Yesterday fans who came to Citi Field got a free hot dog and the chance to watch the Marlins beat the sluggish Mets. But hey, it was a nice night.

Tonight it was cold with periodic spurts of rain. The Mets, meanwhile, meekly absorbed a horrific ass-beating, marked by more bases-loaded walks, dimwitted baserunning, grounders not corralled, double plays hit into and double plays not turned. The Mets have been in free fall for some time, but amazingly, they have yet to reach terminal velocity. Though it defies all the laws of probability, they are actually managing to play worse and become even harder to watch.

Anyway, it's probably best that there was no giveaway. Given all of the above, what possible freebie would have been sufficient inducement to justify a trip out to Flushing tonight? A complimentary Shackburger, shake and fries? Piggyback rides for all from Mr. Met? The Pepsi Party Patrol hurling actual game-used bases navigated ineptly by Angel Pagan? Gold ingots for the first 25,000 fans? A Rey Sanchez edition Bentley given away each inning?

And yet there they were — fans. Ten thousand or so at least, cheering bravely for baseball played about as carelessly and stupidly as it can be.

From the relative comfort of my bed, I watched them and tried to think of a possible explanation for that many people not being able to find something — anything — better to do on a Thursday night in New York City.

Perhaps they were Marlins fans, who find near-empty stadiums comforting. (Joke stolen from Greg Prince.)

Perhaps Tobi Stoner — 2009's 53rd Met — has lots and lots of friends and family.

And then I realized that while I wasn't at the game, I was continuing to watch it, even though Marlins kept scoring and Mets kept falling over things. Surely I had something better to do, but there I sat, fuming at Angel Pagan and hoping Nick Evans might get a hit. If I'd had a ticket, would I have been out there bundled up and cheering for the Mets to draw within eight in the ninth? Good Lord, I probably would have been there. Oh, of course I would have been there.

No, there wasn't anything wrong with those people. They were just Mets fans, showing up even in the spastic dying days of an ungodly season, hoping over-the-hill veterans and undercooked rookies might give them something to clap for. Which, after all, was what I was doing too.

Come to think of it, there is something wrong with us. We're sick in the head, is what we are. Pathetic and delusional. But you know what? Fuck it. We're sick in the head together. And when karma turns — in 2010 or 2012 or 2020 or whenever — the shared insanity will be sweet indeed.

Need therapy? Seek it at AMAZIN' TUESDAY, the final 2009 edition of which is coming to Two Boots Tavern on the Lower East Side, 7:00 P.M., September 15. Please join us and Mets By The Numbers' Jon Springer as we welcome our special guests The Bad Guys Won author Jeff Pearlman and Metstradamus mastermind John Coppinger. There'll be great pizza, cold beer, loads of baseball talk…and a Mets game from Turner Field that will probably make you want to blind yourself.

We're way out of the race. We're about to be officially eliminated. We're going to finish with a losing record. We're depressed. We're dispirited. We're done.

Yet Nate the profane Pirates fan could not possibly be moved by our plight.

I don't know jack about Nate except for what he posted in this space in response to a Faith and Fear rant on the Mets' unfathomable descent into disaster during the final week of 2007. The Mets had just lost their third consecutive game to the Washington Nationals, their ninth of thirteen overall, and were in the midst of tumbling from a seemingly sturdy perch above the National League East into the historical abyss of baseball ignominy.

Perhaps you remember the Mets doing that.

Anyway, Jason had posted his disgust and frustration — you could call it disgustration — with the 2007 Mets, a perfectly legitimate fistful of gripes given how our boys had given away their lead while professing little bother about their impending failure. It is safe to say, judging from the tone of Mets fan comments on that post and every post that week, we all felt essentially the same way.

Into our den of Met disgustration stumbled Nate the profane Pirates fan with his own equally legitimate perspective:

Waaah, waaah, the Mets have only won 87 games this year. They're one of the best teams in baseball and still in the pennant race, and yet they may not win! And even if they don't, we'll still maintain this fantastic team next year! Oh, woe is me!

Fuck you. I saw this post on Deadspin, and shut the fuck up. You take having a great team for granted. I'm a Pirates fan…I've seen 15 years of horrendous teams and losing seasons. We've had one year where we were relevant in the pennant race and they STILL finished with a losing record. You don't know how good you have it.

Then, because Nate was nothing if not thorough, he added a second comment:

Oh, by the way, you're welcome for Oliver Perez.

Jason tried to talk Nate down by lifting him up with some words of encouragement for recent signs of life at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela. He tried to relate to him by invoking Sid Bream sliding under the tag of Mike LaValliere in the heartstopping final instant of the 1992 NLCS, the last time Pittsburgh's baseball team saw the middle of October. He tried. I doubt he succeeded.

We never heard from Nate again, but I've thought of him now and then since his drive-by tirade. I've thought of him and his kind — Pittsburgh Pirates fans — as our current season has come to resemble what is, sadly for them, their typical season.

Is the Pirate plight as played out across almost two decades worse than the kind of apocalyptic episode to which we've been party the previous two Septembers? Certainly every one of us would love to have the Marlins come in with everything on the line for us and take our chances on another debacle instead of what we've got now, which is nothing at all. It's what we live for as fans. We want our September to pulsate. We want our stadium to pulsate. We don't want our souls to be crushed, but we do want our souls in play.

The Pittsburgh Pirates have received an unusual amount of attention this September as everyone seems to have noticed at once that they lost their 82nd game of the season. Not a big story most seasons. The Pirates losing an 82nd game is the baseball equivalent of a rooster crowing at a sunrise. It's a routine occurrence. It's not news. It's just what happens to those Buccos.

This September, however, it was monumental, for this is the seventeenth consecutive season in which the Pirates have guaranteed themselves a losing record — one more than any franchise has ever endured (1933-48 Phillies, you can rest in peace). Not seventeen years without a world championship or a pennant or a playoff appearance. Seventeen years without once experiencing more W's than L's.

That's depressing. That's dispiriting. That's doom.

To fully comprehend, imagine our lost season of 2009 is repeated in some form or fashion next year. Then the year after that. Then the year after that. And so on, clear out to 2025. Take your age this September and add sixteen years to it (knocking wood we all live that long). You'd be standing there at Now + 16 thinking:

1) Ohmigod, I haven't seen the Mets have a winning season in seventeen years, since 2008, since they played in Shea Stadium, since I was so upset they blew their chance at the playoffs on the final day of the season.

2) Ohmigod, I've spent the past seventeen years rooting for a horrible baseball team that has never gotten any better and gives me no tangible reason to believe they ever will.

3) Ohmigod, I'm seventeen years older than I was the last time the Mets were any good.

You can have the next sixteen years of your life back now (I'm in no rush to turn 62 that fast myself). But you can wonder how you as a Mets fan, who has certainly absorbed your share of downs, would deal with having absolutely no ups for a veritable eternity. Not a Wild Card, not a division title, not a hint of a race for anything but the sweet mercy of Closing Day. Would you still be a Mets fan if well after three, five, seven, nine years you'd watched rebuilding programs crumble, phenoms flame out, budding stars blossom for other teams and all your rivals progress at some point while your club goes only backwards?

It's not a question for which I'd ever want to discover an answer. Seven straight losing seasons from 1977 through 1983 were bad enough. Six straight losing seasons from 1991 through 1996 were bad enough. Three straight losing seasons of the particularly embarrassing kind were bad enough from 2002 through 2004. And yes, this thing we call 2009 continues to stink on ice. Every one of these losing seasons has been hell.

If you add them up and string them together, you have seventeen losing seasons in a row. Seventeen awful losing seasons in a row, though I suppose that might be redundant. While I've occasionally derived a bit of fleeting and even lingering happiness from a couple of losing seasons, they're still awful. They can't help but be.

That's life as a Pirates fan. Our September now is their September always, at least dating back to 1993. If Pirates fans go to their brilliant little ballpark the last month of the season, they go with nothing to anticipate in the way of meaningful games. They go with nothing to play for, nothing to root for except what they invent in their minds. Maybe they can get behind a rookie who they think will turn things around eventually. Maybe there's a milestone nobody outside of their section at PNC knows or cares about. Maybe it's just the hope that their team will lose 89 games instead of 90, 94 games instead of 95, 99 games instead of a hundred. Maybe they can take simple pleasure in the beauty and joy of baseball, though after the first sixteen losing seasons, I imagine the beauty and the joy are pretty well obscured, the mind games cause headaches and that even charming PNC Park isn't much to look at.

Teams' fortunes change over time. Consider that the Rays were born dead on arrival and resisted resuscitation from there; the Brewers wallowed in stale Meister Bräu for ages; the Tigers' roar was long reduced to a whimper. But they each shook off their lousiness in the last few years and rewarded their fans with a trip to the postseason. The Reds are about as perennially punchless as the Pirates, but they went to a Wild Card play-in game (heh-heh) in 1999 and won 85 games in 2000. The Royals have been royally screwed since the 1994 players strike, but they managed to sneak a winning season into their stew of perpetual futility in 2003. The Orioles are subpar regularly, but they were a division champion in 1997. The Nationals finished 2005 at .500 if you can believe that. Hell, the Expos, who no longer exist, finished 2003 over .500, and that was with home games divided among Montreal, San Juan and absolute purgatory.

Everybody's gotten a little something out of life since 1993. We've been in the playoffs three times and contended for the same a bunch of other times. There have been disappointments and devastations intertwined with our successes — and rooting for whom we root in New York carries its own special burdens — but we haven't had to give ourselves a pep talk every single day for seventeen years in order to let loose with a “Let's Go Mets!” There are times when the Mets actually do go and go far.

This month is not one of those times, and knowing somebody has it worse doesn't really help. But somebody does have it worse. Being a Mets fan at this moment is no picnic. Being a Pirates fan for the past seventeen years is a blindfold and a cigarette.

Oh, and Nate, if you're still out there — you can have Oliver Perez back any time you like.

Even if we're now bound by the brotherhood of losing records, one thing Mets fans have that Pirates fans don't is AMAZIN' TUESDAY, the final 2009 edition of which is coming to Two Boots Tavern on the Lower East Side, 7:00 P.M., September 15. Please join Mets By The Numbers' Jon Springer and me as we welcome our special guests The Bad Guys Won author Jeff Pearlman and Metstradamus mastermind John Coppinger. There'll be great pizza, cold beer, loads of baseball talk…and a Mets game from Turner Field on TV just to make sure the evening isn't too perfect.

Lost to the Mahoning Valley Scrappers, 3-1. Season over.

Sigh.

There is scant comfort in baseball this year.

There are worse things than realizing your baseball team is bad.

For instance, there's realizing you long ago stopped noticing your baseball team is bad.

The Mets played the Marlins, and the Mets lost, with just a few bright flickers amid the gloom. There was Josh Thole, getting his first big-league RBI and continuing to show a good eye and a compact stroke. There was a nifty play at the plate, with Jeff Francoeur's throw from right bouncing up and over Thole's glove, past Elmer Dessens, off the back wall, into the hand Dessens shot desperately skyward, and from there being relayed hastily back to Thole to tag out a rather startled Dan Uggla. Just your routine 9-2-Wall-1-2 putout.

And there was Carlos Beltran, back from exile at long last. With the season thoroughly lost, I was startled by how emotional I was to see Beltran back on the field. Emily and Joshua and I had seen him on Sunday, wearing Cyclones red and white, and he looked awful, striking out three times and popping to second to end the game. (For video-board purposes the Mets somehow upgraded this to the climactic hit in a walk-off win. If only.) But he looked sufficiently like himself tonight to make you wonder what could have been: He made a sliding catch in left-center, and almost put the Mets in the lead with a drive to the right-field fence.

But almost wasn't enough, and almost was about as good as it got at Citi Field, which was empty as I've seen it this year. The silver lining to that, if I peer hard enough, was that my friend Lyle (a Mets fan relocated to L.A., with a Faith and Fear cameo involving a luckless Staten Island trip) was making his first-ever visit to Citi Field and so got to tour the park and get Blue Smoke in relative leisure. Lyle's mini-review: Great park, but feels like a replica. I can see that.

Happily, it was a beautiful night, and baseball is a pleasure even when there's nothing much to cheer about. Lyle and I camped out in the fancy Caesars Club seats (half-price on StubHub) surrounded by family and friends of the girl who sang the National Anthem, most of whom departed about halfway through the game. Lyle caught a shirt; as the game ground on the already-sparse crowd dwindled sufficiently that we seemed like a near-lock to get a birthday flower cake or be summoned for the latest round of combat between those age-old rivals the forklift and the light tower. (I snagged two abandoned t-shirts made to celebrate the anthem singer's big night. No, I'm not sure why.) In the eighth inning Lyle and I realized that we were the only motivated parties left in a two-section stretch of prime foul-ball territory; we spent the ninth standing on either side of a railing, on our toes like the world's oldest ballhawks.

Which was when two interlopers arrived, obviously to steal our about-to-arrive foul balls.

But wait! It was my co-blogger, accompanied by longtime Faith and Fear reader Sharon. They'd wandered into our section randomly.

One of the things I've liked best about Citi Field is that the funneling of traffic from the rotunda along the field-level concourse to the bridge and the eating area and from there to the escalators virtually guarantees that I'll run into someone I know. I'd said as much to Lyle, which of course meant this time I encountered nobody … until Greg and Sharon arrived. I started to note triumphantly that my point had been proven in rather dramatic fashion, then looked around the somnolent, nearly vacant ballpark and reconsidered the odds. The Mets finished losing, with nary a foul ball heading our way, and bloggers and guests said farewell and headed out of the park into an ever-longer night of an ever-shorter season.

As the season gets shorter, curl up with Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

I'm standing on the LIRR platform Sunday morning, waiting for my train to Woodside. It is obvious from my garb where I'm going. Guy dressed in black, right through to his backpack, comes up to me and asks, “Who's pitching today?”

“Pelfrey,” I say. “Gonna have a nice comeback.”

“Comeback?” he laughs. “Fifteen out of the Wild Card?”

“I don't mean the Mets, just Pelfrey. He's gonna have a good start.”

“Yeah, y'know what? I think he will, too.”

“He's due.”

Nice exchange, right? Just two passersby talking Mets baseball…what more could there be to it?

“Listen,” my new companion says, producing two single dollar bills and changing the subject. “I need to buy a ticket for the train and I'm a few dollars short, and I hate to ask, but…”

Ah, the old Long Island Rail Road ticket scam. How many times have I been the prey for this? For as long as I can remember, whether we're in a recession or an economic boom, there inevitably crops up a would-be commuter who has somehow appeared at whichever station I happen to be, always just a few dollars short of fare into Manhattan or back home. Not a “bum,” just someone who lost his wallet or ran into unforeseen circumstances. His stated predicament can't help but draw out a twinge of empathy — gosh, I'd hate to be in that situation, but if I were, I sure hope somebody would help me out.

I used to believe these stories. I used to believe that somebody could show up for a train bereft of four dollars or six dollars or however much a single off-peak ride cost at that moment. I used to want to believe it, I suppose. I would never ask for this kind of help unless I really needed it. How could anybody else? Eventually, I hardened my shell a bit and just grumbled “no” or wandered away in the middle of the pitch. I don't like being played for a sucker.

But the man in black on Sunday went the extra mile. He talked Mets with me. He acknowledged Mets with me at any rate. He even did it in a manner I could respect — not pretending the Mets were any good just because I was wearing a Mets cap and a Mets shirt, but tamping down my expectations for a miracle playoff run when he misunderstood my “comeback” forecast at first. And he didn't say they're “a million games out” or something disparagingly non-specific. He said they were fifteen games out of the Wild Card.

Which is exactly what they were. He may not have been able to purchase a ticket for the train, but he apparently paid attention to the standings.

A small-time scam artist who knew not just that the Mets sucked, but exactly how much they sucked. I don't respect the scam, but I do respect the research.

So I gave him a buck.

“Hey man, thanks,” he said, accepting the dollar that was still going to leave him quite a bit short of getting anywhere other than the next station (especially if he planned on buying a ticket on the train, which is where they really getcha). I told him, sure, no problem, good luck. As he began walking down the platform to work another mark, he added, “Listen, the Mets are gonna win today. Francoeur's gonna hit TWO home runs!”

I didn't believe for a second he desperately needed to be on the very next train (and indeed when the next one pulled in to the station, he u-turned toward the stairs presumably to gear up for his next group of potential clientele), but he did leave me believing that a) the Mets would win and b) Francoeur would hit two home runs. The Mets did win. Francoeur didn't homer, but still…not “David Wright's gonna hit two homers,” but Jeff Francoeur. Nobody who doesn't keep up with the Mets would have said Jeff Francoeur.

That much, I decided, was worth the buck.

Liván Hernandez is gone from our midst, but the Elton John song they played for him at Citi Field when he did something well resonates slightly this Sunday, specifically the part, “when the New York Times said God is dead…”

I wouldn’t want to get that deep, but what does it say about the state of the modern newspaper when the New York freaking Times doesn’t send a reporter to Queens to cover the only home team playing baseball in its city on this particular weekend?

I know what it says about the Mets. That the Mets aren’t contending and therefore aren’t going to be considered a vital topic. But the Mets have not contended in Septembers before, yet their home games were always covered by the Times. Always, at least as far as I can recall from my many years of dedicated reading.

Whenever I’m reminded of the plight of the newspaper business, of course I get sad. Sports sections have been my Greek chorus for forty years, offering vital commentary and filling in the details of the narrative that has been every Mets season I’ve lived through. There was a time up until a couple of years ago when I didn’t make a move without reading at least three daily papers. Sure I saw the game. Sure I knew the score. But the stories and the quotes and the columns, let alone the standings and the stats and the transactions…that was baseball. I loved that there used to be a newsstand on the 7 extension. I loved that somebody used to sell the Night Owl edition of the next day’s Daily News outside Shea after night games. I loved when Channel 9 used to show newspaper vendors strolling the concourses of Three Rivers Stadium and Jack Murphy Stadium because it underlined my sense that the local paper was the tenth man of every game.

Notice the use of the phrase “used to” pervading my relationship with the daily paper. I all but gave up on newspapers in 2007. I still help myself to much of their work, but I stopped paying for it six days a week. I felt too guilty to let go for the longest time; being a writer and all, I felt I should support the craft even once I had a high-speed Internet connection to give me all the information I used to have to make a trip into the outside world to get. The breaking point wasn’t convenience or thriftiness. I got sick of supporting the local media’s love affair with the New York team that wasn’t mine, reasoning that the space they were giving the Yankees came at the expense of ink to the Mets. Screw that, I finally decided.

And screw it I did. I went from a seven-day-a-week newspaper consumer to one. I stuck with Sunday. There’s way too much tradition to give that up, way too much custom and habit. There’s too tactile a feel to the papers on Sunday, dating back to when I was a kid familiarizing myself with the printed word, for me to just read it on my Mac.

It wasn’t just the reading, though. It was the act as it unfolded for me for as long as I could remember. It was my father bringing them home, sometimes on Saturday night, which seemed almost mystical. It was schlepping from candy store to luncheonette to wherever papers were sold because sometimes we/I wouldn’t get out early enough or they didn’t deliver enough to our area. It was that Sunday morning in college when my Tampa Tribune was delivered to my dorm room without the sports and I called to complain and they sent somebody right over — a guy just off the line…literally an ink-stained wretch. He had this big smile when he handed the rest of my Trib to me, happy that some college kid cared enough about the newspaper to want every bit of it. And I had this big smile when I accepted and realized how much a part of the paper he felt even though he didn’t write or edit it.

For as long as I’ve known the Mets, I’ve known Sunday papers, and I’ve built my Sundays around that one particular section called Sports before reading any of the rest. Sometimes I’d slurp it all down. Sometimes I’d sip a story here or a column there, leaving myself some sports to savor later in the day. I used to have nightmares about looking for the Sunday papers and not finding them, or finding the wrong edition or an issue from a week earlier. That’s how ingrained into my life they are.

It’s a hokey cliché but Sunday wouldn’t be Sunday without the Sunday News (nauseating Jeter soul-kissing and all), Sunday Newsday (Wally Matthews’ continued employment and all) and the Sunday Times. Of course the Sunday Times. Local news notwithstanding, I could live without Sunday Newsday. I lived without the Sunday News when it was struck in 1978 and again in 1990-91, and though I still hold great sentiment for it, I resent its Yankee ragness no end. But the Sunday Times is the Sunday Times. Its price goes up, it gets a little thinner, but it’s still the Sunday Times. The New York Times and I live together in the greater New York area. I would be abandoning my responsibility as a New Yorker if I ever stopped reading it.

Yet the New York Times is abandoning its responsibility. On a Sunday. To the Mets. And to me.

Today’s paper had one story about the Mets-Cubs game from Saturday. That’s OK. I understand the Mets aren’t a big deal at this stage of their lost season. With the tennis and the college football and other teams in pennant races, I understand if their game rates just one story.

But I don’t understand how they rate one wire story.

Nevertheless, that’s all the Mets’ activities Saturday got in the sports section of Sunday’s Times. (There was a cheeky column comparing the woes of the Mets and Knicks, but it was from reporting Friday and had very little to do with informing you about anything you don’t know about your ballclub.) Mind you, the Mets played a home game Saturday. They played a day game. I get that papers sometimes save money by not sending reporters on the road in hopeless Septembers. And I get deadlines from night games not always meshing with the paper I see. And I’ll even throw in the realization that the “New York” in New York Times is a bit more of a brand name than a hometown, that this newspaper has a mission that extends way beyond the five boroughs and environs.

But come on. This is a disgrace. Saturday’s game was in Queens, right next door to the Times-staffed U.S. Open. It sold upwards of 38,000 tickets. Even with the Mets down and out in the National League (and the Cubs about the same), it is a subject of continued interest to who knows how many hundreds of thousands of regular Times readers. It is a staple we look forward to regardless of wins and losses. There is still a little part of me that doesn’t think a Mets game has taken place until I see what is written about it in the papers I buy.

Ben Shpigel is a terrific reporter and writer. I love to read his work in the Times. If he was granted a few well-earned days off, I’d be content to read what his substitute is writing for a weekend. I’d be interested in reading what a new voice has to say. I’d at least skim a lousy story by some hack. The point is I buy a paper that is the New York whatever it is and I expect my New York team, playing at home the previous afternoon, to be covered by somebody on that New York paper. And it was not. It was not in the print edition and it wasn’t online. There was just an AP story. AP stories are fine if you’re out of town.

I’m right here and so are the Mets. Where’s the story?

I was out at Citi Field today, Sunday. The Mets played a marvelous ballgame, at least a scaled down version of one given the expectations we now have for them. Mike Pelfrey found redemption. Daniel Murphy found his power stroke. Frankie Rodriguez found the ability to not disappoint a crowd of nearly 40,000, many of whom came expressly to take home his bobblehead. Whatever special insight is to be gained from their successes and our presence does not look like it will appear in Monday’s Times. There is an AP story on its Web site right now, more than four hours since the Mets won, and nothing else.

As happens regularly, I was reading one of those sad plight of the newspaper industry stories the other day. This one concerned the Times and its sports section. John Koblin reported in the New York Observer on the near demise of its general column Sports of the Times, long a centerpiece of the sports section. The overriding reason for its fade from view, according to the article, was the business has changed. That’s usually the reason newspapers don’t do what they used to do. One of the ways the Times would make up for the loss of that column, according to NYT sports editor Tom Jolly, would be by asking its beat writers to write more opinion pieces.

Whether that’s a great idea or not can only be divined from the pieces that are written and what it correspondingly does to the regular game coverage that has always been those reporters’ first order of business (former Timesman Murray Chass isn’t for it). But how will the Times offer any kind of perspective on the Mets — first-person, third-person, objective, subjective — if they can’t be bothered to send a reporter to Citi Field for two consecutive days?

As a writer, I want newspapers to succeed and endure. As a reader, I want newspapers to succeed and endure. As somebody who counts some good friends as members of that industry, I want newspapers to succeed and endure. But as a Mets fan who has always relied on the Times to tell me about the Mets, if they’re not going to tell me a blessed thing, why should I give a damn what happens to them?

UPDATE: Times posted Shpigel’s story on Sunday’s game on its site later Sunday evening.

Covering the Mets across four decades, Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

Our two-game winning streak didn't become three, but we can take solace in the message inscribed on a sign I saw held aloft beneath the Pepsi Porch Friday night:

AT LEAST WE STILL DON'T HAVE HEILMAN

That's Aaron Heilman, the Mets starter turned reliever whose very sight at Shea Stadium, rightly or wrongly, was an automatic Maalox Moment. That's Aaron Heilman from when the Mets' bullpen was Agita Central. That's Aaron Heilman from…you know, Aaron Heilman.

In the seventh Saturday, with Chicago up 4-2, Aaron entered the game and gave up a single to Fernando Tatis, a wild pitch and a single to Angel Pagan before striking out Luis Castillo and surrendering a sac fly to David Wright to make it 4-3. Then he was removed in favor of John Grabow.

Our former reluctant setup man didn't blow the Cubs' lead and we didn't win the game, but nevertheless, I agree with the sign. At least we still don't have Heilman.

I'm sitting with the Chapmans of recent Bar Mitzvah fame in the very first row of the Big Apple section in center field. It's a few minutes to first pitch. The Mets have taken the field and are tossing balls around to prepare them for the game. They do this all the time but when you're not sitting on top of the outfield as I was with Sharon, Kevin and Ross you don't really notice this ritual. We're not particularly close to Angel Pagan at that moment, but we're closer than we're ever going to be. So Kevin does the logical thing. He stands up, he waves his gloved hand and shouts something to the effect of, “HEY ANGEL! HOW ABOUT A BALL? RIGHT HERE!”

In the time it takes me to think “that's cute, but Angel Pagan is never going to thr…” Angel Pagan throws Kevin a ball. I mean a strike. That's a major league arm, no matter the throws he sometimes balloons into the infield. When Angel Pagan wants to let one loose, I can attest now that he can.

I can also add that Kevin Chapman has soft hands because he caught a major league throw without flinching.

The best part — as if a Met throwing a Mets fan a ball upon request is not a very good part — is upon inspection, it was revealed the ball was a Shea Stadium commemorative ball, one emblazoned with that precious 1964-2008 logo you saw everywhere last year. I guess they have a few gross somewhere in the back and they come in handy for loosening arms and sating fans.

After that, the game started, and Parnell pitched quite well, but the Mets didn't hit enough, and Pagan didn't catch as well as he threw, but then Tatis outhit the mistakes of his team's defense, and the Mets helped nail the Cubbie coffin closed for another year even if we had to do it from inside our own crypt.

Yet that's just the game. The action before the game…Angel firing a ball to Kevin just because Kevin asked — and the ball being from Shea…I know it won't show up in the boxscore.

But it really should.

Mets Weekly begins a three-part countdown of the Top 10 individual statistical seasons in teams history in the episode that debuts today at 10:30 AM on SNY and will be repeated at odd intervals. Look for me affirming the greatness of the players and seasons involved.