Spring training 2009 is finally here, but last night and tonight I found myself in another season and another year.

I'm not normally much moved by baseball rebroadcasts, much as I wish it were otherwise. No matter how improbable the comeback or triumphant the victory, knowing the end result robs the game of its tension and its drama — I wind up waiting around for the denouement instead of enjoying the story.

But for whatever reason, on Thursday night I knew what I wanted to see. It was the Essential Games of Shea, Game 5 of the 1999 National League Championship Series, Mets trailing the Braves, 3 games to 1. You know the one. The Grand Slam Single.

I can't tell you why, exactly. I wasn't consciously aware of the fact that that season is somehow now a decade old, though perhaps Greg's efforts slipped into my subconscious. It wasn't a sudden burst of affection for Robin and Fonzie and Oly and Big Mike and Tank and Turk and Bobby V., though that thrilling, exuberant team has few if any rivals in my heart. It wasn't sentiment for Shea, so soon now to be reduced to an outline in a parking lot, an apple in a museum and a scattering of souvenir parts. For whatever reason, it just felt right.

I was at the Grand Slam Single with Emily and her dad — the ticket stub says Upper Deck Section 48, Row O, Seat 11, which was high enough that the players were ants, back enough so if you leaned in the direction of Row P you were just under the lighting truss (this would prove important) and down the left-field line enough so there was no view of the DiamondVision and the speakers were all aimed away from us. There was no video to be seen and the PA exhortations were muffled thuds — I remember that during quiet moments you could hear the mumble and buzz of WFAN from handheld radios in row after row around us. Diehard territory for a diehard game, in other words.

On Thursday night Joshua wasn't exactly thrilled with this choice; around the third inning he told me solemnly and with more than faint disapproval that this wasn't very interesting to him because he didn't know these players. Stick with it, I suggested. You might change your mind. By bedtime (106 minutes into the DVD, which is shorter than it was on NBC because the commercials and pitching changes and goofing around in the on-deck circle are curtailed), Joshua was insisting that I write down where he'd had to leave so he could see the rest. As I'd expected.

Tonight I picked the game up from that point and just watched, enjoying a close-up view of a game I'd seen from afar, a warm indoor viewing of a game that had unspooled in increasingly cold and foul weather. I watched and noticed things and remembered.

Like the way the game seemed to encompass an entire autumn: It began in daylight and dry weather, with the crowd looking comfortable and relatively unbundled, then slid gradually into the dark and the cold and the wet, until in the 15th swathes of the box seats were empty (faithless weaklings!) and everybody left was huddled in whatever they brought to wear or bought from the clubhouse store.

Like Rocker and his constant police escort whether he was warming up or just sitting there waiting to do so. Rocker was this game's bomb in the suitcase; you kept waiting for him to appear and being teased by his refusal to do so. I'd forgotten a lot of his infuriating tics: the audible grunt of a released fastball, the stalking around in front of the mound, the shoulder shrugs, and most of all how his eyes (set slightly too close together) seemed to whirl like pinwheels when he'd look in for the sign. Or the way he'd stare into the crowd coming off the mound, walking on the very balls of his feet with a slight smile on his face, obviously trying to hear every last bit of the abuse, and you were never sure he wouldn't suddenly go barreling into the stands and sink his teeth into someone's throat.

Like wondering how many of these guys were on steroids. I'd bet $10,000 that several Mets and Braves (including Mets I loved and love) were juicing. Then there are the Mets and Braves whose name on some list wouldn't surprise me. Which leaves the ones whose presence on a list would surprise me, but not nearly as much as it once would have, because who can believe anything anymore? This line of thinking began to depress me, so I consciously shut it off.

Like the sheer desperation of countering Greg Maddux, that soft-as-silk killer, with Masato Yoshii. How did we ever think we'd get out of this one?

Like catching a glimpse, in the 15th inning, of Maddux and Yoshii on their respective benches. If not for those pesky rules, they probably could have gone back out there.

Like glimpses of non-roster Mets barely remembered. Hey, it's Luis Lopez! Who the hell is that? I think it's … Billy Taylor?

Like Bobby Valentine pacing in the dugout like a caged animal, his brain almost audibly whirring in an effort to extract his team from its predicament. Bobby was a storyline all to himself in this one, from the use of Dennis Cook for two pitches of an intentional walk (tactically understandable though regrettable come the wee hours) to the do-si-do with Matt Franco and Octavio Dotel and who was going to bat.

Like Orel Hershiser, standing beside Bobby for most of the game, as if he were co-managing. Come to think of it, that's a conversation I'd love to have been able to listen in on.

Like all the strands of baseball history you can trace backwards and forwards from the Grand Slam Single. Hershiser, who'd brought the Mets' expected dynasty to a decidedly premature end in 1988, now pitching to keep 1999 alive. Terry Mulholland and Mike Piazza would meet again memorably. So would Brian Jordan and Armando Benitez. We still haven't heard the last of Chipper Jones. A fossilized Gerald Williams would later clutter up a Met roster for an interminable period, an object lesson in how paleolithic baseball front offices can be. Jorge Fabregas would be a Met for about a week. Brett Boone and Andres Galarraga would walk away from baseball during or after Met spring trainings. Five Mets from that '99 team would become Yankees in later years — Ventura, Olerud, Benitez, Dotel and Pratt would all test our affections by donning the Raiment of the Beast, though Tank had the good grace to be cut in spring training. Four of those Mets — Pratt, Dotel, Matt Franco and the despicable Bobby Bo — would return to try and do us harm as Braves.

Like Bobby Bo's pinch-hitting appearance, with the disgust of Shea palpable at his appearance, followed by reluctant and then defiantly reluctant cheering. I suddenly, vividly remembered lecturing myself in the upper deck that if Bobby Bo hit a home run to win the game that was not a bad thing. He struck out. By the way, thanks to his deferred contract, Bobby Bo is still being paid by the Mets. Assuming the Mets have 26 pay periods a year and Bobby's in the top tax bracket, he just got a check for somewhere around $20,000 for 14 days of doing absolutely nothing. He'll get another one before it's March. Why doesn't Dennis Kucinich badger someone about that? (Update: This is wrong. See the comments.)

Like the cruelty of the game being slammed onto the unready backs of Dotel and Kevin McGlinchey, two rookies pitching amid steady rain and a howling mob with the whole world watching. Dotel was just 25. McGlinchey was 22, though he looked 52 by the time Ventura connected. McGlinchey was out of the big leagues at 23.

Like the unlikely heroics of Hershiser and Kenny Rogers. Rogers will always be reviled for throwing ball four in Game 6, with his able pitching in Game 5 remembered only by those watching the DVD as I did. I can feel myself forgetting already.

Like thinking that Bobby Cox looks really young. I never thought of Bobby Cox as ever being young — I figured he came out of the womb looking like a smaller, equally grumpy version of his current self. But go look.

Like the utter, unfathomable uselessness of Rey Ordonez with a bat in his hands. In retrospect, it's amazing how we twisted ourselves into knots trying to convince each other that his bat didn't matter.

Like the terror that I still felt seeing Keith Lockhart barreling around third and Melvin Mora's throw from right take a hard, flat bounce as it skipped home — the kind of throw that all too often winds up tipping over the catcher's mitt and going to the backstop. Piazza snared it, intercepted Lockhart and he was out and we were safe. Whew!

Like the sleepy, sad face of Shawon Dunston, at the plate in the rain wearing Ken Boswell's number. That would be 12, as in the number of pitches Shawn saw from McGlinchey, dragging the Shea fans up the ladder from resignation to rote defiance to admiration to hope to enthusiasm to pandemonium. By the end of his at-bat I was up and stalking around the living room, never mind that earlier stuff about denouement and story.

Like remembering how frightened I was, back in 1999, that Pratt — our burly, beloved, ridiculous and improbable Tank — would hit into a double play, an all-too-possible horror that I was achingly sure would leave me to slump into the soaked upper deck and stay there until around January 2000.

Like how instead Tank walked and flipped his bat in glee, so hard that it went over the stands and is rumored to have come down knob-first in the windshield of an illegally parked 1988 Ford Escort. OK, I made that last part up. But I didn't see it come down. I think it's up there somewhere with Jesse's glove.

Like the final release of ecstacy and astonishment and farce of Robin hitting McGlinchey's pitch “back to Georgia” — with Brian Jordan dugout-bound before it even touched down. Looking back, I love how Ventura tries to remain the cool, collected field general amid the tumult, pointing Roger Cedeno to home (if any '99 Met could have peeled off early or been distracted by, say, a shiny penny or an ice cream, it was Roger) and only giving up once Pratt had him three feet off the ground. God bless you, Robin Ventura, whereever you may be.

Like the fact that there will be another Game 5. Not another one quite like that, goodness knows — that particular mold is broken — but another game that takes you from the bleakest despair to the wildest glee and makes you tuck the ticket stub away and shout YEAH! and YES! like an idiot and cover your eyes and kick your feet and just breathe it all in and you're left exhausted but knowing you'll be up until 4 replaying video and listening to the FAN anyway, just soaking in it. You know, one of those.

I can't tell you when it'll be, just that it's getting closer all the time. And we'll love it and talk about it and get really excited the first time it's on SNY and get somewhat less excited the 41st time it's on SNY and wait for it on DVD and show it to our kids and before we're quite ready we'll be amazed that it's 10 years ago. Amazed, but glad we were there, and glad that we'll always remember.

Want to read more about 1999 (and lots more) in 2009? Get Greg's book, up for pre-order from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

The longest offseason in human history is about to end, giving way to the longest Spring Training in human history (thanks, WBC). In about eight minutes, the thrill of Pitchers & Catchers will wear off when it occurs to us all at once that they're tossing, they're drilling but they're not playing. Soon enough, they'll be pretend-playing, which will seem really cool for a good two days before we're back to staring at our sundials and waiting for the Opening Day Solstice.

But right now in Port St. Lucie, late winter is morphing into early spring — on the precipice of Valentine's Day, no less. You gotta love the timing. And you gotta love these Mets. I gotta, anyway.

What's the point of not loving these Mets as they're just beginning to stretch?

They're not always the easiest bunch to embrace, given how they like to turn early fall into the dead of winter. And individually, I've spent many of the days since September 28 not exactly ordering them Vermont Teddy Bears. But that's pre-2/14 thinking. The 2009 Mets commence to reporting for good in two days. It's time to think of them in only optimistic terms.

There was a moment back there during the first few years of this endless offseason that I contemplated a post tentatively titled “Falling Out of Love With Jose Reyes,” the gist of which was the guy who was my favorite player was no longer held in such high esteem for reasons I no longer remember or care to enumerate. Then at the end of December, the Major League Baseball Network began airing promo after promo as it prepared to launch, and the first recognizable player you'd see was Jose Reyes, rounding first. All at once, whatever bugged me about Jose Reyes didn't bug me anymore. I'm as back in love as I need to be.

David Wright…intermittently throughout the winter I'd roll my eyes at the thought of David Wright opening his mouth; and roll my eyes some more when hearing what he actually said. I think the last time I heard him say something of a Wrightomatic nature was, when asked about the Mets getting or not getting Manny, he dared to use the phrase “World Series,” as in “my goal is for us to get to the World Series.” There was something about hearing Wright's voice and that phrase. David hadn't gotten us to a World Series yet. Maybe he might have had he driven in Daniel Murphy in from third against the Cubs when the score was tied in the ninth and nobody was out, but he didn't.

The time has come to stop holding David Wright's worst at-bat ever against him. The time has come to stop rolling my eyes at the best everyday player this organization has ever produced. The time has come to appreciate all over again the way David Wright has turned Pitchers & Catchers into Pitchers & Catchers & David. I love this kid again.

We re-signed Oliver Perez when we couldn't quite nail down anybody better. We paid Oliver Perez too much. Oliver Perez pitches great in some big games. He pitches pretty well in some other big games. And he lets down like crazy plenty. But Oliver Perez is going to put on a Mets uniform and pitch for the Mets pretty soon. I'll be glad to see him do so.

I'll be glad to see Mike Pelfrey, one fine three-month stretch and a slightly shaky September to his credit. Pelfrey took a while to convince me he wasn't going to be every disappointing young Met righty from Hank Webb to Tim Leary to Paul Wilson. I'm convinced for now, for the middle of February.

Did Carlos Beltran say something about being the team to beat again? Or am I still hung up on last year? Either way, he's Carlos Beltran. He doesn't say much off the field. I can't wait to watch him on it.

The other Carlos, Delgado, may have been playing for no more than getting his option picked up last year. That's the cynic's way of viewing it. No cynics allowed on the eve of Pitchers & Catchers & David. Delgado was the offensive MVP of this club in 2008. Why not believe in him for 2009?

Why not believe in Luis Castillo? What's it gonna cost us? He's gotta get better 'cause he can't get worse.

John Maine was a question mark this winter. Now he's recovering — ahead of schedule, he says. Who are ya gonna listen to on February 12: your doubts about his self-diagnosis or the rosiest scenario possible?

Johan Santana will be pitching on two good knees. He was pretty awesome on just one. By my calculations, he'll go 32-14 this year. At least.

One of the happiest moments of my offseason that didn't involve remembering Johan taming his aches and the Marlins was when I read Brian Schneider might be traded. I had no idea how much I sought a world in which Brian Schneider was no longer the Mets' catcher. It appears Brian Schneider is still the Mets' catcher. Ah, what the hell? Welcome back Schneider.

And Ramon Castro. Read something about him maybe being traded. Wasn't distraught. But as long as he's here, I'll be whatever the opposite of distraught is. Traught, perhaps.

And Jose Valentin! He'll be in camp. Nobody was really frothing for his encore, but I always have a soft spot for veterans who haven't been in the bigs since the July before last. In February I do.

Marlon Anderson remains under contract. I'll be damned. Maybe he won't be this year. Damned, I mean.

Ryan Church looked more lost toward the end of the season than he did found at its beginning. I can believe he'll find himself unconcussed soon enough.

Fernando Tatis a one-year wonder? I sort of thought so until I realized it was time to think differently. He can do it again.

It's not that Daniel Murphy is largely unproven. It's that he's begun to prove himself and he can continue to do so this year. Nick Evans, too. Maybe Niese? Maybe not…but maybe yes?

Pedro Feliciano still a Met? Really? Duaner Sanchez joining him? They're not part of that bad old bullpen. They've got new company. It could do something good for them.

Nelson Figueroa still works here. Angel Pagan does also. Here's to giving the old guys you pretty much forgot existed a shot. And here's to the new guys…K-Rod, Putz, Green, Reed, Redding, Garcia, Cora, whoever else is invited to the party. You guys didn't blow 2007 or 2008 for us. Grab a glove, grab a ball, grab a bat. Let's see what ya got.

There'll be plenty of time to grumble at all the recurring irritations that being a Mets fan in the winter of 2009 encompassed. All the sideshows, as a blolleague called them, won't go away all at once. But Spring Training is about to begin. So yeah, actually, they will go away.

All at once.

It's no fun when the world forces you to be a better person than you want to be.

I mean, Jesus. Even with the bottled tears still freshly spritzed on A-Rod's face, this is really something. Robbie Alomar might have AIDS? And possibly have been insanely negligent about it?

My first reaction was shock. Then I reflexively tried for Schadenfreude, but barely even got through the first syllable before realizing that wasn't appropriate. To invert the title of our reaction post about A-Rod, It Wasn't Funny Even Though It Was Happening to Him.

I hate Roberto Alomar. Three years ago, inaugurating Met Hell, I assigned him to the Eighth Level, with only one Met receiving a harsher eternal sentence. (And honestly, that was kind of on a technicality.) According to Dante, the Eighth Circle of Hell was Malebolge, inhabited by hypocrites, thieves, false counselors, sowers of schism and falsifiers — all apt descriptions for Robbie Alomar, whose farcical tour of Met duty proved beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt that he was a malingerer, liar, and a bad teammate. The idea that he'll be inducted into Cooperstown disgusts me — now and then I've fantasized about making the trip up there and picking the perfect moment to be a lone voice booing vociferously while everyone turns around in shock and disgust. As I was led out I'd scream about the game where Alomar blamed everything on rookie pitcher Jae Seo, and how he wouldn't stop freaking bunting, and how he quit even bothering to try and turn the pivot, and how Gary Cohen was right to call him a disgrace, and how….

But now I'm imagining it's July 2003 and I'm facing God, who in this particular imagining has assumed the form of a particularly dour and fearsome schoolmarm. And our conversation goes something like this….

“Sit down, Jason. You hate Roberto Alomar, right?”

“Do I ever! I'm so glad we finally traded that worthless sack of quit! Why, remember the game where he blamed everything on –”

“That will do. So it's true that you hate him.”

“In spades! Why, did something happen to him? Oh boy! I hope it's something bad!”

“It is. Sit down.”

“Ummm … OK.”

“Jason, do you hate Roberto Alomar enough to want him to develop severe fatigue, sores on his mouth and throat, a constant cough and an infection of the esophagus that is associated with AIDS?”

“What?”

“Do you hate him enough to want him to have purple skin, foam at the mouth, be too sick to walk and need a wheelchair to get around at the airport?”

At this point, I imagine I'd be looking down at my shoes and speaking in a rather small voice.

“Umm … no.”

“I DIDN'T HEAR YOU!”

“I … umm … well, of course … what …”

“LOUDER! STOP MUMBLING AND LOOK AT ME!”

“NO! I don't hate Roberto Alomar enough that I want him to develop severe fatigue, or turn purple, or … or all that other stuff you said. I don't think I hate anybody who isn't an actual murderer or war criminal or terrorist that much. Because I'm not insane, OK? I mean, there's sports hate, and I really do sports-hate Roberto Alomar a lot, but I don't hate him for real. Well, actually I probably do hate him for real, but not that much. No, nowhere near that much. Not really very much at all in any way that actually matters, and –”

“That's enough. You were doing better before. OK, read this Associated Press story. And then look me in the eye, and tell me what you'd tell him.”

“Umm … do I have to?”

“Yes, you do! You've said hateful things about Robbie Alomar for years and written hateful things about Robbie Alomar for years, and now I want to hear what you'd tell him if he were here right now.”

“Umm, well … Robbie, I hope none of that is true. I hope you didn't really treat your girlfriend that way. And if you did, I hope you've had some pretty heavy counseling to ensure you don't treat any significant others that way anymore. I, um, hope you weren't raped by guys in New Mexico when you were 17. And if you were — that sucks, and I hope you got help with it somehow. Umm, I hope you're not really HIV-positive. And if you are, I hope you're dealing with it and you're healthy and you stay that way. And this isn't really the point, but … if it's true I hope maybe some people who were your fans but think they hate people with AIDS think about that now and realize they don't, so that at least some good comes of something so awful.”

“Is that it?”

“Yeah, I think so. Um, was that OK?”

“It will do. I think you actually meant that, Jason.”

“You know what? I think I did, too.”

“OK then. You can go.”

“OK. Thanks. But … umm, can I ask you something?”

“What is it?”

“Is there anything wrong with Luis Castillo?”

“What?”

“I mean besides being fat and bad?”

“Why are you asking me that?”

“Well, because I have to have some outlet for being low and vile, and if you're taking Robbie Alomar away from me, I'd hope you'd at least leave me that, because –”

“JASON! GET OUT!”

To be written by some combination of Wally Matthews, Anthony Rieber, John Harper, Joel Sherman, Mark Herrmann, Filip Bondy, Harvey Araton, Bill Madden and Bob Klapisch before too long, I'm sure.

The Mets have remained conspicuously silent during the Alex Rodriguez saga. One wonders what they are hiding.

Nothing has surfaced tying the Mets to A-Rod's misdeeds, but the team in Flushing is clearly complicit in any and all wrongdoing. It is their silence that presents the loudest evidence against them.

Let's turn the clock back some eight years to when Rodriguez, then a young, strapping buck with a world of promise and the most potent presence northwest of Derek Jeter, was a free agent. It was known throughout baseball as a done deal, a dead certain lock, that A-Rod would sign with his long-acclaimed favorite childhood team, the New York Mets.

But the Mets, as they did in the 2000 World Series, were overwhelmed by the moment and broke the heart of yet another of their fans. General manager Steve Phillips covered up his ownership's gun-shy “thriftiness” by labeling (and maybe libeling) A-Rod — 25 and exactly what the Mets needed to attain a shred of relevancy in the Yankee-owned New York market — a “24 + 1” player. The Mets missed out on their opportunity for Bronx Bomber bona fide legitimacy and let A-Rod slip away to Texas.

The Mets owe Alex Rodriguez an apology now.

A-Rod copped to Peter Gammons that he felt pressure living up to the contract Tom Hicks gave him for $252 million over 10 years. That is pressure Rodriguez, an undeniable precious natural resource before his exposure to the Cansecoesque element on the Rangers, would have never succumbed to had Fred Wilpon done his job as a large-market owner and signed A-Rod to a more reasonable but still lucrative long-term contract.

Imagine Alex Rodriguez at Shea Stadium from 2001 until now. While Shea might have remained an uninhabitable eyesore, there would have been beauty to behold four or five at-bats per game when A-Rod came to the plate — and more beauty when Alex Rodriguez fielded ground balls at his original position of shortstop. Beyond the wins and instant credibility a young Alex Rodriguez could have brought those Mets as he truly came into his own, baseball would not be suffering its current ills because there's little doubt A-Rod never would have taken the steroid road he wound up stumbling on.

Why? The answer, as ever where good things are concerned, lies in the nurturing persona of Derek Jeter.

Rodriguez as a Met would not have experienced the Texas-sized pressure he felt as a Ranger because Captain Jeter had long established himself as New York's premier pressure cooker. Pressure may gather like storm clouds around Jeter, but in the end it always falls on him like soft rain.

In the case of Rodriguez the hypothetical Met, Jeter would have been his old friend's sturdy umbrella. A-Rod would have been shielded from the tabloid elements simply by being a Met, which will never be as glamorous or alluring as being a Yankee. Rodriguez's current predicament dates not only to his admitted performance-enhancing drug use but to his stepping into the Bronx spotlight. That spotlight will never feel as harsh in Queens — and wouldn't have, even if Alex was hitting home runs out of Shea in a Mets uniform.

By being selfish and penurious, Fred Wilpon may have ruined baseball's last best power hope. The sport could have basked in the glory of Alex Rodriguez becoming its squeaky clean home run king (an honor Jeter could have nabbed for himself had he chosen that path but did not for the good of his team). A relaxed A-Rod surely would have surpassed 600 homers by now and been on a pace to pass Barry Bonds in a matter of seasons. It would have been the best thing for the game since the Yankee dynasty of 1996-2000.

Now that's gone.

Can the Mets make it up to baseball, to New York? Can the Mets erase the harm they have done the national pastime and the city's obsession?

It's not too late. The Wilpons can take their hands out of their pockets and sign Manny Ramirez.

Manny Ramirez is not Alex Rodriguez and never will be, just as Alex Rodriguez will never be Derek Jeter. But Manny is baseball's and New York's new last best hope. These are troubled times, times when a city and a nation turns its lonely eyes to a much-needed distraction.

Manny Ramirez in Citi Field is surely that much-needed distraction. Manny's dreadlocks, his bat and his joie de vivre are just what we all need these desperate days. Some are talking about a depression. Manny Ramirez is the direct opposite of a depression. He is a smile waiting to happen. And he's just what the Mets need to give them the kind of street cred their current cast of too-bland-to-care characters can give them.

True, Manny's unpredictable ways would never fit inside the professional clubhouse overseen by Captain Jeter, but these aren't the Yankees we're talking about. The Mets have proved an inability to win when it counts. If they can't win, they may as well be entertaining. Nobody is more entertaining than Washington Heights' own Manny Ramirez.

Too expensive? The Wilpons have not invested wisely, it is now well known, but they are the Wilpons. They are accepting taxpayer money — blood money, you could rightly call it — to name their new capitalist pleasure palace. They are torturing the honest businessmen of the Iron Triangle in ways that would make the guards of Abu Ghraib blush. And they are doing it broad daylight. It is implicit in the commissioner's “best interests of baseball” powers that Bud Selig should, no, must dip two fingers into the Wilpon wallet and hand over whatever it will take to make Manny Ramirez a Met.

The Mets ruined one future Hall of Famer's career. They ruined an entire era. It's only fair they give us a makegood. Derek Jeter has accomplished much in his storied time, but even the Captain can only be asked to give so much of his sterling self. The next move belongs to Sterling Equities.

Back when the strongest substance in any major league clubhouse was brine (so as to toughen Nolan Ryan's finger against blisters), the New York Mets became champions of the baseball world. Presumably because it's the 40th anniversary of the 1969 triumph of triumphs, SNY is bringing back from Mets Classics mothballs World Series Games Two through Five every night this week at 7:30, starting tonight. They make for fairly fascinating viewing simply for television's sake. Throw in the Mets becoming champions of the baseball world, and ya think there's something better on?

Also this week, the Mets will win the 2006 National League East (Tuesday, 2 PM); beat the Giants on two balks and a blast (Wednesday, 1 PM); and ride two Robin Ventura grand slams to a doubleheader sweep over the Brewers (Thursday, 1:30 PM). Not that Mets Classics trend toward the predictable or anything.