Normally this is about the time I start settling into my long winter's baseball nap, kerchief and cap optional: The free-agent shuffling is about done, and it's a long hard slog to pitchers and catchers reporting, after which nothing whatsoever happens anyway. Best to rest up and get done whatever it is you get done when baseball isn't barging into the picture with streaks and slumps and victories that leave you up till 3 a.m. cackling with glee and defeats that leave you up till 3 a.m. brooding in despair. At least that's the advice I generally follow come Tundra Time.

But no, tonight I'm in midseason form. And the emotion I'm feeling is the final one in the sports trifecta, the other one that can leave you awake at 3 a.m. with your synapses blowing like popcorn.

It's hate. Coming in waves, over and over again.

What brought this on? It's that the New York Yankees signed Mark Teixeira to an eight-year, $180 million contract.

I'm a bit surprised I had that reaction too. I mean, it's not that I coveted Mark Teixeira for my team. (Though I did briefly imagine it once.) It's not that I particularly hungered for CC Sabathia, or A.J. Burnett. It's not that I'm dissatisfied with our own body of work: The Mets have done a very good job so far this winter, signing the marquee closer they desperately needed and adding a pretty fine setup guy without giving up much. Sure, there are still holes in the back of the rotation and at second, with question marks in left and catcher, but you can sense Omar out there being patient while Derek Lowe and Oliver Perez and Orlando Hudson squirm.

But what does patience matter when you know the Yankees might suddenly awaken and spend nearly a fifth of a billion dollars on a player nobody thought they had any interest in?

I mean, my God, did Hank and Hal find $90 million in nickels in Old Man Steinbrenner's couch and decide they were halfway home? Did they short the entire S&P 500 in August? Did Hank Paulson look at last year's final standings and decide the Yankees are too big to fail?

Who's to say they're done? With the Red Sox and the Angels acting like there's a recession on and the Cubs caught up in for-sale turmoil and the Dodgers trying to get their heads on straight and the Braves mad at agents and the Nats trying to get agents to return their calls, maybe the Yankees are the only game in town. Who's to stop them from deciding Lowe and Perez might be better at the back of the line than a dog's breakfast of gimpy kids from Scranton Wilkes-Barre? Why shouldn't they pay Manny a dump truck full of $100 bills to play left and ensure they own every back page from now until forever? It's what they're doing so far, isn't it?

I know the Mets aren't exactly baseball's Tom Joads — we're a huge-market team that's about to move into a state-of-the-art park and collect a megacontract worth of rights fees each and every year. I know fans of the Royals and the Pirates and the Marlins think the difference between us and them isn't Manichean black and white but a matter of the faintest different shade of gray. (Seriously, what's it like being the Royals and seeing the Yankees spend about a decade's worth of your payroll for a player nobody figured they cared about?) I know this is a case of the guy with the 75-foot yacht seething about his neighbor with the 100-foot yacht. (And the guy with the 75-foot yacht has gashed two holes in the bow at the end of two straight summers and sank the damn thing, but that's another problem.) I know it's small and ridiculous. I know.

But goddamn. You know who the Yankees are? The Yankees are the rich kid on your block whose parents gave him every toy but love, the one who'd give your friend five dollars to leave your house and go over to his. The Yankees are the guy who parks his SUV across the last two spaces in the rest area, breaks into a faster waddle to beat you onto the McDonald's line even though it's pretty short, barks “Supersize me!” and then leaves the wrappers all over the table when he leaves. The Yankees are the guy in the Lamborghini who smokes your Honda Civic pulling away from the light, then tells his bros what a great driver he is. The Yankees are here there and everywhere, as inescapable as death, taxes and our players being compared to Derek Jeter.

If baseball is a country song, the Yankees are Jolene.

And holy mother of fuck do I hate them.

Greetings All!

Welcome to our Mets Family Holiday Newsletter! Is it possible another year has come and gone? Gosh, it seems like 2008 just started, all full of hope and yet here we are again.

The big news around here is our new house! Yes, even in this market! Let's just say we got a pretty good deal from the city (and the Citi — ha!) before things started to turn. Our new address is at the bottom. We're so excited! We'd love to invite everybody over, but it's kind of smaller than the last one, so do us a favor and call ahead (way ahead — we're gonna be pretty popular this summer!).

Seriously, if you want to come over, you really do need to plan with us in advance. We used to say come on over any time, that we had plenty of room, and we did, but our new home is a lot more intimate than the old one, so even though we really do want you to see it, you'll have to come over in shifts.

Also, you'll need to park where the old house is — I mean was! They're still clearing it away, but it should be all gone by the time we're ready for visitors. If it's not, don't freak out on us! We're right next door!

We're still decorating the new place. We thought we might have a new banner to display in the great room, but we seem to have lost that in September before the move (at least moving gives us an alibi this time!). It was a good year at the Mets anyway, we guess. Oh, we had to make some changes we weren't anticipating, some of them really late at night when everybody was asleep, but you know what they say about things changing and things staying the same.

Things always change with us Mets! And they stay the same!

The kids were adorable this year again, as you can tell from the enclosed photographs. Somebody got a Gold Glove and a Silver Slugger for Christmas! Somebody else got knee surgery, but not because he was a bad boy or anything. He was quite good, actually! We adopted another couple of kids just in time for the holidays. Santa's taking care of them quite nicely. Alas, we had to kick out a couple of their brothers to make room, but you know what they say about omelettes and breaking eggs. We break a lot of eggs here at the Mets!

We'll try to stay out of trouble in the coming year (we seem to have a knack for finding it — ha again!) and we promise to follow through on our New Year's resolution to finish what we start more often. It wouldn't be the New Year if we didn't make that resolution…before we break it! (ha once more!).

Happy Holidays!

The Mets Family

If you've explored the upper reaches of your digital cable or satellite packages, you may have come across the test airing of the MLB Network. It's debuting in earnest New Year's Day, which is excellent counterprogramming against all that inane college football. We know the only bowl game on which to be truly Bullish is the not-at-all embarrassingly named magicJack St. Petersburg Bowl, kicking off this Saturday at 4:30 P.M. on ESPN2. USF is an 11½-point favorite…to beat the traffic from Tampa, presumably. But never mind that right now.

All MLBN has shown to this point as it gives a transponders and whatnot a dry run is the 2004 World Series film (with a generous dose of 2004 ALCS, always delightful viewing); the 2005 World Series film (an underrated affair despite it being a sweep); one long montage of great moments; and a slew of promotional spots wherein the images of players past and present assault you at lightning speed.

There are a couple of Mets in Met uniforms, which is of course uplifting as hell in the third week of December. There are too many shots of Phillies, which is of course dismaying as hell any week in any month. But then there is the final player pictured, throwing a pitch and punctuating emphatically the highlights. He's not wearing a Mets uniform, but he is a Met. He's Francisco Rodriguez.

The guy who ends the spot is a relief pitcher, chosen to represent all relief pitchers…chosen to represent all closers…chosen to represent what it means to wind down a game successfully and definitively. And that relief pitcher, that closer, is a New York Met.

He's dressed as an Angel, but that's a mere technicality. We, the home office of bullpen apoplexy, now model excellence in the field. We have K-Rod. It is exciting to consider. We have J.J., for that matter. I find that exciting as I consider it. I am hoping for a couple more exciting arms in their department so my tentative (if not exactly contemporary) nickname for this presumably rehabilitated crew, Frankie & The Knockouts, can become operational, sweetheart.

The implication is they will be relievers who knock out the opposition, not relief pitchers who are knocked out by the opposition. We tried that formula a lot in the latter stages of 2008. It didn't work.

I've never been enthused in advance about a Mets bullpen. We've had some good ones gel, but those came together by happenstance and sampling. I wasn't sitting and ruminating ten years ago about how I couldn't wait for Dennis Cook and Turk Wendell to hand the ball to Armando Benitez so he could set it up for John Franco even if that turned out to be a darn good pen. Maybe it's because the Mets have, to date, done nothing to improve anything else about their flawed team that I'm anxious to get to the ends of the games and see these stress-tested late-inning guys do their highly compensated thing.

In Mets garb, naturally.

Of course it was Greg who sent me the link, from the awesomer-than-awesome Crane Pool forum: A Met fan's first-ever game, preserved in New York Times prose and baseball cards, a card for each of the men who'd played in it, the whole shebang beautifully framed by this Mets fan. How cool is that?

So cool that my immediate thought, as a father trying to raise his son as a member in good standing of the Church of Baseball, Orange and Blue denomination, was that Joshua needed one of these posthaste, to commemorate his own initiation into the finest art form to ever spring from the mind of man. (And I'm not kidding. I'm sure the Sistine Chapel's great and all, but has it ever moved you to hug total strangers while screaming with joy? In the dead of winter, are you comforted by old DVDs about the Taj Mahal? Didn't think so.)

There was just one small problem with my new plan, as I noted to Emily in my exploratory email: “Joshua's first game was a hideous loss and involved Kris Benson.” Which is what I remembered of it off-hand.

My wife is not the type for a leisurely fly-by when there's a target on the ground that needs obliterating. “How much therapy are you trying to sink your child for?” she shot back. “And do we need to have a card for the wife?” (That threw me for a minute. Then I realized she meant Anna. Remember Anna?)

Just how hideous a loss had August 29, 2004 been, anyway? I tried to remember more dispassionately. Surely there must have been something transformative, some lyrical something or other to stir the soul in all the ways Greg and I like to celebrate here. So I started clicking.

And yes, there was something: Let the record show that in Joshua's first game Robin Ventura, forever beloved in these parts for his dry wit and his Grand Slam Single, hit his 17th career grand slam, putting him ahead of two players named Aaron and Ruth and alongside two players named Williams and Foxx. Ventura, being Ventura, said simply that “it’s nice to even be mentioned in any category whatsoever with those guys.” (He would hit one more — a pinch-hit job, no less — as a capper for a dignified, admirable career.)

So OK, that is nice. There's just one problem: Ventura was a Los Angeles Dodger at the time.

Dodgers 10, Mets 2. It was hot as hell, the Mets made two errors in the fourth to hand the Dodgers three runs, and Benson gave up eight in four innings to fall to 2-3 since he'd arrived from Pittsburgh on the same infamous night that saw Scott Kazmir turn into Victor Zambrano.

Bad enough.

But now go back and look at that box score again.

The Mets' starting lineup was Gerald Williams, Jeff Keppinger, Cliff Floyd, Richard Hidalgo, David Wright, Brian Buchanan, Jason Phillips, Wilson Delgado and Kris Benson, an assemblage so bad that after seeing it on the scoreboard, you would have been forgiven for expecting to see Lorinda de Roulet and Mettle the Mule. The pitchers were Benson, Pedro Feliciano and a rapidly putrefying John Franco. Met cameos were made by Danny Garcia, Eric Valent, Vance Wilson and a nearing-the-end Todd Zeile.

My God.

I subjected an innocent child to 10 at-bats from Gerald Williams, Brian Buchanan and Wilson Delgado, which is 10 more than any sane baseball team would have given them in 2004. Yes, I know — David Wright. Agreed, he's the accidental dab of ointment in this jar of flies. He was also double-switched out in the fifth after going 0 for 2.

Oh, on the Dodgers' side? The winning pitcher was Kaz Ishii, who scattered four hits over six innings and somehow scored a run. And Shawn Green scored two. Perhaps those performances convinced members of the Shea brass that one day those two fine players would put the Mets over the top.

And the home-plate umpire? It was Angel Hernandez.

So while I love the idea of the framed first game in theory, given how it turned out for Joshua, I'm passing. If I want my son to grow up as a Met fan, it's in my interest not to have him stare up at a 10-2 box score, examine baseball cards of Wilson Delgado, Kris Benson and Kaz Ishii, or even know about the existence of Gerald Williams. The other day, during the final minutes of a fairly stirring NFL game with playoff implications, I sighed deeply and told whomever was listening (which was probably nobody) that I'd trade watching this fourth-quarter comeback for a single inning of a meaningless Brewers-Rockies game. And I meant it. But the Met defeat on Aug. 29, 2004? I wouldn't watch that in January with three feet of snow outside. I wouldn't watch that after five baseball-less years in prison.

Emily's much more sensible suggestion was, of course, to frame a record of Joshua's first win. Which was this game. Angel Hernandez called the balls and strikes again, but that was just about the only thing not to like: The Mets rallied for three in the eighth, Billy Wagner collected his 300th career save, and the starting lineup included not only Wright (and the blameless Cliff Floyd) but also Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and a very different player named Delgado. Now that's worth having on your wall.

OK, so the starting pitcher was T@m G!avine. You can't have everything.

A more direct look at Chris D'Orso's handiwork right here.

Thirty years ago this very night, I made my debut on the big stage, or the biggest stage upon which I was ever going to act. I was in my first high school play, “Heaven Can Wait,” playing the key role of Inspector Williams…a key role if you consider eighth lead crucial to telling a story. My scholastic theatrical career came and went without much notice, though the kind mother of a good friend always complimented my performances with, “You have real stage presence.” I took that to mean I was one of the bigger kids in the play.

Maybe it's just those annual mid-December backstage nerves I developed in 1978, but I've been thinking about the subject of stage presence for a couple of weeks. The Friday before last, Stephanie and I were handed great tickets to the current revival of “A Man For All Seasons,” starring Frank Langella and other people. That's what it felt like, not unlike Game 161 this year when it was Johan Santana and a cast of dozens putting on a show in Flushing. Langella — now that guy has stage presence. The theater isn't for everybody, but when you're lucky enough to witness someone dominate a stage (as we were when we saw Johan on September 27), you feel that just by sitting in the audience you're part of a grand tradition. You understand why theater can still thrive despite everything that's been invented to make the act of going to see a play seem antiquated.

Langella's not the only man for all seasons who's crossed my radar of late. His Sir Thomas More is the kind of character you root for. Sir Greg Maddux, on the other hand, was somebody we had cause to root against. He was a Brave and a Cub mostly. Why would he root for him considering the troupes with which he toured? Yet he was a master of his stage and, whatever you think of his late-career innings rationing, not an unlikable sort as opponents go. Let's just say where your recent 300-game winners are concerned, he's the class of the field.

Maddux announced his retirement last week, which is noteworthy unto itself, I suppose, but that's not why he's been on my radar. At his muted goodbye press conference at the winter meetings, SNY's Matt Yallof bothered to ask him about the Mets-Braves rivalry of yore. I expected a little lip service, if that. What I heard confirmed for me why Greg Maddux always struck me as a little classier and a lot smarter than almost all of his peers.

“It was fun. It was always fun going to New York. We had Chipper on our team, and Chipper always used to do big things there. It was fun watching the guys play there and it was also fun being a part of it.

“Shea Stadium was one of the best places to play baseball on the road, and especially when the Mets were good, and there was just a buzz in the air there that you'll never forget. There was a smell there at Shea that you'll never forget. There were just certain things about Shea Stadium, that 'this is a pretty cool place to be' and you're just lucky to be a part of it. Sittin' down there in the bullpen with…the security guard down there, talkin', tellin' war stories until the game starts. You have a lot of memories of every ballpark and it seems like you spend a lot of time in the bullpen at Shea Stadium.”

The practiced cynic can infer Maddux, like Chipper, remembers Shea fondly because the Braves did pretty well for themselves here. But color me impressed by Greg's response to a pretty random query. Maddux got it. Maddux understood what pitching in front of the likes of us was about (as opposed to being lulled to sleep in Atlanta). He could have genericed his reply. But it was thoughtful and, for my biased money, he was on target. He got it. He got that Shea was a big stage — a great stage, a great audience appreciative of the craft of baseball. You can't construct that quality no matter how pretty your building, and you can't fake that kind of perspective without having a lot on the ball.

I doubt 300-game winner Roger Clemens would ever say such things about Shea. I doubt 300-game winner and former Brave/Met (in that order) T#m Gl@v!ne would ever say such things about Shea. Come to think of it, the latter pitched here for five years and never remotely acknowledged that this was a pretty cool place to be.

Too bad, I find myself thinking, Francisco Rodriguez won't ever pitch for the Mets in Shea Stadium. A different mound persona than Greg Maddux, to be sure, but his conference call chat showed me he, too, gets what it's going to be like pitching for the Mets in the Mets' home ballpark. Never mind the “team to beat” nonsense that's a no-win subject. What I liked was this:

“The Mets fans, when I was out there three years ago, they made a lot of noise. I tried to draw energy from the crowd. With the energy and all the noise they make, it's going to be a lot more exciting for me on the mound.”

Of course K-Rod is on the M-Ets because of compensation first and foremost. But I like that he grasps what we're all about. I love that he remembers his experience at Shea (believe me, I remember it, too). I like that he's showing, at least in December, no fear. No fear of National League batters, no fear of his home team fans. He did pretty well for himself in Anaheim, but he characterized Angels fans as “more calm. They're really relaxed when they're watching the game.” He didn't seem to be issuing that appraisal as a compliment.

Mets relievers have heard it from Mets fans en masse for years. But it's encouraging to hear from a Mets closer that he likes what we bring to the stage. Nothing about how modern and spacious his new clubhouse is, mind you. Just the stage he envisions and the patrons of his art who will, one hopes, form with him a mutual appreciation guild.

Reminds me of a quote I just read from a book I have to tell you more about when I get a chance. One of Rodriguez's predecessors, Tug McGraw, on pitching before Mets fans the first time he did so as a Phillie:

“What an emotional thing it is to come back here and do a good job. Shea has a magnitude, an intangible air that other stadiums don't have.”

The greats recognize the great stage when they are fortunate to perform upon it and they embrace its challenges. It's what makes them the greats.