6 pm: Go over Nationals lineup. Feel pangs of pity. Decide to pitch to contact to minimize their embarrassment, maximize chance that I can pitch every second or third day to ensure we win games more often than every fifth day. Besides, no point making that Dukes kid mad.

6:31 pm: Sheffield and Tatis in the outfield? Hmm. Move to Plan B: Strike everybody out.

6:45 pm: Anthem singer is dry-heaving. Remind her of words, including additional three stanzas in case she wants to be historically accurate. Offer brief account of bombardment of Fort McHenry, history of Anacreontic Society and drinking songs of London social clubs, capsule biography of Francis Scott Key. She just stares at me. I get that a lot.

7:05 pm: Lay hands on blind and sick huddled down right-field line. Feel bad that I don't have time to cure mild astigmatism I spy in front row of Excelsior level. Remind myself I'm only one man.

7:06 pm: Pregame handshake ritual with teammates. For something a little different, do it with eyes closed, identifying teammates through combination of pheromone recognition and echolocation. Fossum keeps forgetting that the seventh and 21st steps in our handshake are the same movement in reverse. Must be patient with the new guy.

Top of 1st: Game on. Strike out side. Use 11 pitches to do so when nine would have sufficed. Enraged at own inefficiency.

Bottom of 1st: Offense doesn't convert one-out situation with runner on third. Allow self brief sigh. Take call from CDC worried about Mexican swine flu thing. Tear page out of Delgado's notebook, model quick redistribution of stockpiles of Tamiflu and Relenza. Docs grateful. Hey, we're all part of the same team.

Top of 2nd: Dunn singles. This annoys me. Strike out next three. Debate sending Dukes SMS saying “You out, dawg” with picture of baseball. Seems ungentlemanly.

Bottom of 2nd: Tatis misses home run thanks to 800-foot-high outfield wall. With my at-bat coming up, go down to expensive new batting cage. Unnamed teammate (I won't tell you whom — discretion is my watchword) is in there lashing line drives. Batting-practice pitcher announces “Runners on second and third!” U.T. looks at bat quizzically, tries to switch ends, misses pitch, falls down. I feel I should be more surprised. Go to Plan C: Strike everybody out and hit three home runs. Hit into fielder's choice instead. Puzzling.

Top of 3rd: Take mound still troubled by not living up to own standards on offense. Only strike out one guy in 1-2-3 inning. Revolting. As I've heard people tell other people, this game will humble you.

Bottom of 3rd: My teammates' inability to score runs is temporarily eclipsed by Nationals' inability to field. I have a one-run lead. Such bounty — perhaps I was traded and didn't notice? Teammates fail to score runner from third with none out. Guess I haven't been traded after all. Begin to tell myself I'm only one man, stop. Because limitations are loser talk. Set up lab for purposes of cloning self. After that debacle in St. Louis, it could be our only chance. Find Tatis in clubhouse, Googling “Citi Field” and “outfield dimensions” and “architect” with murder in his eyes.

Top of 4th: Allow hit. This annoys me, so I strike out Dukes again.

Bottom of 4th: Find unnamed teammate lost in clubhouse tunnel due to batting helmet facing wrong direction. This does not bode well even by low standards for Mets with runners in scoring position. Get on base. Running toward second after Castillo single, have two thoughts at once. One is new hypothesis about string theory that suggests intriguing possibilities about ultimate fate of spacetime. To be specific, when considering the product space of a five-dimensional Anti de Sitter space and a five-sphere … sorry, I forget you guys aren't interested in that stuff. Anyway, the other thought is “Wow, Luis Castillo is the greatest offensive weapon on the 2009 Mets.” Exquisite strangeness of both thoughts leads me to stray too far past second. Am tagged out. Small prize to pay for 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics. Oh, and run scores. A crooked number? For me?

Top of 5th: Remember line from “Bull Durham” that strikeouts are fascist. Decide to eschew them for an inning in honor of Ron Shelton's valentine to the greatest game of all. A private tribute. I live for the small moments, too.

Bottom of 5th: Now Tatis is Googling “chloroform” and “oil drum” and “shovel.” See that this will end badly, conduct quick seminar in Buddhist teachings, breathing exercises. Using more pages from Delgado's notebook, jot down new thoughts about string theory, send it to Nature. Keep ruminations on Castillo to myself.

Top of 6th: Nick Johnson homers while I'm pondering final wrinkle of how to resolve MTA funding impasse. As Roger Penrose used to counsel me when he could no longer keep up, “One thing at a time, Johan!” So irritated that I walk Zimmerman. Fool Dunn so completely he launches little parachute into the outfield. Ramon drops foul pop from Dukes. Restrain indignation and strike him out instead. That makes me feel better, so I fan Kearns too. Get Flores on pop to third. On way back to dugout, make mental note to erase TiVo recording of this game. Its imperfections make it unendurable.

Bottom of 6th: Teammates score third run for me — perhaps they're confused and think it's already my next start? This is out of even my control, and my work is done. Hit whirlpool.

10:28 pm: Check in on cloning experiment. Something is amiss — there are several Oliver Perezes in the lab, balling up my lab reports and throwing them not terribly near wastebaskets. Of course — contaminant DNA from handshake ritual! Make note on iPhone: Buy more Purell.

10:42 pm: Game won. Why can every other team hit home runs in this park? Continue colloquy with beat writers on new ideas about motifs and alliteration, segue from there into Q&A session at locker. Remember to put pants on one leg at a time. Seems like wasteful extra step to me, but other people find it reassuring.

11:30 pm: Homeward bound! Should I walk on water, or transport self home through sheer power of thought? Decide to just drive. A good teammate isn't a showoff, after all.

Speaking of good teammates, my co-writer has spun the literary equivalent of a perfect game with 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.

There is doubt. There is no benefit. You lost the benefit of the doubt when you blew a large first-place lead one September and a large enough first-place lead the next September while neither time leaving yourselves any slack to salvage a Wild Card. If you couldn't generate your own slack, we don't need to cut you any.

A long season lies ahead of us. All these seasons are long. Fifteen games prove nothing, but they can indicate plenty, even though we get that those indications can be misleading. If these last few days, particularly Thursday afternoon, was part of an effort in that direction, fine. Mislead us, Mets. Mislead us into thinking this listless brand of baseball you've all but patented is the rule and not the exception. Then surprise the hell out of us with timely hitting and competent pitching. We'll be delightfully surprised. We'll line up at the Taqueria not for fancy tacos but for the mea culpa to go. Every one of us will bring you the “we're sorry we underestimated you” special, each platter as hot, spicy and satisfying as being wrong about you can be.

We want to be wrong about you. Yet we have absolutely no reason to think we are.

You have lined up on your behalf an ocean of fans drenched in passion and dripping with care, as one of your executives noted. Oh boy, do we care. We filled out 18,000 of your bricks in support of what you and your predecessors mean to us. Every one of those bricks damn near screams support for your cause. Your cause is our cause. We have made you our cause across the course of our individual and collective lifetimes. We are passionate. We do care.

Do you? We don't see it. We don't detect any real evidence that being pushed all over the field by the other team really pisses you off anywhere near as much as it pisses us off. We watch and listen to what you do these nights and afternoons and we want to see genuine concern from you. Not that you're trying, but that you're trying your best. Not that it bothers you to lose, but that it bothers you no end. We invest our hope in you and our trust in you. We are savvy enough to know you cannot offer a guaranteed return on our hope. But can we ask you to make good on our trust? That we can trust that you will bust every inch of yourselves when you're out on those fields this season? We didn't see it from St. Louis. We haven't seen it much anywhere. Like I said, we're pretty savvy. We can tell when you're going hellbent and when you're going through the motions.

You've been going through the motions this season. You've been going through the motions for several seasons. You seem to have mistaken motions for emotions, talent for triumph, showing up for coming through.

Do you care what those four letters on your uniform mean to us? You've been wearing “Mets” on the road this week, in case you didn't notice, the first time you guys have worn the team name on your road jersey since 1998, the first year when it said “Mets” on a black top and the black tops were worn occasionally in what we semi-seriously refer to as enemy territory. That's neither here nor there, except I wished you had looked closely at those four letters. Do you feel them at all? Do you understand how many people stand behind you? Do you know that the last time the Mets wore “Mets” on the road as a matter of course was 1986? Do you know anything at all about those hallowed predecessors of yours?

The 1986 Mets lost 54 times in their regular season. But they were never beaten. Do you hear what I'm saying? They competed every day. Sometimes they didn't win. But they never let themselves get beat the way you've been getting beat. Some of their losses, quite frankly, were more inspiring than some of your wins.

It may be ancient history to you, but it's never far from our thoughts. Let me tell you a quick story from this morning. There's a garage where I've been bringing my car forever. Until recently, the guy who owns the shop didn't know I was a Mets fan or maybe I didn't know he was a Mets fan. In any case, after more than two decades of cordially conducting business with each other, we had our first Mets conversation. After trading a few thoughts on how awful you looked the two previous nights, he said, “They have nobody like Dykstra and Backman.”

Dysktra and Backman. Those names still come up every time the Mets are down. I'd suggest you do a little research as to who those guys were, particularly Backman. I contend the Mets have never adequately replaced Wally Backman. Wally Backman would not have allowed this wretched series in St. Louis to transpire as it did. It's not that he was the Albert Pujols of his day — he wasn't. But the Mets being run over with ease as was done by the Cardinals this week? Not on Wally's watch. Or that of most of his teammates.

I could bring up other Mets teams who worked through adversity. It didn't necessarily win them as much as we would have liked, but it always made us feel…made us know being the Mets mattered to them as much being Mets fans matters to us.

Does being the Mets mean anything to you guys? Anything at all?

What it means to be a Mets fan: 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.

How is it every time I look up I'm immersed in high batting averages? Even if the batting average has been devalued as a key determinant of offensive effectiveness, you'd figure a lineup in which six of the regulars are over .300 — Beltran and Castillo ranked 1 and 2 in the entire National League at the close of business Wednesday night — and a guy hitting .278, Delgado, is among the Top Five in RBI…you'd figure that team would be on fire, that it would be in first place or at least have a record that indicated they'd be there soon.

You'd figure wrong. Go figure.

Go figure 'cause I can't. The 2009 New York Mets are a page of imposing numbers in search of a bottom line. They don't add up, not on paper, not at all.

There's something missing, starting with wins, of course, but extending right into the way they play the game, every game, right through the most recent one, a bland loss to the Cardinals in which — despite the eternally suffocating presence of Joel Piñeiro — St. Louis didn't seem particularly imposing, just better equipped to prevail. Could have said the same thing about San Diego last week, could have said the same thing about Florida the weekend before that. There but for the grace of Johan, you could say that about every series the Mets have played.

Sometimes, as Freud theorized, fourteen tepid games are just fourteen tepid games, with 148 left to play, smoke 'em if you got 'em. And sometimes you can see your team has no core, no center, no sense of purpose. They're all swell sorts and they're all talented guys, but they're not much of a team.

The Mets aren't much of a team right now. They have appeared lackluster and wan for their last three losses, even when they seemed in command of the score Tuesday. Wednesday, at least, was not 1962 reincarnated, but if the present they are showing us is the immediate future we can anticipate, it's going to be a long, blah summer.

Nice stats, though. And nice guys. Ramon Castro's the belle of the clubhouse, we've been told since 2005. Could he block a plate? John Maine's a sweetheart. Doesn't move anybody off a plate, though, as Ronnie noted from the booth (though I could swear John used to). Doesn't emerge from trouble either. I was a little disconcerted after Maine batted in the fifth, trailing 5-1, and Mr. Darling recalled his own rookie season experience of being left in to fend for himself in a game when he was losing and he said it turned his season around. Next inning, Maine was perfect. Gary and Ron toasted this as a turning point for Maine '09, clear into the sixth…which was when John loaded the bases and had to be removed.

An isolated incident, but indicative, somehow, of the way this team (and it's not the broadcasters' fault), congratulates itself on achieving nothing in particular. Hey, John Maine retired three guys in a row! We're great! Well, sometimes a three-batter sequence is just a three-batter sequence. I'm not in Maine's head. Maybe he learned something Wednesday night the way Darling did in 1984 and he's on his way after coming back from injury. Or maybe he and we are stuck at square one. Maybe we'll keep not sliding into plates blocked by opposing catchers and maybe we'll keep not blocking plates being slid into by opposing baserunners and maybe we're going to keep congratulating ourselves for the way 80-pitch drills in Spring Training produced high batting averages the first two weeks of the season, but I wonder if maybe Jerry should have tried that exercise with runners in scoring position, because the Mets display a disturbing habit of stopping hitting in those situations.

On the other hand, Daniel Murphy didn't fall down and didn't drop anything in left field, so there's another little victory that won't show up in the standings — as opposed to the latest lifeless loss that is ingrained there with all the others that have occurred and however many more seem likely to come if the modern-day equivalent of Donn Clendenon or Ray Knight isn't dropped into this house of empty stats soon. This team needs something or somebody to push it to another level, preferably up.

Don't despair! There's still 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.

One of my signs of spring is that I have to figure out once again how to work my portable radio.

No, I'm not an idiot. (Or perhaps I am, but this isn't the thing that proves it.) It's that my portable radio is a little lozenge of silver plastic whose various buttons had writing explaining their functions when the radio was new. But that was around 1999 — the writing wore off long ago in the slow-motion tumble dry of living in various man-purses and backpacks, and now there's nothing whatsoever to indicate what the buttons do. So every March I wind up remembering this through trial and error. On/Off? No, AM/FM. Hmm. Volume? Nope — that's the tuner. OK, think I've got it. Ready for another year!

As the silver plastic and worn-away lettering might indicate, my portable radio was cheap — I think it was like $10 on Canal Street long ago. But it's endured pretty well. It has a soap-on-a-rope cord that goes around your neck, though this means that if you get walking quickly the radio starts to move with your stride and smacks you in the breastbone with each step. (Moral of the story: Walk slow. Enjoy the world.) Pop in a pair of earbuds and you can listen to the game relatively unobtrusively, or drop one earbud to conduct a conversation of sorts (at least at a Lame Husband level of competence) or make a phone call. I mastered all this long ago, making it part of my Mets routine.

Except its day has passed.

I was trying to solve another problem when I bought the MLB At Bat app for my iPhone. My old job was in a newsroom, and I had a TV on my desk, one that was usually on CNN but could be quietly switched to SNY for afternoon games. My new office has no TVs and radio reception is iffy if you're not right by a window, so I figured that MLB At Bat's animations of pitches and game summaries might be the thing for keeping track of the game. (Shades of my old Motorola SportsTrax, which let you keep track of every game and offered audio cues to your own team. The grand slam noise was quite something.)

I didn't realize that MLB At Bat also has Gameday Audio — for every team. Or that videos of key plays get queued up as the game goes along — it's like watching a little TV when you've got WiFi, and pretty good even on 3G. So I can listen to the FAN whereever I can get a cell signal. Or switch to the enemy broadcast. Or listen to Rangers-Mariners just because. Or review how the game has unfolded if I get to it late. Or check if the pitcher is hitting his spots by peering at the pitch chart for this at-bat. Or check for video of how the Nats scored a run, if the Nats should score a run. It's not just that all this fits in my pocket — it's that it was already in my pocket. I'm still getting used to this — it's like a little piece of the Jetsons come true.

You can guess the rest: My faithful little silver radio has barely emerged from the backpack this spring. On the cusp of May, its buttons remain mysterious.

I'm normally the guy who's all for Progress without asking too many questions, whether Progress means Carlos Gomez or Citi Field. But I confess to a twinge of sadness here. The radio did its job well for good seasons and bad, chronicling the adventures and misadventures of Carlos Beltran and David Wright and Pedro Martinez and Mike Piazza (catcher) and Pat Mahomes and Kevin Appier and Tsuyoshi Shinjo and David Newhan and Mike Piazza (first baseman). But then Radio came to Spring Training '09 and saw he'd been replaced by a rookie who could do everything he did as part of warmups. The kid was like Albert Pujols crossed with Johan Santana, skills-wise, and that was that. Radio hadn't just been Wally Pipp'd; he'd been reinvented right out of the game.

MLB At Bat is one of those technological moments that are promised incessantly but actually happen pretty rarely: an instantly obvious Before and After. The moment I saw what it could do, I realized from now on this was how I'd keep track of the Mets when there was no TV. But I see the tiniest of reasons to keep the old silver bullet on the roster. MLB At Bat gobbles battery power like I inhale Shackburgers, and doing something else on the iPhone (like, say, using it to talk with somebody) shutters and silences it. I imagine these things will be taken care of matter-of-factly soon enough, wrinkles erased by application of software Botox, but for now they're enough to give the old radio a stay of execution. And that makes me happy.

I sense those who really, really love Citi Field off the bat are, in essence, Homer in the episode of The Simpsons when he angered at the high prices and crappy merchandise he continually encountered at the Kwik-E-Mart. But it was all Homer knew, so he put up with it. “If he discovers the discount supermarket next door,” Apu thought to himself, “all is lost.” Citi Field is unsurpassedly awesome if you never went anywhere but Shea or haven't taken a baseball road trip that didn't involve the Vet.

We hopeless romantics in the crowd liked to believe Shea Stadium and the New York Mets represented one another perfectly: too often a ramshackle 71-91 proposition that discouraged you for months at a clip, yet pulsating with enough heart, soul and electrical current built into the recesses of its infrastructure to produce a 97-66 charge we'd never forget. In that sense, Citi Field is a perfect reflection of the Mets as we've come to know them of late: promising a ton, delivering somewhat less and leaving you with the impression that they think they deserve all kinds of credit for coming relatively close to their goal.

Meet 88-74 Park.

That's Citi Field to me at this early stage of its existence (and who wouldn't want to be judged at the ripe old age of six games?). It's pretty good, sometimes very good, ultimately not the most incredible place I've ever been. An 88-74 Mets season — 1997, for instance — can be a great deal of fun, offer occasional surprises and feel extremely invigorating. An 88-74 Mets season — 1998, for instance — can also put you on edge, fail to provide exactly what you need and come up a little short here and there. But 88-74 isn't dreadful by any means. It's definitely above average. An 88-74 Park, unlike an 88-74 Mets season — 2007, for instance — probably won't collapse on you.

Just as you sometimes know by instinct that you've passed through the turnstiles of a remarkable season, you also know when you've come upon a singular ballpark. I knew when I arrived outside Pac Bell in the summer of 2001 and inside Comiskey Park in the summer of 1989 and on the other side of the warehouse at Camden Yards on a brilliant spring day in 1994 that I was somewhere fantastic, the kind of place I'd dream about in my idle moments for years to come. I just knew. When I stepped foot inside Keyspan Park for the first time, I began to wonder, quite seriously, if it would be feasible to move to Coney Island, work the afternoon shift at Nathan's and then spend my evenings watching the sunset reflect on the Atlantic as those circular neon lights beamed to full power (this became my retirement plan for a while, actually). After one trip to PNC Park, I honestly decided that if I ever became what they call financially comfortable that I'd buy season tickets for the Pirates and fly in for weekend series just to sit there for a few hours every couple of weeks. I never became financially comfortable but I haven't fallen out of love with PNC Park.

I haven't fallen in love with Citi Field, not at first sight, not after several sights. I can see us falling into an abiding like over time, getting used to each other, depending on each other for company, feeling each other out until we feel we're reasonably certain we can trust each other. But I'm not in love with Citi Field. Half of that is me, obviously. I brought way too much baggage to its Rotunda gate to let down my guard so easily. Half of that, though, is it.

This is not a lovable ballpark. It's likable enough, as a future president once said of his secretary of state to be, but it's not warm and fuzzy. Maybe the old place wasn't going to be your lifetime sweetheart if you weren't predisposed to see it and feel it that way, but nobody after the giddiness of April 17, 1964 wore off would have referred to World Class Shea Stadium. World Class Citi Field is what we heard for three years. It was overkill. High-functioning would have been enough to draw us in. After Shea's many foibles, functional would have been plenty to sell us. We would have gotten it. “Come to the ballpark that works” would have been an excellent pitch. “The bathrooms won't flood, we'll have paper towels, we won't stick our hands out for tips, we won't take your bottlecap, we'll ready your pretzels and we won't assault your senses with loud, warped nonsense over the PA.” If that was Citi Field's stated rationale from jump street, I would have jumped in with both feet.

The things I liked about Shea Stadium I loved. And the things I didn't like about Shea Stadium I loved to complain about. They fixed a lot of what was wrong with the Shea experience at Shea inside Citi Field. I'm elated to give up my old complaints. I realized Saturday I could stop hiding spare bottlecaps on my person before heading to the game. They weren't going to take my bottlecap! I didn't have to keep a single between my fingers should an usher and a rag emerge from a shadow to show me a seat that was numbered clearly. I could clap my hands on my own steam, not because “everybody” was instructed to. I'm happy to stop complaining about what I hated from Shea Stadium. I appreciate that somebody somewhere figured out a few simple ways of making going to a game more pleasant and, just as importantly, less unpleasant.

And the food is indeed to die for rather than from. Nobody doesn't love the food. I've never encountered so many answers to “how was the game?” that started with “I had the pulled pork sandwich.” It's a 180 from “Olerud lashed a double, scoring Rickey and Fonzie, we all went crazy and oh, by the way, I didn't get ptomaine poisoning.” Mind you, I wouldn't stand in an interminable line for a kidney unless I absolutely, positively needed one, so I haven't sampled some of the more celebrated menu items where innings go by while your burger is created, but I am enchanted by what I've chewed to date. I particularly like the World's Fare Market because its goods are not just delicious but just a grab away. Stephanie and I split a Mets cupcake from the WFM at the preseason workout, so now when I'm going to Citi Field, she asks, “Can you bring home one of those cupcakes?”

When was the last time anybody asked you to bring back food from a Mets game? Unless it was for a fraternity prank?

Food ain't really why you go to a ballgame, so I wouldn't say I love it as much as I like it. There's lots to like. Because I think you should have freedom of movement in general in this world, I like that last Saturday when I wanted to meet up with some of my favorite fellow bloggers before the game, there was a place to do it, down 42 way, without fear of being moved along. I like the Rotunda just fine, I certainly respect the reasoning behind it even if it feels like we've been assigned social studies homework when all we're trying to do is go to a baseball game. I'm really, really liking that bridge, where I spent several minutes leaning back and chatting with a friend I bumped into prior to heading to my perfectly lovely green seat Saturday. I like the vantage point; I like that it represents a landmark between left and right fields, thus a You Are Here for where you are; I like the view behind me (the old Apple), before me (the field) and above me (the stands, the sun, the planes).

I like that the bridge and its environs inadvertently forced me into an odd situation when my friend and I parted ways. The national anthem had begun. I wanted to get moving, stop by the dividerless men's room — don't like that — and the World's Fare. At Shea, if I had places to go before first pitch and the anthem was underway, it was little more than background noise in the concourse. Out there, at Citi Field, most people stopped whatever they were doing, removed their caps as instructed (I could do without the stage direction) and stood at attention. I found myself walking around and realizing what was going on and stopped myself. Even though I really had to go to the bathroom, even though I wanted to make my purchase, even though I needed to hustle up to the Promenade, it felt right to pause among my fellow Mets fans for the bombs bursting in air, et al.

Lots to like, enough to doubt. I have my doubts that we're going to see enough of the field to fully inform us, whether it's because of obstructions or blind spots (formed by the obstructing nature of certain angles of the building). I doubt we're ever going to be sated by the Mets Quotient of the Mets' home park. This is a separate post (hell, it's ten separate posts, several of which I've already written), but there are so many ways to emphasize the nearly half-century the Mets have already put on the wall, yet the Mets have been bizarrely determined to leave their wall blank for as long as they can. I doubt many Mets fans care as I do, but I doubt we'll ever see any substantial evidence that the Brooklyn Dodgers had company representing New York National League baseball before there were Mets. I saw three older men in NY Giants caps in the Rotunda. I exchanged the briefest of simpatico with one of them. His expression was one of dismay, but I could be projecting my feelings onto his face…though I don't think I was. And whatever happened to the setting highlight to be known as “Coogan's Landing” anyway?

I can't speak definitively to the sense that fans aren't or will never be as raucous as they were at Shea. I've been to two games, one of them terrible, one of them gripping. It's not a decent sample. But I am convinced we have raised a generation of Mets fans that requires an electronic tickle to get a decent LET'S GO METS! chant going (and, by the way, that rather statist LET'S GO METS sign above CitiVision puts me in mind of The Office when generally unsmiling Dwight was placed on the party planning committee and he mirthlessly hung nothing more than a plaintive IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY. sign in the conference room). I feel liberated from a surfeit of dopey audio cues for when to cheer, but the audience for Mets-Brewers on Saturday seemed unmoved to act and react when its team could use a shove. Only when the video board got involved did they roar. The wave, however, started organically; oy.

While the Promenade's Upper Deck/Mezzanine hybrid is aesthetically pleasing, it's not paradise up there, not quite, not yet. I'm not complaining about the revolution in legroom, but I feel a bit disconnected from everybody else. Yes, there are those I'd have paid a premium from whom to be disconnected in the Upper Deck, but there was a “we're all in it together” vibe in the parking lot formerly known as Shea Stadium. I'm not quite feeling it in two dates at the Prom, though it's only two and neither game has been an exhilarating 10-9 slugfest. It is disconcerting how far above and below I am from adjacent rows, though the cupholders are nice. It is more comfortable, though I don't remember feeling exquisitely squeezed at Shea. Ah, let's err on the side of comfort — and structural integrity, too. Still, it is my habit to semi-consciously bop along to “Lazy Mary” and feel the ballpark earth move under my feet. When I did so Saturday, it literally didn't feel right. When you shook your groove thing at Shea, Shea shook with you. It didn't take a ten-run inning to turn Shea into a shake shack. It took simply getting up and stretching. It's probably safer this way, but I kind of missed the specter of instability.

I watched the Saturday game and nothing but the Saturday game, which is to say I did not roam as I did Thursday. I could see Johan just fine. If I had gotten up to check out the mini-food court on Promenade, I wouldn't have seen anything. There are no monitors back there, which seemed strange when I noticed this afterwards. It's also a little offensive that after being told a club existed on every level — Excelsior! Empire! Caesars! Is this a ballpark or Plato's Retreat? — that every level's club requires a special ticket, and I never seem to have one. This is one of those situations where if you didn't situate it so tantalizingly in my midst I wouldn't want in, but you did and I do, if just for a look-see. A little too much exclusivity at the top of the park. A little schleppy getting down the stairs when all was over. And to echo Dana Brand's comprehensive spiritual overview on another matter I noticed but couldn't quite identify why it bothered me, the disembodied clang of Cow-Bell Man was downright spooky. (While the sudden reappearance of “Sweet Caroline,” pretty obviously detested by half the house, is simply mystifying.)

I'll confess to one change of opinion from where I was during the runup to World Class Citi Field, and I point to it, à la Terence Mann in Field of Dreams, as someone who was the East Coast distributor of Shea Stadium attachment. I wanted them to keep Shea alongside Citi. I had this idea that it was too beautiful to lose and marginally functional enough to maintain in some small way. As I sat and stared down toward the mound while Santana and Gallardo exchanged zeroes, I realized, no, that was silly. Romantic but silly. These people here, at Citi Field, they weren't looking back toward Shea. Even I'm doing it less and less. Nevertheless, and perhaps this should be filed under the Mets and their expertly hidden history, I am amazed at how intent the Mets were on making Citi Field the UnShea. Lots of good reasons to do that, as catalogued above, but they really must have hated where they were. Yeah, there's the Apple and the Skyline, but that's found art at this point. Otherwise, I don't think there are five words officially sanctioned at Citi Field that you'd hear as a matter of course at Shea Stadium. Even the rows have numbers instead of letters. If they could sell dogs hot instead of hot dogs, they'd do it.

The New York Mets are a long-running series that its producers determined needed a major recast. Out went one of its old characters, in came a new one. They gave the old character a memorable farewell story arc. The new character is going to need time to establish itself. Mike Farrell took over for Wayne Rogers, Kirstie Alley replaced Shelley Long and Citi Field is succeeding Shea Stadium. It's a different character and we will discover its character. As pretty as it is, I don't know what it's all about, probably because it's not about anything yet. When Stephanie and I were planning our wedding, we discussed a First Dance song. I played her one she didn't know but that I thought fit the occasion perfectly, “You're A Special Part Of Me” by Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye. Her response was, “That song means nothing to me.” Right now I feel the same way about Citi Field. It's not a special part of me. That's not a knock, it's a fact. I've just been introduced to its melody. The lyrics will come eventually.

Sometimes it'll be great. Sometimes it'll suck. One way or another, it'll be the Mets.

Good reading between homestands can be found between the covers 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. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

After we lost that mildly disgusting 2-1 game to the Marlins, a friend offered sympathies. My response: “I don't know if you do this, but for me early April is Baseball Honeymoon — I'm so happy that my nights and days have normal structure again that losses don't particularly rattle me. And then it's April 26th and I'm like, 'Goddamnit, how the hell are we 5-13? This sucks!' But until then, I'm good.”

The 6-6 Mets are mathematically safe from a 5-13 record, and I'm still in my Baseball Honeymoon. But it's the equivalent of the day on your honeymoon during which you catch yourself thinking not about the beach or wedded bliss, but about packing and the long flight and unpacking and the stack of annoying mail and the bills that will need to get paid and going back to work. The real world is about to come crashing through the bubble.

Today's 4-2 loss to the Brewers didn't leave a particularly visible mark: I lucked into superb seats for my Citi Field regular-season debut, basked in sunshine instead of huddling in the expected rain, spent my time in the amiable company of a friend I don't get to see enough of, crammed myself deplorably full of Shackburgers and tacos and beer, and snagged a Super Express 7 for an easy trip home. What's not to like about a day at the ballpark, particularly after the months of slush and football?

Well, that 4-2 score. The Mets wore their classic pinstripes! Great, they lost. Jose Jose Jose Jose treated us to the first of many Citi Field triples! Great, they lost. Nelson Figueroa pitched scrappily and cannily in an emergency start! Great, they lost. (And poor Figgy got DFA'd by way of reward.) A right fielder got mugged by the sun — and it wasn't Gary Sheffield! Great, they lost. Omir Santos looks like a cult hero! Great, they lost. You can make yourself hoarse talking up character-building losses; better to grope for something to say about mundane wins.

(Citi Field Observation of the Day: At his superb blog, Dana Brand has been wrestling with Citi Field and his reactions to it in a series of heartfelt posts that are by turns hopeful and agonized. The one that really struck me was his thoughts on the crowd and the noise, which so far he doesn't find equal to the Shea experience. Part of this, as Dana notes, is undoubtedly because people are spending time exploring the stadium instead of watching the game. But Dana also notes that people don't seem to stand up a lot at Citi Field, and that the parade of passers-by — nicely described as “the constant and familiar racket” — is missing, because now those people circulate behind the seats. Particularly poignant is his description of Cow-Bell Man being heard but not seen except when he'd pop up at the top of a stairwell before working his way back down and up to a new section. Dana's right — so far the fans do get to their feet less, and the constant circling of people and crowd reactions to them is basically gone. I'd noticed the lack without quite grasping what was missing. The question, though, is whether it's truly a lack, or just something to get used to that we might even come to appreciate. Cow-Bell Man and the grass-roots Let's Go Met agitators are now back in the concourse, to less effect, but so are the mooks displaying their Yankee gear, the people on cellphones trying to locate their friends 33 sections away so they can say “Yeah, I see you waving!” and the legions of dimwitted, drunk and potentially homicidal who would emerge from a tunnel and stop in front of you to stare like stunned cattle at the field. When I mentioned the lack of fans getting to their feet to my seatmate, she cocked an eyebrow and said, “Well, now they can see.” I'm not sure what side of this one I come down on — ask me around Independence Day. But it's definitely one to think about as we get used to the new place.)

Anyway, the Mets had good at-bats and hit balls hard though often in evil luck. They're 6-6, and those six losses have seen a total margin of defeat of just eight runs, which is what your average pinstriped middle reliever surrenders during a bathroom break up at Leni Riefenstahl Stadium. A bit of regression to a friendlier mean and the Mets look just fine, particularly since I'll go out on a statistical limb and bet against the Marlins playing .917 ball the rest of the way. But stripped of the novelty of new parks and new seasons, losses like this eat at you. What's acceptable and almost forgivable in April is distressing and dispiriting in June, and calamitous in September.

It will repair your losses and be a blessing to you. No, not The Collected Works of Whitman or a DVD of Bull Durham with deleted scenes. (Don't bother looking, it doesn't exist.) I'm talking about Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets. Get yours from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.