Mounting a furious late-innings rally to finish the book (writing one, not reading one), so please forgive if I can offer you only bullets for a bit.

• Want to hear someone ramble on about Doug Flynn and related topics for twenty or so minutes? Please visit Mike Silva's NY Baseball Digest and start listening just past the 62:00 mark.

• Want to hate the Phillies (the only serious Met archrival, it occurs to me, to ever beat us out of a playoff spot and then win the World Series; I'm not counting the '97 Marlins, though I will always count '97) a little less? Probably not, but you might after reading Doug Glanville's piece on the Phillie Phamily in the Times.

• Nothing to do with baseball per se in this Op-Ed piece, but you'll love Matt Mendolsohn's line about radio if you've ever gathered around one with strangers to catch a pitch or more from Murph or Gary or Howie.

• Speaking of one of those fellas, the Gary, Keith and Ron cabal is in a good mood these days and is offering a nice discount if you'd like to purchase some of their excellent items and contribute to the community-minded works supported by their Pitch In For a Good Cause Foundation. Use the coupon code BLOGGER by November 28 and receive 10% off your next order.

• MiarcleMets.net is dead, long live BlueandOrange.net, Chris Wilcox's always thought-provoking blog. It's got a new name but remains the same good read it's always been. Check out his piece on best offensive seasons by Mets catchers for one example of why he's terrific under any name.

• Thanks to Metstradamus for Scribbling us up. We'll pass the love along shortly.

• Belated Happy Fiftieth to my main man Mike Steffanos, who shares a birth date with Keith Hernandez and Mickey Mantle and, to my way of thinking, belongs in exactly that kind of company.

• Finally, in the cheapest anniversary gesture I could come up with, Happy No. 17 to my darling wife, who married me on this date in 1991 and still hasn't figured out that the joke is on her. (Don't tell her, OK?)

You don't know the half of it, partner.

Italy is a lovely place, full of more or less kind people who are willing to forgive monolingual Americans their spastic attempts at communicating through six or seven Italian words, idiotic smiles and kabuki-sized arm gestures of questionable meaning. But all this kindness can't make up for an irreducible lack in Europe: There is no baseball.

I know, there's no baseball back home right now either. But it's different. It started with the absence of baseball fields below the airplane flying from Amsterdam to Milan — I suppose the rectangles of soccer fields evoke some poetry in the hearts of European travelers, but I'm not one of them. What I wouldn't do to glimpse, through ragged clouds, the rounded wedge of a baseball field with a diamond at its heart.

Still, there is baseball here, in a way. Channel-surfing late-night Italian TV is a blur of homegrown Italian slapstick, oddly dubbed American movies and shows (watching “Lassie” in Italian is the equivalent of several blows to the head), softcore personals featuring vaguely scuzzy naked girls and, every once in a while, a Wii ad featuring an Italian family battling at computer baseball. (By the way, using baseball to entice Italians to buy a Wii seems like the equivalent of luring Americans with computer petanque, but then what do I know?) Then there was last night, when a colleague and I walked up Milan's most-famous shopping street, the Via Montenapoleone, and one of the chicer-than-chic display windows had a pyramid of softballs in it. I stared at those red stitches on white like I was gazing at the Holy Grail, which in a way I was.

Oh, and far too many Italians wear Yankees gear.

Entering my third week in Europe, I can say with renewed venom that the ubiquity of the Yankees makes it all the more clear what a fucking scourge they truly are. I swear, I could visit a band of headhunters south of Java and at least two of them would be wearing blingy hats with the goddamn Vertical Swastika on it. This morning I was walking back to the office with my however-many-millilitres of Coca-Cola and a kid in full Yankee regalia flagged me down to ask for directions. He's probably wondering why the weird American's Mi dispiace, non capisco Italiano sounded gleeful rather than apologetic. I mean, I get that the Yankees are an American symbol — it's just that they're the wrong American symbol, the sports equivalent of an supersized carbon footprint. I miss the hell out of baseball, but God forbid I should ever miss it enough to find comfort in the sight of a Yankee hat.

To be sure, I have access to the Internet, and I've faithfully made the rounds of Metsblog and the newspaper sites and ESPN. We're hell-bent on trading Aaron Heilman, want to employ Derek Lowe, are playing footsie with Orlando Hudson and like Brian Fuentes better than K-Rod, or at least we're saying so for agents' consumption. I get all that. But even though it's the same cyberspace reached from my desk back in Brooklyn, it's different. The World Series expired quietly in the pouring rain in the middle of the Amsterdam night, leaving me to awaken in a world without baseball. (And taking the $20 I'd bet on the Rays back in January at 175-to-1 with it, more's the pity) And now there's nothing at all.

That's not nothing as in “no baseball,” though that's bad enough. It's the Big Nothing, marked by knowing that no other soul within 100 miles is trying to figure out how to get rid of fucking Luis Castillo, or waiting to give Johan Santana a standing O, or wondering with equal parts anxiety and excitement about that first walk into Citi Field. I'm homesick for my wife and my son and my friends and my familiar streets, but it would also make me borderline giddy to see an NY in orange and blue, or a back emblazoned with WRIGHT 5.

When that finally happens it'll still be November, baseball-free as always, but man oh man will it be a happier November.

It's been almost six weeks since the Mets played a game. I went through my usual five stages of grief, all of which were anger. But now I'm ready. I've been ready since yesterday when I wandered into a 7-Eleven I frequent during the season and sometimes pick up a beverage and a sandwich to bring to Shea. I hadn't been there since the season ended. I made a beeline to the cooler door and realized I didn't need a beverage. I wasn't going to a game. I couldn't even remember why I came in there.

As I've let on from time to time, I'm quite the political junkie. These past few months when I haven't been skipping from Mets site to Mets site, I've been on political sites. Couldn't get enough of 'em. Then we had the election. It worked out well from my perspective, but y'know what? I can't look at another political blog. Six weeks from now, I will not be waiting for Senators & Congressmen to report (although, come to think of it, that would seem to be the idea behind electing them).

This afternoon, under a bleak November sky, I don't want Pitchers & Catchers. I want a game, a game that counts. I'm not a baseball junkie. Baseball isn't junk. There's a difference between what you shoot up your veins and what is embedded in your soul.

Seriously, though. I want a game. Tonight. Let's go!

Tell the contractors we'll need another shelf in the Citi Field trophy case, with Carlos Beltran and David Wright bringing to the new joint a couple of familiar trophies. Each defender won another Gold Glove Wednesday, third straight for Carlos, second in a row for David (this one, I believe, way more deserved than the last one). Johan Santana, A.L. winner in '07, will have to wait 'til this time next year for his first National League mitt o' glitter as the voters are still in the habit of reflexively handing the pitchers' award to Greg Maddux. The great Maddux, who earned my appreciation for passing Roger Clemens on the all-time wins list in 2008, is leaning toward quietly hangin' 'em up, which also tops everything Clemens the drama queen ever did regarding retirement.

Technically, the Gold Gloves go home with the players, but maybe there'll be something in the Citi Field trophy case signifying the accomplishments of Beltran and Wright. Maybe there'll be a Citi Field trophy case even.

Many of us snorted derisively when Jimmy Rollins took time from the Philadelphia Phillies' World Series celebration to take a shot at the New York Mets. It wasn't much of a shot — we heartily agree, Jimmy, that Johan Santana is a great pitcher — but the shortstop's sidebar struck a dissonant note. You won and you're worried about the team you beat three steps ago on your road to glory?

That, to use a clearly lower-case pejorative, was bush. Why would the Phillies or their fans to whom Rollins was pandering be obsessed with the Mets? our side asked. In turn, why were Mets fans obsessed with the Phillies being obsessed with the Mets? It was a silly loop of an argument, the kind of unanswerable goose chase that clogs blogs and bores boards.

But that's OK. It's partisanship. As sports fans, we may strive now and then for sportsmanship, but that's not why we root. We root for our guys to win and, by necessity or sometimes out of spite, their guys to lose. When confronted by the occasional uncomfortable reality that what we craved didn't occur, we bring ourselves to acknowledge unpleasant news as best we can and get back to being pro-us and anti-them. It's what we do.

It's been 22 going on 23 years since my side won the last baseball game played in a given year. At that moment, I was elated to be a Mets fan. I wasn't interested in sticking it to those we vanquished along the way, though I will confess to dropping by the Carvel where a Mets-hating Yankees fan friend of mine worked and talking a minute of trash before he grudgingly spit out his congratulations. I sought to abuse him as a stand-in for every jerk I put up with in junior high and high school, but on the night of October 28, 1986, fresh from a trip to the Canyon of Heroes, it felt superfluous.

Sports at the upper levels are simple: a championship is won, a parade is held, t-shirts are sold and the story is essentially over. However gratified or wounded we feel by the result, it — our wonderful collective mania notwithstanding — was just a game. We take our games very seriously and we absorb their outcomes with emotional intensity, but their implications lean to the personal rather than the universal. The Phillies won the World Series? It bums us out. The Giants won the Super Bowl? It gave many of us a rush. Outside of their immediate spheres of influence, however, there's not much at large a championship can impact.

The outcomes of other high-profile competitions that aren't sports yet tend to be treated as such are another matter. As in sports, sometimes your side wins, sometimes your side loses. Though the stakes dwarf those yielded by the final score of a ballgame — even a really big ballgame — there usually exists the impulse to cheer or boo, to raise a banner for your side and maybe stick a tongue out when the other guy's motorcade rolls by. You know: pro-us, anti-them.

Then there are those rare moments whose parameters would seem to encourage that familiar form of partisanship, but you don't feel partisan at all. Maybe you've won and you're filled with good cheer and satisfaction for the triumph of the side you consider your team, but you have no desire whatsoever to stick it to the side you've never cared for. You are not interested in dropping by the Carvel and pointing out to your friend/foe how Darryl Strawberry's combination of power and speed trumps whatever Don Mattingly brings to the table. You may have been waiting for this moment for years — say eight years, as in the time elapsed between the Yankees' last world championship in 1978 and the Mets taking it all in 1986 — but when it gets here, it's not where your head is. Your head realizes that the World Series and the Super Bowl and such can grip your imagination, but there's a difference between what you imagine and what you're living through.

And when you attempt to comprehend what you're living through, you decide that sometimes partisanship is a dissonant impulse and that what you really want is for everybody in the game to be on the winning side.

I've been waiting to announce this because like every no-hitter in Mets history, I won't quite believe it until I see it in front of me, but it's listed on Amazon, so…well, there it is. Barnes & Noble, too: here.

I think this is where I say pre-order yours today.

More details as they become available.