In the parlance of boxing matches and hockey games, I went to a Mets loss Tuesday night and a Mets win broke out.

Weird night, to be sure. Thought we'd lose, not out of innate Met pessimism but based on it being an oppressive 3-0 tilted to the bad guys in the eighth while the Dutch version of Johan Santana wouldn't stop sticking it to us but good. I'd spent part of the night with Jason, part with Emily — one had a ticket next to me, one had a ticket upstairs with somebody else, so they King Solomoned the difference by swapping seats midgame — and part away from the action blowing into a cup of steamy Long Island Clam & Corn Chowder from the Catch of the Day stand. Because Long Island Clam & Corn Chowder isn't as strollable an item as I thought (and a little spicier than I would have preferred), I needed to sit on a bench somewhere and let it cool. As I slurped tentatively, the Mets slumped determinedly. While the chowder would eventually cool, the Mets' bats would warm to the task at hand.

Different perspectives, different companions (one lovelier than the one before), different dramatic trajectories and different culinary experiences were all part of the same story Tuesday night, but I never would have bet the ultimate blowing would involve the Braves' bullpen rather than the soup.

More disjointedness came from Section 135, which is Left Field Reserved in the numerical world in which we now live. It was reserved early but rowdy late, though not out of savvy support for the home team. While I was off blowing on chowder, 135 apparently won the Lucky Beer Inning or something. They all got tanked up and they all demanded obeisance to the wave. They didn't seem to understand that once they did their part to get the wave going, they were supposed to sit down and not block the views of those who like baseball. The wave blows even more than the Braves, especially when it takes place as a game is moving from 3-0 to 3-2 and there is pitching, swinging and whatnot somewhere out there on the diamond. Hi-def monitors are not luxuries in wave-obsessed 135; they are your lifeline. Especially the replays, especially on the ones that prove the umps aren't always on the take against the Mets.

We got a little lucky on Carlos Beltran's gutsy steal of third in the ninth, the daring dash that paid off when Luis Castillo lifted his can of corn chowder deep enough to score the tying run. Seems we were screwed earlier when Wright was called out at second. I was just enchanted that the technology exists to show me replays of close calls at the ballpark and no powers that be black them out. Whether Beltran was safe or not we've been owed a big one against the Braves since the day Angel Hernandez became Angel Hernandez, thus fair is fair. It couldn't have been fairer that the aggressive Carlos of the ninth was properly passive as he allowed bases-loaded ball four to take care of business in the tenth. Beltran leads the league in hitting and is right up there in on-base percentage. Now (with some help from teammates) he has won the Mets the first-ever extra-inning affair in Citi Field history. Even by just standing still, he can do it all.

Except for the wave. Even Angel Hernandez wouldn't do that.

Come from behind on your reading list and score a copy of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Listen in as the author describes the writing and rooting process to Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf. And whatever you do, don't give away the ending to at least one diehard Mets fan.

As predicted, the Mets returned to Earth. Heck, they practically burned up on re-entry, came down miles from the rendezvous point, panicked and managed to blow the hatch and flood the capsule while waiting for rescue. I'm pressed to think what was the least fun: the errors, the parade of unlucky or bad relievers or the carousel of Atlanta Brave baserunners.

No, wait, they're all second-place finishers: The least fun was watching Johan Santana in the dugout, gazing out in mild perturbation and puzzlement at the post-error wreckage of what had been a taut game.

Of course the inevitable had to happen on his watch, wasting a gutty, brainy performance in which he arrived with C+ stuff and pitched an A- game. Johan gets the L despite giving up not one lousy earned run — and has now had this happen to him twice and it's not even Memorial Day.

Why do his teammates give him no run support? Maybe it's awe. I felt a little tight myself, and I was a county away. Can fans press too? Of course they can — I caught myself cheering too hard, staring burning holes into the set and grinding my teeth. If I'd tried Let's Go Mets I would have been off the primordially simple beat. If we'd done the wave I would have fallen over the arm of the couch.

Johan Santana is what we wonder if we deserve. Bistro d'Johan is the fancy restaurant at which we knock over our Cokes and get our tie in the soup and wind up getting dragged out by one arm. The Johan Santana Collection is the art exhibition at which we theatrically sigh and fidget and whine so appallingly that we leave early and there's yelling in the car. The Santana is our uncle's new fancy Cadillac whose ashtray we put bright blue gum in for some unfathomable reason. Johan Santana is the losing pitcher, with an 0.78 ERA and a record of 4-2.

Johan Santana — or more properly our squandering of his vast gifts — is the reason we can't have nice things.

A nice thing we can still have is a copy of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets. Check it out at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

Baseball is full of hoary cliches that have become overused because they contain a fair bit of wisdom. Among them is the caution that no team is actually as bad as it looks when it's on the skids or as good as it looks when it's on a winning streak.

It will come as a shocking surprise, tomorrow or the day after or later this week or sometime fairly soon, to watch the New York Mets lose a game. They will pitch badly or make errors or fail to show patience at the plate or pop the ball up or just get beat, and we will fret and grumble and moan and they will lose some more games and we will view them with suspicion or derision or despair. In other words, we'll take a series of baseball games and contort them as required until we've fulfilled the basic human need to impose a storyline on potentially unrelated events.

It's utterly irrational, and you know what? That's fine. Shrugging away the season's ebb and flow as statistical noise is undoubtedly a more accurate way of viewing the world, but it sure makes things dull in the telling. It's important to be able to remind yourself that no, David Wright will not strike out every time from now until the sun goes dark, just as Carlos Beltran will not finish the season at .374 and play with a blank back to his jersey for the rest of his Met career because we'll retire his number posthaste. But once you do that, let go again — whether it's to exult or suffer.

Right now would be to exult. Right now it rains overnight and just enough so you don't have to water after work, the cops are handing out warnings instead of tickets, the bank errors are in our favor, the chef sends out an amuse-bouche with each course, and the toast always lands butter side up. It won't be like this often, so soak it up.

Certainly the Mets can do no wrong — being down 2-0 with Livan Hernandez missing his spots and Ian Snell crackling fastballs and arcing sliders to all sides of the plate felt like a momentary inconvenience, and indeed it proved so. Livan found himself, Snell lost himself, Livan and Jose and David played sparkling defense and the hapless Pirates played their trademark lousy kind. (I cannot figure out why Brian Bixler is on a major-league roster.) Reyes and Luis Castillo pulled off a double steal, Daniel Murphy caught everything hit his way even when it looked like Jerry Manuel had waited too long to bring in Jeremy Reed, and Castillo even hit his 20th career sacrifice fly.

It was all kinds of wonderful, and we got to see it firsthand — as you know from Greg's kind birthday wishes, I turned 40 on Friday, which went into the mix with Emily enjoying her seventh Mother's Day and Joshua enjoying just being a kid at a ballgame on a spring day. Emily decided a while back that going all out at our new ballpark was just the thing for these intersecting celebrations, so we went to Citi Field in grandly over-our-heads style: brunch at the heretofore-unglimpsed Acela Club and seats in the Excelsior deck, behind home plate and a couple of rows below the SNY booth. (My goodness do I love my wife — while thanking God every day that she has such pitifully bad taste in men.) In case you're wondering, the Acela Club's food is very good — Emily had crab cakes and gave them high marks — though given Citi Field's other food options I think brunch makes more sense than dinner. Oh, and be aware that those window views you see on TV come with a surcharge, the exact amount of which we didn't quite nail down in friendly discussions with Mets folks. I think the extra would be worth it to eat good brunch and watch BP, but your mileage may vary.

Our seats were reached from the Caesar's Club, which is a comfortable, elegant space full of cushy chairs and generous couches and big windows that actually give the vista a bit of grandeur that makes you do a double-take when you remember you're looking at Flushing. To that, I must add that the Caesar's Club feels like it has nothing to do with the baseball game taking place not so far away. It would be heaven during a long rain delay or as a retreat for someone who doesn't care about baseball, but happily neither of those conditions applied today, so regarding things that were Caesar's we had rendered unto us nothing except a couple of bathroom trips and a glass of wine.

Emily and Joshua got to go on the field for the National Anthem, courtesy of Joshua being a member of the Kids' Club and Emily being a member of the Moms' Club. (I could pick them out with perfect ease from 500 feet away — like most fathers and husbands, by now I'm very familiar with the posture of my son when he's not really trying and failing to hold still and listen and that of my wife when she's offering well-deserved remonstrances. They arrived just in time for first pitch thanks to some speedy navigation of Citi Field's concrete bowels and still vaguely mysterious elevators, and we were off.

Our vantage point was perfect for continuing Joshua's baseball education, whether it was Ryan Church pantomiming making a catch of Ramon Vazquez's single with Robinzon Diaz on first or the Pirates playing in against Reyes and then retreating to halfway with two strikes. We also inadvertently furthered his education in other ways.

It was fun being 20 feet from Ron Darling and Gary Cohen, and I was inordinately proud of myself for (barely) managing not to loudly profess my admiration of them. To their left and directly behind us was Omar Minaya's suite, where our GM was entertaining folks with the windows open. (I also managed not to yell a grateful “Wilbur Huckle!” at Keith Olbermann.) As I noted to Emily, Omar's proximity led to the amusing spectacle of heads in our section swiveling to give Omar a direct dose of the gimlet eye whenever one of his acquisitions did something questionable.

This became relevant during Sean Green's rather unsuccessful working out of various kinks. Emily was tired and impatient by then, and our son was immensely more so on both counts, plus full of a dangerous amount of sugar. Anyway, Emily started barking at Green, which sent Joshua off, screeching (with a scary amount of both volume and venom) at our distant, hapless reliever that the idea was that he pitch well, not badly, and so stop annoying six-year-old Mets fans and their mothers.

This was amusing, except right about then Nate McLouth (why do the Pirates employ 75% of blond, mulleted ballplayers, anyway?) hammered a ball into the seats and one of us made the mistake of noting that Omar the GM of the Mets, who'd acquired Sean Green, was nearby. If you ever idly noted at a fraternity party that, hey, cups full of beer can be thrown as well as drunk, it was pretty much like that. Joshua yelled something out at the field at “Omir” and we, focusing on accuracy of charges rather than advisability of behavior, compounded the error by noting that Omir was blameless and Omar was behind us.

So up goes Joshua on his seat, turning around to stare like a gunfighter into the GM's suite and loudly give Omar advice about bad middle relievers and what ought to be done with them while everyone around us laughed and we tried to hide. If any of you attend tomorrow night's game and find that the cordon in front of the SNY booth has suddenly quadrupled in size, you'll know whom to blame.

Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets will further your baseball education without the whole yelling at the GM problem. Check it out at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

Straight from the 5/7/09 edition of Manhattan Neighborhood Network's On the Sportslines, I join Debi Gallo for a three-minute discussion of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets. It aired Thursday evening on Time Warner Cable and RCN Cable, and now it airs on YouTube here at approximately the 12:05 mark.

For Mets fans who love to read as much as they like to watch, two Q&A's to share: NY Writing Careers Examiner here and MetsBlog here. Enjoy these links and, if you don't mind, pass them along to friends who may not know the book exists. Word of mouth and word of Web is how something like this gets known…and it's not much of a book unless it gets read. Tell 'em, too, por favor, they can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and at most NYC-area bookstores. Ongoing Facebook discussion continues here.

Thank you for all your help and kind words in the two months since FAFIF: AIPHOTNYM came out. As with a certain team's winning streak and stay in first place, I hope it keeps rolling as the season goes on.

I should be a Mets fan. I identify with their culture. I appreciate how deep into the Bachman-Turner Overdrive canon the Shea Stadium deejay can dig. I have bitten my palm, Squiggy-style, over the throngs of big-haired women who have the Mets logo airbrushed on their nails.
—Joel Stein, Time, 2000

There were good reasons Sebastian Bach of Skid Row performed before Saturday’s game against the Pirates. There were good reasons Gary Dell’Abate, a.k.a. Boy Gary/Bababooey from the Howard Stern show, threw out the first ball. Very good reasons, actually, having to do with the Mets holding Autism Awareness Day. Bach and Dell’Abate (the latter a huge Mets fan) are supporters of a great cause, and it is to their credit that they would use their celebrity to raise awareness, just as the Mets are doing a fine thing publicizing such a fight.

That said…the lead singer from Skid Row…Howard Stern’s punching bag of a producer…the Mets. The spirit of Shea Stadium lives. I mean, really, Sebastian Bach, with the hair and the metal and I assume a reality show to plug. And Gary from Uniondale. There is nothing majestic about having these as your celebrities on a Saturday afternoon. There is nothing sacred. There is nothing prim or proper. There is something very much Mets about it.

To which, I say hot damn, bring on the Sebastian Bachs and the Gary Dell’Abates (hell, their stand-ins are usually riding my train anyway) and let’s be Mets about this. Let’s be Shea about this. Let’s bite our palms as Squiggy would at this six-game winning streak and these new places of ours: Citi Field and first, respectively.

Citi Field? Needs work, still. Never mind the blind spots (none of which bothered me from Mezzanine 1…I mean Promenade 414) and the lack of Mookieabilia. It needs to be louder or somehow dirtier without becoming filthy. It needs some Shea to it. In the top of the second, my friend Jeff, he of [friggin’] fantasy camp correspondent fame, read my mind and asked, “Is it quiet here?” We indeed could have been studying for our PSATs when it was a mere 1-0. As it grew into 5-0 and all the other delightful scores until it was finally 10-1, it got louder and maybe a little Sheaish. Needs work in that respect, but on the occasion of my seventh game, I came away with no other complaints, not from the game, not from the park, not even from the overpriced cheeseburger stand beyond center that I finally bore down and tried (good, not great; get a Steak ‘N’ Shake up in here and we’ll talk).

First-place Mets? I want to exult and luxuriate, but I seem to recall being in first place in some other recent seasons and…well, you know. Nevertheless, there are five places available in your National League East, and the one we occupy as a result of our win and the Phillies’ loss is the best to have, so let’s have it. Let’s keep it, too. Let’s not let up. But it’s May 9 and 29 games in. To paraphrase the great philosopher Howie Rose, the last 133 are the toughest. But this is a better look to the Mets than what constant viewers saw a little more than a week ago. And the sound of “first-place Mets” is, with all due respect to Mr. Bach’s charitable impulses, better than “18 and Life” at its loudest and clearest.

Unless 18 refers to Jeremy Reed, who could have pitched for all it mattered by the ninth. Which would have been pretty awesome.

Fuckin’ A it woulda been.

Two inquiring minds wanted to know more about Faith and Fear: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, thus we have two Q&A interviews it is our pleasure to share, this one with Tad Richards of the NY Writing Careers Examiner and this one with Regis Courtemanche of MetsBlog. My thanks to both for their interest and inquiry. The book they ask about is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

OK, the Mets didn't play a particularly crisp game — it was cringeworthy when Carlos Beltran and Ryan Church both wound up south of Nate McLouth's eastbound fly ball, agonizing to watch any ball get near Daniel Murphy (unblemished though his record was) and disturbing to see the offense lapse into torpor against Jeff Karstens, whom I don't think it's too uncharitable to call a short-arming junkballer.

But my birthday game was a reminder that there's a big difference between a good team playing slightly flabby baseball and a truly bad one. And the Pirates are truly bad, in a lot of ways. (I know by saying that I've ensured they'll summon up the ghosts of Tike Redman and Humberto Cota and put two shivs between our ribs, but even if that happens other teams will prove me largely correct.)

A lot of their players are simultaneously bad and too old to have much hope of getting better. Brian Bixler has a .261 career OBP, showed no ability to play shortstop, and is 26. I know the Red Sox didn't want to give up Brandon Moss, but after looking at his stats and watching him play tonight I'm not sure why — he looks like the kind of sluggish player Boston is smart enough to now employ in a limited role, if at all. Freddy Sanchez's defensive strategy seems to be to fall in the general direction of balls, which does make him a perfect keystone partner for Bixler. Nyjer Morgan played a superb left field, and I never would have guessed he's a veteran of junior hockey in western Canada, but he still became 28 while doing all that, which is a little too late to get excited about.

Catcher Robinzon Diaz (perhaps the “z” is for “ZOMG do we suck!”) looked impressive and Nate McLouth is genuinely good, but there's just not enough there for anyone to think the Pirates will win 75 games any time soon — and if you're thinking about farm-system reinforcements, this spring the Pirates' minor-leaguers got beaten by Manatee Community College. It's like surrounding Ty Wigginton and Jason Phillips with lots and lots of Jorge Velandias, only it never ends. Joshua asked about the Pirates and seemed genuinely surprised when I told him that they were an original National League franchise and told him tales of Willie Stargell and Dave Parker and the Killer Bs. This is a proud old franchise that deserves better than the hideous run of pain and futility that's been inflicted on a generation of fans.

But the general hopelessness about the present and future (Yates and Burnett and Veal, oh my!) wasn't the worst thing about watching the Pirates. Rather, it's that they have the worst body language of any baseball team I've seen in a long time. Every time I looked at them it seemed like someone was staring at his shoes, or gaping at an equally confounded teammate, or trudging in a grim little circle while the brain trust glowered out at the field. I remember this brand of corrosively bad baseball (oh Howe do I remember it), and I feel for those compelled to spend 162 valuable afternoons and evenings watching it.

But all that said, the Pirates are in our way, and empathy shouldn't be allowed a place in the equation. And the Carloses showed a welcome lack of human feeling, with Beltran banking a petite yet perfect double off the tarp for the lead and Delgado supplying the exclamation point off Sean Burnett, a sad-eyed LOOGY whose delivery seemed to begin about five feet behind Delgado's head. Given that, I didn't rate Delgado's chances of hitting the ball 42 feet as particularly high, which once again shows what I know: Burnett threw a breaking pitch that flattened out enough for a good look and Delgado hit it about 420 feet. And we were safe in port, Pirate-infested waters and all.

Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History, whose pages include a more local history of class warfare, is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.