That’s Joshua’s Jose Reyes shirt, off to Goodwill, and if you’ll excuse me I need a minute. There seems to be something in my eye.

Intuition — which is often fallible — strongly suggests it isn’t just to tinker with bookkeeping, or to draw a couple of lines differently on the org chart. The nature of the Mets’ situation and the kind of business companies like CRG do [...]]]> Why did the Mets hire CRG Partners? Beats the hell out of me.

Intuition — which is often fallible — strongly suggests it isn’t just to tinker with bookkeeping, or to draw a couple of lines differently on the org chart. The nature of the Mets’ situation and the kind of business companies like CRG do both make you suspect something more is going on.

It also doesn’t help that, to be blunt, the last few years have trained me to automatically discount anything the Mets say about their own business affairs.

But the nature of that something more that might or might not be going on? You got me. And this is where I start to worry about how the world we live in has changed, and might be making us all a bit nuts.

I love all things digital. I made my bones as a journalist and writer in the digital world. My daily work life is almost entirely digital. Heck, Greg Prince and I began as digital friends, and our collaboration wouldn’t exist without a whole bunch of digital magic. Not so long ago, I used to listen to a Mets game a week by parking my car next to the Potomac River and cranking the scratchy radio, and my fondest hopes were for 30 seconds of Mets highlights on SportsCenter and the Washington Post to run two paragraphs from the AP instead of just the box score. Now, I can hear the Mets on my phone anywhere in the world, watch them on my iPad for a fairly modest amount of money, and I can absorb as much Mets news and opinion as I have time for, even on Jan. 9.

This is beyond a dream come true — we’re the fricking baseball Jetsons, even if we barely realize it.

But there is a downside, and I think you can see it at work with whatever’s going on with the Mets.

Between all this information, and all these voices, and the fact that the news cycle never stops, our habits for consuming information have changed. And so too have our expectations, which are curdling into demands. Between comment sections and Facebook status updates and text messages and Twitter, our vocabulary is increasingly dominated by two words:

1) WHY?

and

2) NOW!

This isn’t the end of the world, but it does leave us with a problem we don’t know how to solve yet. Our increasing voracity for information — summed up by those two little syllables — can leave us out of step with how inquiries get made and issues get solved. You see this, increasingly, with both people and organizations when they’re confronting allegations and potential scandals. We want to know why (followed, as always, by more whys), and we want to know now, and if we aren’t satisfied on either score, we will be inundated by voices accusing someone of incompetence, bad faith, or venality.

But what we’re in danger of forgetting is that sometimes it takes time to get to why. And that telling some stories now, before they’re complete, changes what happens.

Which brings us back to the Mets.

Let’s try a scenario: Suppose you were facing legal jeopardy that might be grim but survivable, or might mean your financial ruin. You’d need to be prepared for both eventualities. And that would mean hiring someone whose job was to think of the unthinkable, and figure out how you’d navigate that. It wouldn’t mean that you’d made up your mind to do something, just that you had accepted that you might be forced to. If you were in that situation, there would be a host of reasons — from deepening your own legal peril to not wanting to endure more distractions to distaste for the whole spectacle — for not discussing it publicly.

In 1995 this wouldn’t have been an issue. Today it is.

Here’s another scenario: Suppose you were the czar of a sports league, and you had accepted that one of your premier clubs was in such financial distress that its owners — who’d been your supporters in a lot of knife-in-the-back political fights — needed to step aside. Having reached that unhappy pass, would you move quickly, or deliberately? Quickly means likely legal strife, a blizzard of embarrassing press coverage, wrecked personal relationships and a cloud of suspicion the next time you have to do such a thing. Deliberately might land you in the same fix, but your chances are better.

Such a thing was never easy. But today the ceaseless choruses of why and now make it a lot harder.

(If this is too baroque for you, substitute firing the incompetent, litigious guy down the hall. Yeah, a public stoning is justified. But it’s probably smarter, if a lot less satisfying, to let his contract lapse or start filing the paperwork to eliminate his position.)

I don’t know if either of the above baseball scenarios has any basis in reality. I’m glad we know about CRG, and proud that one of our blog brethren ferreted out the news. And I understand that being discreet and deliberate can be a cover for perpetuating rotten institutions and hiding gross misconduct. But sometimes things take time and take place behind closed doors. That’s something we increasingly have trouble accepting, because we’re being trained to demand the opposite.

Hat tip to this Will Leitch post, which covers somewhat different ground but got me thinking.

I’ll think they’ll be mediocre, with a relatively robust offense but too many No. 4 starters in the rotation and too many improved teams [...]]]> I don’t think the 2012 Mets will be as bad as most people seem to think … but that’s not the same thing as thinking the 2012 Mets will actually be good.

I’ll think they’ll be mediocre, with a relatively robust offense but too many No. 4 starters in the rotation and too many improved teams in the National League East. And like a lot of mediocre teams, I think we’ll only be able to take their measure a few years further down the road. Looking back from the vantage point of, say, 2015, the 2012 Mets might strike us as a team that was beginning to benefit from the sounder foundation built by Sandy Alderson and Co. in preparation for the Wilpons’ return to financial health and the blossoming of the farm system. Or they might strike us as a pointless way station before the last of Omar Minaya’s contracts ran out, Alderson and his team escaped and the Mets took up residence in the cellar as the Pirates East, with fans pleading for Bud Selig to finally take the team away from its penniless ownership.

I’ll hope for the former — while bracing for the latter.

But either way, this isn’t going to be a great team in 2012. It’s going to be one that will play with plenty of black clouds over its head. And it’s one that could use some distractions.

We’ve got some distractions already — the return of uniforms like they oughta be, the reappearance of Banner Day, and the retraction of distant fences. I don’t mean that to be cynical — I think the first two are great ideas and the third is worth a try. Distractions in the service of worthy causes can be good things.

But how about another one — one that’s openly sentimental and admittedly a bit foolish?

It’s starting to be a long ago somehow, but once upon a time the Mets boasted The Best Infield Ever — John Olerud, Edgardo Alfonzo, Rey Ordonez and Robin Ventura. They never won a title — Olerud departed for Seattle, Ventura’s renaissance proved fleeting, and Ordonez’s uselessness at the plate and shortcomings as a person became impossible to ignore — but while they were together they combined for reliably thrilling baseball night after night at Shea. I loved them all at various points, but the one I cheered for most fervently was Edgardo Alfonzo.

Alfonzo came up when the Mets were bad, and even while he scuffled I was certain that he would become a star — I loved his sense of the strike zone, his ability to work himself into good counts, how his swing was simple and unfussy, and how he proved useful whereever the Mets put him on the infield. As it happened, I was right — he was front and center when the Mets finally became a team that once again inspired pride alongside devotion. He seemed to like it here, he was homegrown, and I dreamed of one day standing at Shea or some successor to it and cheering a 40-something Fonzie into retirement. He’d be a good bet to get 13 added to the wall of retired numbers, a lock for the Mets Hall of Fame, and we’d insist to all comers that he had the credentials for admission to that other Hall up in Cooperstown. We’d be wrong, unable or unwilling to see that our love was papering over a statistical gap, but wrong for all the right reasons.

It didn’t work out that way.

It usually doesn’t, but it’s still heartbreaking.

The Mets let Fonzie become a free agent after the 2002 season, and much as I’m loath to admit it, Steve Phillips was right about that one. Fonzie put up two OK seasons for San Francisco, turned 30, and came apart like a cheap suit. In 2006 he hit .126 in 87 at-bats between Anaheim and Toronto. He hasn’t been seen in the big leagues since.

But he’s still out there — shortly after Thanksgiving, MLB.com noted that he was playing well in Venezuela, mulling a contract to play in Japan, and still saying all the right things: “To play baseball, you love the game. That’s what I’m doing — I still love the game.” (Tip of the cap to Amazin’ Avenue for the link.)

Amazingly, he’s only 38 — still a couple of years shy of when I imagined saying farewell to him in that better alternate universe.

You can already guess what I’m going to suggest next, and you’re probably wondering if I’ve forgotten something — because you’re remembering that the Mets already tried this.

In 2006 they purchased Fonzie’s contract from the Bridgeport Bluefish of the Atlantic League, leading both me and Greg to dream of a return for Edgardo with the Mets’ soon-to-be playoff-bound club. It was perfect, it really was — and there was precedent. In 1986, Lee Mazzilli was the final piece of the Metropolitan puzzle, the 24th man on that immortal team.  He was a capable pinch-hitter and a wise old hand, but more than that he was a symbol for all of us who’d suffered through the Mets turning themselves into the North Korea of baseball, a hermit kingdom that refused to acknowledge free agency and its transformation of the game. Maz had been one of the few bright spots of those awful years, and his return felt like redemption for all of those players who had toiled uselessly under the dispirited gaze of Mettle the Mule and 2,000 fans a night. Maz got a ring, and somehow it was like Pat Zachry and Steve Henderson and Frank Taveras and Doug Flynn and Joel Youngblood and Bob Bailor got a little piece of one too.

It was a nice thought. But Alfonzo hit .241 in 42 games at Norfolk, without much power. The Mets’ postseason roster looked pretty good. He never got called up, never became the second coming of the second coming of Lee Mazzilli, and drifted off to the Long Island Ducks and Mexico and Japan and the Newark Bears and now Venezuela. He’s only 38, but he hasn’t shown much of anything since he was 30.

Against all this, I can only offer a nonsensical plea, a crazy fan’s crazy wish: I know I know I know I KNOW, but goddamn it, he’s EDGARDO ALFONZO.

Jason Isringhausen clawed his way out of the scrap heap and became an awfully nice story at the age of 38. So why not Fonzie? The Mets are shopping in the bargain aisle for middle infielders. Fonzie should be on the endcap, priced to move. So why not a spring-training invite? It would give us a chance to cheer, to read nice features in the papers, to say remember when — even if there was no guarantee that this was more than a February story. If nothing else, it would be another nice distraction. And we could use as many of those as we can get.

I say good for him. A player criminally unappreciated by the Mets’ stupider fans deserves a last go-round in a town that’s reflexively supportive of its players.

But isn’t it weird that Beltran’s a Cardinal? Because remember he took that called third strike that one time against the Cardinals? (If you haven’t [...]]]> Carlos Beltran is a Cardinal.

I say good for him. A player criminally unappreciated by the Mets’ stupider fans deserves a last go-round in a town that’s reflexively supportive of its players.

But isn’t it weird that Beltran’s a Cardinal? Because remember he took that called third strike that one time against the Cardinals? (If you haven’t already, go back and read Greg’s take.)

That Adam Wainwright pitch was a magical offering. Pretty much every day, some batter somewhere in a Major League Baseball game is frozen by an unhittable 12-6 curve to end an at-bat. But not all such pitches are created equal. Ones that end at-bats in the third innings of games in mid-May are just kind of a bummer. But ones that come at the end of Game 7s of playoff series are different. Imbued with the sense of the moment possessed by all inanimate objects, they are little spherical judges of a man’s character.

If not offered at, such curveballs prove that a player isn’t a winner and has never played with passion. When confronted with such pitches, real men realize at the last second that they have been fooled and take gritty, agonized hacks despite the fact that the ball is already settling into the catcher’s glove. They then contort their faces in a rictus of pain intense enough to be seen from the upper deck, rend their uniforms with bloody fingers and try to beat themselves to death with their own bats. Carlos Beltran failed to do any of those things, and so revealed his essential character to those wise enough or sufficiently steeped in WFAN to see it. All of the things he did later — getting the knee surgery he knew he needed, gamely trying to return from it too early, shifting to right field to defuse a clubhouse controversy — were shameful attempts at trickery.

Is it weird that Beltran will be a Cardinal, a teammate of Yadier Molina, he of the comically tattooed neck and the cosmically awful home run?

I suppose it is. But it’s always weird.

It’ll be weird confronting Jose Reyes as a Marlin. It was weird when Pedro Martinez smothered the Mets as a momentary Phillie. It was weird when Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden beat us as Yankees. It was weird seeing Lee Mazzilli as a Yankee. It was weird seeing Lenny Dykstra as a Phillie, or Rico Brogna as a Brave, or Edgardo Alfonzo as a Giant. My forebears probably thought it was weird seeing Jim Hickman as a Cub or Gary Gentry as a Brave. And let’s recall that only an injury saved us from what would have been a deeply, tragically weird confrontation with Tom Seaver of the Boston Red Sox in the 1986 World Series.

We’d like players who were our favorites, or even just logged enough time to be familiar, to never go anywhere else. By all rights they should vanish and be remembered as they were. The world buffets us with change enough as it is — it’s galling, somehow, to get more strangeness and dislocation from baseball, which is supposed to be our escape from such things. But baseball doesn’t play by those rules any more than the rest of life does. Ed Kranepools are few and far between — most players with whom ties are severed find it in their interests to play wearing someone else’s uniform, just as most former colleagues, mentors or mentees insist on continuing to earn a living even if it’s with competitors and most ex-girlfriends fail to do the decent thing and flee to a nunnery.

Carlos Beltran will be a Cardinal. He’ll probably sit next to Yadier Molina now and then and inexplicably not karate-chop him in the throat. He’ll probably get some hits off of us, maybe even one off an attempted 12-6 curveball that turns out to be more of a 12-3. It’ll be weird. Life often is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are the silver lining.

It sucks.

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

Jose Reyes is a Miami Marlin. Eighteen times a year, starting in late [...]]]> Back in May I wondered what it would feel like when the number of Jose Reyes Mets highlights remaining were reduced to zero. Now we know.

It sucks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wouldn’t have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like I said, today sucks.

In all likelihood this will be the offseason in which we face the grim reality that our broke, troubled, outclassed team has become the Baltimore Orioles of the National League. We [...]]]>

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

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

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

And thank goodness for the return of Bobby Valentine.

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

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

But what a happy accident.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mets were born in the Jet Age. Fatherly Eisenhower had given way to hip, stylish JFK, soon to announce we were going to the Moon. The Mets set up shop in [...]]]> OK, let’s get the whining out of the way first: I want to unreservedly love the new pinstripes, but they annoy me a little.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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