That's all.

The country thunder of Raul Ibañez didn't seem all that admirable, did it?

Fucking Raul Ibañez (all fucking Phillies will be, until further notice, referred to in this manner — and none of that cutesy-poo “phucking” spelling either) completely unplugged what had been an electric series Thursday night, one a Mets fan could imagine relocating to October and throwing off sparks under the NLCS banner until a most worthy league champion is crowned.

We Mets fans have great imaginations, don't we?

For 29+ innings dating back to Tuesday, it was real enough. This was 51 hours of outstanding baseball and gripping theater. Then came Ken Takahashi and fucking Ibañez and his fucking laser beam of a home run that bolted right through the Flushing fog causing the curtain to fall and the show to close. Exit the Citi Field crowd, stage left.

Yeah, fucking Ibañez was quite the buzzkill, though to be fair this game didn't seem to crackle like the two before. But so what? We were winning 3-1 for a while. Tim Redding was touchable but not overly penetrable. With his seven innings of walkless, gut-check ball, Redding became the latest “who he?” Met starter to move up the ladder. He would have anyway because of John Maine going on the DL (oh, by the way, John Maine is going on the DL), but he earned the promotion from “disturbing uncertainty” to “one thing we don't have to worry about as much as other things,” not unlike Liván Hernandez's 2009 trajectory.

The Mets' strong points include Liván Hernandez and Tim Redding. What a season.

Redding gave the Mets a real chance to win. He outpitched fucking Jamie Moyer, whose only saving grace is that he was born 43 days before I was, thus making him the only obstacle between me and my mortality. As long as there's a baseball player older than you, you still have a chance to grow up to become a baseball player. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. That said, fucking Jamie Moyer was quite touchable and seemed plenty penetrable, but I looked up from my Cascarino's chicken roll and my Nathan's fries — the food remains awfully good at Citi Field — and noticed penetration wasn't much achieved all night.

Fucking Moyer. And their fucking bullpen. Save for a stray open barn door single to Omir Santos to start the superfluous bottom of the tenth, fucking Clay Condrey, fucking Chad Durbin, fucking Scott Eyre and fucking Ryan Madson gave up not a darn thing to the Mets after fucking Moyer departed. The Mets (rather Luis Castillo by way of Carlos Beltran) did all their scoring by the fifth. Then it was time to tuck the bats in for the evening. Sleep tight, Sluggers!

Takahashi? Maybe he had some awesome stranglehold on lefty hitters, lefty pitcher that he is. That was my guess to my friend David who invited me to share in his interesting left field Promenade Box seats (interesting is code for neat perspective if you don't worry too much about tracking every little fly ball to left or center). I recalled Takahashi made his debut against the fucking Phillies in early May after Oliver Perez — name ring a bell? — was knocked out. Ken acquitted himself decently then, so maybe removing Bobby Parnell before fucking Chase Utley could spank our young man again wasn't a bad move.

I didn't know lefties were actually batting about two-thousand off Takahashi. I was out in left field. What was Jerry Manuel's excuse?

Well, there ya go. The Mets had a chance to sweep the fucking Phillies and instead lose the last two in a row. The fucking Phillies lead the Mets by four games. They're without fucking Brett Myers and fucking Brad Lidge but they just stormed through a gauntlet of a road trip. Maybe the injuries will catch up to them in the same way the Mets' mind-blowing lack of depth began to hit them after they acquitted themselves so wonderfully in San Francisco and Boston (when not sucking the chrome off the proverbial trailer hitch in L.A.).

The fucking Phillies aren't admirable. They're just good. If we start admiring good, then let's drop the artifice and become Dodgers (or Lakers) fans at once. It is the depleted Mets who are admirable for keeping up to this point. Even allowing for the performance du jour of a Sheffield, a Santos, a Castillo — and the heady leadership of Alex Cora — this lineup is Beltran and Wright and hide your eyes from the fright. The whole product is being held aloft by two All-Star hitters, one stellar closer and, at the moment, four generally sound to spectacular starting pitchers. The fifth, Maine, is off to the land of Perez and Putz, Delgado and Reyes and whoever else we've disabled (check closer, and I'll bet you find Pedro Astacio rattling around on the 15-day). Johnny got lit up by the notoriously inept Washington Nationals last Saturday which should have been the tipoff right there that something was very, very wrong. Get well, John. And let us know if you run into Ollie.

Saturday's starter in Maine's place will be…determined at a later date. I listened on the LIRR home as Steve Somers guessed Nelson Figueroa, which directed me to root around my schlep bag in search of expired medications that could dull the pain. Before I could swallow any out-of-code Ibuprofen, Ed Coleman came on to speculate it will probably be Jon Niese (a Saturday morning in 2011: “You know, Richard, Jon Niese never really recovered from being called up to make that start in place of Maine in the Subway Series before he was really ready a couple of years ago. It's a real shame what happened to the kid.”) or maybe Fernando Nieve, a starter only masquerading as a reliever…which would describe Ken Takahashi as well. I don't know who will start for us between Liván and Johan. I do know the Mets should don Red Sox uniforms for the next three days because they seem to work wonders against the Yankees…though it probably helps to fill them with Red Sox.

Lest this resemble the Thursday night fog in its gloom and doom, it wasn't a bad night at Red Brick, not with David one seat over for the first time since we swept the Rockies last July; not with visiting New York expatriate Andee dropping by from Portland, Oregon for the denouement; not with the aforementioned chicken roll; not even with the unwanted conclusion of the all-time Either Log record winning streak of seven games (which was mostly a mélange of triumphs at the hands of the Bucs, Nats and Fish, but ya play who ya play). The Citi Field novelty has, unlike that dense fog, officially burned off for me, and that's fine. I don't want it to be novel. I want it to be where I go to see Mets games (Mets wins ideally). Perhaps it's because I was showing David around on his maiden voyage that I no longer felt remotely like an alien in my ostensible home park (not when there are others who by dint of their personal schedules still do). Listen, there remain things I don't like about this ballpark, things I don't love about this ballpark, things I would change about this ballpark, but 36 seasons at Shea went by and those types of things existed there, too.

Congratulations, Citi Field. In your way, you're becoming Shea Stadium to me.

Three things have helped me permanently accept this ballpark besides the reality that it's not a weekend carnival that will fold up its tents Sunday and realight in Woodhaven next weekend:

1) Familiarity, familiarity, familiarity. It's not the back of my hand, but after fourteen games, it's creeping down my arm.

2) It's where they keep the Mets, and as down on them as I tend to plummet, I still like to join them as often as possible.

3) My coming and going rituals.

My coming ritual is simply stopping by my brick, no matter which way I'm headed. I can go Left Field, Right Field or Rotunda, but I gotta at the every least nod to my brick, maybe tap it with a toe. Last loss before last night? The last time I didn't acknowledge my brick.

My going ritual is exiting through the Rotunda. I don't particularly care if I come in that way, but I just about have to go out that way. Early in the season, I was scuttling out any ol' rathole. I didn't like it, particularly in tandem with trudging down those awful schoolhouse staircases. It was like ending a day at the ballpark with a tedious fire drill. Though they're slower than what I was used to at Shea — nice technological breakthrough 45 years later — I've come to enjoy the stroll down the left field ramps. In the right light, I feel enveloped by those enormous banners of great Mets moments, the ones that face out so people who are not at the Mets game can enjoy scenes of Mets history while people at the Mets games don't have to be bothered by any of that silly team-intensive imagery. While everybody else is spilling right toward the William A. Shea Memorial Parking Lot when we approach the final ramp sequence, I veer left and walk through Field Level, which isn't all that crowded by the time I'm downstairs. That allows me to exit grandly down one of the winding Rotunda staircases. Whatever time I'm taking by not hustling down those soulless back stairs is more than made up for by landing steps from the subway entrance. I find I leave in a much better mood, win or lose, than I did when I was first getting the hang of this place. Heading out the front door assures me I just spent a few hours belonging in that place. It makes me want to come back to see how it's doing, like I have a proprietary interest in its well-being, even as there are things there I don't like, don't love and would change.

I rather enjoyed the temporary ritual in between the coming and going, the one I established in May watching the Mets reel off seven consecutive wins. Perhaps that will be revived in the near future.

Until then, fuck the fucking Phillies. Imaginary NLCS previews are on hold. What we have to do right now is go beat the Yankees. I'd say “fucking Yankees,” but that seems redundant.

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.

You know, I've tried to hate the Phillies. I really have. But I can't quite manage it.

There's the country thunder of Ryan Howard, the guts and intensity of Chase Utley, and Jimmy Rollins' habit of backing up his big talk. Can't hate any of them. There's the goofy surfer charm of Jayson Werth and Cole Hamels, and the strange sight of Raul Ibanez, who somehow has 20 home runs despite looking like he's about 60 years old and hunched over in constant pain. None of them get black marks in my book. There's the stranger-than-fiction story of Chris Coste and the apparently never-ending tale of Jamie Moyer. Great stuff. There are guys who annoy the crap out of you but you know you'd adore if they wore your uniform — a category that includes the likes of Shane Victorino and J.C. Romero. Not so long ago, the Phillies were known as a soft clubhouse full of guys who spent the spring hiding from Larry Bowa and could be counted on to quit in the summer. Now, the Phillies play like the fate of the world's at stake every night, and the clubhouse accused of being soft is our own.

I'm not saying some of the Phillies don't get me worked up — Brett Myers needs no explanation and Greg Dobbs strikes me as a Cody Ross-level douchebag. (Rollins' takeout slide on Alex Cora was clean; Dobbs's tonight was decidedly not.) And I like that the Phillies rub the Mets the wrong way — I wish more opponents made the Mets a bit testy. But watching the Phillies — even getting beaten by the Phillies — just doesn't make me seethe like seeing triumphant Yankees or Braves does.

Maybe it helps that tonight's game was another classic — just one that turned out wrong for us. There was more bad feeling on display, another three-run lead surrendered, chance after Met chance wasted, tit-for-tat highlight plays and finally too much Werth and Utley to withstand. And there was plenty to ponder along the way.

For openers, it's increasingly apparent that Mike Pelfrey is somewhere between eccentric and batshit insane. During the broadcast it came to light that Johan Santana had taken Pelfrey aside and told him to stop fidgeting and taking off his cap and being generally Pelfreyesque on the mound. Gary, Keith and Ron used that to salute Santana's leadership, but it struck me as evidence of just how weird Big Pelf has become: He falls off the mound, mutters the pitch he's going to throw so the hitter can hear, picks fights with enemy batters and at least once per start has to be tended to by the catcher and the infield like he's a spooked horse. It's not that there's anything wrong with this — rather, it's that pitchers are expected to start off flighty and jumpy and then calm down, or at least channel their competitiveness as they mature. But Pelfrey seems to be going in the opposite direction: The better he gets, the weirder he gets.

Speaking of weird, is it possible baseball's umpires have taken up pre-game crack? Dan Iassogna blew two calls at first (Castillo was out, Beltran was safe) and Fernando Tatis all but draped himself over Carlos Ruiz on a remarkably incompetent bunt without drawing an interference call from Randy Marsh. What gives? And while I'm feeling cranky, whatever happened to the home-plate umpire removing the bat when a runner was inbound?

When Bobby Parnell came into the game, I glanced at his stats and did a double-take: Were opponents really hitting .300 against him, with lefties up in Ted Williams territory? Yes, they were — and the Phillies immediately proved it, with Utley lacing his fatal home run into the right-field seats and Ryan Howard driving Jeremy Reed to the left-field wall and a good distance up it. Lighting up three digits on the radar gun is nice and all, but that BAA is more than a little terrifying for an eighth-inning guy.

And finally, what can you say about Werth's catch? Werth himself admitted he didn't expect to catch it, which I'm sure offers David Wright no comfort. A couple of inches in any direction, and our lasting image of tonight's game is Werth rolling over disconsolately in the grass as SNY's cameras track the ball to a final resting spot somewhere on the warning track and Wright gets dogpiled at first. Then Emily goes to Citi Field Thursday night with her husband having bought her a mini-broom and insisted she chant “SWEEP!” all night while he glues himself to the couch and tries not to think too hard about a share of first place.

Instead, we're left with this: He sure as hell looked like Ron Swoboda out there, didn't he?

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 them, 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.

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.