According to Adam Rubin, Jose Reyes is not DL'd yet and may not have to be. The Mets are calling it tendinitis behind the right calf, a situation that can't imperil the leg. So he'll be back right away. Or soon. Or eventually. He's (drumroll, please) day-to-day.

It's the Mets and an injury. Believe what you will.

The catcher was a spy, but with apologies to Moe Berg, it was the leftfielder who wore the most cunning of disguises for nearly forty games. Turns out Daniel Murphy was a first baseman. He's been found out — praise the lord and pass the ammunition.

Now if we can solve the mystery of the incredible disappearing offense — featuring the shortstop who suddenly vanished midgame — the world may be safe for Metropolitans. But I wouldn't count on that happening for a while.

Yes, Murphy's masquerade, as beguiling as any incognito guise perpetrated on gullible Mets fans since Robbie Alomar impersonated a future Hall of Fame second baseman, has reached a merciful ending with the hint of a happy beginning. The kid from hunger from left field played first base professionally Wednesday night in Los Angeles. He wasn't Keith Hernandez. He wasn't even David Segui. But he wasn't Dave Kingman, and that's promising.

The Mets shouldn't be promising anything else right now, because they appear woefully incapable of delivering anything besides a mildly encouraging position switch. They can't deliver a big hit, they can't deliver a key run, they can't deliver a victory, certainly not over a quality team on the road. That wasn't a good formula for Dodger Stadium. It's not likely to work wonders in Fenway Park.

OK, so they've lost four in a row. OK, so they were swept three by L.A. OK, so they wasted one of their best non-Johan starts of the year. Not OK at all, actually, but it's not the losing that's been the Mets' bad moon rising every late night this week (and doesn't it feel as if the Mets were the third New York team to move to California?). It's the spectacular lack of fight they've put up in these four losses, and I don't necessarily mean the lack of grit, edge, “gredge” or any of the yada-yada many of us, myself included, have bandied about. They just look incapable right now of playing a full, well-rounded game of baseball. I don't know if they've done it more than a few times this year, even during the 11-of-13 good times.

Maybe it was my fever over the weekend, but I didn't think they looked that imposing while they were running wild on the Giants. They were getting on and they were delightfully aggressive and San Francisco was suitably rattled, but those weren't excellent all-around games. They were slugfests won by the Mets. They didn't look that good beating the Braves in that walkoff-walk win last week; it took a lucky call to push them over the top. They looked kind of disheveled against the Pirates, but the Pirates give you lots of wiggle room. It was wonderful beating the Phillies, but I didn't get the sense we were putting it to them. I got the sense the Phillies weren't so hot.

Hey, I'll take 95 instances of the Mets being partially awesome if they can half-ass their way to a playoff spot, but this team is frightening in both its inability to rev on all cylinders and its ability to zitz out on too many of them at once. Until proven otherwise, its talent is concentrated into a small clutch of players, one of whom is available only every five days — note we scored generously for Johan one time and took it out by inflicting penuriousness on Pelfrey, Redding, Maine and now Hernandez — and one who is rarely used when not protecting a lead. There are almost no leads now because the only two healthy talented regulars are being helped by almost no one. Every trip around the order in the Dodger series was an exercise in breath-holding and finger-crossing. C'mon Carlos! C'mon David! They came on. Nobody joined them.

Any team can have four fallow games. What's troubling is what lies ahead, and I don't mean just the Red Sox. Jose Reyes limping into the dugout in the third and then stomping frustratedly through it en route, probably, to the DL was a more harrowing sight than any five flies hit to erstwhile leftfielder Murphy. No team can lose its starting shortstop for any significant period of time and thrive, not unless you've got young Cal Ripken waiting to take over for Mark Belanger or something. The Mets don't seem to have that. They have Ramon Martinez. I've had a soft spot for Ramon based on his burst of big hits the last week of last September. That spot has now hardened and dried

Martinez — his nickname here was going to be “Bring 'Em Home Ramon” if he had tied it in the ninth — didn't lose the game. Putz and his cortisone shot didn't lose the game. Murphy's Tatisian production with runners on didn't lose the game (though when Wright moved Castillo and Beltran to third and second with a long fly to right with nobody out in the eighth, I groaned because I just knew that was our scoring opportunity right there). They all lost the game. Not Liván and his RDA of seven one-run innings. Not Beltran and Wright, of course. But the fightless Mets, the pulseless Mets, the directionless Mets, the depthless Mets, the Mets sans Reyes, Delgado, Cora and whoever else they don't got…they lost and it was pretty apparent they were going to lose. While not as flat-out embarrassing as a passel of their earlier losses, it was just as definitive.

A quarter of the season is now complete. The Mets are one game out of first with three-quarters of a season to go. That's the good news. Beltran, Wright, Rodriguez and Santana are the great news. Murphy playing one fine game at first is a swell development. Except for one bad pitch by John Maine to Casey Blake, the same could be said for Johan's backup singers of late. We all love Bobby Parnell and Brian Stokes, and Pedro Feliciano will have a job striking out Ryan Howard as long as he wants one.

But based on what we've seen, when those we count as assets veer to a bad week, I don't know who or what is going to pick them up. We're seeing a lineup not sustain the loss of its cleanup hitter. Now it will likely be without its leadoff hitter. Should the bullpen show a little more give, should the starters go not quite as long, should, god forbid, Daniel Murphy not be Vic Power…boy are we in trouble. David and Carlos have done almost nothing wrong for a week. They're due to not get the big hit, the big walk or even the big fly ball. Is anybody going to pick them up?

It's forty games in. Do you know where your Mets are?

I do: Barely over .500. It didn't take long to suss them out there either.

Rooting for a team that never seems to score enough? That's not new. That's 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.

Suddenly this is what amounts to progress around here: The Mets' loss was merely aggravating instead of disgusting.

Oh, it didn't look good when Daniel Murphy, cast as a hapless plaything of the cruel baseball gods, mishandled the first ball put in play since Jeremy Reed mishandled last night's final ball put in play. And, logically enough, that led to a run. But other than that the Mets had one other defensive hiccup — Ramon Martinez seemed to go out fairly slowly for a ball that Carlos Beltran couldn't reach. Logically enough, that led to a Dodgers run as well. (I've swiftly remembered that Ramon Martinez only looked good late last year because Luis Castillo looked so stupendously bad. He is, in fact, useless.) Without Jose Reyes back in the fold making several nice plays, goodness knows how much worse it would have been.

Oh, and everybody touched every base that needed touching, with the exception of a desired three more foot-plants on home plate.

Casey Blake's blow sounded fatal on the radio, even without Wayne Hagin's aggravating habit of being so leisurely on play-by-play that the crowd reaction tells you what's happened before he does. BAM! Far too long a time for nothing to have happened, cheering rising, Met chins falling.

It wasn't so long ago that the Mets seemed almost to be toying with the anonymous Giants, swiping bases at will and waiting patiently for big clutch hits when things didn't go their way. And all that without Reyes or Carlos Delgado. Then there was Mike Pelfrey's festival of yips, with all of us watching TV reduced to twitchy irritation by ESPN's festival of dips. Seemed like a bump in the road — a close game undone by a couple of flukey plays. But then came last night's epic disaster, with various Bisons screwing the pooch in astonishing fashion and Ryan Church choosing the wrong time for a self-administered colonoscopy, and now tonight.

We've been officially kicked out of first place; listening to this team over the last 27-odd hours, the astonishing thing is that we were ever in it.

Ramon Martinez is not mentioned (best I can recall) in Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. There are lots of other reasons it's a great read beyond that, but it helps. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

Even Marv Throneberry touched third.

As legend and record have it, Marvelous Marv hit a triple against the Cubs in 1962 but was called out for missing first. When Casey Stengel came out to argue, coach Cookie Lavagetto stopped him. Don’t bother, Case, Cookie told him. He didn’t touch second either.

But he touched third. Everybody touches third. “It’s just hard to miss third base,” Jerry Manuel confirmed. But Ryan Church took the hard way home, pulling off the highly unusual feat of sliding in safely at the plate while technically never making it there.

The Mets didn’t make it last night. They didn’t make it to third base or to a third run or a twelfth inning. They didn’t make those mythical “game-winning plays” Steve Phillips pounded into the ground Sunday night except this was Monday night turned Tuesday morning and there were plays to be made and all of them were game-losers.

They were all made by the Mets. The Mets of 2009.

“That’s unbelievable,” Manuel said about Church missing third on Angel Pagan’s drive to the center field wall. What else could he say? He didn’t pull a Casey and attempt to argue the point. Everybody but the rampaging Ryanosceros knew third went untouched. The man’s got two bases to hit with a foot before home plate and he missed one of them. The camera picked up Manuel in the Mets dugout. His face was turning into one of those comic balloons filled with no words, just disgruntlement.

There’d be more of that.

The bottom of the eleventh in what remained a tie game almost obscured Church’s instant-classic baserunning blunder. Stokes issues a leadoff walk. Humdrum mistake. Then a long fly ball to left-center. Or center-left. It’s very playable, though, and for a change we have two legitimate outfielders who can handle it. Pagan can track it down. Or maybe Beltran. Or Pagan. Or Beltran. Or…

No, nobody tracked it down. No, of course not. Not that kind of eleventh inning. “I called that ball like six times,” Beltran said later. “When the centerfielder calls the ball, everyone has to get out of the way.” Isn’t that also what they say after “lead, follow or…”? I sure hope Phillips and Joe Morgan were asleep by the eleventh inning. Even though it is the centerfielder’s ball, I won’t blame Pagan because a) he just got here; b) he had four hits; c) he slid home earlier in a way no Met seems to slide home — correctly; and d) he had been robbed of the go-ahead RBI by his own rightfielder five minutes before.

Meanwhile, it’s second and third, nobody out. Manuel convenes everybody but the secretary-general of the U.N. on the mound. We’re going to walk the next Dodger and play five infielders and if you count Stokes, Castro and the umps, the Dodger Stadium diamond has more people on it than most countries have diplomatic delegations.

And it nearly worked, too. Stokes gets Rafael Furcal, still on loan to L.A. from the Braves, to pop to the one spot in the outfield that won’t allow Mark Loretta to score from third. Then Brian induces a hard grounder to first, perfectly constructed for a 3-2 forceout at home and maybe even a bang-bang DP and we go on and play eleven more innings, Pelfrey is double-switched in at shortstop, Santos pitches the 21st for the win, Reyes the 22nd for the save.

Except the first baseman is a leftfielder whose literal lack of a glove has been a running storyline for days and he’s not terribly accustomed to his surroundings. Jeremy Reed makes like it’s stoopball except without a stoop. He throws the Spaldeen as hard as he can, well out of Ramon Castro’s range, Loretta scores, the night and the morning are over, the misery lingers.

Whoa. What a tragicomic event.

It never ceases to amaze that a roughly $138 million outfit like the Mets can so quickly deteriorate into undermanned and overmatched. Delgado’s out, sure. And Reyes’ day-to-day status is creeping up on a week. Then we lose Alex Cora, who’s been a wonderful, heady veteran, but, you know, he’s Alex Cora. I found it revealing that afterwards, when Manuel was asked about being at a disadvantage given the players he’s lost lately, he went first to Cora and his intelligence, then Delgado and didn’t mention Jose at all. When all is clicking, as it clicked for three days in San Francisco, everything is Ray Stevens beautiful. But when the streak is over, it’s over, and — don’t look Ethel! — you’re suddenly fielding Reed at first, Martinez at short, Pagan in left and handing the ball to Tim Redding.

Wow. That was quick. But let’s not get caught up in labels. Pagan, as noted, was sublime Monday night/Tuesday morning. Redding, in whom I’m not a believer, wove a fairy tale start for six innings. Luis Castillo, who by default and performance has morphed into a stalwart and an asset, saved the night in the ninth when he corralled Sean Green’s ill-advised fling to first. Aaron Heilman was always making ill-advised flings to first. And to think Sean Green didn’t want Aaron Heilman’s number.

What was also frightening was learning the five errors committed by the Mets were their most since…September 16, 2007. That was the Greg Dobbs Game for you collapsologists out there. The Mets’ six errors twenty months ago no doubt contributed to that pivotal loss to the Phillies, but I mostly remember Dobbs’ grand slam off Jorge Sosa. I bring that up not to relive good times but because when you hear five errors are the Mets’ “most since,” you expect the “since” to be followed by “1963” or thereabouts. Green’s wheel and throw to nobody…the Beltran/Pagan/two-men-on hallelujah twist…Reed’s desperation heave that didn’t have to be so hasty…those were heavy-duty, expansion-team errors. They should have counted as two miscues apiece. And that’s not counting Church’s inexpert finesse of third.

Yet the Mets, who for all their injury and ineptitude are still sort of in first, could have won this game. They had ample opportunity, particularly Fernando Tatis who unfortunately never met a Monday baserunner he couldn’t strand. It’s probably not to their credit that they seemed so outclassed by the unspectacular Dodgers, and it’s not really to their credit that they couldn’t cash in their chances (or touch a most touchable bag when they had to), but all could have been lost a lot sooner than almost two in the morning. Yet they persevered and made it, uh, interesting.

Doesn’t make for much of a moral victory either, does it?

All the bases are covered and touched in Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

Carlos Delgado goes in for arthroscopic hip surgery Tuesday, according to the Mets. I guess we knew, once they halted the folly of treating him as day-to-day, that this was serious enough so that he'd require real attention and that he'd be out a significant period. Let's not play doctor, so to speak, and speculate on the length of his absence. Let's not play GM either. Tatis, Reed, maybe Murphy remain the prevailing stopgap options in his stead. Sheffield played a few games there a few years ago, too. If Nick Evans finds his stroke and everything else, he could be back. Maybe David at first with Daniel at third…nah, not in the middle of the season. Whatever happens, better to be facing this from first place than from some other place.

Best wishes to Carlos Delgado for successful surgery and a speedy recovery to his right hip. In retrospect, we're lucky his back didn't give out from carrying the offense last summer.

Going into the weekend, I was pretty happy about our being the ESPN Sunday night game. Thursday and Friday night I worked and gave what attention I could spare to Howie and Wayne on the radio. On Saturday night Emily threw me a 40th birthday celebration at B61, which was enormous fun but meant Johan and Co. were viewed and listened to on the run. (In the ninth Joshua's babysitter called in distress — the cable feed had cut out and Joshua was demanding updates. I listened to the last three outs via Gameday and SMS'ed Joyce after each one.) Given the whole 40th birthday celebration, I knew today would begin with a king-sized hangover and afternoon baseball hours might need to be occupied by a restorative nap. (You know it's going to be rough when you begin the day showering in the dark because the bathroom light feels like a Gitmo interrogation.) Anyway, given all this, 8 p.m. sounded much more promising for enjoying a couple of hours of baseball.

The only problem was I somehow forgot (or more likely blocked out) that Sunday night means Jon Miller, Joe Morgan and Steve Phillips.

Speaking of Gitmo.

I don't mind Jon Miller — he seems to genuinely enjoy himself and inhabits the game easily and mostly unobtrusively. But oh man, the company he's forced to keep. Joe Morgan's reflexive hatred of any kind of modern thinking about baseball is well-known and properly derided (there's this definitive takedown by Tommy Craggs, not to mention Fire Joe Morgan's entire existence), but what irritates me about his knuckle-dragging isn't the anti-intellectualism but the laziness — give me a couple of helpings of grit, season with intangibles and knowing how to win and call me next Sunday. Well, that and the fact that Joe Morgan's job is to watch baseball and talk about it and yet he seems to be having about as much fun as the guy at the end of the line at the DMV. When he's actually breaking down baseball instead of crabbing about the unquantifiable, Morgan can be interesting — witness his discussion of why some batters are unsettled by a runner going on a two-strike count. Unfortunately, I usually miss any such wisdom if it's imparted after the third inning, because by then I've willed myself to go deaf for fear that otherwise I might snap and try to perforate both eardrums with a chopstick.

And then there's whatever the fuck Steve Phillips does.

Listening to Morgan and Skill Set agree, kind of agree and not agree about “leadership” was slow torture, like being a lobster in a pot with the dial turned all the way to Suck. Ugh, Omar's stupid quote about the Mets and their lack of edge. … let me guess, Wright is too young and Reyes makes mistakes and Beltran is quiet … did Jon Miller pick out that shirt and tie because he fears he'll be lost at sea? … if Derek Jeter's name is brought up I'm going to fly to San Francisco and hit Joe Morgan in the face with a pie … good God, they're still at it, this has been going on for more than inning … HOLY FUCK PLEASE GOD MAKE IT STOP I WILL DO ANYTHING. Generally when Morgan and Skill Set were talking I was rocking back and forth and quietly sobbing, so I'm sure I missed some details, but I do seem to remember that Morgan said the Mets were 11-2 but not playing well, just taking advantage of other teams' mistakes (huh?) and that Skill Set advocated trading Carlos Beltran because he doesn't make game-winning plays. (Good Lord, shut the fuck up. Isn't there a secretary in Bristol you can chase around a desk or something?)

Oh yeah, the game.

Mike Pelfrey balked three times and spent an inordinate amount of time trudging around the mound looking like he was plotting how to get a flaming bag of dog crap onto each umpire's front doorstep without the second victim alerting the others. The Giants' astonishingly anonymous lineup — the last names make you think you're playing a videogame whose makers wouldn't pay the MLBPA — pecked out runs on singles sandwiched around Balk #1 and a starting pitcher parachuting a single over short after failing to bunt fair on a suicide squeeze. The Mets left 12 on base and got zero runs out of the following situations: Runner on third, one out (first inning), bases loaded, none out (second inning) and runners on second and third, none out (eighth inning).

In other words, if you had to pick the perfect game to be accompanied by Jon Miller, Joe Morgan and Steve Phillips, it would be this one.

Greg promises that the audiobook adaptation of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets will not be read by Jon Miller, Joe Morgan or Steve Phillips. It's available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

Three consecutive wins with ascending run totals starting from seven should make any Mets fan feel Amazin'. But when, without warning, your head explodes into a disco inferno — it was burn, baby, burn, my temp briefly but sharply returning to 102.4 — it's hard to enjoy one of the most fun series you'll ever see.

It's fun for the Mets. It's been shadows and fog to me. Even when they schedule an afternoon game on one of those glorious San Francisco days and the Giants can't do a thing to stop us, I'm at a loss. I've been missing crucial hits, pitches and errors between the sixth and eighth since Thursday. But through my shadows and through my fog, I'm able to make out that just about every crucial hit, pitch and error goes our way. So I take my antibiotic and I let that 'tussin get down to the bone and I hang in as best I can.

Not unlike the Mets versus the Giants these last three shadowy, foggy days.

I was up and at 'em early Saturday, at 4:00 PM. I had a sixth (or sick) sense of where this alleged Mount Olympus of pitching matchups was going to go. The Fox broadcast seemed set to slobber over Randy Johnson, so it didn't surprise me that he gave up four consecutive hits to start the game. “First time! First time!” they caterwauled in shock. “First time Randy Johnson has given up four hits to start a game!” Interesting? Perhaps. Surprising? Well, barring any Clemenstorious revelations, he's on his way to the Hall of Fame and he's only almost as old as dirt (a.k.a. me), so no, not really. Approaching 46, even without the flu or a virus or whatever it is I've got — perhaps it's just Mets fever — you're lucky to get out of bed in one piece some days. Giving up four hits to start a game is the least of your problems.

So we generate megatallies for Johan and you had to know that this would be the one time when he wouldn't cruise (not even pitching in San Francisco and throwing to the Castro). The Giants would milk his one day as merely human and appear, through the shadows and fog, capable of catching up. But that must have been my delirium's interpretation, because the Mets would just keep hitting. Their husbandry of runs for the day Johan would need them more than any other represents some fine planning or dumb luck.

Nothing can ruin a game in which your 3-4-5 hitters scald everything they see, but when you're burning up and slipping in and out of consciousness, every little thing you don't care for begins to bother you disproportionately. Friday night, for example, I sucked on ice chips and persevered gamely for Frankie's last knockout of the evening. When Gary and Keith threw it to the studio for the postgame, a most unpleasant bald man was shouting at me. Under optimal circumstances, Chris Carlin is maybe borderline tolerable. On a night when I was fighting off fevered dreams in which I argued with umpires and Bruce Bochy that some controversial home run counted even though I didn't see it (what — you don't have fevered dreams like that?), this Loudmouth bellowing at me wasn't just a bad broadcaster. He was bad for my health.

Note to SNY: Bench Carlin and bring in someone with a comparatively soft, soothing manner for any postgame show that starts after one in the morning. Like Atilla the Hun.

Saturday my bête noire was Eric Karros. Can Fox please send him out for coffee for nine or more innings? How inane and generally incommunicative does an ex-ballplayer need to be to become a backup Fox baseball broadcaster? In the production meeting, was Eric instructed to treat every viewer as utterly unfamiliar with the sport and its participants? Besides beating that “first time four consecutive hits” tidbit to within six feet, ten inches of Randy Johnson's life; mastering the obvious (he doesn't like when pitchers throw above the shoulders — who does?); and reviving the hoary “crack statistician” line from forty years ago when it wasn't that funny, Eric Karros seemed to believe he had a secret discovery in David Wright, as if it was time for America to meet the wonder. “He's the future of this team,” Karros babbled. “Mike Piazza introduced me to him when he came up and…”

David Wright came up five years ago. David Wright was the future of this team in 2004. David Wright is the present of this team in 2009. His present is scheduled to endure for quite a few more seasons, knock wood or whatever substance constitutes Brian Wilson's glove. David Wright is a three-time All-Star, two-time Silver Slugger, et al, et al. Even folks going to the trouble of tuning in a baseball game outside of New York have probably heard of him and know something of what he's been up to since he shook Eric Karros' hand a half-decade ago.

Annoying when you're feeling fine. Inexplicably grating when you're woozy, queasy, sneezy and every dwarf dating back to John Cangelosi. Cream and sugar, Karros, cream and sugar.

My own internal issues aside, the Mets scored seven Thursday night, eight Friday night and then nine in the afternoon Saturday. My head may have blazed like a disco inferno, but no panic at the disco, the ballpark or anywhere else this weekend that doesn't involve the Disabled List, no matter when Delgado and I get off it.

It's even better than chicken soup for the Mets fan's soul: 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.

Nothing like sending the defending National League Cy Young award-winner to the showers or to his video game or wherever Tim Lincecum goes once he leaves the mound, eh?

OK, so we didn't technically beat Lincecum Friday night, but how satisfying it is to not lay down and die against one of the premier pitchers in the game? For five innings he was as impressive as his hype, but sometimes the Mets are, too. While I struggled to stay awake and cool (my fever was soaring like Lincecum's pitch count), the Mets bided their time, waiting until just after Tim helped his own cause in the sixth to foil his ultimate goal.

Meanwhile, some Mets just keep hitting, some Mets just keep walking and all Mets just keep running. They're finally fast (dot com) even without Jose Reyes. Reyes wasn't in the lineup three years ago the night they scored eleven runs in the sixth inning at Wrigley Field. He hasn't been playing as the Mets have stolen eleven bases in two games at Phone Company Park. Obviously Jose Reyes is a drag on the Mets' offense.

The other statistical oddity that has grabbed my attention between cold compresses and the like — your blogger's temperature circa 3 AM was 103.4, which was scary but still well south of Sean Green's ERA — is the nugget that the Mets hadn't won the first game of a road trip that started in San Francisco since 1988. We were 0-10 entering such situations heading into Thursday. Think about that. Think about how these West Coast trips work, how you look forward all day and then for three extra hours at night to first pitch. Ten times out of ten we were completely let down for all our anticipation and sleepiness. But we weren't let down Thursday night.

And we weren't let down last night. The Mets found all kinds of holes at gaps (the most egregious of them in the Giants' bullpen) at AT&T, making me think not hitting home runs at Citi Field is great practice for these visits. While the boxscore lines on the hitting side reveals all kinds of delights — 4 RBI for white-hot Mr. Wright, 2 sac flies for Mr. Santos, three runs for the kid Sheffield, a slumpbuster for Ryan Church, another pinch-hit for Le Grande Murph — I like what we keep getting out of Liván Hernandez. This is two starts in a row where he wobbled and didn't fall down. The Liván Hernandez diet is usually innings, innings and more innings. He must be watching his point total a little closely since he only went five, but the last three were almost perfect. The man knows how to pitch.

And Sheffield knows how to hit. I'm getting the same sensation watching him as I got from Pedro Martinez and T#m Gl@v!ne a few years ago. Those guys were master craftsmen, both past their physical peak, neither capable of dominating hitters the way they did when they were putting up the career numbers that earned them their lucrative Met contracts, but it was thrilling on an intellectual level to watch them think and throw their way out of jams. That, to a certain degree, is Sheffield right now. You still see the quickness and the determination. You know he knows what to do. When he's able to do it, it, like his batting average of late, is all the better.

Lincecum's got nothing to be ashamed of, either, even if he is in wrongful possession of Johan Santana's third Cy Young award. I tip my cap to any pitcher who can produce a tack-on run batting for himself when others in his position would be called back for a pinch-hitter. But just as my fever eventually broke — I'm normal now, if I can ever be said to be that — his grip on the Mets' bats and psyches loosened and it was all good from there.

There was a lot of talk before the Mets headed west that they were staring at an abyss: the Giants, the Dodgers, the Red Sox for ten games in their parks. We shouldn't expect too much, they said.

And we don't listen to that.

Listen to this: 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.

Flashback Friday: I Saw The Decade End is on hold as my well-being teeters on the verge of September 2007-type behavior. Just went to the doctor, and while he says I'll live, I don't believe the prognosis. Anyway, I was halfway through writing the latest installment when I decided I didn't like my head being as hot as Carlos Beltran has been at the plate, so I'm going to put aside what I was working on (even though it's got that topical thing going for this Friday in particular) and present a Best of FAFIF from the greatest Mets West Coast trip ever. Please travel back, won't you, to June 8, 2006 and enjoy my unsurpassed talent-evaluation skills as they appeared under the headline “Suddenly Smitten“.

I'm reading a pretty good book called A Great Day in Cooperstown about how the Hall of Fame came to be and the festive occasion its opening was. All the immortals who were still alive in 1939 — Walter Johnson, Cy Young, Tris Speaker, a recently retired Babe Ruth — came to Upstate New York and caused quite the commotion. I wondered what it must have been like to have witnessed modern baseball in its formative years, to have seen these players create the game as we know it, to possibly bump into one of them on Main Street when they showed up to get enshrined.

It must have been tremendous, I decided, but it's all right that I wasn't there then because if I had been, I wouldn't be around now. And if I weren't around now, I wouldn't be seeing Lastings Milledge in his formative years recreating the game we will know in the 21st century.

That's how far gone I am over this kid who's been a Met for a week and change. I had held it in check until last night, but by this morning, as I savored the back page of the late edition of the Daily News which documented his ARM & HAMMER…well, WOO! as the scoreboard often says. I'm head over heels for Lastings Milledge.

Yes, he's to be mentioned with the residents of Pantheon Row. Of course I'm searching my mental database for whether we've ever had anybody like him (we haven't) or whether we've produced and employed a trio of homegrowners like Reyes, Wright and him simultaneously (we also haven't). I've skipped over the ifs in record time, slid around the ands, and slammed the buts over the leftfield wall. No ifs, ands or buts, Lastings Milledge is as awesome a Met as I could imagine.

Xavier Nady? Swell fella. I hope Willie finds him some at-bats.

I've flipped through all the obvious precedents. He's not Ron Swoboda. He's not Mike Vail. He's not Alex Ochoa. He's not Benny Agbayani. He's not Victor Diaz or Craig Brazell or Mike Jacobs even. I have no evidence, only intuition, and I'm likin' what I'm feelin'. He's not Darryl Strawberry, either, though after watching him do everything right last night, I no longer mean that in the “don't compare him to a superstar yet,” but rather “Darryl was no Lastings, not at this stage of his career”…career meaning, if I'm not mistaken, eight games to date.

It's not much of a sample, but what sample it is makes me want to order the complete set right now. Lastings Milledge has filled up my senses like a night in the forest, like the mountains in springtime, like a walk in the rain.

Holy Honus Wagner! He's hitting, he's running, he's throwing, he's got me channeling John Denver.

I'm gone, baby. Waaaaaaaay gone.