Back up a truck.

—Giants manager Leo Durocher's player personnel report to owner Horace Stoneham, 1948

The Mets need a heart transplant, a new set of guts and a severe makeover. There are two trades that will never happen, probably couldn't happen, maybe shouldn't happen, but let's say they did.

1) The Mets send David Wright, Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, Tim Redding and Ramon Castro to Philadelphia for Jimmy Rollins, Shane Victorino and Ryan Howard.

2) The Mets send Carlos Delgado, Brian Schneider, John Maine, Brad Holt and Ike Davis to Toronto for Roy Halladay, Rod Barajas and Kevin Millar.

In concomitant moves, the Mets shift Daniel Murphy to third base, call up Fernando Martinez and have Oliver Perez and Bobby Parnell switch roles.

Our new starting lineup:

Rollins SS

Victorino CF

Sheffield/Martinez LF

Howard 1B

Millar/Church RF

Tatis/Murphy 3B

Barajas C

Castillo 2B

The bench would include Jeremy Reed, Omir Santos, Alex Cora and the platoon third baseman, leftfielder and rightfielder who aren't starting on a given day.

Rotation: Johan Santana, Roy Halladay, Mike Pelfrey, Bobby Parnell and Livan Hernandez (until Jon Niese merits replacing him)

Bullpen: Frankie Rodriguez, J.J. Putz, Oliver Perez, Sean Green, Brian Stokes and Pedro Feliciano (with Nelson Figueroa on speed dial should another arm be deemed necessary)

Why would the Phillies go for it? Castro gives them some catching depth, with Ruiz recently injured. Redding, once he heals, is another arm for a club that desperately needs arms. Those guys are deadwood on this team. Obviously it's the three bigger names that will make this happen, three players with a world of talent and a pretty impressive track record, all of whom have produced at Citizens Bank Park. Reyes is younger than Rollins. Beltran is a bigger power threat than Victorino. Wright sends Feliz to first to platoon with Dobbs, potentially making up for Howard. They still have a batting order with four legitimate all-stars, including Chase Utley. Wright and Reyes are still relatively inexpensive for a while. That franchise has already won a World Series. The can think long-term.

Why would the Blue Jays go for it? They're not going to stay in first place. They're probably not going to compete for the playoffs. Halladay's a free agent after 2010. It's unlikely they'll hold onto him. Carlos Delgado is going for 500 home runs. He was a big deal in Toronto and his milestone march where he established himself would create great goodwill. That's for the short term. Maine and the two prospects are for the longer term, understanding you have to give up a lot to obtain a Roy Halladay.

Why would the Mets go for it?

Why not?

All right, seriously, why not? Where are we going with the core we have? The core four, we can all agree, includes three of the most talented players in the National League plus an all-time power hitter with some legitimate pop left in his bat. But the Mets, it should be painfully apparent by now, aren't going anywhere as presently constituted. So why pretend anymore?

Rollins and Victorino are exactly the kind of players we're always crying out for, guys who talk the talk and walk the walk. Rollins isn't as fast or as dynamic as Reyes but he brings us similar dimensions, plus more power and maturity. Victorino is close enough defensively to Beltran and surely knows enough to slide. Wright, the face of this franchise, is becoming, no kidding, a frowny face. As productive as he's been, he may have peaked in New York. He's no longer draped in Teflon. Howard strikes out more than Wright (though not much more) yet he may possess the one power stroke in baseball that could thrive at Citi Field. We've already seen anybody can triple here, but he may be the only guy who can consistently homer here. We'll be down a little in overall power, but have you seen how this place plays?

Halladay is in Santana's class. The two of them, with a few runs behind them, give you a leg up in every series in which they pitch. You have Johan under contract, you get Roy under contract. Barajas for Schneider, I confess, is dog and cat. Millar, however, comes for much the same reason Victorino and Rollins do: fire, dirt, the whole bit we're always despairing we're missing. These are guys who play to win, not to simply get one more game crossed off the schedule. At this stage of Millar's career, that's almost his sole equity. It's a valuable one to have on this club.

As for the internal moves, if Fernando Martinez is going to be the future of this club (along with Ryan Howard), let's get him out there and see what he can do. You've got Sheffield for a year, so it's not all on the kid. Murphy needs to forget about left field. Eventually he becomes the everyday man at third. Until then, let him be spelled by Tatis, who deserves more at-bats and, more to the point, helps the club by playing, not sitting. Millar might not have much left, but let's maximize him and Church. Jeremy Reed should get some starts somewhere along the way as well. He and Tatis can add outfield depth should Martinez falter and need a brush-up in Buffalo or Sheffield go kaput (though his bat speed and eye still seem fine).

Santana and Halladay explain themselves. Pelfrey's too promising to trade, thus he stays over Maine if the Blue Jays want a pitcher. Parnell's too promising to waste in the bullpen; he was a starter his whole career 'til the end of last year. Perez is too risky in the rotation. He could be an incredible set-up man to Rodriguez in short spurts (Putz is only signed through this year and I can't believe he'll want to stay in an eighth-inning role). Like Castillo in the offseason, you simply can't move him, so you have to hope he finds himself and you have to help him find his way. With as much upside as this new rotation should have, let's carry one fewer pitcher in the pen and see what happens.

There. Done. New team. Grittier team. Less talented lineup but still capable (particularly in Citi Field) and probably way heartier — to say nothing of being able to throw two absolute aces every five days. You'd miss the guys you've grown to love, but there was a time you didn't love them. There was a time you'd never heard of them. You'd love a different brand of baseball, a winning brand of baseball, if it introduced itself to you, whoever was making the introductions. There was a time a couple of these new guys weren't your enemy. If they do for you what they've done to you, you'd grow to like them plenty.

These two trades are never going to happen. But let's say something like these trades were to happen. Seriously. How about it?

Don't wait on Omar to make this acquisition: 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.

Citi Field is beginning to grow on me. The Mets are beginning to feel like fungus.

Spent a lovely afternoon in Section 509, my favorite section to date. First spot I've sat where at least 95% of the field was available to me. Crisp but not uncomfortable weather for Weather Education Day. My buddy Rich made his CF debut, his first retro park appearance of any kind. Yes, we agreed, afterwards: this was definitely a Retropolitan type of outing. The Mets have been playing like this more often than not since 1962.

What can you do with a game in which Santana is plenty good (if not otherworldly), we get twice our daily allotment of triples, a disputed home run call goes our way and we are presented with a surprise (shocking, really) appearance by the backup catcher at the very last minute? You can win, but the Mets refuse to not lose. Intimidating AC/DC fanfare notwithstanding, J.J. Putz failed to leave the Marlins thunderstruck. His post-Johan performance was disappointing and ultimately fatal, but he merely picked up the smoking gun. The culprits who killed today's chances all carried bats, particularly when there were runners on base.

And hoo boy, were there runners on base.

The chicken nachos, the gentle sunshine and the company, planned and otherwise (I've been fortunate to run into some very nice FAFIF readers every game I've gone this homestand), made it too nice a day to complain virulently or send up distress signals. Indeed, Rich thinks it's too early to push the panic button. Me, I think Citi Field should stock the cupholders with emergency flares, but maybe he's right. The Mets had an afternoon game like this last May: midweek, hopeful and eventually futile. We lost it by one run. We missed the playoffs by one game. But it wasn't the end of 2008, just as this, despite our ugly 9-12 mark, wasn't the end of 2009.

Merely a discouraging continuation of everything we've seen.

If you're not going to push the panic button, at least click on 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.

Meanwhile, a Mariners fan says Mets fans will love the book…even if Mariners fans will only like it.

On a lot of nights, the New York Mets are a pretty unstoppable baseball team from about 7:20 until about 7:45.

Unfortunately, the nights drag on, and so do the Mets. The orange-and-blue hare begins to coast. To hop only now and again. Then it goes to sleep somewhere, and you feel yourself go rigid at home on the couch or out in Flushing in your new properly angled green seat. You can feel it coming. Then you watch it happening.

Tack-on runs not scoring. C'mon, Mets.

David Wright striking out AGAIN and looking perplexed. Get UP, Mets.

Starters not going deep enough. The game's not over!

A little insurrection put down and now the lead is less comfortable. METS!

Some reliever comes in and is fine. More runs, please, fellas! Please?

Another reliever comes in and is not so fine. AUUUGGHHH!!!!

Fizzled rallies and strikeouts and it's over, the tortoise has won, and you are so not surprised. You realize you felt this marching towards you since about the third inning or so, and it arrived sure as the thunder and lightning followed the racing clouds and the treetops bending and pitching. Only the Mets are the ones out there soaking wet, looking perplexed.

I really don't know what it is with this team. They look poorly constructed and rickety and mismatched, and logy and lead-assed and dull. I'll just go for the lethal comparison: They look like the plodders who bumbled along under Willie Randolph's sour glower for half of one season and then half of the next. I thought Jerry Manuel had at least exorcised that evil spirit, but here it is again spitting bile and showing off its alarmingly flexible vertebrae. I'd call it the Ghost of Shitty Baseball Past, but a 9-11 record and a run differential of zero isn't exactly past. This phantom is all too Present, and the Future scares me.

Speaking of the past, HEY, HAVE YOU BEEN TO MY WEB SITE LATELY? As if things weren't irritating enough.

* * *

A more interesting note: Over at Keith Olbermann's blog, he's discovered another Almost Met — a guy with the Only In Baseball name of Wilbur Huckle, who suited up for the Mets in September 1963 but never got into a game. Huckle becomes the ninth Almost Met — the others are Jim Bibby, Randy Bobb, Billy Cotton, Jerry Moses, Terrell Hansen, Mac Suzuki, Justin Speier and Anderson Garcia. But Huckle joins Cotton and Hansen in having tales that are not just odd but tragic, from a baseball point of view: The other six Almost Mets played at least one major-league game in another uniform, and so became Real Something Elses, but not those three. They never crossed the white lines to find a home in the eternity of the Baseball Encyclopedia. (Olbermann calls the sad ranks of such players the Bill Sharman Society, after a Brooklyn Dodger phenom who suffered the same fate. Elias, less poetically and more cruelly, calls them zombies.)

I've been obsessed with the Almost Mets for some time, and the line I always use — because I haven't been able to improve on it — is that Terrell Hansen would give his eyeteeth to be Moonlight Graham. Think about that some night when 3 a.m.'s sitting on your chest and you know it's going to be a while.

Anyway, Ken Takahashi — if you're warming up for your debut and feel a little tight, maybe you should just go on out there anyway. Trust me on this one.

You know what looks good next to the Baseball Encyclopedia? 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.

Remember, at midnight you can turn to WOR 710 AM, when Greg joins Joey Reynolds to talk Faith and Fear and whatever else comes up. Besides, like you want anything to do with the FAN after this debacle.

We were not shown the time machine that would make it possible for us to adjust our career choices in order to earn what it will take to afford a seat at the Excelsior Club conference table.

—The author, after visiting the Citi Field Preview Center, September 27, 2007

First class is what's wrong, honey. It used to be a better meal. Now it's a better life.

—Dorothy Boyd to son Ray, Jerry Maguire, 1996

Omir Santos is no mere Santos. And a seat on the Excelsior Level isn't your typical perch at Citi Field, at least not as I've experienced it in its young life.

It was on something of a lark that for the first post-Shea Mets home game I ever bought tickets to I went for something identified as Caesars Club seats. Back in March, I had no idea what that was, but I figured the proverbial Monday night in April against the Marlins — a Value Date during which the true value was delivered by our new starting catcher and a return to form by an old starting pitcher — would lack the demand later, sexier appointments might inspire, thus giving me a semi-affordable shot at how the other half would be living. Nothing against Porches, Promenades and the other proletariat positionings placed up and away from the action, mind you. Just wanted a feel for what I'd be railing against.

I can see why I will resent this level. Because I want in. “I want to go to there,” as 30 Rock's Liz Lemon would put it. I want very much to be in da club. I won't be, not at those well above 50 cent prices most non-Value Date nights carry. Yet now I understand what they were trying to tell us at the Citi Field Preview Center nineteen months ago when I had a hunch that I should've gotten rich or died trying in anticipation of the day when the pretty nice seats for Mets games would grow out of my general reach.

This is the World Class part of Citi Field. Or at least it's the phenomenal upgrade that we were promised as we lined up for propaganda and flowers at that Preview Center. Taste of the City might be the home of the tangy tacos, but Excelsior is where they keep the good china.

If you've ever squeezed a packet of Dijonnaise, you can relate to understanding Excelsior as the Logezzanine. That's all it is, really. If they took Mezzanine, scaled it down and lowered it a little to more or less where Loge was, you'd have Excelsior. You'd be covered, you'd have some sightlines (not all of them — still couldn't see a portion of the outfield, right this time) and you'd feel if not that ballyhooed intimacy, then at least familiarity with your 2009 New York Mets. That's all any Sheafolk could want, structurally: not an improved-in-spots Upper Deck, but an objectively better Mezzanine.

I'd strongly suggest taking a stroll through Excelsior, getting a sense of the amenable ballpark view, maybe sampling some of the fare at the Caesars Club if the Mets are up by five or six runs and you're comfortable following the action on a few dozen HD screens for a couple of innings…but you won't be doing that because this is the part of the park where they turn you away if you flash the wrong ticket. The right ticket can be yours for the correct combination of presidential flashcards — that's baseball in 2009 — but you're on your own there. I'm on my own after this fluky Value Date purchase. Each of my tickets Monday night was $45, about the upper limit of what I can/will ante for a single game of a nonhistoric nature. Hence, next homestand, when the Bronze Buccaneers sail in from Pittsburgh, the same very nice if not particularly spectacular right field seat in Section 308 would cost me $60. A glimpse at the Silver-tinged World Champion Phillies from that very same longitude and latitude would set me back $75. A fan-friendly quote no doubt exists to remind me there are affordable seats up in Promenade, that for $15 Bronze and $19 Silver, I can sit in something that isn't as high as the Upper Deck at Shea. And indeed, I've sat there four times already, in the company of good and gracious friends with whom I could gather anywhere and feel enriched.

But y'know what? These seats are better. Not the best, but better. Better and essentially unaffordable to me and, I'm guessing, most people I know. Maybe that's my fault for having waited 'til I'm deep in middle age to achieve a scintilla of accomplishment and a nugget of recognition in my chosen field — or for going into writing instead of hedge fund management when that kind of thing was clubworthy. Maybe it's my fault that I cheered as Beltran was signed and Delgado and Santana were acquired, forgetting not just that you get what you pay for but you pay for what you get. Maybe I shouldn't have put such an emphasis all winter on shelter and groceries. Or perhaps I've been so brainwashed by sports that it is I, the forty-year loyal fan, who feels I've failed myself and my team by not being able to sit in pretty nice seats for its games whenever I wish. I'm not asking for Sterlings, Deltas and Ebbetses. I'm asking for an occasional evening in the Logezzanine with a price tag that doesn't make me wince hard. I don't remember Loge or Mezzanine being almost uniformly and almost unfathomably prohibitive. Excelsior, with its Caesars Club entrée, kind of is. I expect to see Omir Santos hit another grand slam before I can see paying more than I did for a single evening in Section 308.

Not that Santos doing what he did wouldn't look good from any sightline.

Read it on the level of your choice: 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.

Stay up after tonight's Value Date to listen, come midnight, to WOR 710 AM when I join Joey Reynolds to talk Faith and Fear and whatever else comes up.

Some Atlantic League general manager will eventually decide to unite Daniel Murphy and Elijah Dukes in the same outfield because crowds have always been attracted to trainwrecks. May the Good Lord have mercy on that craven GM's soul.

Manny Acta sat Dukes yesterday. Jerry Manuel started Murphy. Dukes' team won. Hmm…

Murph seems the polar opposite of Dukes in terms of personality. Everybody agrees he works real hard and occasionally he runs toward and dives for a ball, resulting in a spectacular if momentary success for the Mets. Then a ball is hit at him and, as Daniel himself admits, those are the toughest ones for him to handle, no matter how much he practices catching them instead of, as he did Sunday, flopping to the ground. “It just comes off a little different in the game — a little harder, a little firmer,” the kid was quoted Sunday.

You feel bad for the kid. You really do. The kid, however, is a starting Major League outfielder. And these games count in the standings. Hmm…

Daniel Murphy could be the Mets' next big marketable star, assuming the Mets discover the sense to position him properly. They mustn't pretend they know he's going to excel. Emphasize the excitement inherent in never knowing what you're going to get from Daniel Murphy. Bill him as the Human Box of Chocolates.

Same idea could be and has been applied to Oliver Perez, albeit with more bittersweet overtones. Perhaps he rated his three-year, $36 million contract because the Mets figured they were getting two pitchers for the price of Ollie. But Good Ollie is apparently sequestered away down in extended Spring Training somewhere while Bad Ollie is right here sucking up the other guy's mojo. At this point, you're developing a pretty good sense of what you're going to get from Oliver Perez. And it doesn't involve anybody's money's worth.

Damn, are we back to this? Mocking two of Our Boys just because the unit as a whole was bush and lost to a bunch widely considered incapable of nine full innings of even fleeting success? Yeah, that's about the size of it. The Mets used up their weekly CQ (Crap Quotient) in St. Louis, so, no, they're not allowed the standard bad day exemption for a day this bad against Washington. Bad Mets! Bad!

There were 360 degrees of bad on display at World Class Citi Field (save for the company of my friends the Chapmans and the distraction of my lunch the tacos). Dismal starting pitching. Ineffectual relieving. Comical glovework. No baserunning acumen (Slide Carlos! Sli…oh never mind). No clutch hitting, of course, but no hitting would also cover that. The Mets were no-tool players Sunday. They are no-win players most every Sunday. Where in the basic agreement is it written that, on the seventh day, they rest? They're 0-3 on Sundays this season and haven't allowed us to experience an unblemished Sunday at home since July 27, 2008, which was a whole stadium ago. They won the back end of Shea's last day-night doubleheader in September, but that was a .500 Sunday…not that .500 doesn't look pretty good right now.

Casey Fossum has been designated for assignment and let's hope the assignment involves a very long field trip. I have nothing against this gentleman, but I have to confess watching a lefty in 47 — with the modern-day drop shadow (thus making those numerals Orosco-proof) — brought back memories of the one person I never again wanted to see during a Sunday 8-1 loss viewed from high above left.

Can't blame T#m Gl@v!ne for never exiting my subconscious just as I can't blame Casey Fossum for not magically erasing Perez's indelible mistakes. But here was my real problem with Fossum, and I imagine it was mine alone: his name is Casey. It is my instinct to urge on every Met pitcher I encounter with a simple “c'mon” followed by his first name. “C'mon Ollie!” “C'mon Sean!” “C'mon Whoever!” But when I heard myself utter “C'mon Casey!” I was stopped cold. I haven't called out to a Casey since my beloved second cat exited the game, so to speak, in 2002. Thus, every time I tried to call out to our pitcher, I couldn't get it out of my head that I was futilely attempting to communicate with a member of a species predisposed to pay my exhortations no heed. “Casey! No! You're getting mop-up hair all over the mound! Bad pitcher! Bad!” Mets long men, not unlike my own cats, rarely listen to what I have to say.

Like I said, nothing personal, but I'm kind of glad somebody brought out the big spritz bottle for Casey Fossum. And that I've never had a kitty named Ken Takahashi.

There are worse things than losing to the last-place Washington Nationals by seven runs — such as not securing your 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. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

Listen Tuesday night/Wednesday morning midnight to WOR 710 AM when I join Joey Reynolds to talk Faith and Fear and whatever else he's got in mind.

We don't wait for a panel of judges to score baseball games by holding up signs indicating what they thought of the precision and beauty of the respective entrants' execution. This ain't Blades of Glory (though it would be infinitely more entertaining if it were). So never mind that the Mets lacked a little crispness here and there or weren't particularly razor sharp (or even Razor Shines) around the edges. They showed up, they played ball and they won handily.

It helped that they were participating in the same game as the Washington Nationals.

If the Nationals were a bit ragged, it would be an upgrade. They are the worst team in the history of Citi Field. The St. John's Red Storm, the Georgetown Hoyas and whoever's frolicking out on that Wiffle Ball diamond have all represented the tenets of baseball professionalism with more distinction than the Nats.

We beat them by six runs Saturday. We should have beaten them by sixty. That's probably an indication that the lousy Mets of midweek haven't been altogether cured, but no judges showed up to look down their noses from a sea of 5.7s because of it. New York took the undisputed gold in this contest. Washington came in second in the competition yet didn't qualify for the silver. If there's a tar medal, Manny Acta should fire up his troops by exhorting them to, by all means, try for the tar. And maybe go for the nicotine.

The whole day, frankly, was a blur of stumbling outfielders, twin killings, pop flies and bases on balls. A few of those went against us. Most of it transpired to drown the Nationals who, as my host and seatmate Charlie Hangley put it, were already under two feet of water. They sunk only deeper from there. I wish I could be more specific about what I remember witnessing from Promenade 532 — me in fair territory, Charlie geographically if not personally just foul — but what I mostly recall is hoping fly balls to deep left and deep center elicited a useful crowd noise. Oh those World Class blind spots! It's a fly ball…let's hear if there's a groan or a cheer…never mind, Elijah Dukes is involved, we won't have to listen for long. First the Mets were winning by a substantial margin, then they were winning almost prohibitively. Usually I derive little warmth or security from a simple six-run lead. When you're playing a professional baseball team, six-runs leads aren't necessarily enough.

Today we played the Washington Nationals. Today I was pretty relaxed.

One thing I did see amid the fresh air far above and beyond left field: birds. Lots of birds winging around. I used to sit in Shea and notice the birds over the fence. The people have moved; the birds stayed put. Nobody told them to fly south, so they haven't. The Polo Grounds was infamous for housing pigeon coops and accumulating piles of what pigeons left behind. Given how close Row 10 felt to the pigeon skyline, maybe some of us are in for a Giants tribute after all.

It ain't Johan Santana's diary, but it will do in a pinch: 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.

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.