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.

Ya gotta love ballplayers. They put the brutal loss behind them, they say. They show up at the park, to a man they insist they don't mention among themselves the devastating events of the night before, they drown out their bad memories by turning up the clubhouse music and they go get 'em.

Congratulations, Mets. You forgot you lost on Friday, or so you claim, and you won Saturday with no sense of drama other than that provided by the backdrop of having lost horribly Friday. We got a start that would have delighted us had it come from John Maine; because it came from heretofore unknown quantity Fernando Nieve, we can be ecstatic from it. Given the tenor of what enshrouded the Mets from Friday, I think we can catalogue Nieve's 6-2/3 innings as the best, most crucial start we've seen since Johan in Game 161 last September. It was definitely an effort that won't keep us all awake and drinking later tonight.

Yet, at the risk of labeling them liars, I don't believe the Mets had total amnesia about Friday. Nor should they have. They should carry the way that game ended with them into Sunday's game, into Tuesday's game and for the rest of the season. The way they played Saturday indicates to me Friday weighed on them, which is good news. Something can weigh on you without necessarily crushing you.

Take our entrenched second baseman Luis Castillo, who apparently will be a Met clear to the final weekend of 2011 no matter what he does in the field or when he does it. His recent glovework is the most noteworthy aspect of his recent repertoire, but I'm thinking of Luis at the bat for the moment, specifically what he does once he puts the ball in play. I don't think Luis dogs it as a rule. I don't think any of the Mets dogs it as a rule. But every time Castillo hit something Saturday, he consistently busted it out of the box in a way I hadn't seen all year. It paid off in terms of a second base hit late in the game when Robinson Cano took his time on Luis's grounder and Castillo beat the throw to the bag by a half-step.

Was that single manufactured because Luis Castillo woke up Saturday with total amnesia about Friday or because he thought about the previous game a lot and wanted to atone?

The entire team's approach to baseball from first pitch to last seemed much improved, as if the Mets were the kid who was scolded by a parent for naughty behavior and then threatened with TV or computer time being taken away. “No, no, I'll be good! I'll hustle!” And off they went, darting from home to first and appearing interested for nine full innings. Still saw a little too much one-handed magic with the gloves, but Rome wasn't rebuilt in a day.

You wouldn't want your team standing and staring into space thinking “I can't believe he didn't catch it…” while their next game is in progress. You do appreciate that they might know more about the mindset it takes to play professional baseball than you do, including the importance they attach to having a short memory. But I don't want them forgetting Friday, and I don't think they did Saturday. My concern is they don't develop a brand new case of amnesia for Sunday, one in which they collectively decide everything is fine, nothing was ever wrong, let's settle in to our usual relaxed pace.

Remember Friday. Remember Castillo. We the fans will. You the players should, too. Short memories are fine, but selective amnesia can be dangerous.

We the fans will always have long memories, of course. That's our blessing and our curse — mostly our blessing. If we didn't care, we wouldn't care, y'know? Unless you were just introduced to baseball Friday night in the bottom of the ninth inning, there'd be no frame of reference to explain the immense, intense shock that set in when Luis Castillo didn't do what second basemen have been doing since Bid McPhee came up to the Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1882. If you hadn't been a Mets fan long enough to understand what it means to lose to the Yankees anytime but particularly with a one-run lead and 26 outs penciled into the books, you could dismiss Friday night as a novelty and flip over to Bill Maher on HBO.

That's not why we're fans, I don't think. Some who follow baseball seem to pride themselves more on adherence to isolated ideals or leading-indicator statistics than raw emotion and blunt passion. Most of us live somewhere in the middle, but some nights cry mostly for emotion, passion and a long memory. As long as you don't make good on your threats of violence to yourself or Luis Castillo, those are perfectly valid landing spots on those kinds of nights. Some moments are absolutely more immense and intense than can be plotted on a graph. Sometimes you gotta ask not “who's going to play second base let alone replace his on-base percentage if he's released?” but declare, “fuck it, get him out of here, fix this goddamn team.”

There's always the next day to recalibrate. There's always the next day for the Mets fan who's cheered every second baseman since Charlie Neal to wander back into his allegiance after swearing to swear it off. There's always the next day to not completely rue every single Luis Castillo sighting you're going to experience for the next 2½ years but to take a deep breath and say, all right Luis, get on and maybe Cora can move you over.

It may not satisfy a dark night's bloodlust, but next days are relentless, so you've to be prepared for every contingency, including that the Mets won't release the guy you don't really want to look at anymore for what should be considered the worst sin of them all: not not using two hands; not not throwing to the right base; but not beating the Yankees.

We don't root for the Mets to go 6-156, but if the Mets could only win six games out of 162, which six would you choose? Accomplished college football coaches have been shown the university door because they lose the rivalry game once too often. Auburn boosters, for example, have been known to communicate their priorities as such: we don't care what else you do, but beat Alabama. SEC, Big Ten, Pac-10…baseball ain't college football, but boy wouldn't it feel good to see a blue and orange penalty flag thrown for allowing the Yankees to encroach on our sure thing of a win?

However high they fly or low they skulk in the American League standings, the Yankees will always be the Yankees to us in terms of the one team to whom we do not want to lose, ever. We just watched three searing battles with our divisional archrivals and, from a comparative fan standpoint, it was a tea party. I've already forgotten how much I hate the fucking Phillies. They're a warmup act in that respect. We could play the '69 Cubs, the '85 Cardinals, the '99 Braves and the last three years worth of Philadelphians as prelude to a Subway Series and I'd forget everybody from Leo Durocher to Shane Victorino. It may not be the formula for securing a pennant, but for six games per season, who gives a fuck? Beat the Yankees…especially when up by a run with two outs and a pop fly is wafting softly into a mitt.

An encouraging development, at least as gleaned via television, is the Yankee Stadium aura & mystique bit may officially deader than Brian Bruney's sense of discretion. Remember how every time the Mets would go to Yankee Stadium II (1976-2008) and whichever of our players was new would be asked about what a thrill it must be to play on the (approximate) site where so many greats and so much history, blah, blah, blah? And our guys always went along with the script of what a privilege this was. I always thought that put us two runs in the hole before a pitch was fired in anger. But YS II is vacant and YS III is just another retro park that can't sell its best seats.

Yesterday I heard Mike Pelfrey interviewed about how great and exciting it must be to come to Yankee Stadium.

Oh yeah, he said, the clubhouse is really nice.

BAM!

And Nieve, answering questions about how well his mystery date went, was queried as to whether he was even more nervous considering it was the Yankees he'd be facing.

No, he said.

Just no.

DOUBLE BAM!

Pelf, like my wife, is from Wichita, and she suggested Mike was “just being a Kansan” about it (when asked how she liked Star Wars, Stephanie's grandmother responded, “It sure was loud”). But Fernando the Third — good for you. Don't let the media revive the dying “we're in such awe” narrative. You can use “it's important we beat the Yankees because we're the Mets” or just keep that in mind as you head to the mound. But no visits to monuments, nothing about ghosts, ixnay on all that tired “they're just such a great team” logorrhea.

And, it can't be stressed enough no matter what happened in the most recent game played, always use two hands.

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.

Of course I thought of Buckner. As I watched slow-motion replay after slow-motion replay, I thought of Bob Costas' line that the Bill Buckner play, October 25, 1986, is the Zapruder film of American sports. The Luis Castillo dropped pop fly was now the ball through Bill Buckner's legs for the 21st century.

I thought of the Billy Wagner game from three years ago, May 20, 2006, how helpless that felt, how commanding Pedro Martinez was for seven innings — and Duaner Sanchez for an inning beyond that — and how all Wagner had to do was come in and not give up four runs to the Yankees. He gave up four runs. We lost after he left, in eleven.

I thought of Armando Benitez. I could have thought of a dozen Armando Benitez games, but I thought of one of his last appearances in a Mets uniform, a Subway Series Sunday night, walk after walk, destroying a Mets lead and creating the platform for an extra-inning Mets loss at which point everybody in the house had heartburn. Armando saved a lot of wins for the Mets but blew a lot of saves, too. Each blown save felt bigger than any ten he didn't blow. On that occasion, June 22, 2003, Stephanie, sitting up and battling fierce indigestion that got her out of bed, asked, “if he keeps doing this, why do they keep him?”

I thought of Looper, Pittsburgh, July 8, 2005. It wasn't the Yankees. It didn't have to be.

I thought of and sputtered on as part of my post-Castillo pillow-throwing rant (hey, they're throw pillows) to Stephanie about the Jets. The Jets? Why on earth the Jets? Because this was pretty Jetslike. This was January 3, 1987, the Jets with a ten-point lead on the Browns, some four minutes from going to the AFC championship. Then Gastineau roughs Kosar and Cleveland has new life and two overtimes later, it's the Browns who will move on to face the Broncos and it is the Jets who I will never, ever again trust with a lead until 0:00 is on the clock.

They're not the only ones.

I thought of earlier in the evening, being out at a local Italian restaurant for my brother-in-law's birthday, a man thoughtful enough to have reserved me the seat that faced the TV. I watched the Mets take a 6-3 lead on Sheffield's fifth-inning blast and celebrated for about a minute and then turned dark. “Y'know what the problem with my mind here is?” I said to my baseball-oblivious sister. “I can't enjoy the Mets having a lead because now all I can do is worry that the Yankees will come back and before I know it, we'll be losing 7-6.” Which we were shortly after we got home and Jon Switzer became a Met.

And I thought of Francisco Rodriguez who, it was being noted by Gary Cohen as the Yankees celebrated their improbable…no, impossible comeback, had technically blown his first save as a Met. At that instant I didn't ache for myself as a Mets fan and I didn't ache for the Mets. I ached for K-Rod. This CANNOT be a blown save for Francisco Rodriguez! I squealed. How? How? I'm used to saves being blown by Mets closers who were congenitally incapable of closing consistently — Wagner, Benitez, Looper, the grand old man Franco — but that wasn't this. Frankie Rodriguez did his job. If Omar Minaya has done anything exquisitely in his almost five years as general manager of the New York Mets, it was sign this man, this closer, this bastion of perfection who has flourished in a pool of incompetence all season long.

A BS for K-Rod? BS, indeed.

I thought about Luis Castillo, but not out of empathy. I was empathetic toward Luis Castillo in 2008, even as I wished to see him remain sidelined for his and our own good. Luis Castillo was a one-man Mets bullpen last September. You did not want to them in a game and you did not want to see him in a game. That's why we got Damion Easley until he could no longer trudge out to second. That's why we got Argenis Reyes and Ramon Martinez even though one was woefully undercooked and the other was practically done. If Omar Minaya has done anything abominably in his almost five years as general manager of the New York Mets, it was to sign this man. In 2007, Luis Castillo was ineffectual. In 2008, Luis Castillo was a sad sack. In 2009, as he soared to bare adequacy, I could have sworn Luis Castillo was a Comeback Player of the Year candidate.

Now he is no longer barely adequate.

I imagine Luis Castillo comes to work Saturday and greets Ryan Church and Daniel Murphy, among others. I imagine their conversation will be self-satisfying to all involved.

“Guys, you think I'm in trouble?”

“Gee, Luis, I missed third base to cost us a game, but nothing bad happened to me. I got to keep playing.”

“Yeah, Luis, I dropped several fly balls, but nothing bad happened to me. I got to keep playing.”

“That's good, fellas. Because I just committed as egregious sin on the baseball diamond as could be imagined, but I guess I'll get to keep playing, too.”

“Of course you will, Luis. This is the Mets. There are no consequences for failure to execute the easiest and most vital steps that are part and parcel of winning baseball games. Maybe on other teams those miscues are frowned upon, but here only the fans get worked up about them. Our supervisors look the other way.”

“Yes, Luis, it's true. They are either very forgiving or have exceedingly low expectations where results are concerned. In fact I'm assuming that like almost every day here, we won't have to take infield or do anything other than go through the motions for a few hours before we can shower and leave.”

“We still get paid, right? I'm due $15.5 million over the next 2½ years and I have all kinds of uses for my absurdly high salary.”

“Luis, I'm surprised you'd ask these questions. You were of virtually no help to the team last year — most would say you were a detriment — and I'm guessing you didn't miss a single paycheck.”

“That's true, Ryan. I was compensated in a timely and lucrative manner.”

“Then relax. We're very good at that here.”

“I know. But what I did last night — drop a most simple popup that our closer worked so hard to generate for what was supposed to be the last out…and against the one rival who our fans so hate for us to lose to — I thought there might be a penalty.”

“Despite my near-rookie status, I don't think that's a problem, Luis. Maybe you get moved to a new position…”

“No Daniel, unlike you, I don't have even perceived versatility working for me.”

“Then I think you just get paid and everybody acts like nothing ever happened.”

“Cool!”

“Isn't it, though?”

Not cool. Not cool the way most of the Mets play. Not cool that Castillo was fooled by a most guileless ball. Not cool that once he got his footing and was under it, he used exactly one hand — half of his quota — to secure it. Not cool that he did not secure it. Not cool that instead of grabbing the ball and firing it home, he tossed it mindlessly to second base where there was no play. Not cool that as a Mets fan I thought the trail runner on the play would only be at third base. As a Mets fan, after all, I know very well that a player who is on first base when a ball is popped to shallow right/deep second with two outs isn't going to run very hard.

I forgot it was a Yankee running all the way from first base. Of course Mark Teixeira scored. The Yankees do that. The one thing I'll never take away from the Yankees is that somebody somewhere instilled that ethic into them. You run, you run, you run. Teixeira ran on an impossible play and thus scored because somebody teaches him and his teammates that nothing's impossible in baseball.

Not when you're playing the Mets.

The dismalness of this experience was a thousand percent enhanced by the fact that it was the Subway Series, that we wound up losing a game we were about to win to the Yankees, but the Castillo dropped pop fly transcends even the opponent. We've grown up since the early days of Interleague play when making a stand in the face of the pinstriped propaganda apparatus seemed paramount. This wasn't that Friday night, not in 2009. We're supposed to be a big-time contender as a matter of course, whatever city we're playing our road games in on a given weekend. This wasn't about attaining braggin' rights or a Mayor's Trophy. This was about winning a baseball game, something the Mets did not do. You can't win 'em all, you've heard, and that is true. But you can operate in a manner in which attempting to win every single game you play in is your most obvious priority.

The Mets aren't in that business, which is a bad fit considering they're a baseball team.

What business are the Mets in exactly? I ask that quite seriously. If the Mets are in the business of winning baseball games rather than putting on airs to project an impression that they are interested in winning baseball games, then Omar Minaya releases Luis Castillo before today's first pitch. Then, when that is done, Fred Wilpon releases Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel. And if a commission could be convened to find the Mets a new owner, that wouldn't be the worst idea in the world either.

Break up the Mets. For their own good, break up the Mets. Break off a piece of the Mets at any rate. Dismiss the most blatant offender. Dismiss Luis Castillo. Tell some lucky Buffalo Bison or Savannah Sand Gant he is now the second baseman in Flushing. Tell Luis Castillo, however, that he no longer plays for the New York Mets. Tell him and his erstwhile teammates that there have to be some minimal standards for maintaining membership on this team and that not catching a catchable pop fly for the final out is that standard — a standard that could be overlooked this one time if he had made good on his Pee Wee League error and thrown home. But he didn't do that either.

What does it take to not be a Met? Is this enough? Is not making that play enough? He doesn't make that play in the second inning against the Padres, or even the Yankees, we say, well, OK, these things happen. But c'mon, this is crunch time. You don't have to be Wise, the Official Potato Chip of the New York Mets, to understand the concept of crunch time. You, Mr. Veteran Second Baseman with three Gold Gloves gathering dust on your mantel, are paid to catch that ball.

You are paid to not allow a blown save onto Francisco Rodriguez's ledger if Francisco Rodriguez did not blow the save. Frankie will blow a save eventually. He will blow several over the course of his contract, and we will deal with that reality when it occurs. But you, Luis Castillo, committed not just an error, but a sin. You did not support your teammate. I don't mean you didn't issue some worthless stream of quotes after the game. You didn't back him up with your glove. Not in the second inning, but in the ninth inning. We have Frankie Rodriguez so we don't have those Wagner, Benitez, Looper moments. The frustration of watching a solid to spectacular start swirl down the drain is immeasurable. It was unspeakably deflating when Pedro would be no-decisioned because of Looper or Wagner, or Johan came away empty-handed because of Billy the Kid…and never mind their W-L. The team W-L took a hit. Frankie's the barrier to that happening more than rarely between now and 2012.

Yet you, Luis, you conked Frankie over the head with that barrier. He did his job. One out, a single to Jeter, another out, Jeter steals second, 3-1 to Teixeira, an intentional ball four, then Alex Rodriguez, Mr. Clutch. K-Rod popped up A-Rod. That's doin' the job. That's exactly why K-Rod was such an acquisition. Wagner and Looper and Benitez and sleepless nights extending back to John Franco…it was no sleep 'til K-Rod. But he did exactly what he had to do.

You didn't. You did the opposite.

The other night Carlos Beltran misplayed a ball in center field that led to some Phillie runs. It did not occur to me that Carlos Beltran should be released. You don't weigh one misplay against a portfolio bulging with sensational catches and bountiful hitting. Luis Castillo is not Carlos Beltran. Luis Castillo is usually adequate. Once in a while he is adequate-plus. Thursday night he collected three hits and scored three runs and flashed a bit of leather. That was very nice, but it's not enough to counterbalance Friday night. Friday night was Monster Chiller Horror Theatre and our second baseman was Count Luis, sucking the blood from victory. His act must be cancelled.

This is not a call for Jihad against Luis Castillo per se. I've got nothing against him personally. I felt bad he was such a target for boos in 2008 partly out of sympathy and partly out of utility. I don't think booing a Met will help a Met and we tend to need all the help we can get. But it doesn't help the Mets, plural, to continue to foster a roster of zombie players who make some of the most embarrassing, unprofessional and deleterious mistakes a baseball player can make. Everybody who makes them — like Church, like Murphy, like Fernando Martinez — is essentially patted on the back and/or the head and is told that's all right, you get to keep playing for us.

Is that the plan for Luis Castillo? Is he, like everyone else on this team, given a pass for what has bulleted to the top of the Worst Play Ever charts? Are the New York Mets in the business of winning baseball games? Or are they just putting on airs?

While I was thinking about Buckner and Wagner and the Jets blowing it in Cleveland, I watched the postgame show on SNY. Bobby Ojeda, Darryl Strawberry and Chris Carlin at once closed ranks and praised Luis Castillo to the hilt for standing at his locker and speaking to reporters. I feel bad, Castillo said. I thought I had it, Castillo said. I have to catch that ball, Castillo said.

He looked very sad. He's a human being and you can't help but wish a human being who is not in the opposition's uniform not look that sad. But honestly, I don't care that he stood at his locker and admitted culpability. Geez, are our standards for performance that low that blowing it and then saying “I blew it” earns you credit?

Not here it doesn't. Make a vital mistake in building a car so the car breaks down, you shouldn't be on the line any longer. Make a vital mistake with a prescription or a ligament, then mister, you shouldn't be a doctor. Be the Met who can't catch the game-ending popup against the Yankees, you can't be a Met in the next game. You just can't. I'm trying to be reasonable and not hair trigger in recommending this course of action, but sometimes it's reasonable to do what appears drastic.

Next week, when Luis Castillo shouldn't still be a Met but probably will be, the Tampa Bay Rays will come to Citi Field. Every beat guy will write a Scott Kazmir story, even if Scott Kazmir is on the DL. You'll recall the trade of Scott Kazmir for Victor Zambrano raised a firestorm of dismay and disgust among Mets watchers in 2004. It was nothing but bad in most eyes (not mine; I reflexively concluded Kazmir was an overblown Mets pitching prospect in the tradition of every Mets pitching prospect for a decade) but later its narrative got a fresh coat of rationalization. Yeah, Scott Kazmir was a bad trade, but it moved the Mets to act positively. It brought in Minaya who brought in Martinez and Beltran and we all began to live happily ever after.

Could a dropped pop fly, a mindless toss to second and two hustling Yankee baserunners have the same effect in 2009 that Jim Duquette's front office bobble in 2004 had in terms of righting the ship? Could this be, to cross over to football again, the baseball equivalent of the most infamous moment in Giants history, the one from November 19, 1978 when Joe Pisarcik muffed an unnecessary handoff to Larry Csonka? Remember or at least read about that one?

The Giants were about to put away the Eagles. All they had to do was take a knee; fall on the ball. Inexplicably, the order was sent down from the press box not to do what every team did with the clock running down — hand it to Csonka, that's the ticket. Pisarcik handed the ball to Csonka's hip instead. The ball fell to the Meadowlands turf, Herman Edwards picked it up for Philadelphia and romped into the end zone. The score went from 17-12 Giants to 19-17 Eagles in an eyeblink. The subsequent scream, when prorated to 2009 Mets levels, may have been the harshest I let out until 8-7 Mets became 9-8 Yankees on June 12, 2009.

The Giants, who hadn't made the playoffs since 1963, were on the fringe of the NFC Wild Card race until that football slipped free. When what happened happened, their competitive aspirations died yet again. What followed was a firestorm that made the Kazmir controversy look like Cap Day. Bob Gibson, the Giants offensive coordinator who was pressured to call the handoff from director of football operations Andy Robustelli, was let go the next day. Fans — which is to say people who had been with the team for generations — burned their season tickets in the Giants Stadium parking lot. Most memorably, a plane was hired to carry a banner: 15 YEARS OF LOUSY FOOTBALL — WE'VE HAD ENOUGH.

Enough was enough. Robustelli, a great old Giant from their last glory epoch, was fired. Head coach John McVay was fired. NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle stepped in and facilitated the hiring of GM George Young. Young hired head coach Ray Perkins. They drafted Phil Simms (who replaced Pisarcik early in the 1979 season). Perkins' defensive coordinator was Bill Parcells. I realize this is a digression about football from thirty years ago, and more Mets fans are Jets fans than Giants fans, but I'm guessing you can see the point: from utter disaster came deliverance. Parcells would succeed Perkins. Young would steer the organization to a series of successful drafts, including that of Lawrence Taylor. There would be growing pains, but there was a powerhouse rising in the swamp. Eight years after Pisarcik couldn't hand the ball to Csonka, Simms brought a Super Bowl trophy home to East Rutherford.

The Giants were far more of a mess in 1978 than the Mets are presently, but the Mets do not appear to be heading in a super direction for the long term. The Minaya era has peaked. Jerry Manuel has peaked. Luis Castillo has peaked. In the time it took Alex Rodriguez's pop fly to peak, descend and bounce away — 15 seconds of lousy baseball at most — it became crystal clear to me that this is a Pisarcik moment.

This is a team that needs to start being saved from itself at once. This is an organization that needs a modern-day Gil Hodges to march out to second base and tell Luis Castillo that his leg isn't quite right, you're leaving the game. Except Luis needs to leave the clubhouse and keep walking. Don't cry for him, Lou Castillo — he'll still get paid his $15.5 million whether he's here drifting uncomfortably under pop flies until he's not catching them with two hands or not. We're getting Sheffield for almost free, so look at eating Castillo's contract as good financial karma.

In late April, I pondered the future of this team and wondered if it was being well-served by its core. I now realize my concerns were misplaced. The Mets' core is not Beltran, Wright and Reyes. The Mets' core is complacency, ineptitude and unaccountability. That trio is locked in here unless something is done to remove them. If Wellington and Tim Mara could be made to understand they weren't doing themselves any favors by keeping those who had failed them around, Fred and Jeff Wilpon can, too.

Omar Minaya can no longer be graded for what he did between December 2004 and January 2006 when his deals yielded Pedro, the Carloses, Wagner, Lo Duca, Sanchez, Nady and Maine. It is 2009. He brought in Frankie Rodriguez. That's one big check mark in his favor. He also constructed a roster and a depth chart behind it that was ill-equipped to handle adversity and injury. That's a huge minus. He has run an organization where slothfulness is nurtured and tolerated. That's an outsized minus. He has created a team of four or five stars and as many as seventeen or eighteen journeymen. Mark that a minus, too. Omar Minaya isn't helping the Mets win baseball games.

Jerry Manuel? Isn't Jerry Manuel responsible for the way his team plays? For not touching third and not catching flies and not running to first and not sliding home and not knowing enough to use two hands or to throw to the right base? Why don't they take infield every day? Why don't they make it around the bases when they're on the bases? What was Jon Switzer doing in there against Hideki Matsui besides a Mel Rojas impersonation? Jerry Manuel isn't helping the Mets win baseball games.

Luis Castillo? Until Friday night, not the Mets' biggest problem. But he's bearing the brunt now. Luis Castillo did not help the Mets win a very big ballgame. In fact, he lost it for them not because he isn't good enough but because he didn't play well enough. There's a difference.

If you're not helping us win baseball games, you're hurting us. If you're hurting us, you shouldn't be here. I don't know why anyone would run a baseball team any other way.

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.

Something looked wrong with that play from the first tentative step Luis Castillo took back and to his left. Something was awry with his footwork, with the way he was staring into the night sky, with the set of his shoulders … I don't know, but something looked wrong from the start.

Granted, a properly paranoid fan (which is to say every fan) always holds his or her breath on a game-ending pop-up that stays up there long enough for horrible thoughts to creep into the brain. But 999 out of 1,000 times, those horrible thoughts evaporate when the ball is squeezed, the held breath is released and the game is safe. But … I don't know. Something told me this might just be that 1,000th time, and it was.

Did Castillo lose it in the lights? Did he hear Ryan Church's footsteps? Did he … oh, whatever. It hit him right in the pocket of the fucking glove, the one his other hand was nowhere near. That's whatever.

The rest of a messy but fairly entertaining game now goes right down the memory hole, alas. The Mets were patient (and corporeal) when Joba Chamberlain and his annoying straight-billed hat kept throwing pitches around the plate and into Met bodies. Gary Sheffield blasted a from-the-heels home run that was decidedly satisfying; David Wright came back from what looked like a fishing expedition of a failed at-bat against Mariano Rivera to rifle a ball up the gap and score Carlos Beltran. Shawn Green and Pedro Feliciano offered bullpen hope, even if newcomer Jon Switzer made an instantly persuasive case that he is not the answer to the search for that other lefty in the pen. Livan Hernandez pitched ably enough on a night when you knew the two teams involved were going to trade broadsides for the duration and lost leads were the stuff of concern, not disaster.

No, disaster is hit about 200 feet in the air and a lousy 140 feet from home plate.

Well, I do at least have my hatred back. This week I learned a valuable lesson: Don't confess to anything less than a desire to see every Phillie and every Phillies fan left destitute and living in a refrigerator box on an active railway. The line to batter your correspondent was long: Faith and Fear readers, other blogs' readers, my wife, my co-blogger. Duly noted. Settling in for tonight's game, I knew there would be no such issue. Just the sight of Derek Jeter sticking his hand out behind him at the plate was enough to make me grit my teeth. Ditto for the first glimpse of A-Rod's oversized Mickey Mouse batting gloves, Joe Girardi and his annoying, presumptuous uniform number, and the sound of those awful post-Yankee-homer bells. It wasn't until the seventh inning when my jaw unclenched. (A temporary condition. Thanks, Luis.) Sometimes people who don't know me very well try to plumb the depths of my hatred for the Yankees, and I explain that seeing that the Yankees have won a spring-training game pisses me off, at least for a moment. When we're in a zero-sum affair, every pitch to a Yankee that's a ball is a bruise, every Yankee hit is a wound, every Yankee run is a near-death experience.

And every Yankee victory that comes with two outs in the ninth on a dropped pop-up by a fat, overpaid second baseman you've spent the year trying reluctantly to accept? I'm kind of amazed I can type. Shock is a powerful thing, I suppose.

I haven't seen enough of the new Yankee Stadium to form an impression of it, but it's definitely true — as Gary, Keith and Ron noted — that the place was oddly quiet. The score can't be an explanation, so what gives? In April Citi Field seemed oddly quiet itself, but it hasn't felt that way in a while, now that the weather has warmed and people have stopped touring the ballpark. Curious. I have no idea about the interior because I was too annoyed at Kevin Burkhardt being gosh-and-golly about the Museum of Pinstriped Fascism. (Memo to Kevin: This is a bad place for bad people. You should be a somber, reluctant guide, like you're showing us around an exhibit of war crimes.) Beyond that, the right-field stands gobbled their share of Yankee baseballs, but only Jeter's wouldn't have been out last year.

Just heard Howie Rose's call of the fatal play. Excuse me while I projectile-vomit.

Where do we go from here? I don't know, man. Ruinous loss against the Phillies. Another ruinous loss against the Phillies. A jaw-dropper of a disaster against the Legions of the Vertical Swastika.

Baseball, man. It'll fucking kill you sometimes. And now I'm off to stare at the ceiling and replay that one in my head. I'll do that with this play several thousand times in my lifetime. May as well get started.

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 not discuss FUCKING LUIS CASTILLO AND HIS FUCKING APPARENT LACK OF A FUCKING OPPOSABLE THUMB. 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. NOTE: FACEBOOK IS EASIER TO USE IF YOU HAVE A FUCKING OPPOSABLE THUMB, APPARENTLY UNLIKE LUIS FUCKING CASTILLO.