 155th St. and 8th Ave. Father Knickerbocker now pitches beer in that great saloon in the sky. Willard Marshall never calls. Sal Yvars never writes. The Giants are another lost tribe.

This man had been a pro for decades, yet in that instant, he was a fan again. A fan of a team that had neither won nor lost in more than forty years. A fan who could be honest and self-deprecating and sincere and dry and funny as hell. All fans who wish to write about their love affair with their team would be blessed if they could write as well and as long as Vic Ziegel.

And I just came across this: Vic on being a sportswriter, replete with Wes Westrum/Cleon Jones anecdote. Geez, he was good.

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: Citi Field
HOME TEAM: New York Mets
VISITS: 51 regular-season games, 1 exhibition game, 2 open workouts, 3 off-field events
FIRST VISITED: April 3, 2009
FIRST OFFICIAL GAME ATTENDED: April 16, 2009
CHRONOLOGY: 33rd of 34
RANKING: 16th of 34

There’s a Citi Field I can’t stand and never will. There’s a Citi Field I think is OK. There’s a Citi Field of which I’ve grown fond and feel increasingly positive about.

There is not, however, a Citi Field I love, and that’s too bad.

I’d like to love the home ballpark of my favorite ballclub because it’s supposed to be my home. It is by technicality, but not by heart. I can’t quite throw my arms around Citi Field the way I did Shea Stadium. Neither can I view it — no matter how I attempt to adjust my blue & orange-colored glasses — as a damn sight better than most of its stylistic peers. The grudge I held against its mere existence has mostly melted, yet when I look at it closely I still don’t see a great place to see a ballgame.

Because it’s where the Mets play, I’d like to rank it higher than I do, but I can’t. I don’t love it emotionally and I don’t love it objectively. Yet I keep coming back to it. My actions if not my words will have to stand as my implicit endorsement.

I tend to rank the ballparks I visit as soon as I exit them. Most of them I see 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 relatively 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 instinctively 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 I’ve seen combined.

But it does have a ranking, which is No. 16 — in the upper half of the ballparks in which I’ve watched one or more games, but behind three handfuls of its predecessors and contemporaries. Such a ranking implies not bad, not great — which seems about right.

I like Citi Field. I don’t love it.

A year ago, it will come as no surprise to inveterate readers of this blog, I would have spit out the part about liking Citi Field through gritted teeth, as I cursed it first for having the nerve to replace what I never wanted replaced and then for doing such a poor job of replacing it. I came home after one of my first games there in a state of absolute crisis over how this place was going to be my ruination as a fan and a blogger — how, I asked Stephanie after about 90 minutes of ranting and lamenting, can I serve my readers if I don’t want to go to that stupid ballpark anymore?

Citi Field and I have come a long way since then.

Nowadays, it’s the other half of the uncharacteristically terse appraisal above that I issue with reluctance. I wish I could say I love Citi Field. I wish I could tell you that all my exposure to it, combined with the time that has passed since Shea Stadium became no more, has brought me to a zone where I feel at one with my ballpark, the only ballpark that’s going to be “my ballpark” for the rest of my life.

Can’t quite do it yet. Can’t quite tell you I love the place. I just don’t. It hasn’t been for lack of trying to get to know it better. It is creeping into my heart, in its way, but my head still rejects it. It has less and less to do with my lingering attachment to Shea and more to do with the sense that Citi simply could have been designed better and could be run better.

How many of the things that bother me about Citi Field would have bothered me had I been just passing through Flushing on a ballpark excursion? I have no idea. But Flushing, Queens isn’t Arlington, Texas to me. On the road, a few things strike me and I move on. Here, I care about everything. It’s personal if it’s the Mets. Thus, nothing has been assessed or graded on a curve in my mind. Leave leniency for RFK Stadium or the Vet. Citi Field should have gotten everything right. It didn’t come close.

But it didn’t screw up completely. If you’re a Mets fan, you understand that not screwing up completely is sometimes as good as it gets.

THE CITI FIELD I CAN’T STAND AND NEVER WILL…

• Eliminated decent mid-priced, mid-level seating. Maybe the Mets wouldn’t be crying about BETTER SEATS and LOWER PRICES if there were actually better seats at lower prices.

• Is short on whimsy and long on clunky.

• Turned a sweet idea about an homage to a dear, departed ballpark into a creepy carbon copy exterior.

• Hovers all around me like it’s going to demand my hall pass.

• Slapped mismatched ads everywhere in sight.

• Picked an awful color for its outfield fence. Black has nothing to do with a Giants tribute (ha). It was just another clumsy attempt to seem different. And it is different…which doesn’t make it any good.

• Engenders claustrophobia in most of its seating bowl.

• Kills any momentum you may gather from coming in the front door by having an escalator lead you almost smack into a brick wall and preventing any immediate glimpse of the green grass once you turn left or right.

• Stuck too many seats in the outfield and didn’t figure out how to make sure you could see enough action from there.

• Encourages guests to act like disengaged patrons instead of rabid fans.

• Had to be pulled kicking and screaming into acknowledging almost anything about the history of the team that plays there.

• Forced idiotic geometry into dimensions that have made the home run an unnecessarily endangered species. (I like triples, but I’ve had it with the endless parade of deep fly balls to nowhere.)

• Shows little in the way of improved personnel training from the edgy days of Shea.

• Includes too many areas that carry an R-rating for Restricted.

• Wastes space with the barren and charmless Bullpen Plaza.

• Forgot to innovate in any meaningful fashion.

• Would be enhanced if a centrally located clock and flagpole had been part of the plan. Those are little things, but little things make a big difference in a ballpark.

• Could not be deader at more inappropriate junctures. A friend and blolleague thinks a Citi Field postseason “will make Shea seem like a monastery inhabited by Trappist monks.” I sincerely doubt that, but I look forward to the chance to help make him look like a prophet.

• Will forever be held back by a rash of crummy sponsor names — starting with the one on the front of the joint — as long as everything about its identity is for sale.

THE CITI FIELD I THINK IS OK…

• Offers expansive (if expensive) food choices and amenable areas in which to enjoy one’s generally delectable selections.

• Saved the scoreboard skyline from Shea and placed it where it could inject some needed personality into what would otherwise be cramped and grim.

• Is navigable enough to decipher by section number in no time at all.

• Stands literally steps away from the 7 train.

• Never leaves you wondering if there’s an ATM around here.

• Lets me loiter on a bridge that allegedly has something to do with there being five boroughs of New York City.

• Is lit by distinctive light stanchions.

• Permits planned and impromptu meetings with friends away from the action, though I’ve pulled back on this option since I’m supposed to be watching baseball at the baseball game.

• Honors a great American and outstanding local ballplayer at its primary entrance even if the noble fellow in question was never a Met.

• Reveals interesting angles of its environs if you peek hard enough despite “enveloping” you within its claustrophobic walls.

• Provides decent Promenade perspectives once you figure out where they are.

• Created a successful signature seating area with the Pepsi Porch, where the promise of “intimacy” seems more or less fulfilled.

• Veers to the modest versus the grandiose, which is worth mentioning because I honestly find this modest ballpark preferable to the grandiose Stadium that opened the same week. Grandiosity has its limits; modesty is capable of pleasant surprise.

THE CITI FIELD OF WHICH I’VE GROWN FOND…

• Once it was dragged kicking and screaming, produced a marvelous museum as well as representative Met decor outside and occasionally inside the ballpark.

• Brought the real Apple out of hiding and made it a front yard centerpiece.

• Installed oversized Topps cards of Mets greats on the first and third base sides of Field Level.

• Christened the Shea Bridge and labeled its VIP entrances after three Very Important People in Mets history (too bad you have to be a VIP to enjoy the displays dedicated to Hodges, Seaver and Stengel).

• Shows me the Mets’ starting lineup as soon as I ascend the Rotunda escalator.

• Gave those who were willing to shell out (or, as in my case, were lucky enough to have somebody willing to shell out on their behalf) a personalized brick that’s always right where you left it.

• Captures my imagination from Section 326 — the money shot, vista-wise, at the ballpark, even if those seats are mostly prohibitive budget-wise.

• Provides me (albeit at $7.50 per cup) a favorite beer in Blue Point Toasted Lager at Catch of the Day…and I’m not really a beer drinker.

• Is the place where I’ve seen the Mets go 40-11 in games that count, including 13 consecutive wins since April 19.

• Has been the setting for dozens of wonderful interactions with dozens of wonderful people who share with me, at the very least, this one particular passion and probably more than that.

Back when word came down that Shea Stadium was on the clock and a new ballpark would rise to take its place, my co-blogger wrote off the old place in one swift, unsentimental stroke, citing as his Shea memories “good ones by the bushelful, but for me they’re bound up with the people (in player uniform and fan uniform), with precious little left over for the place.”

I got what Jason was saying, no matter how much I disagreed with his verdict that turning Shea into a parking lot “sounds like a vast improvement” — but now I really get it. I have lots of apparently intractable problems with Citi Field, but I’ve experienced more than a year-and-a-half of instant classic moments, innings, afternoons and evenings there, because of the people I’m sitting with and the people I’m cheering for. As long as I have both, Citi Field is only going to mean more to me.

It’s home. Eventually home, like family, gets graded on a curve. Just not yet.

ONE FAN’S TOP FIVE CITI FIELD GAMES:

1. Chris Carter’s pinch-double in his Met debut keys a six-run, eighth-inning come-from-behind rally and Ike Davis’s tumbling catch over the Met dugout railing preserves a rollicking 8-6 win over the Nationals. Stephanie and I celebrate the 23rd anniversary of the night we met by dining at the Acela Club, but mostly by winning 8-6. (5/11/2010)

2. Henry Blanco ends a long, windy and intriguing afternoon by homering in the eleventh inning off ex-Met Guillermo Mota to beat the Giants 5-4. Joe and I embrace for only the second time I can recall at the end of a game after going to games together for nearly 20 years — the last such occurrence was also against San Francisco, when Bobby Jones clinched the 2000 National League Division Series. (5/8/2010)

3. Nelson Figueroa does what he can to erase the bitterness inherent in a lost Met season by twirling a four-hit 4-0 shutout at the Astros on Closing Day. Jim and I temporarily abandon our lovely wives to take advantage of our first mutual access to the Caesars Club concourse bars and decide it’s as ideal a set-up as we had hoped it would be. (10/4/2009)

4. Jon Niese is almost spotless, throwing a 3-0 one-hitter past the Padres to win the second half of a day-night doubleheader. Entering the ninth, Kevin and I agree we’d be a lot more anxious if one fewer hit had been allowed earlier, yet we were pretty nervous about preserving this non-no-hitter because we’re Mets fans and one-hitters may be the most we ever get to fret about. (6/10/2010)

5. I’m not exactly sure, but the basic ingredients would likely be the same as above: a resounding Mets win, some superb Mets company and another in a burgeoning portfolio of memories that allows me to call this ballpark my very own.

And what fun it shall be to extend this list in the years to come.

Being a Mets fan lends itself to a certain pessimism — Tug McGraw’s “YA GOTTA BELIEVE!” always struck me as more of a desperate entreaty than a statement of confidence. But this stretch? This is as bad as it gets to be a baseball fan. If Phil Cuzzi doesn’t vapor-lock last week, we’re 0-8 since the break. 0-8, Jesus. Betcha never thought 1-7 would be lucky.

When your team’s winning, you become happily distracted. Being a fan sits lightly on your shoulders: Hey, lookit that, we won! Got scary there for a moment, but it all turned out great! Wheee! Winning is fun! When you’re losing here and there, either getting better slowly or steadily or puttering around at .500, losses hurt but don’t strike you to the quick: You won one yesterday or the day before that and you’ll win one tomorrow or the day after that, so there’s no reason to get too worked up.

But every now and then, your team’s not just losing but flat-lining. And then every game hurts. Every opposing run hurts. Every half-inning where nothing happens hurts. Every out hurts. Every called strike hurts. Everything that happens shoves you down deeper into the muck and mire of hopelessness. The team is incapable of winning, of getting a run, of getting a hit, of working a good count. They will never, ever win again.

This is one of those times. And there is no end in sight.

But “no end in sight” is what defines these times. It isn’t actually true that the Mets will never win again, of course. It never is. The Mets will win again, will even get on a roll again, and our step will grow light and lively.

But when that happens, we’ll look ahead without any illusions about 2010. I’m not saying the year is a failure, by any means. The Mets have been reassured about David Wright and Jose Reyes returning to form, seen Angel Pagan emerge as a player to build around, been shown enough by Mike Pelfrey and Jon Niese and R. A. Dickey and Ike Davis to feel optimistic about their futures, and have raw but promising young talent to further develop in Josh Thole and Ruben Tejada and Jenrry Mejia. That makes 2011 look a lot brighter than I could have imagined in March, and that’s a victory.

But 2011 won’t help the rest of 2010. And this team can’t hit with any consistency and can’t win on the road. The division’s gone, the wild card’s slipping away, .500 is a rapidly approaching floor that’s about to be a ceiling. It’s not a disaster, but it sure is a shame.

Time to forget the current plight of 2010 for a moment and cheer up. Travel via the magic of video to the heart of The Magic Being Back in 1980.

If you’ve never seen it in its full context, here it is, the most talked about home run ever hit by a member of a team that would finish a season 67-95. It’s courtesy of our own LarryDC, an unparalleled Met video pastiche auteur. The June 14, 1980 game action begins at the 1:00 mark and the home run comes just after the 2:00 mark but watch from the beginning for a little bonus coverage of what Metsomania was like as that summer broke, and for goodness sake stay tuned to the whole thing and watch Mets fans react like Mets fans just don’t react anymore.

A few positive developments can be found buried deep within the detritus of the Mets’ otherwise soul-killing 14-inning loss at Arizona Wednesday night.

• Carlos Beltran drove in his first run since September 30 and is now only 43 behind Jason Bay for the season.

• Angel Pagan was one triple shy of a cycle. And Jason Bay was one base short of a single.

• Rod Barajas hit his first home run since the end of May. Jason Bay has yet to hit a home run in a standard National League road ballpark this season.

• Oliver Perez didn’t implode on contact, automatically earning him the status of Best Ex-Pirate On The Mets Who Isn’t Elmer Dessens.

Jason Bay would be the worst.

We all need our scapegoats, and Bay is mine. I’d like to believe it’s temporary, though temporary is suddenly rounding third and heading for August. On a night when few did much and many did little, Bay continued to brave the storm in a skiff made of futility, standing in proximity to home plate six times for no immediately discernible reason. He produced a groundout, reached on an error and then struck out, struck out, struck out and…struck out.

0-for-6 with four strikeouts, none of which came with a Met runner on base, which prevents me, in all good conscience, from picketing the team hotel in L.A. this morning while chanting:

HEY, HEY, JASON BAY!
HOW MANY METS DID YOU STRAND TODAY?

I am the proud owner of a Jason Bay bobblehead, and every day I stare at it and wonder what the hell it’s doing here. That is, why did the Mets choose to make Jason Bay their poster doll for 2010? Oh, right, because, in addition to showing next to no marketing imagination, they threw $66 million at him in late 2009 and are obligated to propagate the pretense that he is a star.

He’s not a star. He’s not much of anything at the moment, but when he’s not sucking like Jason Bay has sucked as a Met, he is, I sort of recall, not as bad as Jason Bay has been. But I’m in possession of his rather bland ceramic figure just as the Mets are stuck with his fabulously extravagant contract through 2013. Until then, they can throw it on the pile over there with Castillo’s, Perez’s and that clever quarter-century buyout genius Steve Phillips cooked up for Bobby Bonilla.

The whole team’s been Bayish, of course. The Diamondbacks were rumored to be horrendous, yet they’re 3-0 since the Mets passed through Phoenix on their way to nowhere. That bullpen of theirs was supposed to be the most flammable item since Mrs. O’Leary’s barn, but it extinguished every Met hope for three nights. Then this series ends with Chris Snyder smacking a ball over the head of — who else? — Jason Bay in the fourteenth. Best thing you can say regarding the losing run is Kirk Gibson didn’t drive it over the fence in the twelfth.

I’m sure the Mets aren’t any happier than they’ve made us. And if they are, Alex Cora will be certain to dampen their mood even further. “Have some respect!” Cora chided giggling reporters and maybe Mike Pelfrey in the Met clubhouse Tuesday night.

Score some runs, Mets fans chided back.

Aw, how can you get mad at these Mets for being, per coach Dennis Green, who we thought they were? We thought they were going to be not very good and now we are beginning to be proven fairly prescient.

It was a heckuva first half. There may be some heck left in the second half. Or it may be all hell. I don’t know. But I can’t get mad at these Mets. These Mets brought me back to life in April when I dreaded them in March. They brought me back around in late May when I was ready to write them off in mid-May. These Mets gave me three solid months, or at least three months that were more often solid than sodden. For that I cannot and will not excoriate them.

You don’t forget a team that made you genuinely happy for a spell when all you anticipated was total misery. And you can’t stay mad at them. You just can’t.

Pending all the ifs, buts, candies and nuts you can stuff into the remaining 68 games of the 2010 season, I have a hunch I won’t. Better yet, I have a precedent that almost guarantees I won’t.

On July 9, 2010, the Mets’ record fell to 47-39, which was neither here nor there, except 47-39 represents, to this day, a monumental Met milestone in my mind. Not the transient 47-39 of 2010, but the transcendent 47-39 of another time.

To understand that 47-39, you have to start with a wholly different set of numbers:

64-98
66-96
63-99
9-18

The historically savvy Mets fan, particularly one drifting ever deeper into middle age, will recognize those first three as the won-lost records of the 1977, 1978 and 1979 Mets. If you lived through those years, you know those numbers scratch only the surface of how bad it was to be a Mets fan in those days. If you weren’t around then or were on fan hiatus, the numbers — exactly 100 games below .500 — give you enough of an idea.

The 9-18? That was the continuation of the trend in 1980. It was shaping up to be another year exactly like the three years before it when the Mets were a last-place club that finished a cumulative 31 games out of next-to-last place and a cumulative 95 games from the distant galaxy we’d learned about in astronomy class, the one known as first place.

It was a place we were told existed, but one we knew we’d never see from anything but the most powerful telescope.

On May 13, 1980, the Mets visited Riverfront Stadium to play the Cincinnati Reds. After scoring twice in the top of the fifth inning, they trailed the home team 6-4. Manager Joe Torre sent Mark Bomback to the mound to relieve Kevin Kobel in hope of keeping things close. Bomback gave up a leadoff home run to Reds third baseman Ray Knight. One out later, pinch-hitter Rick Auerbach singled. Center fielder Dave Collins did the same. Then right fielder Ken Griffey homered to make it Reds 9 Mets 4. Bomback stayed in to allow a single to shortstop Dave Concepcion and a walk to left fielder George Foster.

Torre removed Bomback and replaced him with Ed Glynn. Glynn retired first baseman Dan Driessen on a fly to center for the second out of the inning. He then walked catcher Johnny Bench to load the bases. Knight came up again and homered again — a grand slam, the third Cincinnati home run of the inning. It was now Reds 14 Mets 4.

The Mets would lose this game 15-4, lowering their record to 9-18, keeping them 8½ games arrears of the first-place Pirates and dropping them three games behind fifth-place Montreal. They had lost two of every three games they had played through the first sixth of 1980. Their record since the start of 1977 had declined to 202-311, 109 games below the break-even point, a cumulative 103½ game out of first place in a span that now covered more than 500 games.

For 3.1667 seasons, the Mets had consistently lost three games for every two they had won. On average, if they won on Monday and Thursday, they lost on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday — and it wasn’t likely they were going to have an above-average weekend, either

64-98
66-96
63-99
9-18

202-311

This felt as painful as it did endless. The decade had changed. The ownership had changed. The trend did not change. The Mets lost and lost and lost and projected to keep on losing. To be a Mets fan was to be trapped in a perpetual 15-4 loss to the Reds, with an eight-run fifth in which the same guy who homered to lead it off belted a grand slam nine batters later.

Then on May 14, 1980, the Mets won. It took ten innings, but they won.

They won again the next time they played, on May 16. They would play twice on May 18 and win once. They were idle on May 19 and they lost on May 20, but they won on May 21. With that win, they left last place for the first time that late in a season since August 16, 1978.

There would be a loss on May 22, but then three consecutive wins. Another loss came, but so did three more consecutive wins. On May 30, 1980, the Mets were 19-22 — 10-4 since losing on May 13, only 4½ games from first place. They hadn’t been that close to the top of their division that late in any season since May 31, 1978.

The 1980 Mets slipped back into old and bad habits immediately thereafter, losing four straight. But then they won four straight and were again just three games under .500 at 23-26. Another loss came but then three wins — a sweep of the Dodgers at Shea — made up for them. They were 26-27, a single game under .500 after 53 games. The Mets hadn’t been that good this late in a season since the end of the 1976 season when they finished 86-76.

One more loss was followed by the most dramatic win of the season and the era, the oft-remembered Steve Henderson Game, the one against the Giants in which the Mets trailed 6-0 in the middle of the fifth, 6-2 entering the bottom of the ninth and 6-4 with two on base and one out from defeat. That’s when Steve Henderson launched a home run off Allen Ripley that landed in the right field bullpen and made the final score Mets 7 Giants 6.

It wasn’t just a come-from-behind walkoff win. It was the win that assured us the bad times were over. It was the punctuation mark on the sentence we had been formulating for a month. “Hey, we may be in this thing!” Since that horrific night in Cincinnati, the Mets were 18-10, almost the inverse of the 9-18 with which they started 1980. We took the most recent 28-game sample as indicative of where we were going and quickly consigned the 27-game sample that preceded it to the ash heap of history. The Magic Was Back and the fourth-place Mets — only six out of first, only three out of third — were on their way.

Alas, those Mets went out and lost their next seven in a row, six of them on the West Coast. But once more, they recovered with a stretch of seven wins in eight games, all on the road. Two losses followed, but then three wins came on their tail. After another loss and another win, the Mets were, as of July 5, 1980, again just a game under .500 and in fourth place, but only 3½ out of first. The last time the Mets had been as close to first place as 3½ games this deep in to a season was on August 17, 1975.

Five years.

A half-decade had passed since the Mets were in contention in July. The 1976 team finished strong, but was long out of it by the time the nation’s Bicentennial bells rang. The 1977, 1978 and 1979 teams were nowhere to be found as summer took hold. None of these editions was even single-digits from first place by July. But the 1980 Mets were. The 1980 Mets were a contender on July 5. The Mets were in a pennant race on July 5. How else to describe a team that was 3½ games out of first after having played 77 games?

The Mets would lose one, win one, lose two and then win three. That 4-3 stretch that concluded on July 15, when combined with the 38-39 mark of July 5, added up to a record of 42-42. The Mets, 3½ out, were now at .500 for the first time this late in a season since 1976 ended.

The Mets were not a losing team. They had been a winning team for two months: 33-24. They were still in fourth place, but the National League East was a dogfight. The Mets had 78 games to make up 3½ games.

We had a dog in this fight.

The teams ahead of the Mets were the Expos of Gary Carter and Andre Dawson, the Pirates of Bill Madlock and Dave Parker and the Phillies of Mike Schmidt and Pete Rose. Montreal could throw Steve Rogers. Pittsburgh had Jim Bibby. Philadelphia featured Steve Carlton.

We had Steve Henderson hitting and Mark Bomback pitching. But we were at .500 and we weren’t going away.

Or were we? We lost a game and then we won a game — 43-43, still a .500 team on July 17, 1980, just 4½ back of the lead. There’d be more losses (8) than wins (3) for a little while. But then there’d be four straight wins through August 2, at which point the Mets were 50-51, still in fourth, now six lengths behind Pittsburgh and Montreal. It was, after 101 games, still doable and still conceivable that the Mets, who had been so awful for so long, could win a race for the division title. Clearly they were in that race to stay.

A loss to Houston broke the four-game winning streak. The Mets traveled to Montreal for a showdown with the front-running Expos and split four. They took two of three in St. Louis, then two of three at Pittsburgh. On August 13, 1980, the Mets’ record was 56-57, good for fourth place in the N.L. East, 7½ behind the co-leading Expos and Bucs. It wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t impossible. On the same date in 1969, the Mets were 10 out of first place. On the same date in 1973, the Mets were the same 7½ out of first place they were now — but in last. Both years became magical years against long odds. 1980 had been magical for exactly three months. They had played 86 games since bottoming out in Cincinnati and were 47-39 in the more than half-season that had passed.

No way 1980 wasn’t a success.

You quite possibly know the rest of the story. The Mets, beset by injuries and a general lack of talent, went home to face third-place Philadelphia, whom they trailed by only 2½, for a five-game series. When it was over, the Mets’ aspirations were done. They had been swept and swept badly: 8-1, 8-0, 11-6, 9-4 and 4-1. That’s Phillies 40 Mets 12. The wreckage of that weekend left the Mets eleven games out of first place and, in a way that I refused to accept for the longest time, reeling.

The Pirates, Expos and Phillies would soon be out of our sights, but I treated us as contenders a little longer. I knew coming back from eleven out was all but impossible, but we didn’t feel like the losers we had been in 1977, 1978 and 1979. We had just been within realistic dreaming distance of first place. We were a game under .500 less than a week before. The Mets stayed home and lost two to the Giants before winning one. They beat the Dodgers one before losing two to them and two to San Diego.

Then it was off to California where they lost one, won one and never won again. They took an eight-game losing streak to Olympic Stadium for a makeup game that they lost. They then returned to Shea and lost another three, including two to the Phillies who had grown ragingly hot since sweeping us those five in August.

It was September 12. The Mets were 59-82, or 3-25 since I sat hunched over the 1980 pocket schedule on August 13 allotting three wins here, two wins there and however many more it would take to push the Mets past Philadelphia, then Pittsburgh, then Montreal. Instead, the Mets had slid not just out of contention, but out of fourth place. They were five behind the Cardinals and only 3½ in front of the last-place Cubs. Most discouraging was their 82nd loss — their 13th in a row — guaranteed a fourth consecutive losing season. The record would show the Mets would not be winners in 1980.

But I’ll be damned if I ever saw them as losers once they started up that mountain on May 14 and gave me the baseball summer of my adolescent life.

They went 47-39 over 86 games. They were a winner for more than half a season after being the worst kind of loser (the hopeless kind) for three-plus years. It’s thirty years later and it’s all I can do to not cry as I recall what it felt like. The 3-25 tumble after 56-57 was harsh, no doubt. The Mets would lose eight of their final 21 from there to create a miserable 11-38 bookend to more than match the 9-18 start. 11-38 sticks with me because it was the exact inverse of how 1969 ended. Those Mets won 38 of their final 49 and became indelibly immortal. The 1980 Mets lost 38 of their final 49 and became statistically forgettable.

Yet I haven’t forgotten them. I don’t forget anything, I know, but I really haven’t forgotten 47-39. I haven’t forgotten Steve Henderson, which isn’t uncommon for Mets fans of my generation, but I also haven’t forgotten Mike Jorgensen and Tom Hausman and Mark Bomback and Lee Mazzilli and Elliott Maddox and Joel Youngblood and Frank Taveras and John Stearns and Ray Burris and Alex Treviño and Pat Zachry and Craig Swan and Roy Lee Jackson and John Pacella and Doug Flynn and Neil Allen and Jeff Reardon and the rest of those summer of 1980 Mets. The tendency here is to use those names as a punchline or as the “before” picture for the Mets who would begin to slowly emerge in their wake — starting that September, actually, with the callups of Mookie Wilson, Hubie Brooks, Wally Backman and Ed Lynch. But I’m not doing that here. They were my winners — our winners — for 86 games in 1980 and they left behind a stealth legacy that is this:

1980’s run of 47 wins in 86 games changed our perception of what the Mets could be.

The Mets could contend again someday. That was the legacy of 1980. It was all but impossible to imagine in 1977, 1978 and 1979, yet it became fathomable in 1980. It was a thought worth holding onto in 1981 and 1982 and 1983 even as the strides of 1980 were snowed under by another blizzard of losses that felt as if they’d never, ever melt. Sure we relied on 1969 and 1973 to remind us anything was possible, but we looked, too, to 1980 and remembered what it was like to have the impossible kind of, sort of, just a tiny, little bit in our grasp.

Next time SNY shows it, pay close attention to Mets Yearbook: 1980. As much as a highlight film of a fifth-place, 67-95, 24-games-out team is going to strain its right shoulder in order to accentuate the positive, this one wasn’t kidding. It really was all new and exciting even if it didn’t endure in the standings. Listen as Bob Murphy narrates the stirring series in Atlanta when the Mets reach .500 in July. There’s no irony to it. Reaching .500 in July was explosive stuff. It was fireworks. It was how far we had come in such a short time from the depths of the immediately preceding years.

I’d recommend keeping Mets Yearbook: 1980 in mind in a couple of weeks when the Mets honor their new Hall of Fame class, Dwight Gooden in particular. You know how we twist ourselves into contortions to “forgive” Doc his continual transgressions when if he were anybody else we’d write him off as an inveterate addict? Of course it’s because he helped us win in 1986 and was magnificent in 1985 and burst upon the scene in 1984, but I am telling you the true answer lies in that 1980 highlight film. 1980 gave this fan base its first fleeting taste of tangible hope in a Koonce age. The miracles of 1969 and 1973 were dusty history. The comforting mediocrity of 1975 and 1976 may as well have been traded to Cincinnati on June 15, 1977. Until the 1980 Mets went out and started winning a few more games than they lost for a few months, the concept of the Mets ever winning as many as 82 games in a season, let alone 90, 98 or 108, seemed absurdly unattainable.

1980 changed that. 1980 gave us a sip. 1980 made us thirsty for the whole keg. And that’s what we knew had arrived in 1984 in the sleek delivery vessel that was Dwight Gooden. He ended Prohibition for us after seven horribly dry years. If you can, watch Mets Yearbook: 1984 on the heels of Mets Yearbook: 1980. You will sense the connection. You will sense what we sought and when we began seeking it in earnest. The greatest era of Mets baseball, the one that culminated in 108-54 and a world championship, found its first tentative footing the day after its World Series MVP to be, Ray Knight, hit two home runs out of Riverfront Stadium in the fifth inning of a 15-4 Met loss.

You have to watch those Yearbooks and you have to take my word for the link between them. It goes unmentioned in the ’84 film, because nobody wants to be explicitly reminded of a season that ended with 95 losses. Thus, there’s no map that traces the connection. There were no Mets from when the Mets were good between May and August 1980 who were Mets when the Mets got great in April 1986. Dwight Gooden was a high school sophomore in the late spring of 1980, Darryl Strawberry a senior, Keith Hernandez a Cardinal, Gary Carter an Expo and Knight, obviously, an enemy. Jesse Orosco, who broke camp with the team in 1979, spent all of 1980 at Tidewater. The coming of Wilson, Backman and Lynch occurred when the Mets were in their 11-38 death spiral. Lee Mazzilli would help spark key rallies in Games Six and Seven against the Red Sox, but he had to leave our midst for an extremely long exile, and when he returned, he was the cherry atop the sundae, not part and parcel of the incredibly rich 1986 ice cream itself.

Let’s put it this way: If the 1984 Mets who rose to certifiable contenders were 1607 at Jamestown, and the 1986 Mets who ruled baseball were 1776 in Philadelphia, the 1980 Mets who went 47-39 and who made Magic for 86 games were Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke, circa 1587. They’re our lost colony of contention that barely shows up in the history textbooks.

But they are an essential part of our history and they taught — and perhaps teach — us a great lesson. The 1980 Mets were a happening for every Mets fan sentient from the middle of that May to the middle of that August. They thrived. They flourished. And then they disappeared. That inconvenient little detail doesn’t make them any less real in the recounting.

Today, those of us who were around in 1980 are thirty years older and likely lack both the patience and naïvete to particularly appreciate another relatively brief spurt of success that defies our expertly crafted cynicism. Expectations are supposed to be higher, prices are definitely higher, and the pressure to keep on winning can’t help but be higher. When results don’t climb accordingly, our reaction often leaps right over disappointment and clear into fury. Right now many in our tribe are simmering with anger because our team hasn’t kept up the surprisingly agreeable pace it set earlier this season, leaving us to fume over moves they’ve made, moves they haven’t made and a few moves that we were convinced they were going to make but didn’t. Far be it from us to shake loose of the ire we decided we would gather on a contingency basis just in case they did something we considered counterproductive.

Meanwhile, the 2010 Mets, who perhaps peaked the afternoon of June 24, when they were eleven games over .500 and in first place by percentage points, have under contract at least three players for whom I wouldn’t trade the entire aggregation of mid-1980 Mets, and maybe a dozen more who’d have no problem jumping into a time machine and grabbing whatever roster spot they liked from their predecessors in evanescent progress.

Don’t give up on this bunch just yet. The Magic Is Never Really Gone, not if you can bring yourself to resist shooing it away at the first, second or even third extended sign of adversity.

In fact, I would like my money back, please.

What’s that? I listened to it on the radio, which is free?

Oh. WELL, THEN IT WAS WORTH EXACTLY WHAT I PAID.

/ fumes for a while

What’s that? You want a discussion of significant events? What on earth for?

Posterity?

Yeah, there is that, though I have trouble imagining there ever being a time when I’ll think to myself, “I’d really like to remember that dull, teeth-grinding July 2010 game in Arizona in which the Mets lost by one and it felt like 100.” Perhaps not even if I’d done something really bad and was being fitted for a noose. But OK, posterity. Josh Thole and Angel Pagan hit home runs in the late innings to put a little lipstick on a pig of a loss. You know Josh Thole, right? He’s the young catcher whose roster spot is in the crosshairs, despite the fact that he can hit and get on base without hitting, unlike Rod Barajas who at the moment can’t do the former and has never shown any ability to do the latter. Yeah, so Thole went deep. And so did Pagan — the same Pagan who’s shifted over to right field for Carlos Beltran, despite ominous signs that Beltran is missing at least a step and maybe two or three, and we’d all be better off (at least for the moment) with him not trying to cover all that ground on a knee that isn’t 100% yet.

I am not being a bringdown. A bringdown is watching the Atlanta Braves vanish into a distant point of light against the darkening sky of the NL East. (Yes, the same Braves we once upon a time passed in the standings for a sunny technicality of an afternoon, but suddenly that was a long time ago.) A bringdown is hanging one-handed from the rickety ladder of the wild card while teams scramble past you, stepping on your fingers and head in passing. A bringdown is sighing about Jerry Manuel and wondering if Jason Bay will ever show up and worrying about Mike Pelfrey and bracing yourself for Oliver Perez. Those are bringdowns, not….

Actually you’re right, I am being a bringdown.

We could dissect this one further, but I could also knee you in the kidneys repeatedly if we were crammed into a crowded subway car together. You’d put up with that once, maybe twice, but definitely not a third time. You’d be like, “Dude, that really hurts — cut it out!” So even though we’re not in a crowded subway car together and I haven’t been actually kneeing you in the kidneys, you’re right that friends shouldn’t inflict pain on friends. So I’m going to stop, and we’re going to go our separate ways, and we’ll all meet up here tomorrow night at some horrid West Coast hour, and perhaps things will be better.

Less news flash than point of fact: On Monday night, Justin Turner, a largely anonymous utility infielder with perhaps the most generic ballplayer name to grace a Met roster since 2004 catcher Tom Wilson arrived and departed, became the team’s 141st third baseman Monday when he replaced David Wright in the seventh inning of an eventual 13-2 loss at Chase Field.

It used to be a big deal tracking Met third basemen given that nobody could hold down the position for more than five minutes. Wright happily placed that particular meme into cold storage six years ago tomorrow, yet the third base count is still a staple of the Mets Media Guide; it’s appropriately on page 141 this year. They’ll have to be sure to add Justin Turner to the next edition, just as they added the immortal Andy Green and Wilson Valdez last year.

Oh, you know what else used to be a big deal? Mike Pelfrey. He used to be a great Met pitcher, back in April, May and select portions of June 2010. There was a time when you heard Big Pelf was pitching and you felt pretty comfortable predicting a competitive evening for the Mets.

Hmmm…doesn’t feel so competitive lately when Pelfrey pitches. Mike claimed a stiff neck got the best of him on the flight to San Francisco, which is why he pitched Monday against the Diamondbacks instead of Saturday against the Giants. His neck couldn’t have improved much watching Diamondback hitters and Diamondback baserunners do their Diamondback worst to his many, many pitches in his short, short outing. The Mets didn’t improve much, either. If anything, they, like their starter, just kept getting worse and worse.

I could go on about how bad Pelfrey’s been; how tenuous our rotation appears two of every five starts; how frightening it was to learn Oliver Perez will likely be reinstated for active duty in a couple of days; how our extracurricular concern is swiftly shifting from how the Braves are doing to how umpteen potential Wild Card rivals are doing to whether there’s any point in monitoring the out-of-town scoreboard; or how downright shaky this team has looked since accepting the Marlins’ invitation to briefly summer in San Juan. They’re 6-12 since alighting on Thunder Island, and the American Southwest is so far no more welcoming a venue for these Mets than was picturesque Puerto Rico.

I’m neither psychologist nor physiologist, so don’t ask me what the hell is wrong with Pelf. I’m no Jon Heyman scoop artist wannabe, so don’t ask me who the Mets can get to bolster their moundsmanship on the nights that quality early innings are suddenly up for grabs. I’m no legal scholar, so don’t ask me how the Mets can slither out of their contractual commitment to employ Perez no matter how large a detriment he proves to their bottom line. Most of all, I’m no soothsayer, so don’t ask me to tell you whether the Mets will emerge healed and whole from this disheartening morass in any kind of contending shape or come home limping as anything more than a barely .500 team. I sure hope they will, though, as it’s way more fun worrying about keeping pace with the Braves than it is looking up at the Diamondbacks.

Feel free, however, to ask me about the 141 Mets who have played third base, a list that began with Don Zimmer and has now pulled up at Justin Turner. I know it’s not a subject that’s top of mind for most Mets fans, but after 13-2 drubbings that are too horrible to contemplate for too long, it’s the sort of thing that gets me through the night.

You could have colored me the whitest shade of pale orange and blue when I saw Frankie “Release K-Rod Now” Rodriguez return to the mound in the bottom of the tenth inning to attempt to do with a one-run lead what he couldn’t do with a two-run lead in the bottom of the ninth inning.

“I wanted to go back out and try to finish it,” the pitcher credited with the decision for the team that wound up with the most runs on the scoreboard — to call Rodriguez the winner Sunday seems a bit much — told reporters.

Commendable on the part of one who felt responsible for this series’ brush with death. And more than a touch insane that his desire to make things right was allowed to manifest in a continuation of his participation in this game. That could describe the Cult of The Closer, too, but what cult doesn’t veer toward craziness?

“If he’s our guy,” Jerry Manuel explained after it all somehow worked out in the end, “we have to give him the ball. We have to give him every opportunity.”

You do? Since when? Was General Custer granted a Next Stand at Little Bighorn? Do we really have to take what failed five minutes earlier and give it another go with the confidence if we just do the exact same thing it will work to plan?

I’m familiar with the concept of a win that feels like a loss because “closer” is just one letter removed from “loser”. This wasn’t quite that, I don’t think. Too many things went right on Sunday to get irretrievably hung up on the one inning in ten that was nearly disastrous. But make no mistake that the ninth inning was about as asinine as it gets and that the tenth loomed as too hot to be playing with firemen.

After emerging from the ninth- and tenth-inning hall of mirrors as the (ahem) Winning Pitcher in Sunday’s quasidebacle, Frankie remains unreleased if untrusted. But he is here and we are going to need him. I admit I’m as capable of being brainwashed as any Good Baseball Man about closers. I was half-expecting Bobby Parnell to pick up the gauntlet to start the tenth, yet I was half-nervous about putting a veritable must-win on his relatively untested shoulders. Parnell’s pitched great since coming back from Buffalo, which alone gets me nervous because I worry he will fall victim to Manuel’s New Toy fascination, a syndrome that revealed itself in, shall we say, stark relief last year when Jerry overused the one and same Bobby Parnell.

So no, I wasn’t thrilled that we had to give General Disaster another stand in the tenth, but I get it. I get the not giving up and not giving in. I get the preservation of precious psyches. I get that you have to manage to both the situation and the season, though one could argue if you don’t get out of the situation — holding that tenth-inning lead after blowing that ninth-inning lead — you may not have much of a season worth strategizing, no matter that the schedule indicates the season remains slightly more than 43% unplayed.

Carp away at K-Rod at will, but this doesn’t feel like a loss. It feels like a very, very lucky win. And you can bet your ass we’ll take it.

We’ll take it no matter how much Phil Cuzzi had to do with wrapping a bow around it — after his inconsistent strike zone, insipid self-control and inane deference to third base umpire Mike Estabrook on revoking the fourth or fifth out of the ninth nearly titled things in the other direction. Forgive me, I couldn’t keep track of how many times the Giants should have been deemed done in that inning, though my ability to maintain a sense of what was actually going on isn’t nearly as important as Cuzzi’s.

The Giant elephant in the room isn’t so much K-Rod pissing away a lead or Manuel giving him another shot to load up and do it again or weird regulation of strikes that weren’t called, fair balls that weren’t foul or emotions that couldn’t be held in check. Neither is it Johan’s eight ultimately rigid innings; David first homering off Jonathan Sanchez and later refusing to be felled by Pat Burrell’s line drive (Pat Burrell can feel free to leave this mortal coil anytime he likes); nor Jason Bay and Ike Davis doing outstanding impressions of Darryl Hamilton and Jay Payton in the same ballpark in the same inning at the dawn of another decade. It wasn’t even the intriguing nugget which had, in its own way, as much to say about how this day wound down as did Rodriguez and Cuzzi.

As the ninth unraveled all around us, Jeff Francouer’s arm elicited the kind of respect in right that nobody else’s likely would have, part-time right fielder Angel Pagan’s included (though Pagan played a beautiful center in the ninth, handling two bouncing singles that conceivably could have been doubles, particularly Edgar Renteria’s), and it was a phantom boxscore play on the part of Francoeur that kept Travis Ishikawa from advancing all the way from first after his two-run single.

When Andres Torres’s double into the right field corner — the shallowest right field corner this side of Fenway — was played flawlessly by Francoeur, Ishikawa had to be held at third. Giants third base coach Tim Flannery had no choice. Frenchy may be inadequate to many tasks in a given lineup, but his ability to throw from right is a core competency that cannot be taken away from him, and in the ninth inning on Sunday, we were fortunate to make use of it.

It was because Francoeur generally makes great throws that Torres’s double didn’t score Ishikawa. And it was because of that little reality that the biggest falsehood in this game exploded immediately thereafter.

Freddy Sanchez’s one-out grounder to third should have scored Ishikawa. It did score Ishikawa in the eyes of everybody but the eyes that count, Cuzzi’s. Wright made a lousy throw. Blanco made a valiant if heartbreakingly late tag. Ishikawa was safe if you factor in his foot touching the plate before Blanco’s mitt touched him. Ishi (they call him that, apparently) didn’t do himself any favors by looking over his left shoulder as he ran the ninety feet from third to home — if he wants to be a San Francisco tourist, he should take the boat to Alcatraz — but he, unlike Rodriguez, did what he was supposed to. And he was called out for it.

Blown save for Frankie. Blown game for Cuzzi. A win for the Mets. Remember this the next ten-dozen times we get screwed and you reflexively whine, as I assure you I will, that nothing ever goes our way. Amid as messy a Met ending as any of us would ever imagine, something did.

I can also say it went well for me, Al Franken.

It’s a matter of self-aggrandizing public record that the Mets have not lost in the last thirteen games I’ve gone to watch them at Citi Field. Yet for a month there’s been an insidious flip side to my streaking ways. Only now that it’s no longer applicable am I comfortable revealing it

Jason and I adhere to a loose, primarily ad hoc schedule of who’s going to do the postgame recaps in a given series. There’s no magic or pattern to it — it’s mostly about availability and convenience. And for more than a month it’s been about incredible personal frustration because, until Sunday, save for the games I’ve attended (and goodness knows I’m grateful for those), the Mets have lost EVERY FUCKING GAME it’s been my responsibility to recap. That means I watch TV, the Mets lose and I trudge morosely upstairs to write about it.

The last time I watched TV, the Mets won and I skipped giddily upstairs to write about it was after the game of June 16 when it was Pleasantly Warm in Cleveland. That was a very long time ago. Until Sunday, I’d been stuck, by nothing more than luck of the draw, with nine miserable couch-as-couch-can losses in a row to recap. It was like getting to lose twice in any given night. (Jason’s recap record of games he didn’t go to in the same span, in case you’re wondering, is 8-5…luck of the draw, I assume, though I might have gone on a long blogging vacation if only one of us was mysteriously bringing the Mets wins and it wasn’t me.)

As someone who tends to detect and dissect trends to within an inch of their lives, I began quietly beseeching the baseball deities to stop this madness during the Puerto Rico trip. That’s when it became A Thing in my mind. That’s when I began to wonder why all the Mets did was lose when I stayed home and wrote. Those gods came close to coming through on my behalf on July 3 when a standout starting pitching performance staked the Mets to a two-run lead heading into the ninth on the road, and all they needed was three simple outs to salt it away. It didn’t have to be Ideal, it just had to be a save.

Alas, Frankie Rodriguez couldn’t do it, which gave me seven consecutive losses and one case of total apoplexy. Then he entered today’s road ninth nursing a hard-earned two-run lead and very nearly raised those totals on my watch to ten and two, respectively. But he didn’t, so hallelujah. Here’s to barely adequate relief pitching, comically abysmal umpiring and hopefully basking in a gentle glow from the dry heat of Arizona.

Still, I find it hard to believe I’m the one between me and Jason who doesn’t hate Frankie Rodriguez. Maybe it’s because I understand anew, after those nine TV losses that became my nine unhappy recaps, that you always want to stay out there and keep pitching until you can say, hey, we won.

That’s all.

(Apologies to Greg.)

I have to confess that after the Giants finished subjecting Hisanori Takahashi to every indignity short of drowning him in San Francisco Bay I exiled this game to radio and the occasional look-in, if only to save my own sanity. I registered the Mets’ basically cosmetic comeback, noting that it was just numerically sufficient to give me another look at the obnoxious showboating closer I dislike who doesn’t wear our uniform, and got on with life. Sure, it was good to see some life in Ike Davis’s bat, some spring in Carlos Beltran’s step, and David Wright emerging upright from encounters with Matt Cain. Beyond that, though, there were not a lot of positives to extract.

You could argue that a dip like this was inevitable, and given that the Mets are on a tough road trip (the longest in years) that will be followed by a tough homestead, it stands to reason that this would be the time for that dip. Let Beltran get his legs under him and Jose Reyes get the stitch out of his side and then Jason Bay and Ike can relax a bit. And Luis Castillo will be back soon, which I won’t say is grounds for celebration except for the fact that Ruben Tejada’s growing pains have become cruel to ignore. Staying positive, Rod Barajas can’t be this bad forever, and if he is, Josh Thole has shown that he deserves a chance to join the Homegrown Mets movement. If the Mets can survive this current stretch they’ll be looking at a pretty soft schedule. And then who knows?

On the other hand, plenty of promising seasons have run aground come July, with flawed teams revealed as such in unforgiving heat. We’re just five games over .500 now and once more looking up at the Phillies. The high point of the year may have come and gone.

But if that’s true, you know what? I can deal with it.

I did a book signing in Greenpoint today and wound up chatting with a Yankees fan who seemed like a decent enough sort about our respective seasons. He offered his sympathy for our season going down the tubes, to which I objected. First of all, I said, we were still very much in it. Second, I said that even if we didn’t wind up going anywhere, after the wreck of 2009 it was a relief just to watch normal baseball again instead of bracing for agony and futility on a nightly basis.

Which had the added benefit of being true. Jerry Manuel annoys the hell out of me with his bunting and his slash-and-burn use of the bullpen, I still think Omar was negligent in planning (word used very loosely) for the starting rotation, and we’re stuck wondering if the post-Madoff Mets will be able to take on the salary of a Ted Lilly or pay for bullpen help in the next two weeks. But I’ve gone from fearing 2011 will be the wreck of everything to hoping it will be something wonderful built on the foundation of 2010. And that’s nice. And if the next couple of weeks reveal that 2010 isn’t all we dared to dream of a month ago, it will still be nice.