You know how Frankie Rodriguez gets a save and then points skyward? I used to think he was giving thanks to the Heavens for instilling in him the talent and fortitude to close out baseball games for the New York Mets. I now realize he was just saying “hi” to the folks in Row 17 of Promenade.

“Hi” back, Frankie. Thanks for the save.

And thanks to a nice man and great Mets fan named Michael Garry who showed me how the upper half lives Friday night, for I got an unexpected and by no means unfulfilling taste of the last row of Citi Field for the first time. The last shall be first, or something like that, which is fine when the Mets win. When the Mets win, every seat in the house is one of those unfillable Field Level niches — Metropolitan Box! Field Box! Baseline Box! Let's Name More Overpriced Boxes We Can't Sell At Full Price! — for which I'm continually receiving mets.com e-mail come-ons. From high atop Citi Field, way back in Section 537, you can see a lot of empty green way the hell down in the territory you'd infer would be the first to fill in. But that's not how it works in 2009. People don't particularly care that a visit by the A.L. champion Rays has been deemed Gold by the Mets marketing department. They care that they have enough silver in their pockets to get home after a night at Citi Field.

When the invitation from Michael was extended my way via his co-worker and my blood brother Jim Haines to tag along on their office outing, I assumed we'd be seated more or less where we were. When your ballpark suddenly accommodates 41,800 instead of 55,300, group sales isn't quite the Mezzanine field trip it used to be. The intimacy the Mets hail in hyping Citi Field takes on a whole new perspective when it sends you to the last row in left field. For example, you get an intimate view of the out-of-town scoreboard. Not the scores, just the board, because we're staring at its back. Fortunately its back is dotted with hi-def monitors, so you're not exactly at a loss trying to follow a Mets win. Michael wasn't far off when he joked this was a different kind of suite level. Except for the fact that nobody in a maroon jacket was going to stop you from gaining access to Row 17, it did feel oddly exclusive up there.

I won't pretend the sky and a majority of the outfield weren't welcome sights when we moved down a whole bunch of rows for the bottom of the eighth, but this season at Citi Field is about getting to know the place, and getting to know Row 17, spiritual descendant of Shea's Row V, had its small, unanticipated rewards. For example, I found my attention occasionally drifting to the Willie Mays Bridge, of which we had an uncommonly great view. Jim and I marveled at how there was a steady stream of pedestrian traffic each way throughout the game. Where were all these people coming from and going to exactly? One of the innovations I heartily approved when this place opened was the potential for walking around. I partook a couple of times until I realized I was missing the game. I like access to snacks and the opportunity to stretch my legs as necessary, but mostly I like to watch the Mets when I go to a Mets game.

The Mets were going somewhere at least. We got a great view of the monorail route Brian Schneider's homer took to shockingly deep right-center. By dialing up his first dinger, BriSchnei killed my private statistical notation in which every individual Met's home run total could be expressed as Schneider Plus, as in, “That was Gary Sheffield's eighth home run of the year, or Schneider Plus Eight.” Oh well, I imagine I'll find something else to carp about with him. Nothing but hearts and flowers, however, for Fernando Nieve, who has never done anything wrong in a Mets uniform. We had hopes as high as Row 17 for Eric Hillman and Alay Soler and a lot of two-start wonders over the years, but let's ride the Nieve wave as long as we can. If he can generate six splendid innings every time out, I'll hike up to top of the park every time he starts and call that slightly claustrophobic corner of Citi Field Fernando's Hideaway. And we'll point right back at Frankie for a job well done, even if he can't possibly see us behind that scoreboard.

What you won't find in any boxscore or seating chart is the revelation that the longstanding dark night of Jim, me and Mets games has reached an end. Ten consecutive night games we'd attended dating back to 2005 dealt us ten consecutive losses, darkening our mutual mood to a stark jet black. A sample of what it was like for us leaving Shea Stadium on those occasions:

September 22, 2006: “I find myself growing snippy and impatient after schlepping to Shea for another subpar game.”

May 15, 2007: “It was more annoying than entertaining.”

September 28, 2007: “Jim and I were owed at least one beer for our trouble, so we stopped in a watering hole he knew not far from where he grew up. And after letting loose an ear-steaming monologue probably far more entertaining than anything I am capable of piecing together at the moment, I noticed I had become another cliché: my head was literally on the bar and I was figuratively crying in my beer.”

May 30, 2008: “I know they kind of suck and am learning to accept it. Jim knows they kind of suck yet it still bothers him. It leaves him questioning why he likes baseball, why he watches baseball, why he allows the Mets to disturb his biorhythms, why do they HAVE TO SUCK SO MUCH?”

June 27, 2008: “[S]omehow it came to pass that on the very day our beloved New York Mets crushed the despised New York Yankees in Yankee Stadium and swept, in however delayed a fashion, their entire season's slate of games in The House That Uncouth Built, I concluded the night more anguished than ebullient. Timing is everything.”

September 26, 2008: “Not so deep down, though, I kind of wish the Mets and all their nonsense would just go away.”

Jesus, either we or the Mets are incredibly depressing. I don't know how our mutual and preternaturally optimistic friend Matt from Sunnyside puts up with us.

But our relentless Met fatalism was not a problem last night, not from the back of the house, not on the leisurely amble down the left field ramps, not as Jim as I merrily strolled the path to the Row 17 of parking lots, a.k.a. the Queens Museum (at $18 less than the $18 it costs to park adjacent to the facility so aptly named for a bank, it's totally worth the extra strides). The walk to Jim's car — swell guy to give me a lift, by the way — was an angst-addled march into the dimly lit recesses of the Mets fan's soul on those defeat-tainted occasions of the past few years. One time we walked past the well-lit and surprisingly active USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center and the idea that anybody was enjoying anything athletic sickened me. How dare tennis balls be struck with glee when baseball is making us so goddamn miserable? Last night, it was game, set and match Mets. I was so happy, I could have hopped over the nearest net.

It marked an encouraging change from all those nights when I could have been carried away in one.

Our heartiest congratulations to Friend of FAFIF Roger Kowalski — Kowalski to you — for winning the Mo Maniacs contest and the sweet season tickets it brings. He and Sal the Sign Man (whom I don't know but see on my train sometimes) were chosen as the Mets fans best suited to hyping up the crowd down in the Mo's Zone. Veterans of Sundays in the left field Mezzanine know Kowalski is totally the man for the job. Matt Artus of Always Amazin' shares the details here.

If you missed METSTOCK: 3 Hours of Pizza and Baseball Thursday, an enterprising blogger covered it like it was the newsworthy event it was. Go to Section Five Twenty-Eight and enjoy the observations of Paul V. And if you're wondering what all the fuss is about, 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. Makes a great last-minute Father's Day or Graduation Day present, I hear. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

It's been a while since we treated Brian Schneider like an All-Star. But can you blame us?

Schneider arrived from Washington as either the first or second incredulous “Who?” we offered after hearing the Mets had exiled Lastings Milledge (along with his mouth, rap career and casual schedule) to the Nats for the former Expo and Ryan Church, then chiefly known for his misadventures in religious studies. Installed as the Mets catcher by default, Schneider immediately began bumping his helmet into metaphorical boom mikes: He allowed an alarming number of passed balls and runners scoring in his vicinity and was hurt sufficiently often that we got to shiver in the wan light of the Robinson Cancel-Raul Casanova-Gustavo Molina era. Schneider's final line for 2008 — .257 AVG, 9 HR 38 RBI in 110 games played — all but stands up in its seat and yells “average catcher.” The only thing he does that's demonstrably better than average is throw out runners, and even there a historical-minded fan is mostly left wondering why today's catchers nab so few. When Schneider got hurt again this year, none of us seemed particularly interested in giving him another take. For fans who aren't particularly stat-minded, the anger that greeted Ramon Castro's departure had less to do with whether or not Omir Santos is incredibly lucky — rather, it was that Castro was going instead of Schneider.

Nothing that happened tonight really changes that — Brian Schneider is still a thoroughly average catcher with a doofy Toyota ad that's been shown enough to burn out untold ganglia in what passes for my brain. But he hit a baseball exceptionally hard at exactly the right time, driving a 2-1 Andy Sonnanstine fastball 415 feet or so into right-center. That was the key blow for a Met win over the Tampa Bay Rays, about whom I care about even less than I do the Baltimore Orioles. If not for a cameo by former Met nemesis Pat Burrell, whose new uniform and facial hair make him seem vaguely like Tom Hanks in the latter stages of “Castaway,” who could work up much antipathy about this one? I suppose you could yell at Dan Wheeler for not being useful as a Met five years ago, or hiss at the Rays for foiling Rick Reed's attempt at closing the Clubhouse of Curses in a previous millennium when they were the Devil Rays. I'm not exactly feeling the hate either way.

(Actually, I have reason to be irked at the Rays: Last January in Vegas, I put $20 on the Rays — then a 150-to-1 shot — to win the 2008 World Series. Fucking Phillies.)

No, most of tonight's displeasure seemed to be directed at the very real possibility that another Met lead (built on the thoroughly unlikely one-two punch of Schneider's power and Fernando Nieve's pitching) would unravel: Since being handed J.J. Putz's old gig, Bobby Parnell has spit the bit rather determinedly; Sean Green looked emphatic (in his IT-guy-who-just-pwned-somebody-in-Halo-way) in getting himself out of trouble, but then the trouble was of his own making; Pedro Feliciano needed to make an acrobatic play to retire Carl Crawford; and Frankie Rodriguez didn't look quite right just yet, greeted in the ninth with a long flyout from Dioner Navarro.

But we won, as we somehow have more often than not in this thoroughly weird season. Reyes and Delgado and Maine and Perez and Putz are hurt, the bullpen is iffy, the defense is suspect, and the Mets regularly do something so dunderheaded that you're left staring at the TV or the field with your mouth hanging open. And yet somehow we stay above water and the Phillies continue to stagger, and though our internal standings show us about 12 back and sinking fast, the real-world standings insist that we're just two games out. It doesn't seem possible, and probably it isn't over the long-term. But you never know. Maybe we're living through the best lousy year ever.

Our thanks to everybody who came out to Two Boots for Metstock. For the uninitiated, 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.

I can't decide whether having had a wonderful time in spite of the Mets losing a tough ballgame is a sign of a healthy outlook on life or proof that I've got my priorities all screwed up.

Well, I did have a wonderful time at METSTOCK: 3 Hours of Pizza and Baseball and I'm pretty sure that save for one severely unpleasant detail toward the end on TV, everybody else there did, too. A few things did not go as arranged — one author, one camera crew and one rousing victory cry apiece did not materialize — but mostly it was what I had hoped it would be. It was an evening to revel in our fandom in a setting that couldn't have been more perfect. My thanks to Skyhorse Publishing editor deluxe Mark Weinstein for pulling this off and for filling in ably for Stanley Cohen by reading a lovely passage from A Magic Summer. My thanks to blolleague and old friend Jon Springer for putting those Amazin' numerals together so intriguingly over the past decade at MBTN.net and presenting a literal fistful of them as he read from Mets By The Numbers. My thanks to our hosts at Two Boots Tavern, worth a visit at 384 Grand Street on the Lower East Side even if nobody's reading aloud to you. You'll come for the pizza, you'll stay to both finish your pizza and carefully eyeball every bit of baseball memorabilia that's everywhere you turn.

My ultimate thanks go to all who attended, listened to my spiel and said hi. It was an incredible mix of people I know very well, people I know pretty well, people I know a little and people I'd never met. It says something good to me that all those people would come out at the end of a long and soggy day to celebrate their love of the Mets, listen to a couple of writers talk and root, root, root for the road team. We didn't win, and that's a shame, but as is proven time and again where our affection for the Mets is concerned, you can have the great pizza; you can have the cold beer; you can have the three diagonally positioned 1967 Bill Hepler baseball cards on the wall; you can have tales of Jeff McKnight's revolving identities, of impromptu October ticker tape blanketing a city and of a 14-year-old unknowingly snubbing Lee Mazzilli in a Catskills resort elevator; you can have a room full of true believers who all attempt to lift each other up until they all go down together on a bases-loaded walk and a bases-loaded single in the bottom of the ninth…but you can't have everything.

We couldn't have the win. In promoting this event, it was haughtily suggested the Mets would stick it to the Orioles as they did in 1969, yet on Thursday night, Huff beat haught. Of course that was unplanned and unfortunate, but that ninth inning — you had to be there. Dozens of Mets fans intermingled all doing what they probably would have been doing in the privacy of their living rooms if we weren't promoting togetherness and three Skyhorse books. With our forces combined, it was a sight to see. Such energy. Such focus. Such a shared sense of purpose.

Such a shame it had to turn from “YEAH!” to “NO!” but that's baseball for ya. Great part is we'll all be back somewhere Friday. Maybe in a place like Two Boots (though there is no place quite like Two Boots), maybe at Citi Field, maybe in our living rooms. We'll all remember how disappointing it was to watch Frankie Rodriguez legitimately blow his first save of the year but we'll conveniently forget that that's the price we pay for our inextricable involvement in this lifelong affair we call being a Mets fan. Come 7:10 Friday we'll see a Mets team that has a chance to win a game. That's what we see when we look at the Mets. That's what we see when we look at ourselves.

It doesn't look so bad on us, y'know?

The spirit of METSTOCK lives on 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.

Is it only the presence of the designated hitter that makes games in American League parks so intrinsically boring? Is it the knowledge that the Mets are just passing through? That these games couldn't possibly count even though, after 13 seasons of this, they obviously do?

The Mets are 4-3 in A.L. parks in 2009, though it would be more gentlemanly to describe them as 4-2-1 vis-à-vis Friday night, and we'll surely take a winning road record wherever it's compiled, but boy are these games a contest of endurance when it comes to paying attention. That includes the sublime (when Omir hit the replay home run off Papelbon) to the ridiculous (the aforementioned gum on our shoe from Friday) to the inane, which was Tuesday at beautiful Camden Yards.

OP@CY is my favorite park still in operation and second only to old Comiskey Park all-time. Regular access to Oriole home games was one of the reasons I used to revel in MLB Extra Innings. But you put the Mets there and…yawn. Better to yawn in victory than defeat — by their defensive unpredictability, I glean that O's is obviously derived from castill-O — but still. I've watched the Mets hit every town in Ban Johnson's wildcat circuit since 1997 and I am almost never captivated. I went to Baltimore the first two years of Interleague play and saw them play the Birds three times and, as theoretically awesome as it was to see my favorite team play in my favorite park, the sensation was somehow less than scintillating. And that was when we had guys who could hit home runs out of a bandbox.

I haven't been a kneejerk Interleague basher, at least not in terms of relying on the common complaints you hear this time of year. I get why it exi$t$. I don't automatically dismiss the non-glamour matchups, a.k.a. any that don't involve the Yankees or Red Sox. I'm not going to roll my eyes at some putrid pairing of perennial basement dwellers because you never know when a series between two such teams won't look so bad (Rays vs. Rockies three seasons ago would have been the skunk at the garden party, but now they're the last two Cinderella stories facing off and they've both been sizzling). I've never subscribed to the notion that it's not fair we have to play six games against a well-funded neighbor while whoever we're fighting for a postseason birth inevitably gets a half-dozen shots at the Dregsville Dimwits or Kansas City Royals. We live in New York — we should play the other team from here if we're going to do this at all, and I like the home and home for it gives each fan base a chance to howl at the moon.

But these games, when in the A.L. yard, inevitably trend several degrees south of interesting, no matter the novelty or the occasional throwback appeal of a Fall Classic rematch like that which is in progress. Part of it is the hit & run nature of it all, the unfamiliarity of the opponent, the strangers passing in the night. But mostly, when we're the road team, it's the frigging DH. The frigging DH has been in the A.L. rulebook for 37 seasons now and I still see it as a cheap, transitory gimmick. For 150-some games every year I don't worry about it. For however many times we visit the places where it's allowed to roam free, I hate it. I despise it. I detest it. Somebody hand me a Thesaurus so I can find other things to do to it.

Gary Sheffield just hit a couple of homers at Yankee Stadium III as the DH. If it weren't for naked self-interest, I'd figuratively throw them back. I don't want the Mets to have a DH. I don't want anybody to have a DH. It may save Sheff some wear on his knees, just as it may have kept Piazza's bat in the lineup once upon a time, just as it gave Beltran a break in Boston…but it's wrong. It's not baseball. It's phony. It's a fraud. It's a sham. (Thesaurus, please…) It's a tenth man who doesn't do anything most of the time. Where I'm from, we call that someone who's not playing.

I'm not saying a darn thing you haven't heard before or perhaps thought yourself. That it's been repeated incessantly doesn't mean it's not worth restating when it's in our face. There is no defense for the DH, and I don't mean in the Delgado Shift sense. I don't care if it let Hank Aaron hit 22 extra homers or that it gave Edgar Martinez a Hall of Fame career or made David Ortiz lovable and beneficial to the Greater Good. It's artificial. The National League doesn't play on artificial turf and it doesn't use artificial players — artificially enhanced on occasion, but it's nine men and pinch-hitters and managers making decisions and complete games being actual complete games. It's baseball! Our National Pastime! What they've got in the American League is a longer, noisier, watered down imitation.

But as long as we're indulging them, good to do it more or less the way we did it Tuesday night. Nobody played ball like David Wright, who is presently batting .365, or a point a day to keep the doubters away. It's a bit of a weird .365, with more strikeouts than you usually see and, to date, a paucity of power (which makes him fit in perfectly among the popgun Mets), but it's freaking .365 which, if you're from Long Island, you understand as freaking awesome.

And the .365 was only the second-most impressive thing about David as we went about humoring the American League with our guest appearance Tuesday. Did you see him read the riot act to Mike Pelfrey on the mound during the righty's now-regular middle innings cry for help? That was just the warmup act. Pelf was out of the game already when David commenced to lecture him about the facts of life on the bench in the bottom of the sixth. He went on for several minutes and appeared to rise several decibels as he proceeded. In that episode, David Wright was a stand-in for every single one of us — fans, bloggers, what have you — who has wanted to grab a Met by the scruff of the neck and shake him for not maximizing his potential. That was toughlove David was dealing (seemed to be giving a bit of it to Brian Schneider as well) and it's what I've been dying to see any Met give to another Met these past three seasons. Maybe it happens out of camera view regularly. I'm guessing no. Later Pelf seemed pretty pleased to have been singled out for the older man's attention. David said something about lending guidance to the younger players.

David Wright is 26; Mike Pelfrey is 25. Way to take care of those kids, Dave.

In other positive news, Sean Green and Pedro Feliciano continue their stellar setup work even as Bobby Parnell slumps. Together they retired six consecutive Orioles and haven't been the cause of any discomfort lately. They have worked so well in tandem that I have come to consider them Sedro Greciano. They could be Pean Feen, but I like the first formulation better.

You know what makes a game in an American League park really interesting? Being distracted for the first several innings of it by METSTOCK: 3 Hours of Pizza and Baseball, which is arriving in Manhattan, Thursday, June 18, 7:00 PM. Meet your favorite Skyhorse Mets authors — Stanley Cohen (A Magic Summer), Jon Springer (Mets By The Numbers) and yours truly (Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets) and dig on pizza, beer and shared hatred for the designated hitter rule while we relive the 1969 World Series and wallow in other great Mets moments. Details and directions here.

How's that? You still haven't secured YOUR copy of FAFIF: AIPHOTNYM? Or a copy for a loved one? Don't despair, just get to a Metropolitan Area bookstore or let your fingers do the clicking at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. We wouldn't want your dad and/or grad to go without a copy. Or you! Also, it makes everybody better informed for when they join the discussion at Facebook.

How to keep up with the Mets when I'm away from New York City has been a question all my life. Picking between colleges in Connecticut and Massachusetts, I chose Connecticut because in 1987 that was within radio range of the Mets. Living in Washington, D.C. in the early 1990s, at the very edge of that radio range, I invested in signal amplifiers hawked by quack electronics outfits and spent summer Saturdays in the front seat of my little Honda CRX parked beside the Potomac River, which amplified WFAN's signal sufficiently to get it during the day. Visiting my folks in Maine one summer, I pulled in the FAN's stream every night for a week before realizing we were making toll calls to AOL. Later, I went old school and simply accepted that listening began when the sun went down and the FAN signal rose up out of the hum.

I'm used to this state of affairs, so a while back when Emily and Joshua and I made plans to join friends in Vieques for an extended weekend, I figured I'd be missing two-thirds of Mets-Yankees I. And after Luis Castillo cemented his place in Met infamy by transforming victory into horror, I decided that two days without Mets was exactly what the therapist ordered. Away from the things of Met? Perfect. Take that and a lot of beers and call me on Tuesday.

Vieques, for the uninitiated, is a sparsely settled, gorgeous island off the east coast of Puerto Rico. It's basically jungle hills and beaches plucked out of Corona ads — not exactly the place you'd expect to get a great cellphone signal. But the sprawling guesthouse where we were staying was a hill away from a huge cellphone tower, and so I had five bars of AT&T service, which is about four better than what I get in my apartment in Brooklyn Heights. (Oh, the ironies of the digital age.)

By Saturday evening we had arrived and unpacked and were drinking restorative beers, and despite my post-Castillo vow to give the Mets a bit of space, of course I had to check in on them — and of course I wound up stalking around the pool, Wayne and Howie filling the air as if I were on the Belt Parkway, while Fernando Nieve and Co. proved again the old adage that in baseball carryover is tomorrow's starting pitcher.

Sunday afternoon we were at the beach, and I left the iPhone behind, more out of fear of rain and salt and sand than out of a sense of decent behavior. But we got back at 3:30, and of course I made a beeline for the cellphone and MLB At Bat.

Another one of my many quirks: When I'm turning on the TV late or getting to a Web browser a couple of innings in, I'm interested in the moment in which you see how many runs each team has scored and process these two generally different numbers and their relationship to each other. You react, of course, but it takes a moment to add everything up before you can react. How long is that moment? Which number do you notice first? Does that moment have an emotional arc, or is it too brief? When I called up MLB At Bat around the sixth inning of Sunday's game I gave a kind of strangled cry and rid myself of the iPhone like it had burned me. Yankees 13, Mets 0? Really? (Later, a fellow vacationer who roots for the Yankees and I giggled over having done the same thing that afternoon: Both of us had snuck off for an Internet fix, read the headlines about the unrest in Teheran, and first read about Brian Bruney and Frankie Rodriguez exchanging unpleasantries. What's a potential insurrection in a nuclear-armed theocracy compared to MET AND YANKEE RELIEVERS YAPPING AT EACH OTHER DURING BP???!!!!!)

Tonight once we'd retrieved luggage and secured a cab back from JFK and parried the douchebag cabbie's innocuous question of which route to take (depends how much traffic there is, which we expect you to know), it was time to check in on Mets-Orioles, now a lackluster interleague matchup with a faded strand leading back to ancient glories. (Seriously. Who cares?) Technologically speaking nothing much had changed — the Mets were on the iPhone same as they'd been on Vieques — but it sure felt different. There we were figuring out that Mike Pelfrey hadn't allowed a hit as the eastern reaches of Atlantic Avenue yielded to the more familiar. And soon enough we were back home, sorting through laundry and books read and unread and mail to be similarly catalogued, with the Mets back on the TV, early-evening domestic life rotating around them as they, for a change, took advantage of someone else's gaffes.

Returning from a place you liked and a vacation you needed is always bittersweet — you're happy to get home and there's a certain satisfaction in reassembling the regular world even as you're dreading how easily you'll fall back into the lockstep of the routine you just escaped. And this is an oddly sour season so far, a nasty cocktail of injuries and malaise and questions Mets fans are really tired of asking, with the sometimes-startling chaser of remembering that the team driving us insane is in fact right in the middle of the nascent playoff race despite our certainty that by now they must be 20 games out. But for all that and Luis Castillo too, the Mets were filling the yellow cab and the living room and the New York night, and I found myself very happy that they were there.

Come to METSTOCK: 3 Hours of Pizza and Baseball, this Thursday, June 18, 7:00 PM. Meet the authors of A Magic Summer (Stanley Cohen), Mets By The Numbers (Jon Springer) and Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, talk baseball, watch the Mets beat the Orioles just as they did in '69 with us and have a generally great time. Details here.

Next time you go on vacation, take along 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.

The novice baseball fan might infer that a game lost by 15 runs is far worse than a game lost by one. I doubt there's a Mets fan after this weekend who wouldn't set the neophyte straight.

Sunday's blowout shutout in the wrong direction was, of course, a total embarrassment, but it was a standard whaddayagonnado? total embarrassment. Every team tastes a little of that medicine once, maybe twice a year. When 15-0 scores start being inflicted on you with regularity, then it becomes an issue. When it's novel enough so that your announcers are dipping into their mental archives for the time we lost 26-7 or the time Desi Relaford showed a pretty good fastball, it's less gargantuan of a biggie than it would appear at first glance.

That it happened against the Yankees made it less pleasant (if you were at Yankee Stadium III, you have my sympathies), but the unpleasantness meter has a ways to go before again approaching TILT! so soon after the unspeakable farce of Friday night. Even the Yankees looked bored after the fourth inning. That it happened not with Nelson Figueroa on the mound but with Johan Santana, well, that's certainly cause for concern. Johan swears he's fine. We have no choice but to believe him, just as we have no choice but to believe in him. It's been a little while since Johan was solving global crises in between opposing hitters, but he's Johan. He's entitled to a few less than Santanarrific starts, such as those he's been compiling since San Francisco, and perhaps one that's a total Brett Hinchliffe. If you can't have faith in Johan for the long term, you can't have faith in anything.

That it happened less than 48 hours after Friday night is what really gnaws here, because had Luis Castillo — still a Met, incidentally — caught that popup and (though you never assume anything) Fernando Nieve & Co. had still done their thing successfully Saturday, we could look at a hollow, punchless, gutless 15-0 loss not as an example of the Mets letting down, surrendering and stressing us about how they'll play the rest of this tough month, but as a sour note that ended an otherwise gratifying two-out-of-three trip to the Bronx. And had a couple of hits or breaks gone their way against Philadelphia during the week…word is ifs, buts, candies and nuts make great Flag Day gifts.

The only Met who showed a hint of fight Sunday, you might have heard, was Frankie Rodriguez, who told Looney Skip Bruney to stuff your sorries in a sack, mister after Bruney reportedly tried to apologize to K-Rod for mouthing off about…oh, whatever. It's Mets For Me covers the kerfuffle with its usual Amazin' aplomb.

My rule on this sort of thing is simple: the Met's point of view is the correct one. For example, if it were a Met complaining about Joba Chamberlain's idiotic histrionics, the Met would be correct. Because it is a Yankee whining that an all-time great like Frankie is expressing unbridled joy at helping his teammates win a game, the Met is right to take offense. Frankie Rodriguez didn't pitch in the series finale and he gets my vote for Met of the game.

Not that the Mets who did play provided anybody with anything resembling competition.

MUCH better Flag Day game recalled here, courtesy of the always fun Centerfield Maz.

METSTOCK: 3 Hours of Pizza and Baseball is coming to Manhattan on Thursday, June 18, 7:00 PM. Meet the authors of A Magic Summer, Mets By The Numbers and Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, talk baseball with us, watch the Mets beat the Orioles just as they did in '69 with us and have a generally great time. Details here.

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.