1) Where the hell was Tom Seaver?

2) Was the total Yankee lovefest, complete with Boss George, totally necessary?

The middle of the current nine-game winning streak, that is.  The Second Annual Unadvertised Unplanned Met Blogger Conference took place this year on July 9 and 10. I believe this was the first time in my life I attended games on two consecutive days; I'm sure it was the first time in my life I witnessed Met wins in person on two consecutive days.

It didn't have quite the re-novelty of last year's long-overdue pilgrimage; by the time I left Thursday's game, I felt almost like an old pro around the yard. Still, the sights of future novelty in the outfield reminded me of the real reason for making this trip, which was to say farewell to the sights and memories of this particular spot on Flushing Meadow that, this time next year, will probably be no more than preferred parking.

( Cut for the faint of band.... )

My thanks to all who made it possible, and fun, and appropriately Amazing.

----

I had lengthy opportunities, sitting on the Deegan and Cross-Bronx onramps, to take pictures of another allegedly historic park. I wasted not a pixel on either Yankee Veterans Stadium (1976-2008) or on the Babe Ruth Mausoleum they're building just about as close to its butt end.

You'll get enough about that tonight, thanks. Here's one local sycophant's take on it, quoting two noted authorities who together make more money than it cost to build, tear down, and replace that old park:

“Yankee Stadium should steal the attention,” Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, a lock to join that group [of Hall-of-Famers]someday, said Monday. “The stadium should be the story. It deserves this attention, this going-away party for all it’s meant to baseball.”

“This is so big. This place means so much to so many people,” added Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez. “What I’ll always remember here is the intimacy, how loud it gets. Hopefully we bring that passion and noise across the street next year [to the new Yankee Stadium].”

As I know I've said before, cry me a River Avenue. You drive by (or in Thursday's case, sit in front of) that Grande Damn of the Bronx for very long and you realize: it's just another 70s cookiecutter from the outside. Granted, those 32 years produced a lot of history, but really- what moment, or how many moments, went into baseball lore there which didn't get outdone across the river? (Sorry, Bucky Dent's 15 seconds of fame happened at Fenway; BuckyNer's 15 seconds happened on our field.) If the highlight-reel statement of your history is a roided-up pitcher throwing a bat at the crosstown opponent's most beloved player, it's time to build yourselves a new playpen.

I still have much to say about the past eight straight victories, about the two I witnessed in person in the company of my fellow blogger(s), about the several (including the second of those two) which caused most of said bloggers to bite their nails down to the nibs on the constant 3-2 counts.

Not yet. Not now.

A lifetime Yankee hater pauses to honor the memory of Bobby Murcer.

He was born the day before my still-living sister was, in 1946. He was Mantle's heir apparent much as the Mick inherited from DiMaggio, but he took a share of a much smaller estate and didn't leave much in the record books for his career across the bridge, at least compared to them.

Yet he was a good guy, even in our eyes. He wore #1 before its former owner reclaimed it on the bench and largely made a mockery of it. Murcer stood up to the Commish but also stood up his own career for two prime years to serve in the military. Despite being traded after losing his home run touch at Shea, I never thought of him as anything but a Yankee, and can't remember ever thinking an unkind thing about him.

He kept the faith for the game and his team- for a dying child and a deceased former teammate, in the halls of the Oklahoma legislature, and in a Yankee broadcast booth which so desperately needed his honest voice among the shills.

Rest well, sir. You were certainly the finest center fielder on our field in 1974.

The Budweiser Unintentionally Ironic Turning Point of the Game™ came two plays after Utley broke up the shutout. In the brief, still-shining moments of an 8-1 lead in the bottom of the fourth, after Ryan Howard was called out at second:

We were 7 ahead of the Phillies with 17 outs to play.

See yas tomorrow. I hope.

Not much to say during this latest rain delay, other than wondering where all this rain seems to be coming from along the coast- we haven't seen a drop in days- and speculating about why they let these teams play in seemingly just as much rain last night in the 9th when it was a tie game.

For tonight's installment of Rainout Theater, I'll be bringing you back only to the early and mid-90s. It's just added some weirdness to my fannish life over the past month or so, seeing names from my distant past resurfacing in 2008 games against the Mets.

The first was Arthur Rhodes.

Or rather, that's him on the right. He came up through the Orioles organization and wound up in Rochester for three seasons, beginning the year my daughter was born. He never lived up to his promise, wound up doing a bit better in their bullpen, but left after the '99 season and wound up on a journeymanish trail that began, and has now ended, in Seattle, where he saved the game King Felix just missed out on winning after taking Santana deep.

No sooner did I get that bad taste out of my mouth than along came this one:

That says it's an Orioles card, but the colors and cap look distinctly Red Wingish, and that's where I remember him from as the later 90s' promise of the O's pitching salvation. He was part of the rebellion between the Birds of Different Feathers that resulted in Rochester ending the then-longest MLB-AAA affiliation after the 2002 season. Ponson had been a hot prospect for the rotation, and worked his way up to AA by 1997, but instead of sending him to the Wings for final grooming in 1998, he started and won precisely one game at AAA before Baltimore called him up, never to return. He never had a winning season for the O's until the year they traded him to the Giants in 2003, and he drifted after that before showing up in pinstripes last weekend, just in time to secure his first Yankee win in the second game of the Triboro-header.

Which brings us to tonight, and yet another pitcher who I saw toil at Silver Stadium back when there was such a thing.



This was so long ago, I can't even find a picture of the man in uniform, but my sources assure me that in 1993, tonight's Phillie starter, Jamie Moyer, posted a 6-0 record in and on the road from that ballpark. That, after he was already something of a reclamation project from the Cubs organization. Dude is three years and nine days younger than I am.

And bless us, he did not win the game tonight. So I'll be seeing you, after all. Hopefully not in a rain delay.

In about zero minutes, my incredible mediocre Mets begin what can only be described as a crucial four-game series, with the team that leads them now and vanquished them not that many months ago. Bear with me if I've told this story before, but it bears repeating since it has bearing on events later next week.

Return with us to those not-so-thrilling days of yesteryear. 1980yesteryear, to be precise. It was the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I was living in my university town that summer, working a campus and a newspaper job, and living with two of my roommates from the previous year who would, two years hence, marry each other. Other than their company, not many folks were around for the season, but one highlight was a weekend in the middle of that summer when most of the school newspaper's crew returned to assemble a major task. The Freshman Issue was a combination of orientation, subversion and shameless self-promotion of The Sun Itself, and it took most of a weekend for the writers to write new stories and update the old chestnuts, for the copy editors ::waves:: to get it all in shape, and for the layout specialists to turn it into a Sunday paper-size behemoth to knock the socks off the incoming Class of '84.

By this summer, my interest in the Mets was at a lifetime Tommie Apogee. I hadn't been to Shea in years, and from the look of their most recent finishes, neither had the Mets, having finished barely in sight of a .400 record each year after I departed for the mainland. But things were stirring. The Payson estate had finally been settled, the ways of Ohhhh Miser Grant were behind us, and we'd actually signed some free agents and given the largest contract in team history to the most appropriate pitcher of all time: Craig Swan.

Most appropriate for this team, anyway.

By the time of Freshman Issue weekend, it seemed to be working. As we came home for a crucial five-game series against the eventual champion Phillies, we began play one game under .500, just as we are tonight.

That was close enough to get me talking some trash. I was joined in it by a few other hardy Met-fan souls in that newsroom. One of them may even be reading this ::waves to Andy::, but we were outnumbered by the cadres of fans of That Other Team which had been monopolizing the mojo since they got their replacement ballpark in '76, and even by a Phillie Phanatic or two. 

There was no television in that newsroom, and I can't recall any radio. We did, however, have teletype, and on the eve of this make-or-break weekend for our future prospects, I recall running to that machine more than once to see what the AP had to say about the events of the weekend.

The events of the weekend were not good.

Even before things got into full swing downtown, we lost the opener, 8-1, to our former friend Nino Espinosa. The next night, the Phils equaled their 8 but we couldn't even manage a single run off Larry Christensen.  Saturday brought a veritable hitfest for the hometown Mets, who managed to touch up Bob Walk and his bullpen for 6 runs, but Craig Swan must've been counting his millions rather than counting pitches as he gave up 7 earned runs in under 4 innings and we went down again, 11-6.

That left Sunday, a doubleheader and a chance at redemption in the eyes of the newsroom.

Wanna guess how THAT turned out?

A 9-4 loss in the first game, to Steve Carlton. No shame there. Rather, we saved the shame for the nightcap, when the Mets pitching finally held Philly to under 5 runs, but the offense only managed one in response, giving the W to Phillie non-ace Randy Lerch, the fourth and final game he would win all year on his way to a 4-14 record.

The Mets never came within a half dozen games of .500 or 10 games of the division lead after that collapse. My heart was well and truly re-broken, and true stirrings didn't resurface for another four summers.

Oh, and their next opponent after that debacle? The Giants, at Shea. Just like next week.

----

And so I say it. I hate to, but I must.  Since history has proven that these guys do listen to their fans (well, to Greg, anyway), I must use that influence when it's at its greatest.

I am scheduled to leave these cool Lake Erie shores in a little under 100 hours from now, arriving in Manhattan late Wednesday morning and meeting NostraDennis (and, I hope, far more of you) for the Wednesday night and/or following day games against "these same San Francisco Giants." But. If the Mets pull a collective golden sombrero in this Phillie series, and return home five rather than one game under .500?

As the Beatles (and later, more in my memory, Anne Murray) once said, You Won't See Me.  I will give it up, turn my back, shake the dust from my cleats and go on to the next town.  I will be sad for the missed opportunities, but what can one man do but be 1/55,000th of a wakeup call?

Make it not so.

I regaled my general audience the other day with one of my triannual tales of getting a motor vehicle inspected in the State of New York. I focused on how much of it really equates to legalized gambling- whether your check-engine codes will be covered by warranty or not, whether any of those codes will require repairs before you can pass the online emissions test, and, if so, whether you can succeed at resetting the computer monitors yourself versus paying your dealer (note they bear the same name as croupiers) to drive your car around on your gas to reset them for you. That sad story ended with the following expert mathematical analysis:

Instead of 50 [the dealer wanted to charge me], it'll cost me 11 for the re-inspection of the emissions system after clearing the codes. With the 39 dollars of my net savings? Lotto tickets, what else?

I was kidding about that. Mostly. Gambling holds no interest for me because, generally, winning gamblers hold a great deal of interest in my money. I don't think I've ever won more than 20 bucks betting on any kind of game, pool or sporting event.

Even so, as I cashed out my small Saturday grocery order, I had to pass by the instant game machines. Calling to me, like in that old Zone episode.  I looked down at the two singles I'd received in change, and my eyes were drawn by the blinking lights to the only $2.00 game I could ever, in good conscience, waste my money on:



My numbers were 19 and 20. I scratched across the top of the lineup. Nothing.

Then, the late-inning comeback we've seen all too infrequently this season. Right before my ticket turned into wastepaper, a #19 came up. I then scratched off the prize below it:

My two bucks back.

A split doubleheader. A .500 record.

I bet every Mets lottery ticket is the same.

Monday night: was watching. Saw the bottom-of-the-Mariner-order disaster, culminating in the grand slam. Saw the one step forward and the one step back. Then saw Beltran run over the pitcher. Wasn't watching after that.

Tuesday night: mostly wasn't watching. Tuned in out of curiosity's sake just in time to see Beltran again at the heart of the action, with what I believe were flashbacks to Manuel's immediately preceding departure. Highlight of the evening was watching the first official managerial act in the career of Sandy Alomar (who, sadly, actually played for this idiot team when I first saw them in person in 1967). The SNY camera zoomed in to the sight of Sandy's hand writing in Marlon Anderson's name onto the lineup card and then, ever so carefully, writing "T-H-R-O-W-N O-U-T" above Beltran's name. I figured it would never get any better than that. It didn't.

Tonight: Wasn't watching. Had a brief watching moment when our evening choice of DVD ended, long enough to see the 8-0 score, in our favor for a change. The moral seems to be, "Don't make us angry. You wouldn't like us when we're angry."

Frankly, guys, I haven't been liking you even when you're NOT.

All Mets fans turn their stunned eyeballs to you (woo woo woo).

For it seemed only seconds before that we were (however unwillingly) witnessing Hernandez's Thrill of Victory at the plate- the first home run ever by a Seattle pitcher and the first grand slam by any AL pitcher since the DH's introduction, on the anniversary of Rick Wise's hurling a no-hitter and knocking out two home runs on that 1972 night himself.

As if only That Guy could top That Guy, there he was, one pitch away from a W, uncorking his second straight wild pitch, only this second one eluding the catcher and launching the 8:22 Beltran-to-Agony-of-Defeat.

I do not root for injuries to the opposition. I do not think for a second that there was intent to injure. I merely suffered at the sights of this man trying to stay in the game (and I don't think he wanted it just for that one legalizing  out), shaking off his manager as his leg looked scarily like Dave Dravecky's arm for those few seconds.

Then, the dugout scene, practically throwing himself into the wall in frustration.

We're down four as I write this. The final score does not matter. Neither do all these promising new signs of Jerryball. No, I have seen enough for one night. And then some.

As only Jim could say it:

I got in a little bit of cardio before the game began yesterday. SNY was showing Gil Hodges: The Quiet Man. From my treadmill at the gym, the television had no sound or closed-captioning.  All the same, I was just enjoying the silent images- of a winner, a leader, a teammate and a manager to so many generations of New Yorkers.

Eventually, the Hod-umentary caught up to the familiar sight of Davey Johnson making his anachronistically ironic flyout to end the 1969 World Series. I know that moment by heart- from watching it when it happened, from the season-recap renditions of it by Durso and Allen which I practically memorized, and, most recently thanks to certain fellow bloggers, from its inclusion in the official MLB World Series film for that year.

The documentary had a longer extended shot of the on-field celebration, though. If you ever see it, watch closely about 20 seconds after Cleon camps under the ball. The crowd goes wild, pitcher and catcher embrace, and an NBC camera from somewhere above home pans up to get a wider view of the pan-demonium.

And there you'll see it. A Met fan in the foreground of the camera shot, cheering hysterically, and waving a rolled-up copy of MAD magazine. 

It was yellow. It was October, but their issue dates were always months in advance when they came out, so it must've been this one:



What a perfect party favor to bring to that particular celebration. The Mets have never made a literal connection with the signature character of that tome- Alois and Newhan are about as close as we come, and as for the middle initial, well, being a Met fan never comes with E's, anyway. Yet both of these New York based institutions were born out of departed 50s standbys (the Gi-odgers in our case, the dreaded Comics Code crackdown in theirs), and both entered my life in the late 1960s as harbors of fun and distraction in a world all too much in need of such things, then just as now.

I don't remember who tipped me off to MAD that far back. My friend Mike from church had a lot of their paperbacks, I know, and I vaguely remember a kid around the corner named Russell, and another round another corner named Craig, whose older brothers had access to such contraband. It would be almost four full years before I'd become a subscriber; I had a serious accident in June of '73, and my godparents got me a get-well subscription to MAD which lasted, I swear, into nearly my early 20s. Even weirder was that they'd make such a selection; they were card-carrying Republicans of the rightest order, and I got many a tongue-lashing from my godfather Gil about the evils of McGovern before, a year later, they sent me seven years worth of the best anti-Nixon propaganda going.

Sadly, I've lost touch with the magazine- they don't even claim the cover price to be "cheap" anymore- and MAD-TV never seemed to have the same allure for me as SNL, SCTV or any of that ilk. Even so, finding this random connection between my two favorite "usual gang(s) of idiots" makes hanging in there this year all the EC-ier.

Earlier this morning, Greg asked his readers an excellent, but eminently answerable, question: why do we sit in front of our televisions and watch entertainment programming that's just not very good?

In many cases, at least, the answer is: because it's fun! A beloved cable-based series made a living out of skewering decades of so-bad-it's good cinema, from sci-fi and horror to teen drama to those educational filmstrips we all had to endure in the 60s. Through numerous roster changes and even a switch of networks, the team stayed true to their mission, and the sight of the three members of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 "broadcast crew" in the front row was always enough reason to stick with something truly bad.

Maybe it's the same for us. I know, I riffed on the MST3K theme song last year, but that was during one of my "physically incapable of discussing the Mets" phases and it was a love theme to the guy who offered to shoot the #756 home run ball into space.  Besides, Joel and Mike were changing the theme song all the time, so why can't I?

In the not too distant future,
Deep within the bowels of Shea,
Dr. Omar and the Wilpon boys
Hatched an evil scheme one day

First they hired some SABRmetricians to delve
Into all the stats about Number Twelve
Then they said, "Hey, you're still the man, Willie"
But they stuffed him in an airplane and they shot him sea to sea. (Get me down!)

"We'll fire him when he gets there,
After squeezing out one last win,"
(la-la-la)
"We'll announce it all at 3 a.m.
When the media isn't in!"
But they didn't know that they can't control
What goes out on the Internets
And it wasn't long before it all started to spin
With the robot friends of the Mets

(Robot roll call!)
Kiner! (I remember back in '46!)
Gary! (Get that spotlight off my dome!)
Ron Darling (Wanna open a Sovereign Bank account?)
Mexxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (That's one X!)

If you're wondering if this big change will lead
To one of our renowned comebacks (la-la-la)
Just repeat to yourself, "It's just a game,
I should really just relax
For Met-sery Science Theater, 2K8!" (twang!)

I don't know why I remember this so vividly, but I do.

The exact date? No clue without help. ::goes, gets help:: April 15, 1972, or as I do clearly remember it, the strike-delayed Opening Day of the '72 season. For the first time, the players had withheld their services for 13 days at the start of the scheduled year, gaining salary arbitration for the effort, and a compressed season began somewhat later than we were used to even then- in our case, on Tax Day at Shea, Tom Seaver beating Dock Ellis's nose and the rest of his team in a 4-0 romp.

I remember two things about it. One, not especially memorable, is that we won. Even then, we were winning most of our openers, after all. More to last night's point, though, is the historical curiosity of the occasion- for that year's Opening Day uniquely pitted two virgin NL managers against each other.

In the opposing dugout, Bill Virdon was making his major league debut, and under trying circumstances. He was replacing Danny Murtaugh, the came-and-went-and-came-again manager of the Buccos, who had merely won his division, his pennant and the '71 World Series before re-retiring with nothing left to prove- until 1973, anyway, when he came back for a fourth stint in their dugout.

Over on the first base side, the pall was even heavier over our new manager, Yogi Berra. He'd taken over for Gil Hodges after his shocking death on April 2, one day into the strike, and had less than two weeks to make that identical team into his own.

My distinct memory is from the top of the ninth, with the Mets comfortably ahead and Tug McGraw on the mound to save the game for Seaver. I must've acquired a cassette player that winter, because I remember recording these moments of sweet victory off the sound of the Channel 9 broadcast. Lindsey Nelson was doing the 9th for that game, at least, and with the help of the director and cameramen, he painted a poignant picture of the meaning of that 4-0 win in, more or less, these words:

::as the camera pans into the Met dugout:: Yogi Berra, on his first day as a National League manager, is a winning manager,

::and quickly, the cut over to the distaff side:: and Bill Virdon, on his first day as a National League manager, is a losing manager.

Lindsey was perhaps the least eloquent of the original triumvirate (he largely let his loud sportsjackets do the talking for him), but the memory of that observation stayed with me- through the 49 days of 1972 from April to June that we held or shared first place, through the rest of that season after Loser Bill Virdon's Pirates surpassed us in the standings, .... and even into last night, when Jerry Manuel, on his first night as a National League manager, became a losing manager.

I don't blame him for that result any more than I ever expected a 162-0 outcome from Yogi. Manuel and his crew must have spent most of the night, and day, and night in a semi-comatose state after the bomb dropped on them from the bomb bay of the Wilpona Gay at 3:14 the previous morning.  They doubtless had no choice in the decision to send Santana out against an old AL rival which had hung a 2-3 record and a 4-plus ERA on him in their previous meetings. Jerry can think, and hug, and smile real well from the SNY clips I saw, but I don't see him being any more awake or alive than Delgado or Alou or half the men we're paying to play rather than manage.

The tape of that ninth-inning broadcast is long lost to history, along with the tape player and most of the things I owned and held dear then. (Yes, including the baseball cards. Shut up.) My hope is, come Closing Day of this 2008 season, I will have been given far better things to remember Jerry Manuel by than these currently vivid memories of his own debut.

Wow.

Imagine what the Wilpons might've done if they'd lost last night.

Flying a man 3,000 miles for the third time in three weeks, only to fire him when he got there? Even Hedy Lamarr thought that was strict.

That's HED-ley.

We may not win any titles or awards this year, but the Elias Sports Bureau has confirmed that 3:14 a.m. is now the record for the earliest managerial firing in the history of baseball. Or the latest, depending on your point of view.

Clearly, we're not good at this sort of thing. Understandably, perhaps, because we went through four managers- losing each, respectively, to injury, depressed resignation, interim-ness, and death- before we finally got around to actually firing one of them.

Oops, my bad. According to mets.com, they didn't "fire" Willie Randolph. They "dismissed" him. Somehow that seems much more comforting, passive. The word I most associate with "dismissed" is "class." Until now, anyway.

It is probably just a matter of time before Hillary Clinton applies for the permanent job.

When Jerry Manuel goes through the manager's office back home, I'm sure he'll be looking for any words of wisdom left for him by the great interim managers of Met history. Mike Cubbage's seven-game stint still stands as the shortest of the ephemera, but I'll always remember Salty Parker as the man who epitomizes the job. He finished out the last eleven games of 1967, my first season after contracting this dread disease, with a 4-7 record. Until Gil came back for a second season, I naively assumed that's what losing managers like Wes Westrum just did- pass a tearful note to the GM with a week or so left in the season and say, "I'm going home."

Westrum's home was in Clearbrook, Minnesota- halfway across the country, but only half the distance Willie Randolph now has to travel.

Good luck tonight, guys- especially to whoever has the unfortunate job of going out every morning to start Omar Minaya's car.

Of all the words one could hurl at yesterday's half-assed Met effort, most of them unprintable in traditional publications, perhaps the oddest yet most appropriate one would be "symmetrical."

I don't mean that in the micro sense, because in many ways the second game was as much a train wreck as the first, only with fewer casualties.  No, I refer to the serendipity of our 2008 Fathers Day hosting what will be, almost certainly, the final traditional Sunday doubleheader in the history of Shea Stadium.

The first Fathers Day on that virgin field also hosted a twin killing, although it was by no means the first doubleheader within the Horseshoe: that one occurred on Mothers Day of 1964, and actually resulted in a Game One win (over Roger Craig, appropriately enough) before Ray Washburn showed us our place in the nightcap.

That first Sheason was scheduled to host its second doubleheader on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend against the Giants. It wound up being closer to a quadrupleheader, as the second of those games went a full 23 innings before the Mets went to L for the second time that day.

Yet another DH should have been played the following Sunday, but the elements intervened, resulting in a Game One loss and a bobtail 5-inning tie with the Dodgers. And that was the prelude to a pair of twinbills on Fathers Day weekend: Philadelphia swept two on the Friday before Fathers Day, toyed with the Mets by letting them win the middle game on Saturday (Dallas Green was the loser, in a sign of things to come), and then came back for the fateful pair on the Day of Dads itself.

The Mets scored two runs in the nightcap, losing 8-2, and thereby put up a run total that exceeded by two their hit total for the now-famed opener. A Bunning linguist went down on us from the top of our mound and left no doubt of who was going to finish that series, and season, with a better record.  So they choked massively at the end of that campaign; hell, 33 years later, who'd even remember that?

Now, 34 years later, we said goodbye to Shea's observance of Dads with the same event, however unintended and despised by the Wilpons, that we started out with. The circumstances are a bit different- I'm 22 years removed from having a father but 16 years into being one- and the results were about 50 percent better in the W column, but not so much in the one labelled H standing for hope. Whether Willie is shown the proverbial Pan-doora or not over the coming hours or days, I strongly suspect that most of our hope of a final Shea post-season got stuck inside the box after all the other evils escaped (most of them landing in our bullpen).

----

A grateful return receipt and thanks to metsgrrl, whose DVD set arrived the other day. It's nice to know there are still at least eight games at Shea I will WANT to watch the rest of this season.

FLUSHING (RAY-P)-- After weeks of uncertainty, but now with Willie Randolph safely stashed away on a plane to Disneyland, his termination notice already prepacked for him in his front-row airsickness bag, General Manager Omar Minaya hastily called a press conference to introduce the 19th manager of the New York Mets:



"Generalissimo Francisco Franco is the man to turn this franchise around at this crucial time," Minaya said. "He's a stern disciplinarian, we believe he'll be able to relate well to our Spanish-speaking players, and most important for this city, he's used to valiantly struggling on in prolonged fights over his status."

Wearing his customary number 36, Franco had no immediate comments for the assembled media. He did, however, point to his hurriedly-assembled new coaching staff: pitching coach John Franco, bench coach Matt Franco, first base coach Franco Harris, and, in a somewhat controversial move, third base coach Benito Mussolini.

"After recent problems with signals over there, we really need a guy who can make the Mets run on time," Minaya explained. "Plus he's a natural for the MTA's 'Take the Train to the Game' campaign."

Good night, and have a pleasant tomor-row.

It's just become comical.

I turned in early tonight, despite it being top eight with a 3-0 lead well before 9:30.

Yet something woke me up, so I checked the Yahoo board.

Pelfrey, still pitching a shutout, into the ninth?

When DID I last see a complete game?

I head for the idiot box. Pelf is gone, Wags is there, one pitch away. The crowd is on its feet.

The 2-2 hits the batter. Everybody sees this except the umpire. I expect the ghost of Gil to come out with a shoe polish-covered ball.

But we dodge the bullet. And promptly take a 3-2 bullet to the bleachers.

I can't take much more of this.

We all have our favorite sports talk hosts. I've been a listener in several different cities, but for many years was a regular caller to one of the longest-lasting of the genre, weeknights 6-8 p.m. on Rochester's 50,000-watt blowtorch WHAM.

Usually unsung in these radio efforts, though, are the producers/call screeners, who keep the shows moving and, outside of Astoria at least, try to keep them moderately sane. From my arrival in Rochester until the dawn of this century, the nightly WHAM sports show was produced by a Buffalo native and, like me, a Town of Brighton transplant named Allan Harris. Even after I moved here and kept calling, we got onto a first-name basis, and it turned out that he'd grown up not far from where I now live. He was the gatekeeper and the occasional gadfly on the sports watch, especially through the Buffalo Bills' Super Bowl run and its aftermath.

You see, for unexplained reasons, Allan was a San Diego Chargers fan. So in those every third seasons (occasionally more often) when there would always be a matchup with the Bolts, or in the increasingly frequent post-seasons when the Bills were eliminated but Flutie and Butler and A.J. Smith were still occupying Bob Murphy's Brother Stadium as Bills West, Allan would often serenade 38 states and Canada with this disco theme song for his beloved team:




This earworm inevitably rears its potent self when the Mets make their annual visit to Son of Brother of Bob Park, where we'll be spending the next four nights and days after our typical 2-1 split up the coast.

I've always had a moderate fondness for the Clowns in Brown. They were worse than us in the early days but we didn't give them 18 chances a year to kick our asses like the Expos got. Other than Nate Colbert's lifetime .957 batting average against our formidable pitching staffs, and other than Randy Jones's seeming perfection against us which got left at the naval yard before we signed him, they never seemed to get much better than the Mets. Even last year, when the Pods were major parts of that final-weekend mix with the wild card still barely in sight, they managed to fall as flat, if not as far, as we did.

And this spring, so far? Shadows of their recent selves, not that such a fall stopped Colorado from kicking our asses last month.

Allan left the comfort of his gig producing sports talk and, occasionally, filling in with his own talk show on WHAM for a shot at a morning slot on a (mostly failed) experiment with left-leaning news talk on a much lower-power AM station there. These days, the only show I hear him on is the one he's relegated to on the weekends, doing news announcing on the much righter-wing news-talk station here in Buffalo, which I presume he commutes to. I would so much prefer to have him behind the mike of a talk show, or behind the board of one of the over-the-top sports shows in this town. I suppose, though, that as long as I still remember his fondness for Quarterback Kemp and Air Coryell and LT (Model II), his legend still lives on.

Or maybe all of this is just a Kroc of shit.

The holiday doubleheader. The ANY day doubleheader. The daytime Ladies' Day/Businessman'sperson's special as a part of just about every series. The promotional cap/bag/whatever that's ordered in enough quantities for everyone and isn't just a shameless sponsorship opportunity. Even a countdown of events that's not merely a nightly plug for a dead president and a near-dead car company.

These are the days of our past lives, long gone and long lamented. Few of them died under our direct sight; we just looked around and they were gone.

Yet here's another one, which has stayed away from my radar until this season. It was a mainstay of New York baseball, and a given among the schedulemakers, that Met and Yankee games would be a yearlong dance of Yin and Yang. Having both teams at home on the same day- even more rarely, at the same time- was the stuff that back-page highlights would be about, totally independent of the outcomes of the games themselves. Yet this year seems to be the beginning of a break here.  Not only have these home game overlaps seemed like a non-event, but in retrospect they seem to have been happening almost randomly throughout this season.

I shall experiment.

Yahoo, show me..... APRIL!
Pick a random number: 17!

Sure enough, Mets outlasting the Nats in 14 at home while They were losing to the Red Sox at ::koff:: The Stadium.

Show me,.... JULY!
Give me.... 7!

Giants at Shea, Rays at That Other Place, first pitches five minutes apart.

On it goes, until we get to an odd day when both teams are scheduled to be home for the ensuing weekend but on which neither team is actually playing:

Not a beautiful day, except maybe for baseball.

The outcry has already begun. It began with a fan, got blogged by a Newsday beat writer, and has now made Anthony Rieber's column:

Move the Lost Subway Series game to September 11th. Have both teams and MLB kick in part of the gate for the sake of 9/11 charities. Make the game mean something, on so many different levels.

If this isn't an alignment of the stars and planets, I don't know what is. (Even if I don't, I consider keeping our teams off their fields that day to be an insult- to the players of that year and the venue which meant so much to the recovery effort.)

If you agree, spread the word- in your journal, among your friends, with anyone of influence you know. And quickly, before the cute but it's-been-done day-nightness of late June overtakes this one opportunity to make Yankee Stadium mean something good to me for the first time in my life.

I suppose this sort of thing was inevitable in a game going up against the Lost season finale. They've been time-shifting in an infinite number of directions all year, with flashbacks and flashforwards and, probably, flashsidewayses I didn't quite get. I just didn't expect the effect to spill over onto SNY.

Part of it may have been the way I was watching the Mets and recording the Lost finale, normally an impossible task for our TV/DVR setup. I did it by being 200 miles from my recorder, at my sister's house in between court appointments. I resisted the urge to check in on Benjamin and Kate and the rest of the Losties while watching the game from here, instead using the bottom-four commercial break, following the lame Vargas groundout, for the, erm, other traditional use of commercial breaks.

....And returned to see Vargas, not on the mound, but on the bench recovering from his run around the bases, Reyes following him to the bench in the face of Penny's total fielding indifference, and, moments later, Wright blasting another one off the pillars of the Whitestone Bridge.

The huh?!? Oh. Catcher's interference. The poor kid was still sitting in his gear for most of the top of the fifth, looking like someone had just stolen his lunch money. Which, it would appear, we had.

I know comic books occasionally find the need to "reboot," rejecting the canonical story line up to that point for the sake of the story. I'd just never seen a baseball team do it, especially, almost, right before my eyes.

For whatever reason they did it, I like it.

I like Delgado making diving stabs and Tatis making running grabs and, hell, Castillo and Reyes fielding routine infield grounders without hurting themselves. I like all eight of our runs scoring with two men out.

God help me, I'm even starting to like Schoenweis.

Just keep George Clooney out of the ballpark. Put him in a fake-nippled Batsuit and he can ruin even the best of the reboots.

I can't take credit for that incredible formation of English words. If I ever get to break into the Shea or Citi sound booth and beat up the "Sweet Caroline or whatever they're playing now" guy, I will be armed with the first CD I ever bought, something like 20 years ago:



That would be Indigo Girls' second album, Nomads Indians Saints, and the lyrics I'll be playing are from "You And Me Of The 10,000 Wars." They used them in a somewhat different context:

About as full as I got was of myself
and the upper echelons of mediocrity

But nights like last night, and months like this month, make them work for our franchise as well, even if Mike Piazza would likely call a press conference at his retirement home to deny that he isn't a lesbian like them, either.

These Mets get awful full of themselves, too, especially when they have the arguably best pitcher in baseball on the mound. That's when the bats suddenly come to life and the swagger returns and you just wish they could pocket those extra runs for those seemingly week-long streaks where they can't buy, borrow or steal a clutch hit.

Going into last night's game, the Met record over the previous 162 was 79-83. 70's and 80's, the hallmark of their mediocre seasons of so much of their history. These are the years their record fell within (or in a couple of cases, within one game of) those parameters of dullness:

 2007 88-74 (.543)  
 2005 83-79 (.512)  
 2002 75-86 (.466)  
 2001 82-80 (.506)  
 1998 88-74 (.543)  
 1997 88-74 (.543)  
 1992 72-90 (.444)  
 1991 77-84 (.478)  
 1989 87-75 (.537)  
 1984 90-72 (.556)
 1976 86-76 (.531)  
 1975 82-80 (.506) 
 1973 82-79 (.509)  
 1972 83-73 (.532)  
 1971 83-79 (.512)  
 1970 83-79 (.512)  
 1968 73-89 (.451)  

There you have it. Almost half this team's life has fluttered around the .500 mark.  Well over half our managerial roster settled in there at least once- even Gil, even Davey, and of course Willie.

This is who we are.

----

And, oh, the dissatisfied with the satisfied
everybody loves a melodrama
and the scandal of a lie -

As Neil Best pointed out this morning, the Mets and Yankees have both settled into identical records of mediocrity after last night's contests, but since the Yankees lost more recently, the talk radio boobirds have recalibrated their sensors for the Bronx, giving Willie a temporary reprieve.

Sometimes it's an established star bailing him out, like last night. Previously, it was an unknown flash-in-the-missing-pants. One more such effort from each type of Met and we'll be back to .500. Our home and native land.

The heart and the mind on a parallel course,
Never the two shall meet....

But until I see a sustained effort, a goodly number of comebacks, and a reacquaintance of all 25 heads with all 25 hearts all around this team, I won't be expecting any more out of this season than that of the 17 mediocre ones which came before it.