Before Tuesday’s demi-classic took flight, I was slightly amused to read of the significant impact one of the Mets’ off-season acquisitions was having on the team. No, not Mr. Perfect, Francisco Rodriguez, but erstwhile afterthought Alex Cora. Yessir, Ben Shpigel wrote in the Times, Alex Cora has been quite the addition and a heckuva teammate. He’s exactly what the Mets were missing, as evidenced by his determination to play in the face of the torn ligaments plaguing his right thumb:

Cora’s thumb has become a symbol for a team that, at various times, has been criticized for a lack of gumption. General Manager Omar Minaya said he signed Cora as much for his swagger and baseball acumen as for his middle-infield talents, and Cora’s toughness will be tested in the difficult week ahead […] manager Jerry Manuel said he would need Cora’s patience, solid defense and cerebral approach every day.

I’m all for off-day happy horsespit articles like this in the course of a season. In their way, they’re as essential to the rhythms of baseball as peanuts and Cracker Jack. The coverage from our most recent off-day was not necessarily unmerited either. Alex Cora’s aching thumb hasn’t stopped him from displaying Big Nut Bars, à la the Citi Field scoreboard ad for Planters, and if the Mets are really rallying around his ligaments, swell. Furthermore, I don’t doubt for one second that the ex-Red Sock is as important as Shpigel and everybody around the team says. We saw it again Tuesday night when he singled home the fifth run, ensuring Santana’s double wouldn’t go to waste, and we watched him hang tough against Jimmy Rollins’ hard slide (the kind Marlon Anderson was once called out for, but that’s another Mets-Phillies gripe from another, darker time). Gary Cohen mentions Cora’s contributions every chance he gets and Ron Darling seconds that emotion. He is surely one of those players easy to overlook when the season begins and impossible to not notice as he makes himself indispensable through his on- and off-field presence.

The slightly amusing — maybe bemusing — part is over the last two decades I’ve read a variation of Shpigel’s story every couple of years. It inevitably features some veteran coming to the club and infusing the Mets with not just performance but professionalism, not just hits but heart and head. And leadership. Always with the leadership. The thread that has run through all of these reports — from John Franco in 1990 and Rick Cerone in 1991 to Robin Ventura in 1999 and Todd Zeile in 2000 to Mike Cameron in 2004 to Julio Franco in 2006 to Alex Cora right now — is the Mets really needed the veteran leadership these fellows (and others, though these are the guys who stick out in the mind’s eye) provided because as previously constituted, the Mets so sorely lacked it.

What’s up with that? Why are the Mets always so desperate for some dude to come in from somewhere else and set them straight, teach them the facts of life and light a fire under them?

This trend transcends any given managerial administration, because it was going on late in Davey Johnson’s term and it’s going on today. Mind you, this isn’t just “useful player plugged in, shows grit” or whatever other teams’ beat writers write about on off-days. This is always about the Mets missing something not necessarily related to ability. Whatever the talent level on a given Mets roster, the collective is almost always aching for somebody to take charge. The incumbent players are inevitably portrayed as frightened turtles who can’t find their way out of their shells or down the first base line until a man like Cora who’s seen it all — on some team that Knows How To Win far better than the Mets do (“excuses were not tolerated in Boston,” Shpigel writes, implying alibis are all the rage in Flushing) — comes along. Some of the Veteran Leaders stay longer than others, some put up better numbers than others, some impact the won-lost totals more tangibly than others, but the one thing they’ve all had in common is none of them changes the Mets culture for more than an instant. That’s why the same story keeps getting written.

If you’ve watched the Mets these past two decades, it would be tough to dispute this recurring, almost constant portrayal. Every franchise is going to have good streaks and bad streaks. The Mets making the playoffs only thrice in the past nineteen complete seasons isn’t really the indictment here. It’s not even the way they’ve managed to miss them when coming so close on several occasions. It’s just the way the Mets — whoever the Mets are in a given year — go about their business and the way so many of them seem to sag. It’s no wonder they so easily fall under the sway of This Year’s Leader, whoever he is in a given year.

How is it the Mets, dating back to the dissolution of their last championship edition, have been regularly constructed and reconstructed without enough heart, pulse, cojones or whatever it is so that it requires emergency injections from elsewhere? Why do the existing Mets always have to take their cue from someone who just got here? How come we never hear about a player who comes in and picks up on the Met way of doing things in a positive sense? Is there a Met way of doing things that doesn’t involve moping, assuming, dawdling and a paucity of fundamental execution?

Shouldn’t there be?

Taking not a blessed thing away from Alex Cora’s baseball-courageous response to what has afflicted him and his team in 2009, how is it that Alex Cora of all Mets has emerged as the embodiment of swagger, acumen and cerebral approach? I’ve been hearing and reading these types of qualities applied to newcomers for nearly twenty years. I never seem to read it or hear it about those who work their way up the Met ladder or those who become Met mainstays. When was the last time somebody came to the Mets and said, particularly of an entrenched position player, “I really learned something from [blank] — he really knows how to play the game and took me under his wing and I’m better off for it”?

It never happens. Never. There is often admiration for the talent and production and work ethic of a Wright or a Beltran or a Reyes or a Piazza or, going back a ways, a HoJo. But where’s whatever it is the Mets have to keep attempting to import from the outside? Why isn’t it cultivated within?

Inevitably, as the Cerones, Venturas and Camerons depart, the default tone reverts to quiet. When things are going well, it’s presented to us as quiet professionalism. It’s Delgado or Gl@v!ne or Leiter (or John Franco, whose fiery persona burned off by the time he was elected captain in 2001, which was more an honorary degree than indicative of anything useful) and it’s fine when the Mets are winning. But when they aren’t, it represents a crisis of confidence from which nobody dares to speaks up. No wonder, hence, there’s always a void for an Alex Cora to fill.

Maybe I’m just taking an off-day article for more than it’s worth, but I don’t think so. If I hadn’t read it so often over such a long stretch of time, I’d take at face value that a utility guy with some experience has been pressed into service, has played with pain and is proving valuable in different ways. Instead, I take it as a sign that things are never quite right with the Mets. If they were, would the season really hinge on Alex Cora’s thumb?

***

Gotta love our good friend Mark at Mets Walkoffs. He devotes the fourth anniversary of his sublime Minutiae-fueled blog to his favorite score…or at least the most Metsian he could think of. That score is 6-5, made famous by Bill Buckner, Lenny Dykstra, Paul Lo Duca and many others since 1962. Then the Mets go out and win 6-5. The only thing that would have made it as perfect as Frankie Rodriguez would be if yesterday’s date had been 6/5. Here’s sending fistbumps Mark’s way for four years of Mets Walkoffs and hopefully many more Mets walkoff wins to come.

***

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.

After the Wagnerian (as in Richard, not Billy) storms that rolled through here overnight and this morning, I thought we'd be lucky just to get a game in. I didn't count on one so thoroughly entertaining.

You want home runs? Done. Wright. Beltran. Howard. Ibanez. Rollins. Church. Utley. And a shot by Tatis (of course) that would have been out if the Great Wall of Flushing weren't quite so lofty. (Tatis seems to get victimized inordinately by Citi Field, and he's learned — he hauled ass out of the batter's box to ensure he could get to second.) Church's drive went in the apple housing, which doesn't count extra but feels like it should. I wonder whose job it is to retrieve those. It'd be kind of cool if they just left them there.

Drama? 3-0 Mets turned into 4-3 Phils in a potentially deflating hurry, thanks to Ryan Howard and Raul Ibanez exploring distant Citi Field nooks and crannies. But Tatis immediately dragged the Mets right back into it with his laser-beam double, followed by various misadventures put right by Santana and Alex Cora.

Santana? We got a look at his greatness (maybe we should just call him JHN) from a rather different angle. After a bravura show against the first six hitters he was very hittable — but if he didn't exactly pitch flawlessly, he did everything else that way. I know this is pretty far from quantifiable, but it's like his will has its own gravitational pull — he is not going to lose, and by God you are going to do your part, whether it's zeroing in on a 2-1 pitch or hitting the cutoff man or handing him a towel or offering particularly timely Yays and Attaboys on your couch in Brooklyn. The one thing Johan hasn't done since becoming a Met is hit — he arrived as a lifetime .258 hitter but hasn't ever looked particularly good with the bat for us. So of course tonight he goes into an 0-2 hole trying to bunt, then tries the butcher boy and yanks a double down the right-field line. Going in (hard) to second base his eyes were fixed plateward — had Church scored? (Yes.) Could Santos score from first? (No.) And then he short-circuited a Phillie rally with a calf-height stab of a Shane Victorino tracer up the middle, turning first-and-third and one out into the bottom of the seventh. Johan with all his pitching weapons is an awe-inspiring spectacle, but somehow Johan barreling through on sheer competitiveness is even more impressive.

Supporting Cast? They did their part, from Pedro Feliciano's efficient throttling of the Phillies to Church's resurgence to Gary Sheffield doing a pretty fair job in the field and on the basepaths on one and a half 40-year-old legs to Cora's gutsy play at short on nine fingers. They better — see Santana above.

Sideshows? Lance Barksdale botched a call pretty thoroughly at home — Tatis was clearly safe, with the ball rattling around up Carlos Ruiz's wrist as Fernando slid underneath him, but Barksdale was out of position and couldn't see that. The Times reported Johan's double was against Jerry Manuel's orders, which is interesting. Johan squawked about coming out of the game, which was also interesting. Who plays, Church or Fernando Martinez? Whither Daniel Murphy? All interesting.

Bad Feeling? Jimmy Rollins shushed the crowd after his bolt into the left-field stands brought the Phillies all the way back. From the variety and exuberance of his postgame pointing (against Greg Dobbs — take that, motherfucker), Frankie Rodriguez's God is indeed a mighty God. SNY caught Shane Victorino staring at Frankie with a distinct lack of brotherly feeling. Good. A little summer hatred is the stuff of baseball history.

Yet for all the potential ill will, the lasting image for me of this game might be Rollins taking out Cora at second base on Matt Stairs's little bouncer with one out in the ninth, dropping Cora on his bad thumb and wrecking his throw to first to give his team another out. A pitiless play, but one that violated neither written nor unwritten rules. Rollins didn't appear to offer any kind of apology and Cora didn't appear to expect one.

Which is as it should be: Pennant race ahead, between one flawed World Champion and one battered nemesis. It's off to a pretty fair start.

Be nice to yourself by picking up 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.

It's 40 years since 1969. That's 40 years since the Mets beat the Orioles in the World Series, 40 years since hundreds of thousands tore themselves away from the Miracle in the making to beat a path to Woodstock for three days of peace and music.

Hence, you are all invited to METSTOCK, Thursday night, June 18 at 7:00 PM. While the Mets give the Orioles yet another rematch in Baltimore (will they ever learn?), we'll be hosting approximately three hours filled with pizza, baseball and three of the Metsiest books ever written.

The best part is you don't have to schlep all the way up to Yasgur's farm or, for that matter, down to Camden Yards. We're bringing the whole thing to the island where the Mets were born, beautiful Manhattan, specifically Two Boots Tavern on the Lower East Side.

Here's the deal: Skyhorse Publishing is presenting an evening of Mets reading, Mets talking and Mets signing — along with the Mets themselves, beamed up from Baltimore. We'll be eating baseball, drinking baseball, schmoozing baseball…plus pizza and beer will be available from an establishment noted for both. And of course we'll be watching baseball.

At the center of the action will be the Mets-Orioles game, but if you can stand to have the sound turned down for a spell, you'll be treated to live readings from the recently re-released classic tale of 1969 A Magic Summer by Stanley Cohen; the encyclopedic yet relentlessly wry Mets By The Numbers by co-author and MBTN site creator Jon Springer; and Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets by yours truly.

Why Two Boots? The name has nothing to do with Daniel Murphy's defensive stats for any given game in left. You'll step inside and you'll understand immediately why this is the place when you take a gander at the huge Hubie Brooks poster on the wall. The tavern is decorated in early Payson and the pizza's suitably Amazin'. If you're reading this right now, chances are you'll feel quite at home.

We the writers go on at 7 and our official event runs 'til 9. Since the Mets game will be in an American League ballpark, it will presumably be in the fifth inning by then, so all are welcome to stick around and watch the Birds whimper back to their nest. And I think I speak for Stanley and Jon when I say nobody will be offended if somebody gets a little distracted by David, Carlos or any Met rediscovering his power stroke in the friendly OP@CY confines.

Skyhorse will have each of our books for sale if you don't have them already. We look forward to sharing our work with you, to meeting you and to cheering on the Mets with you. We really hope you can make it to METSTOCK, an event so cosmic it took 40 years to convene.

Peace…and Let's Go Mets.

Two Boots Tavern is at 384 Grand St., between Norfolk and Suffolk. You can take the F to Delancey; the J, M or Z to Essex; or the B or D to Grand. Phone: 212/228-8685.

Hernandez…Schneider…Church…obviously the way to ensure putting away the Washington Nationals is to play Washington Nationals against the Washington Nationals. The Nats have never been particularly good since they've existed, but when you get ahold of a few of 'em and deploy them strategically against their former employers, watch out.

Our men in Washington showed up their men in Washington. Five in the first, led (as much as anything) by Ryan Church's double — Ryan always seems to start or return from injury strong — and Brian Schneider's sac fly, and then Liván Hernandez locked it down for seven solid. Conversely, their ex-Met Anderson Hernandez fielded but didn't hit, just like old times. There have been moments this season when our infield has been depleted (which has been most of the time) that I've thought it was a shame we traded Anderson for Luis Ayala last summer, but that's stone revisionism. I didn't give a whit about Anderson Hernandez by 2008, no matter how good he looked with the glove in 2005 and 2006, no matter much he resembles South Park's Kyle when each of them takes his hat off. Every time Kyle…I mean Anderson grounded out (which was frequently; he went 0-for-12 this weekend), he'd remove his helmet in disgust and that hair of his would go off in all directions, Broflovski-style.

As do the Mets sometimes, come to think of it. Sunday's direction, however, was straight up. The Mets soared and stayed aloft, a position we can only hope they maintain as we brace for the team that comes to Citi Field next. I mean the Phillies, but I suppose that could refer to the Mets as well, seeing as how we never quite know what we're going to get from our own.

But we love them anyway.

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.

That wasn't a baseball game in Washington Saturday night between 7 and 9. That was a disco nap. That was what you do when you have big plans later in the evening. I hope the Mets were feeling refreshed for whatever Georgetown cocktail party or embassy reception they were saving their strength for.

The Mets did not lobby vigorously for a win in our nation's capital. They didn't do anything vigorously except sleepwalk, and that they did with their customary élan, particularly when two of them passed each other in the night on the basepaths. I'd like to think that little mishap was just a bad dream, but it was Met reality per usual. When you think back over the first third of this season and the way Mets have regularly fallen down in the outfield, stepped gingerly around third base and not slid into home, the only surprising part of Luis Castillo going this-a-way and Emil Brown going that-a-way in their “morning, Sam…morning Ralph” homage is that something like it hadn't happened sooner…and perhaps that Daniel Murphy wasn't involved.

Emil Brown just took a bus out of town; I'm not particularly sorry he won't stick around. I must not be a very observant baseball fan, having completely missed this guy's entire major league career — I apparently saw Takashi Kashiwada hit him with a pitch in 1997 — but what have I missed exactly? How did it come to a point where the Mets were starting Emil Brown in right and batting him second? More to the point, what was Emil Brown doing here? No offense to a man with 742 more big-league at-bats than I'll ever have, but where is the depth in this organization? Injuries are a bummer, no doubt, and they're a reasonable alibi to a reasonable extent. What's distressing here, however, is not that a journeyman works his way into the lineup for a night. It's that Emil Brown and the other Quadruple-A non-stars the Mets keep parading into a ballpark near you indicate what a Potemkin village the Mets are when it comes to game-ready personnel.

When Carlos Beltran lashed out at his team's miserable effort in Pittsburgh (confined to his hotel room with the stomach flu, he saw how awful they can be to watch on television — welcome to our world, Carlos), it was of course a most refreshing reaction to hear from a Met, a breed not noted for its mirror-facing candor. Yet I might ask Beltran to present compelling evidence for his assertion that the Mets as presently comprised are prohibitively better than the Pirates or anybody they plan to play in the near future. He and David and Johan and Frankie are what separate the Mets at the moment from the riffraff and hoi polloi of the National League. Behind them are a few fellows (Parnell, Feliciano, Santos) who have generally exceeded expectations, a few others who have done a decent job more than they haven't (like John Maine when not flu-bugged or dead-armed) and otherwise a bunch of question marks and ellipses, none of which complete sentences comfortably.

What to do? I don't know…

Thanks to Mets MVP Brad Lidge and a recent schedule as soft as my cat Hozzie's fur, the Mets maintain the veneer of being in the thick of things. They're three games out of first and one behind St. Louis for the Wild Card. There are two-thirds of the season remaining, which is never bad news unless — their sudden powerhouse ways notwithstanding — you're the Nationals. I don't think anyone would dispute that with the missing Mets making their absences felt so heavily now we'll need reinforcements to prevent the next four months from devolving into a bleak and Putzless future. I wonder where the hell they'll come from. I turn on the 'FAN and hear names like Matt Holliday and Adrian Gonzalez as well as the occasional authentic No. 2 starter. We get some combination thereof, we'll be rolling.

Fantastic. How do we go to there? What on earth do we have to trade that will earn us these fabulous upgrades? Sure you can give up on Fernando Martinez or Jon Niese, the two names that always arise in these scenarios. But do you really want to dismiss what little promising youth you have in-house on the chance that one big bat will conk this somnambulant outfit out of its chronic slumber? Wouldn't it have been easier to have signed Orlando Hudson or Raul Ibañez when all it would have taken was Mets money and roster rejiggering?

This, I believe, is where the whole post-Yadier Molina mindset kicks in again. This is where the team that's built to Win Now gets us in trouble. Forget Yadier and Called Strike Three and all those happy memories. This team was supposed to make up for that in 2007: same basic bunch as '06, Alou in for Floyd, bullpen reassorted, the semi-inevitable absence of Pedro Martinez finessed. They almost did it, too. Even with the lackadaisical meanderings they wandered off on two years ago this week (from which they've never completely found their way back), they were unstoppably en route to the playoffs where they could have Won Then and made the eventual rebuilding process — the one the Mets avoid acknowledging as necessary — less painful. They almost did win with Wagner, Delgado, Lo Duca, El Duque, Gl@v!ne, Alou and the reconstituted Martinez. They very nearly validated Omar Minaya's lunge toward the finish line philosophy.

But they didn't. And here in 2009, we continue to pay for it. We have a team that chronically depended on a bunch of very old players who didn't get it done, and now there's little to rely on in their wake.

You lose Jose Reyes, even a somewhat diminished Jose Reyes, and it's not going to be easy to replace him. You lose Carlos Delgado after anticipating (perhaps overly wishfully) that he was the 38 HR, 115 RBI, 159 GP man of the previous year, and it's not going to be easy to replace him. You lose whatever you thought you were going to get out of Oliver Perez, and it's not going to be easy to replace him. But geez, it shouldn't all be this difficult. There shouldn't be such a paucity of contingency talent here. Maybe for the Pirates or the Nationals, but not for a team that has framed its product as way above average. Slack is not being picked up for the most part. Except at third and in center, not a single position on the field is being manned consistently competently. There are a few good games here, a few big hits there and maybe there'll be more. That's a lot of maybe on which to rely, even from three games out of the division lead and one off the Wild Card pace, even with 108 games to go.

It's one thing to lose, even lose big, to a seemingly much worse club on any given evening. It happens. But the Mets flat-out napped for two hours against the hands-down worst team in baseball Saturday night. The Mets appear dead asleep far more than they seem wide awake. The 2009 Mets who are ostensibly healthy have, whatever the composition of their Disabled List, played some of the most sickly ball I've ever seen a Mets team play. Having witnessed some downright enfeebled Mets teams in my time, that thought sends one scurrying for one's surgical mask so one won't accidentally breathe in whatever's afflicting them.

To borrow from a Keith Hernandez knock on the Nats that seems just as apropos to the Mets this sunny Sunday morning, that'll get your fanbase fired up.

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.

We now live in a world in which we actually find ourselves thinking, “I feel much better now that we have Alex Cora back.”

Welcome to the unexpected summer of the 2009 New York Mets. Stalwarts are now sidelined: No Carlos Delgado and no Jose Reyes. Offseason acquisitions and reacquisitions are now idle: No J.J. Putz and no Oliver Perez. Temps are now past-tenses: See you around, Ramon Martinez. Heck, we have health concerns about guys we didn't concern ourselves with in March: Has any player gone from shocking arrival to unknown quantity to pleasant surprise to relied-upon regular to dreaded absence faster than Gary Sheffield has?

We've got prospects who aren't old enough for a legal beer expected to do a large part in keeping an anxious fan base from hitting the bottle. We've got old men expected to be regulars in the summer heat. We've got Emil Brown, whoever the hell he is. We've got hopeful visions of reuniting with guys we'd figured were forever departed. (Billy Wagner should face live batters by the end of June.) We've got problems and worries and uncertainties and a whole mess of trouble. It's enough to make you dizzy, even if you're not a right fielder left to the tender mercies of the various Dr. Nick Rivieras who apparently make up the Mets' medical staff. (Anybody believe Jose's tendon tear is actually new? Me neither. Oh, and now he'll undergo an “innovative medical procedure” in an effort to come back more quickly. If memory serves, the last time Reyes and innovative medicine were combined, he came back trying to run like a shotgunned gazelle.)

We've got a lot of issues. But happily, we've also got baseball.

No, seriously. Time will tell what close encounters with the Phillies and Yankees and Rays and Cardinals and Brewers and Dodgers will do to the odd collection of Mets and Bisons and waiver-wire pluckees and God knows what else that will take the field until the All-Star Break, when maybe we'll have a better sense of when the shelved might return. I can imagine the Mets hopelessly buried by then. I can also imagine them scuffling along thanks to strong pitching and occasional offense. And now and again I can even imagine them showing surprising pluck and fortitude. Stranger things have happened, after all.

The fortunate thing right now? In a weird way, it's that we're lifers. No sane newly minted fan would hitch their wagon to the rather uncertain New York Mets on June 6, 2009. But we left sanity behind long ago so we don't have to agonize over the big picture, just a nightly procession of little ones. We're here for the duration and we'll see how it turns out. We might even relax a bit, feeling that keeping the Phillies in sight is victory enough.

And of course we do get to play the Nats. (Though a lot of us recently thought the same thing about the Pittsburgh Pirates.) The Mets were a bit uncertain out there tonight, what with David Wright remembering how to hit but forgetting to run the bases and Carlos Beltran lazing himself into an out and Razor Shines doing his best to reduce the number of baserunners. But then there were the Nationals making the Mets look good, whether it was Adam Dunn doing his best Billy Loes impression by losing a ground ball in the lights or Cristian Guzman playing shortstop like a Teamster on a cigarette break. (And once again I'll ask: When does Manny Acta get blamed for veterans playing half-hearted baseball?)

Maybe everybody should have been graded on the curve tonight, considering all involved looked like they were playing in an aquarium. Great pitching, one more burst of hitting than the other guys managed, three baserunners who managed to get past third without being thrown out there or missing that wiliest of bases, and no immediate reports that another Met had something broken, dislocated, torn, strained, ruptured, impacted, concussed or severed. Right now, that's almost a victory in its own right.

Andrew Vazzano at The 'Ropolitans passes along informed Tweets that Jose Reyes has been diagnosed with a tear in his right hamstring tendon. That means Reyes must rest and that he won't be playing for the Mets 'til at least after the All-Star break. In Metsdom, that could mean mid-July or it could mean a season to be named later. “Clearly,” Adam Rubin adds, “Reyes will not return very soon.”

That's not good. That's not good at all. In fact, I'd say we're kind of screwed for the foreseeable future.

“Do they lose every weekday game when I'm listening at work?” a reader asked late in this afternoon's affair. If I am to assume he has listened to every weekday game this year, yeah, just about. Opening Day was a weekday game and it was triumphant (thanks in great part to the awesome relief work provided by Sean Green and J.J. Putz — boy, Opening Day was suddenly a long time ago). There have been five midweek matinees since and each of them has ranged from dismal to abysmal and then some, culminating in the lousy Pirates sweeping us out of town. Just as the Allegheny meets the Monongahela to form the mighty Ohio, the Mets in Pittsburgh represented a confluence of their own: lousy pitching joined with ineffectual hitting to create three injury-riddled losses.

Mets are coming and going these days, few doing anything worthwhile in between. The David seemed reborn in terms of reappearing on the basepaths (he also saved Putz even more embarrassment on a heads-up play after J.J. muffed a catchable grounder in the seventh) and Carlos was no longer sick (what do they call that thing again when a Met hits a baseball over a wall?), but otherwise, not much offense of which to speak, at least not the timely variety. Of course the Mets were behind all day, with Big Pelf suffering a big letdown and the bullpen being only selectively helpful (Green is looking better, as he couldn't look any worse…but oh our aching Putz). Alex Cora has returned, which I can't believe has evolved into as big a deal as it has. The SNY guys were saying he's been a great influence on Fernando Martinez; he does seem to be running everything out, which is terribly thoughtful of the kid.

Is the problem the injuries? On any given evening we're without a genuine starting shortstop, an authentic first baseman and at least one able-bodied outfielder. Depending on how Wright and Beltran are holding up, that doesn't leave much slack. You don't want to hastily or harshly judge a roster that's being held together by the baseball equivalent of Rub 'n' Glue, but these are the Pirates. Even if they're athletic (whoosh! goes McCutchen; whoosh! goes Morgan), they're the Pirates. They trade Nate McLouth because it's a Wednesday.

Sure, there are a lot of Bisons on this roster, but it occurred to me as I watched Emil Brown make his long-unanticipated Met debut that we always hang in a Buffalo stance. That is to say the Mets are chronically shuttling in AAA players, wherever they keep them stored in any given season.

Emil Brown became the 863rd Met in team history when he grounded out to end the fifth. Just for fun, or my idea of it, I checked the lifetime roster I keep, the one that tracks every Met's first and last game ever. Met No. 764 was June '05 journeyman Brian Daubach, just under four years ago. I knew it felt like we go through new Mets like car companies go through government bailouts, but a hundred Mets in just under four years? Isn't that a lot?

Not for this organization for the past dozen or so years. Our previous hundred new Mets — Matt Lawton through Danny Graves — were compiled in slightly less time, from July 2001 to June 2005. And the hundred Mets who debuted directly before Lawton, the group that spanned Steve Bieser to Gary Bennett, bowed between April '97 and July '01; a slightly less manic pace, but indicative of a pretty disposable player supply nonetheless.

Before the Valentinian Epoch took hold, Mets didn't quite traffic players as quickly. D.J. Dozier to Barry Manuel (464 to 563 in your program) took not quite five years, though the player strike of '94-'95 may account for a bit of the slowing. The hundred before them — Kevin Mitchell through Rodney McCray — represented a veritable ice age of more than seven seasons.

Mets By The Hundreds is clearly a game that has picked up speed since the late '90s. Why is that? I don't know (four different GMs, four different field managers would indicate it's more systemic than personal…or maybe our guys just get hurt a lot), but it's become apparent that when you bring in player after player, not that many are going to be great players. You wind up with the Quadruple-A guys. You wind up with Emil Brown, Wilson Valdez, Casey Fossum, Ramon Martinez, Ricardo Rincon, Andy Phillips, Trot Nixon, Chris Aguila, Robinson Cancel…and that's just a sampling of who's been brought in during the last calendar year from a team that very nearly made the playoffs in the middle of all that and isn't desperately far from first place at the moment.

On the other hand, such roster shuffling, whether necessitated by contingency or philosophy, eventually takes its toll. The Mets have been lucky thus far to have pieced together a contender despite having to make enough moves to have played 37 different players in only 52 games. They've been lucky and they've been, more often than not, good. But sometimes your luck runs out and things go bad. Sometimes you trot Nixons and Browns out there so often that before you know it, you're getting swept by the Pirates.

The one book your literary roster needs to call up immediately is 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.

Mets rained out tonight. Makeup will be July 2, 12:35 PM. When we finish this series Thursday afternoon, it will be without Nate McLouth anywhere in sight. Adam Rubin reports he's been traded to Atlanta.

Emil Brown replaces Ramon Martinez in a roster move that is sure to set my partner's heart aflutter. Reyes set back at least a few days in extended spring training, which can't possibly be good news in Met medical lingo, but at least it's not the same as Mike Francesa's forecast of Jose missing the next hundred or so series (apologies for listening to Mike Francesa, even incidentally). And could anything be more depressing in baseball terms than “extended spring training”? We all agree actual Spring Training goes on far too long. Imagine it never ending.

Good luck to Randy Johnson in his quest for No. 300 tonight in Washington. Randy Johnson went 5-0 in the 1995 ALDS and 2001 World Series combined, delaying a dynasty on one end and dismissing it on the other. Plus we kicked his very tall ass whenever it really mattered, so we're square.

Not every winner of 299 or more games who is technically active has an appointment to pitch. Our old buddy whose name I don't feel like spewing has been released by the Braves. Nothing worth gloating over. I admire how pitchers never seem to give up. That's why the whole Clemens farewell tour was so bogus. Not a single pitcher of any stature has ever hung 'em up in advance the way he claimed he was going to in 2003. Even Mike Mussina, who walked away without fanfare, didn't announce it beforehand. He won his 20th for the first time, figured he was good, and he gracefully exited the stage. Every other pitcher who pitched a long time hung in and hung on as long as he could until a matter of health or ability did him in. Kudos for their kind, no matter how badly they may flail toward the end (remember Steve Carlton suddenly talking to reporters?). It's their life and livelihood. It must be difficult to put it away for good. Not that I'm particularly rooting for the former and eternal Brave lefty to make a big comeback. He's six wins shy of Tom Seaver and I'd like him to stay there.

Non-baseball recommendation as long as SNY is likely to ply us with Beer Money: Part II of NBC's behind-the-scenes look at the White House at 9:00. I slipped into Part I it as the Mets were going down to quiet defeat last night and it was way better than the game.