They wear uniform tops with NEW YORK on the front and their unfamiliar last names on the back. They dress in a major league clubhouse. They test their skills against professionals. They generally don't look like they belong on the same field as the pros, yet there they are throwing and catching and running and hitting as if they do. Their families sometimes tag along and cheer relentlessly for them from mostly empty stands. And when their moment in the sun has passed, at least a couple will tell you they had the time of their lives.

It's all part of the fun now that the Mets are holding Fantasy Camp in September.

MISCH 48, VALDEZ 4, THOLE 30…you might not mistake them for actual players, but honestly, if you squinted a little, they didn't look so bad out there Thursday afternoon.

MISCH 48 took time out from what one assumes is his “real life” job to try his stuff as a starting pitcher. He impressed the coaches not only with his stamina but the way he supported his teammates by not going back into the clubhouse when he was done throwing to live batters.

VALDEZ 4, who came to one of these camps earlier in the year, is really getting the hang of baseball. Bunted his way on, scored a run, and didja see that throw he made to the plate the night before?

And THOLE 30 — great hustle, great attitude, great big smile. Two hits, including a long double! Nobody would have known who he was without the uni, but why should he be any different from his teammates?

Some woman who they said was the mother of THOLE 30 screamed her head off in support of her son. MISCH 48 posed for pictures afterwards. VALDEZ 4 and SULLIVAN 19 and HERNANDEZ 11 and even that guy who didn't get to put on a regulation batting helmet until late in camp all appeared thrilled beyond belief. For one stray afternoon in September, I'm sure they were.

The reality of being a Mets fan toes the rubber in 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.

Oh, I remember games like these, Septembers like these.

The team has a playoff spot in its sights — and a pack of rivals that want the same prize. Your young hurler takes the hill; you know he’s good and can’t wait for the rest of the world to find that out. Your opponent is already beaten on paper, a collection of raw kids and vets playing out the string, with a journeyman on the mound.

The kid falters a little bit early on, and you worry about some awful blowout, some awful evidence that he isn’t ready. But he settles in and puts your worries to rest. Unfortunately, the journeyman isn’t pitching like one — and so on and on you go. It’s tied and it stays tied and you’re fretting, wondering why these palookas can’t just go down to defeat and not wanting to assume they will, because the baseball gods notice hubris like that and punish it. And as it stays tied the fear creeps in — maybe you’re not that good. Maybe that recent losing streak isn’t just a bump in the road, an enhancement of the ultimately joyous drama, or a test of character. Maybe it’s a true measure of what you are.

But then it comes together late. Their bullpen comes apart. The aging bat you brought up for the stretch drive, the one you thought empty of further hits, rifles one up the middle, just over their shortstop’s leap, and you have a lead. Then you’re running wild — the catcher stole a base, wasn’t that wonderful! — and you head for the ninth with a three-run lead. Nothing is assured, but it is three runs, and you just dropped a dead team walking with a hard shot between the eyes. Sure enough, they go down quietly in the ninth and you’ve won, taking another September step toward October.

Yes, I remember games like these and Septembers like these. Unfortunately, that was written from the point of view of the Colorado Rockies. I’m a New York Mets fan. And this September, the New York Mets suck.

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

Tell me if this sounds familiar: Runner on first, ball hit through the infield to center…runner out at second.

I'm sure it does. But just how familiar is it? We're so used to seeing the 2009 Mets pull boners out of their oversized hats and then learning that such missteps are either virtually unprecedented or thought extinct since the days of Chris Cannizzaro that it's surprising to find a Met doing something embarrassing that another Met did not that long ago.

When Angel Pagan cleverly ran from first to first by way of second on Luis Castillo's otherwise well-executed hit-and-run non-single Tuesday night, of course disbelief boiled over in the SNY booth, just as it did on my couch. Yet while Keith Hernandez muttered over and over (interrupting his steady stream of Laugh-In references) some variation of “I've never seen that before,” I sank back and shook my head.

I don't know about you, Keith, but I'd seen it before. I saw it so recently to have blogged about it when it happened.

We take you back not to some archived Philadelphia A's vs. St. Louis Browns tilt or even Casey Stengel's Amazin' uptown incubator. We take you back only as far as we need to go for a precursor to Angel's descent into hellish baserunning.

We go back a scant four years.

Yes, the Mets' style this September is clearly as retro as any episode of Mad Men, but that doesn't mean final Met months devoid of competitive aspirations and competent baseball went out with the Charleston let alone Art Howe. We had one of those months in September 2005 — at least for a few depressing weeks.

I'll always hold a special place in my heart for the 2005 season because it was Year One for Faith and Fear. With Willie Randolph in the saddle and Omar Minaya calling precious few press conferences, it felt like high summer from April through August, certainly when compared to its immediate predecessors. We would write, the Mets would improve, life was pretty good.

But then, the Mets ceased their improvement program and reverted to the form that had been their signature in the seasons immediately preceding '05. Just as they tumbled into August abysses and September swoons of 3-17 in 2002, 4-19 in 2003 and 2-19 in 2004, the Mets took a swan dive into the deep end of 2005. At their nadir, they posted a stretch of 15 losses in 18 games, knocking them from legitimate Wild Card contention into the lonesome basement chill of last place.

It was as if 2005 had all been one cruel tease, with all the talk about “The New Mets” turning hollow. We got Pedro Martinez. We got Carlos Beltran. We got progress-packed first full years from David Wright and Jose Reyes. We got, finally, a healthy Cliff Floyd and the results were enormous. We even got a mini-surge from Mike Piazza in advance of his exit from our midst. We got all that and we still got last place.

Life was unfair.

There was a showdown series at Shea with the Phillies in which the Phillies showed up far more emphatically than the Mets. There was a Saturday night in Miami during which Randolph decided Shingo Takatsu, just recalled from wherever Shingo Takatsu had been vacationing, should face as his first batter Miguel Cabrera. The Mets had been leading 4-2. One ringing double later, they were trailing 5-4. There was then the customary three-game sweep at Turner Field to seal the Mets' fate for 2005. That road trip ended in St. Louis with the first-place Cardinals pecking out whatever entrails the Mets' corpse still maintained.

We were dead, yet we weren't done dying — not until the Washington Nationals came to Shea Stadium, and the play that epitomized the decline and fall of the nascent Metropolitan empire transpired. Let's lean on the AP account of the action from September 13, 2005 for the details:

New York cost itself a chance to rally with some bad bunting and inexplicable baserunning in the seventh.

He was easily forced out at second by Wilson, and Carlos Beltran flied out to end the inning.

So yeah, when this happened on September 1, 2009…

Angel Pagan, who led off with a single, was running on the pitch and didn't see Castillo's one-hopper to [Carlos] Gonzalez. He mistakenly thought Gonzalez caught the ball on the fly, and started sprinting back to first.

Gonzalez threw him out, which denied Castillo a single and rendered the play a fielder's choice.

…I knew I had seen it before, in the nightmare death spiral of September 2005.

One of the comments that trickled in here four Septembers ago was this from a reader who noted, “I've been scoring games for Stats, Inc. for a while now, and that was my first ever 8-4 ground ball forceout. We've all seen the 8-4 force on the shallow pop, but never on a solid grounder.” Indeed, it was unusual then. It feels common now that “never” has become twice.

Dig these two lines from the play-by-play data ESPN posts with its game recaps.

9/13/05 K Matsui grounded into fielder's choice to center, J Offerman out at second.

9/1/09 L Castillo grounded into fielder's choice to center, A Pagan out at second.

I mean, geez. An 8-4 ground ball forceout twice in the span of four years. By the same team. In the same month.

I mean, geez.

Listen, we like Angel Pagan a lot. He's no Jose Offerman, a surly baseball zombie collecting checks here for no discernible reason in 2005 en route to achieving his ultimate infamy in the independent leagues two years hence when, as a Long Island Duck, he attacked the opposing pitcher and catcher with his bat. Strangely, his alibi then — “I lost it for about 10 seconds” — blamed his loss of mind on the vagaries of time, same as he did when misreading Matsui's shoulda-been single to center. “You've got a second to think about it. You don't have all day.”

If he had, would have he brained Majewski, too?

Jerry Manuel didn't excuse as much as explain Pagan's Rocky Mountain blunder, and even then he could only expound on what we all saw:

“He lost sight of the ball, didn't pick up the coaches and I guess his brain locked up on him. We've done that a number of times this season, kind of shoot ourselves in the foot on the bases to some degree.”

Yes, we have, haven't we?

David Wright at least brought Castillo home with a most welcome double and Angel later tripled Cory Sullivan home with a run that didn't matter much in the wake of Mike Pelfrey's own myriad problems. All wasn't lost because Pagan didn't know where he was going between first and second — it was going to be lost anyway.

On that night of shame four years ago, a lot seemed lost. The season had already swirled drainward, but now we were certifiably inept. With ineptitude came mass apathy. I went to Shea the next night and there was practically nobody there. I don't mean they announced 52,000 but it was more like 35,000. I mean they announced 24,000 and it probably wasn't 12,000. The Mets had revived their post-2000 malaise persona. I thought it was behind us. I thought we were The New Mets with our established stars and our emerging talent. Instead we were the same old Mets, the kind of team that can run into an out without really trying. The kind of team that relies on Jose Offerman.

The Mets lost the second game of that dismal National series. Then they lost the third game on a humid afternoon with even fewer people at the park to witness it. It was an outstanding Metaphor for what 2005 had been: We fell behind early, rallied ahead (on a Floyd grand slam), gave back the lead in the ninth as errors by Gerald Williams and Kaz Matsui undermined Braden Looper before Willie Randolph inexplicably let Roberto Hernandez pitch to Vinny Castilla with a runner on third and two out in the tenth, perhaps unaware that .000-hitting Keith Osik was due up next and Frank Robinson had no better option on his bench. The Mets lost 6-5. The Mets had lost 15 of 18. The Mets had sunk four games below .500 after rising eight games above it in August.

I didn't know it, but the 2005 Mets reached bottom that afternoon. They wouldn't get any worse — a lively 12-4 spurt lifted them from the basement and to their first winning record since 2001 — and Shea Stadium was never again the ghost town it so regularly morphed into during those dreadful Septembers of this decade's first half. It was the one time I can recall when they turned themselves around in some meaningful fashion toward a season's end and maybe generated some momentum for better times to come. The Mets raced out to a 10-2 start by mid-April 2006, and looked back neither at the rest of their division nor where they had wallowed in mid-September 2005. The old Mets were dead. The New Mets were en route to becoming champion Mets. The Shea of '06, '07 and '08, no matter the indelible heartbreak it held in store, never again featured anything quite like Jose Offerman running from first to first by way of second, certainly not in the same kind of dreary atmosphere that was pervading the ballpark and the ballclub during that one final bow to utter Met hopelessness.

Shea would fill up and stay filled in its final years. The Mets would move up and stay close to the top if not always at it during those three high-stakes seasons. What we experienced directly beforehand was a dark interlude just ahead of the bright sunburst that we convinced ourselves was going to become an epoch of brilliant success. We fell a little short there somewhere between the dust of 2005 and the dank of 2009, but we did rise there for a while, too. We really did.

Now, however, we endure Offerman moments so often that they have become our literal running gags. We fall down in left, we don't touch third, we line into three outs to end games and, once again, we can't make it from first to second on singles to center.

I've seen it before. Lord, how I don't care to see it again.

Derive the beauty, pain and joy that is our favorite team by reading 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.

We drove down to Long Beach Island on Saturday, with the Mets/Cubs game getting lost between happy escaped-to-vacation road-trip music and offloading a rented SUV’s worth of stuff into the beach apartment. The first eight innings of Sunday’s game were spent on the beach; digital enthusiast that I am, I forgot to bring an old-fashioned analog radio only to realize too late that I didn’t want the iPhone exposed to sand and sun and salt. Monday? Monday was an off-day.

By this morning I was fidgety; and I knew what was wrong. I missed my Mets.

As it turned out — as it has so often turned out in 2009 — watching my Mets play a couple of innings of baseball was an instant cure for having missed them.

Mike Pelfrey was awful, as he has been for large stretches of 2009. It’s seductive to assume that 2010 will be entirely different, that 2009 used up a decade’s worth of buzzard’s luck when it comes to the Mets and injuries. Seductive and far too easy: Before you start daydreaming about 2010, remember that Mike Pelfrey is your presumptive No. 2 starter. Mike Pelfrey, whose career now looks like a logical progression from 2006 through 2009, with the second half of 2008 a statistical outlier that should be discarded.

Yes, Pelfrey was awful and Sean Green was awful too — as noted on SNY, the Mets have somehow managed to allow 19 runs scored on walks or hit batsmen, which is simply unfathomable even in this simply unfathomable season.

But no matter — a lot of other Mets were pretty bad too. The moment that got me hollering was the play in the second: Anderson Hernandez fell down in vague proximity to Todd Helton’s grounder up the middle, Angel Pagan (whose baserunning had turned a successful hit-and-run into a fielder’s choice in the top of the first) threw a one-hopper over David Wright’s glove at third, Pelfrey wasn’t backing up the play, and the ball went in the dugout.

Emily, sensibly enough, wanted to know why, after a ruined season, this was the play that had me hurling obscenities into the Jersey night. I muttered something vague, but I know what it was. It was that once again I was witnessing the kind of ass-headed baseball that you shouldn't expect to see when you sit down to watch major-league baseball — no matter if you’re watching a first-year expansion team or a wrecked team fielding Plan C guys at too many positions. It’s the kind of baseball the Mets have played all year long, and injuries are no alibi for it.

Beyond that? I was happy to see David Wright back, even looking like a Little Leaguer underneath his Great Gazoo helmet. (That thing is not going to be widely adopted. It’s simply ridiculous looking.) I was happy to get a glimpse of Nick Evans, of whom I hope to see a lot more in September. Lance Broadway looked serviceable. Josh Thole looked awfully young, out there in the Rockies’ surreal Bambi outtake of a bullpen, but any Mets prospect looks good right now compared to the broken-down mess we’ve become all too used to.

I was happy to get to watch baseball, until the baseball became unwatchable. And until I was left with this thought: In the home stretch of better years, you care intensely about the outcome of your own team’s games and about the outcome of games involving the team or teams you’re trying to catch. And you wind up playing amateur scout about those teams’ opponents: Which out-of-it squad will nonetheless fight like rabid badgers, giving your opponent fits? And which out-of-it squad will roll over and expose a soft white underbelly by about the third inning, offering your cause no support whatsoever?

The Mets are the latter — they don’t back up plays, they can’t run the bases, they walk in runs about as often as they're given opportunities to do so. Fans of the San Francisco Giants, looking at the scoreboard during their own tilt with the Phillies, saw the Rockies were playing the Mets and thought, Oh shit, the Mets. We’ll get no help there. And they were absolutely right. In this spoiled season, even playing spoiler looks beyond our capabilities.

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

A game-and-a-half out of the Wild Card in a five-way scramble. A magic number of 15 to clinch the National League East. A two-game lead on Philadelphia. One game up with 25 to play.

That's how we entered September these past four seasons, our first four seasons of Faith and Fear. We were in it; we were way ahead of it; we enjoyed an edge; we hung tough. Only once did anything good come of our position, but we didn't know that on September 1, 2005; September 1, 2006; September 1, 2007; or September 1, 2008. We just knew that for the foreseeable future, everything the Mets would do would be crucial.

Today is September 1, 2009, and it's very different in these parts. The Mets are not any of the following:

• A gritty 69-62

• A dominant 82-50

• A secure 74-60

• A solid 76-61

Those records of the past four Firsts of September are history in more ways than one. They are from another era. They are from that time when the Mets mattered dearly. They still matter, at least to the likes of us, but how much they matter is left to personal taste, and I can't imagine there's a Mets fan who holds dear what they've become to get to this moment:

• 59 wins

• 72 losses

• Fourth place in the N.L. East, 17½ games out of first

• Ninth place for the N.L. Wild Card, 13 games from the lead

• A tragic number of 19 until playoff elimination

This is not the September to which we had recently become accustomed. This is the September to which we had become accustomed before. This is the September of minute consequences, limited attention, sparse attendance and strange names. This is, to my well-honed instinct, 1974 all over again, when the Mets who we thought were all about Seaver and Matlack and Staub and so on were suddenly chock full o' Brock Pemberton and Randy Sterling and Ike Hampton.

Welcome to September 2009. Welcome to Rich Puig redux.

And yet, this is also the time of baseball. The Mets will be playing baseball tonight for the first of 31 more occasions in 2009. There's a school of thought that suggests they can't finish their sad maneuvers soon enough. Yet there's a competing theory that insists it will be a shame when they literally stop trying.

Each concept has merit. This has been a most horrendous season as anybody with eyes, ears or any sense will tell you. Entering June, the Mets were seven games above .500 and a half-game from Philadelphia for the Eastern Division lead. Since then they are twenty below and have fallen so far from sight you'd need to rent one of those Arpielle Equipment mini-excavators if you wanted to dig them up. Even before June, however, if you can think back that far, they weren't playing all that capably — but they were winning more than they were losing. When your team is winning and nobody else in your division is winning much more, you can ignore the Wile E. Coyote way they're playing and how they're standing momentarily on air before they realize there is no solid ground beneath them.

Honestly, it was only a matter of time and injuries before it occurred to them they were in for a precipitous drop. And whoosh!…there they went.

Let's face it. This was coming. This was coming from 2007 and 2008. This is, at its heart or lack thereof, the same entity we grumbled at for playing such uninspired baseball for practically endless stretches across the summer of 2007 and the spring 2008. This is the same franchise that produced not one but two stretch drives straight into a ditch. This is the same organization that prided itself on signing fifth-starter candidates under the impression that at least 20% of its games were less important than the other 80%. This is the same enterprise that is run by people who depended greatly upon young pitchers with limited track records, erratic pitchers who have never proven themselves consistent and pitchers recovering from arm problems. This is the same undertaking that allowed four of eight positions to be filled by ever less capable players over a span of four seasons, yet seemed surprised when the players at the other four positions couldn't sustain a disproportionate share of the load required for continued contention.

They were playing horrible fundamental baseball before the injuries crushed them. This was not a good team in April and May. They faced the Nationals a lot, basically. They had holes all over the lineup, all over the field. One Cy Young candidate, one top-flight closer and four erstwhile 159-game constants were supposed to cover for most of the other nineteen spots on the roster. What kind of madness was that? How on Earth did Sports Illustrated pick this team to win a World Series?

I don't know about the fallout from Bernie Madoff. I don't know if instructional league cancellations/transfers to the Dominican or a lone catcher callup when the rosters expand or anything else that appears chintzy is a sign that the Wilpons are truly strapped for operating capital. I don't know about 2010. I'm in no better a state from 2009 than anyone else is, but I cushion my current pessimism with, if nothing else, the knowledge that no team's future looks bright when its present is so relentlessly dim. There was a time this summer when I thought this would all feel better if the losing were just a little less over-the-top, but then I remembered there's no such thing as a good feeling when the Mets are losing, no matter how best-case innocuous one imagines the defeats. There have been plenty of seasons where victories have outnumbered defeats and our mood was gray anyway.

So yeah, what a lousy season and won't it be nice not to have to deal with it 31 games from now? The only season worse than the 2009 Mets season is the season in which the Mets don't play at all.

And that will be here 31 games from now.

For fans of a team with no playoff prospects, the end of September — give or take a few straggler games in early October — means the end of baseball as our everyday cause. The end of baseball as our everyday cause means pretty much the end of everything worth looking forward to for months to come. You're free to live your lives and derive joy/meaning from non-baseball activities; I might even do the same now and then. But we all know it's not the same. Baseball season is where our arrow points when it's not baseball season. Once we get comfortable in it, no matter how uncomfortable the fit of a year like this one, we don't realize what we've got 'til it's gone.

I'm not calling for an extension of the 2009 Mets' campaign. One-hundred sixty-two contests requiring their distinctive brand of participation will be plenty, thank you. But I'm not wishing away the 31 that remain so fast. True, there's no Wild Card possibility as there was on this date in 2005, no postseason lock as there was on this date in 2006 nor the sense of the vital that pervaded our existence on this date in 2007 and 2008. There's only 59-72 and inevitable mathematical dismissal.

But there is Mets baseball. There is the kid coming up from Binghamton to catch. There is the centerfielder going out to Brooklyn to test his knee. There is the third baseman whose head will be protected as best it can when it gets back into a game sooner than we might have thought or consider ideal (medical degree holders that we are). There is the possibility of another once-in-a-lifetime play unfolding before our disbelieving eyes (no matter how grotesque such an episode can be to witness in person). There will be strikeouts for and against. There will be home runs against and maybe for once in a while. There will be satisfactions vague against a backdrop of disappointments vast. There will be several more trips to the ballpark I still don't love but know I will miss when there are no more trips possible. There will be 7:10 and 1:10 and, tonight, there will be 8:40 from Coors Field in Denver, Pelfrey vs. De La Rosa, the Rockies desperately needing to win and the Mets playing out the string.

The Rockies might beat the Mets, but string, no matter how little you've left and no matter how thin it might feel, surely beats staring at a bare spool.

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