After the events of the past few days — the Yankees winning their 27th World Series and being feted for it; the Mets doing no such thing — perhaps you wonder, what's the point? I'd love to tell you what it is, but I have no real clue.

But I do have a correction to offer, specific to previous entries to this blog:

This was not the World Series from hell, at least not in the sense that either outcome would be equally terrible. If the Phillies had won, I can say with a great deal of certainty that their hypothetical victory, however annoying when considered on its own conceivable merits, would not have measured up to the actual victory of the Yankees.

Which isn't annoying. It's atrocious.

The Phillies won in 2008. I didn't care for it. They beat us and then made their way through the playoffs. It felt like the Cardinals winning in 2006, that it had something to do with us. In '06, however, it was a more direct process: Cardinals beat us and they were in the World Series. I hated the Cardinals for the next year or so. The other day I ran across something I wrote in 2007 in which I reflexively spewed nasty things about the Cardinals. I stand by those feelings for then, but they seem quite out of code now. At present, I don't particularly hate the Cardinals as a going concern. I'll restoke my hostility toward them April 16, per the 2010 schedule.

When April 30 rolls around, I'll hate the Phillies plenty. I'll hate them eighteen times next year. I'll hate their players, I'll hate their fans, I'll hate their Phanatic. That's a promise. But right now the Phillies mean nothing in particular to me. If they were parading around in fresh new World Champion t-shirts, they'd mean about as much.

I hate the Yankees. I always have and I always will. That wasn't going to change because the Yankees might have lost the World Series. They could have gone down in four straight and I'd hate them more than I did before for having been exposed to them four more times. I don't like them any better for having doused our division rivals in six games even if the collateral damage of the Phillies losing was fine and dandy. I surely don't like them getting to update their bios with a 27th line. I surely don't like the spate of special sections my Sunday papers have printed in their honor or how blanketed my television was by their parade on Friday or how every time I poke my head outside my house somebody's walking by in their garb or how the cemented media narrative is, as it was more than a decade ago, that all of New York just adores the Yankees.

What is New York right now? A place where Xavier Nady has a key to the city. A place where the guy who gave it to him exhibits no institutional memory. A place where the Dunkin' Donuts on Chambers St. is needlessly overrun with thirsty jugheads.

Tell me how this isn't tangibly more hellish than a Phillies victory. (Residents of New Jersey who live closer to Philadelphia than New York are excused from this exercise.)

Early in the history of Faith and Fear, there was some Yankee contretemps making headlines. It was Spring Training 2005, the beginning of Alex Rodriguez's second year in pinstripes. It probably had something to do with him. I honestly don't recall, but I do remember it was one of those Big Stories all of baseball reportage was consumed by. My initial impulse was to blog about it, but then I stopped myself. No, I thought, this is going to be a Mets blog. We exist in a universe that is Mets-oriented, a universe of our own creation. We didn't start this thing to add to the nonsense that everything about New York baseball is Yankees-this and that Yankees-that. If that was what we were going to produce, we could have just kept reading the papers.

Five seasons went by and where are we? With the Yankee cloud overshadowing everything in its midst, just as it did heading out of 1996, just as it did heading into 2005.

I thought we were past all that. We are not. We are essentially back where we started.

The late '90s/Millennial Yankees were an anvil that kept befalling us, even when it appeared we were enjoying a marvelous postseason stroll. Bop! they went on us. Mets have a nice season in 1997? Nobody noticed because the Yankees were back in the playoffs. Mets take it down to the wire in 1998? Nobody noticed (except for the gruesome ending) because the Yankees were winning 114 regular-season games. Mets do semi-miraculous things in 1999 and 2000? They weren't as tangible as what the Yankees were doing.

The anvil fell lighter starting November 4, 2001, the night when Luis Gonzalez flicked a soft line drive into short centerfield and the pain eased some. The Diamondbacks, then the Angels, then the Marlins and then, most deliciously, the Red Sox all lessened the burden of being a Mets fan. We weren't winning anything from 2001 to 2004, but neither were they, by their standards. We didn't have much, but at least we had Elimination Day.

Nevertheless, even when The Yankees had stopped automatically winning World Series after 2000, they still had the cloud. It still obscured everything, not that the Mets were difficult to obscure in those particularly dark days. Yet the moment was at hand there in the spring of '05 for change to take hold. Not right away, maybe, but we were getting back in the game. We were improving. They weren't. They were making the playoffs, but weren't a sure thing anymore. By 2006, we were a better bet. We even went further in our quest for No. 3 than they did in their quest for No. 27. The Cardinals tripped us up, but we had the momentum. This team, this town…it was all there for us.

And it never happened. The Yankees experienced a rough October of 2007, but they got an October. We pulled up short on September 30. The Yankees bowed out altogether in 2008, but so did we, in far more humiliating circumstances. They were all but eliminated when they closed their stadium but they looked sharp and stood tall on the way out. We simply went “thud!” for a second year in a row.

Then 2009, which might as well be 1996. They're World Champions and we're trying to figure out to dig our way out from 90+ losses. It's like the promise of '05 and the reasonable satisfaction of '06 and even the excruciating teases of '07 and '08 never happened. It's like the two good years of '99 and '00 and the two decent years of '97 and '98 never happened. It's like 1996 all over again. The Yankees are champions of baseball and New York and we are…who are we again? And are we going to throw four years and $20.4 million at Bernard Gilkey?

I don't know if I ever learn anything, but I'm going to try to learn not to care about them all over again. This blog was a big step in that direction. Except for the annual Subway Series sets and a little peripheral schadenfreude, we've stuck to our New York team pretty exclusively since February 2005, at least until developments warranted otherwise in October 2009. (Stupid developments.) I'd have preferred we hadn't become a sidebar to what just transpired. I'd have preferred the World Series From Hell Scenario not grown legs. Though I annually write about the World Series no matter who's in it, I'd have preferred staying out of it altogether.

We'll deal with the Phillies when the National League East demands it. We'll ignore the Yankees as best we can until May 21 at Citi Field. Our mission is the Mets. They're hell enough these days. Even so, I take comfort from what the first Mets blogger to put down roots here in the Metsosphere, Steve Keane of Eddie Kranepool Society, had to say in the wake of the inevitably unavoidable outcome of the final six baseball games of 2009.

[T]he big difference between Mets fans and Highlander fans is that we have a passion and love for our team, the Highlander fan has a love and a passion for Championships.

It's the sort of thing we told each other in other autumns of our discontent, particularly the autumn of 1996. If it sounds like the last refuge of an also-ran and an excuse for rooting for a certifiable loser when everybody else is riding high from winning, that's because it does.

Which doesn't mean what Steve wrote isn't true. Because it is — the part about us, for sure. I'm willing to go along with his diagnosis of them, but the confetti's cleaned up and the special sections are bundled for recycling, so I'm not worried about them going forward.

They're going to be how they are, just more so for a while.

We have, as Steve put it, Mackey Sasser and Mike Vail and Glendon Rusch to give us an “ah yeah” smile. We cherish our champions. We relish our reserves, too. We take it all in, no matter how distasteful, and we keep coming back. Right now we feel like roadkill from somebody else's parade route, but we're already up and marching to our own drummer. I don't know that that's a good or healthy thing, but it's what we do, and we're already doing it in ways we don't even realize.

We're done rooting against the Yankees. We're done rooting against the Phillies. We're rooting for the Mets.

God help us.

The New York Review of Books' November 19 issue was the first one I ever picked up, and I was not sorry once I got to page 22. Printed there was a story by Michael Kimmelman about the no longer so new ballparks in New York. What made it worth reading was the generous helpings of quotations it contained from The Last Days of Shea by our friend Dana Brand. We're very happy for Dana since he's been reading TNYROB a lot longer than we have and he says it was a thrill to find himself excerpted in there. You'll be happy (and, because of the subject matter, a little sad) if you pick up a copy of The Last Days of Shea, a book that brings you back to the old ballpark both psychically and physically one more time.

Let Manhattan clear out Friday, let the authorities spray downtown full of disinfectant Saturday and then reaffirm your love of baseball Sunday by taking Peter Laskowich's Baseball Evolution Tour from 10 AM to 1 PM. Lovely weather is forecast, and I can vouch that what Peter will show you and tell you will enrich your appreciation of both baseball and New York no end. He is also leading a group in Brooklyn on Tuesday morning at 10, which I can't yet speak for from personal experience, but I would trust Peter to make it memorable.

Who among us couldn't use a little baseball boost at this moment in time? Take Peter's tour and you'll love this game more than you realize right now.

Here are some details from our historian friend himself, a lifetime Mets fan with deep Dodger roots and extraordinary Giant appreciation:

These tours link the creation of the game with the history of New York. No other bat-and-ball game has foul lines — why did baseball need them? Baseball's most valuable franchise was the Giants — how did they wind up moving to San Francisco? The early Yankees were New York's forgotten team —what sent them to greatness? How did pitching go from an underhand lob to fastballs, curveballs and brushbacks? Why was Brooklyn able to put a black man on the field when no other community dared consider it? This is the kind of thing we will address on Sunday and on Tuesday.

These are all New York stories. My tours, lectures and classes focus on New York, and my baseball-related tours, lectures and classes explain baseball through New York.

Best of all, “We are unlikely to discuss the 2009 World Series.”

Visit Peter's site for a broader look at what he does; contact him directly here for specific details regarding his upcoming outings.

FYI: Flashback Friday: I Saw The Decade End closes out its undying appreciation of the 1999 Mets next week, probably before Friday. Just keep your dial set right where it is. Until then, if you find yourself in need of the kind of fix only a Mets fan could understand, you are invited to revisit the Amazin' exploits of Mora, Pratt, Ventura and all their friends from ten years ago.

Trust me: It's better than watching the local news.

The President returned to the White House late that night to cope with history. History…would not care at all that the Cards won the World Series that day by 4 to 3.
—Theodore White, Making of the President 1964, regarding the events of 10/15/64

On December 15, 1991, six Democratic presidential candidates met in New Hampshire for a debate in advance of that state’s first-in-the-nation primary, which was two months away. Most of them included in their closing statements some variation on “happy holidays,” which got my attention more than anything specific Bob Kerrey, Paul Tsongas, Tom Harkin, Doug Wilder, Jerry Brown or eventual nominee and president Bill Clinton promised that night.

“Happy holidays”? In a presidential primary?

This is all wrong, I thought. There are election campaigns, there’s Election Day — the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November — and then there’s your pile-up of Christmas and Chanukah and New Year’s, all blissfully politician-free. Only after all the market-sanctioned merriment is disposed of, then you can have your caucuses and primaries. They don’t belong stuffed in stockings or hovering over menorahs.

A quaint notion on my part. Campaigns have commenced earlier and every in every presidential cycle since 1992. The 2008 Iowa caucuses were held January 3. Political junkie that I am, I spent most of the 2007 holiday season riveted to C-Span. Such are the hazards of frontloading the nominating process until the year before the election becomes part of the election year itself.

I bring all this up because last night I watched Michael Bloomberg give an acceptance speech for winning re-election as mayor of New York City, and as he wrapped it up, he attempted to rouse his already jubilant crowd with a little call and response.

“And working together,” he declared, “I have no doubt that our best days are still ahead. Our best years are still ahead.

“Now, can we do it?”

His supporters cheered in the affirmative.

“Will you help me?”

Yes they would, they said.

“Will you help me — will you help make the greatest city in the world even better?”

They agreed to that, too.

“Will the Yankees win Game Six?”

Never mind that this, sadly, was an applause line (though a few dissenting hoots sounded a reassuring note). This was Election Night, November 3, and a politician was exhorting a local baseball team to victory.

This I found to be even more wrong than candidates insinuating themselves into the December holidays. Candidates go where the votes are, even if it’s a little unseemly to be doing it amid holly and mistletoe. It’s what they do. Politicians have established a cherished tradition of sticking their faces everywhere if they think it will help get them elected. Embroidered into the legend of the 1969 Mets is the way Mayor John Lindsay planted himself in the middle of every Shea clubhouse celebration that September and October, thus boosting his limited popularity among Queens residents who had just finished digging out their streets from the previous February’s snowstorm.

I find Bloomberg blameless for his reflexive sucking up to a bloc of his jurisdiction’s sports fans, no matter which fans we’re talking about. It’s what politicians do in all seasons. But Bloomberg wasn’t trolling for votes. The election was over. The dissonance here was that the World Series wasn’t. The first Tuesday after the first Monday in November was passing into its first Wednesday and they were still playing baseball.

That’s wrong. It just is.

Baseball should not still be in progress after Election Day. It’s unnatural. It’s weird.

It’s cold.

There’s an old, probably outdated adage that Americans don’t start paying attention to an election until the World Series is decided. That was when there used to be a discernible gap between the two events. The 1964 World Series, to pull Teddy White’s ancient example from the archives, ended nineteen days ahead of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide over Barry Goldwater. Mayor Lindsay was re-elected eighteen days after his final Met champagne bath. Eight years later, Ed Koch succeeded Reggie Jackson as the big news in town by a matter of twenty-one days. Even in this age of playoffs and postponements, the 2008 Phillies clinched their title a full six days before Barack Obama clinched his.

The Phillies have been defending that championship an awfully long time now. They hoisted their trophy exactly 53 weeks ago tonight. That’s more than a year. The Yankees maintained their defense from 2000 to 2001 slightly longer, but the November 4 ending to that campaign was attributable to everything being pushed back a week by 9/11 — and Election Day still came two days after the World Series.

That’s how it’s supposed to be. It’s the American way: you have your baseball season, you have your postseason, you have your Election Day and then you get on with dreading Thanksgiving. Instead, soon enough, Bud Selig will be dressed as St. Nick, touting the virtues of expanding the World Baseball Classic and insisting the World Series is, as Albert Brooks attempted to convince Garry Marshall regarding Las Vegas in Lost In America, a Christmas kind of place.

Bloomberg’s back to work this morning. His campaign is over. Everybody’s campaign is over except for the Yankees’ and the Phillies’. It’s November 4 and there’s going to be a baseball game outside tonight. It’s just wrong.

Though having another one on November 5 would be just fine by me.

Flipping over from the encore presentation of perhaps the best episode ever of Mad Men and glimpsing the Yankees' ninth-inning rally in Game Four — the one that has all but buried the Phillies' hopes of successfully defending their 2008 championship — I thought of Luis Castillo…or “Luis Castillo”. If I say “Luis Castillo,” you know what I mean. The vignette that leaps (or drops) to mind is so identified with the player, that's it's not even synonymous; it's eponymous.

I thought of “Luis Castillo” a little after Johnny Damon stole second and zipped to third when he noticed and processed that a Delgado-like overshift left the base uncovered. I thought of “Luis Castillo” a little more when Brad Lidge hit Mark Teixeira. And I thought of “Luis Castillo” a whole lot when Alex Rodriguez doubled Damon home. But what really brought “Luis Castillo” front and center was Jorge Posada singling in both Teixeira and Rodriguez. The Yankees were by no means dead before this chain of events, just tied. But the momentum, built on homers from Chase Utley in the seventh and Pedro Feliz in the eighth — clearly belonged to the Phillies. There was no reason to think, when nobody was on and two were out, that this game was the Yankees' to win.

But it was and they did. It's not so much that they didn't give up (though they didn't and never do). It's that they took advantage. Damon singled and saw an opening from there. The rest was a “Luis Castillo” of a half-inning, right through to A-Rod hustling home with that third run to put his team up 7-4. For a sec, I wondered if he'd be held or if he'd hold up himself. Then I remembered the aspect of “Luis Castillo” that made “Luis Castillo” so chilling.

To return as briefly as possible to the horrors of June 12, there was the dropped Rodriguez popup with two out in the bottom of the ninth, to be sure, and there was the upsetting realization that the runner on second, Derek Jeter, was going to dash home and tie the game at eight. As legendary hard-luck hurler Charles Brown himself would say, “Rats.” But the true dagger to the heart that Friday night was Teixeira never stopping running.

• Castillo couldn't quite settle under the popup; Teixeira ran.

• Castillo got a glove on it; Teixeira ran.

• Castillo failed to ensnare the ball; Teixeira ran.

• Castillo picked it up; Teixeira ran.

• Instead of firing it home, Castillo tossed it foggily and lamely to second. And because Teixeira had been running the whole time, Teixeira scored…from first.

That was the knife, the wound and the blood right there. That was the proof that, certainly in that game and, more broadly, in ways that transcended any one game, the Yankees were better than the Mets. They were better at playing baseball than us. They weren't better because of 26 rings or $210 million in payroll or whatever arrogance we wish to assign their personality profile. They were better because they compounded others' mistakes, while our team simply made and compounded its own mistakes.

They knew how to play the game and they played it. It was an eye-opener — it honestly was. I had been peripherally watching the Yankees hustle from home to first and from first to third and all that for the better part of a baseball generation, but at no time since the 2000 World Series did I really get just how well they do their jobs.

While all through 2009, I was reminded how badly we do ours.

As I considered how this World Series was landing as squarely in the Yankees' column as that A-Rod popup in June had landed on the outfield grass next to Castillo, I noted who executed the go-ahead run: Damon, Teixeira and Rodriguez. I thought back to how each of them put on a fancy suit and stood in front of a top hat logo pledging fealty to all things Steinbrenner. They were the boys of various big-spending winters past. The Yankees assumed a huge contract with Rodriguez. When they didn't win a World Series the next five chances they conceivably had, we all had five good laughs. The Yankees waved a ton of money at Red Sock For Life Damon and it didn't help them get back where they thought they belonged. We laughed some more. When they threw a Federal Reserve's worth of loot at Teixeira and CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett this past winter, it looked like more of the same.

Not anymore it isn't. Those fancy suits became players and those players became, in concert with the those who have been there all along, a team. We've seen the Mets hold similar grip 'n' grins and hand out extra-large novelty checks to their share of free agents, but we have yet to see a payoff on this level. We never saw our collection of high-priced imports coalesce and take a 3-1 lead in a World Series. We never saw them in a World Series at all.

The Yankees, it has been said, can outspend their mistakes. They've made their share of them, most of them more expensive than some teams' entire payrolls. Now it appears almost irrefutably that several of their extravagant investments have yielded long-term payouts. I don't do their books. I don't know if dedicating however many zillion dollars to Alex Rodriguez since 2004 for one championship in 2009 has been worth it…if Matsui's been worth it since 2003 or Damon's been worth it since 2006. But they and the most recent class of lavishees and all those who received ever more significant raises as enticements to stick around this entire decade…they're about to win a World Series.

When the Yankees took that 7-4 lead in the top of the ninth, I knew I could flip back to AMC and Mad Men without suspense. Mariano Rivera was coming in. Of course it was over. Rivera blew key saves three postseason series: 1997 to Cleveland, 2001 to Arizona, 2004 to Boston. Those were lovely nights to be a Yankee Hater. They were also isolated incidents. Mets management didn't take time out of its busy schedule to rip the rubber off the Citi Field mound and send it to the Bronx as a keepsake because Rivera didn't save 500 games, which doesn't even include playoffs and World Series.

The Phillies went down 1-2-3; Jimmy Rollins, popped to first for the second out. Teixeira used both hands to make the catch.

The Fox cameras kept finding dejected Phillie fan faces, all of which appeared to register the same realization that winter was fast closing in on Citizens Bank Park, I actually felt a twinge of simpatico with them. It's no fun realizing your team is about to stop being champion of its sport. Sure, we'd all love to have that problem, but it is jarring to comprehend that everything that made you feel special for the previous year is about to dissipate. It felt instantly familiar to me because that's how I felt in January when the Giants were about to be dismissed from the NFL playoffs not quite a year after winning the Super Bowl. The sensation was less acute than that which I experienced in early October of 1987 as it sunk in that the Mets were ceding the N.L. East to St. Louis, but it was definitely its own kind of bummer. It was no longer “we are the champions,” but rather “we were the champions” and we have no idea when we're going to be again.

It took me about three seconds to abandon the empathy tic once I remembered a) the Giants were eliminated by the Eagles; b) Phillies fans are generally Eagles fans; c) I hate the Phillies; and d) Phillies fans are a pretty accurate reflection of their increasingly unappealing team — increasingly unappealing for the Phillies, which is a perversely impressive feat considering it's November and you'd figure they'd have revealed their character for all it was worth by Halloween.

The Phillies had played like champions for the balance of 2009, until Burnett outpitched Pedro Martinez in Game Two. Game Three, when A-Rod homered off that oddly positioned camera, recalled 1996 Game Four and Jim Leyritz effectively ending Mark Wohlers' usefulness (as well as the last scrap of my residual N.L. West affinity for Atlanta). When Leyritz homered, you pretty much knew the Braves, that year's version of Not The Yankees, were en route to finished. Thirteen years later, strange batfellows are letting us down again, which is unfortunate. What makes the Phillies newly unappealing, however, is not the not beating the Yankees, but reminding us what jerks they can be when things aren't breaking their way. Consider David Lennon's impressions regarding the Phillie stars' attitude toward reporters working their clubhouse on the off day prior to Game Three:

Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley and Jayson Werth were conspicuous by their absence. Ryan Howard loudly proclaimed that he was not talking. Shane Victorino, after some persistent prodding, gave an interview in which he greeted reporters with a string of expletives and then dismissed most of the questions.

Gosh, what sweethearts.

After losing Game Four, Charlie Manuel, who has received overwhelmingly favorable coverage since last October, snarled at a question about whether he regretted not starting Cliff Lee on three days' rest. Granted, he couldn't have been in a good mood and the issue had already been beaten into the ground, but c'mon. You're a World Series manager, and your players are World Series players. You're all defending champions. If you can't play like it, act like it.

Except when I wanted Dwight Gooden to achieve his no-hitter, I've never actively rooted for a Yankee victory, and I'm not about to start. But the Phillies showing their less than sunny sides when things begin to grow cloudy reminded me of a couple of the Dodgers — Davey Lopes and Bill Russell — blaming their misfortunes in the 1978 World Series on all the “animals” in New York. Not that I'd disagree with that assessment of Yankee Stadium crowds, particularly in those days, but I found their complaints to be alibis. The Dodgers were letting a 2-0 lead slip away as if it wasn't their fault, as if it was the city of New York's. I surely did not root for the Yankees to win that World Series, but I wasn't terribly sorry when Los Angeles lost it.

The Yankee players, not necessarily among the most press-accessible in the sport, have been cooperative and then some with the assembled multitudes, according to Lennon. They've gone beyond the usual Jetertronic Q&A. Maybe it's the winning. Maybe it's an extension of the professionalism they've shown on the field, the way they keep running and keep playing. Maybe, uniforms notwithstanding, they're not such bad sorts. At those prices, there's no reason for them to be anything but charming.

Nevertheless, it's encouraging to read about good behavior. It's more encouraging to see heads-up baseball. I'm a baseball fan. The Yankees have been playing it better than anyone. I've always respected it even as I've begrudged it. I'm on the cusp of admiring it. When they receive their inevitable trophy sometime this week, maybe I won't be as reflexively dismayed by it as I've been before.

What the hell — at least they're Not The Phillies.