Red state? Blue state? Forget that stuff.

It's Cubs Nation!

As long as they keep on beating the Phillies, they're my favorite team that isn't my favorite team.

One game up, 28 games to go…Yes We Can!

FRIDAY AFTERNOON UPDATE: Cubs come from behind for a second day in a row and beat the Phillies 3-2, extending the Mets' lead, albeit temporarily, to 1½ games. Philly was ahead before they were behind…now that's change we can all believe in!

Yes We Can!

Win the National League East, I mean.

Yes We Can! was the rallying cry of the long-dormant Phillies in 1974, popularized by second baseman Dave Cash. Cash apparently co-opted it from Chavez (Cesar, not Endy). I always assumed he co-opted it from the Pointer Sisters, whose “Yes We Can Can” reached No. 11 on Billboard's Hot 100 around the time the Mets were rallying behind “You Gotta Believe!”

The Mets won a pennant in 1973. The Phillies finished third in 1974. Then they co-opted the guy who came up with “You Gotta Believe!” Co-opted Dykstra, Brogna and at least one division title from us, too. Once a decade, it's Phillie co-op time.

Turnabout is fair play then. I'm co-opting Yes We Can! regarding the Mets' divisional chances — as long as nobody else is using it in a stadium setting at any point in the next several hours.

After watching last night, I know we can make it work, I know we can make it if we try.

Besides, “Win With Willie!” or whatever our last slogan was didn't really have legs.

Meanwhile, all sincere White Sox sympathies aside, we encourage the Chicago Cubs to be extraordinarily serious over these next four days.

I'm a Mets fan and I approve this message…and I rarely approve of anything the Cubs do.

I haven't broken it to Joshua yet (or Emily), but an hour or so ago I decided the boy is being renamed. From now on he's Daniel Fry. Daniel Murphy Fry. Actually, he's Daniel Murphy Johan Brian Carlos David Luis Fry, but Daniel will cover it.

Murphy — the otherwise inevitable “Murph” doesn't seem to fit a kid who insists he's Daniel, not Dan — started his Met life as a cult hero: He went 10 for his first 20, a streak that was clearly unsustainable. But he also showed us that he could work a count and make contact, and demonstrated a welcome seriousness of purpose (there's that “Daniel,” again), all of which suggested it might sustain him when he inevitably regressed to the mean.

Regress to the mean? He regressed to the cruel, to the vicious, to the pitiless, riding an 0-for-13 streak into tonight's game, which only meant more than any other game in his young professional life. Struck out looking in the second on a tough 3-2 pitch, failing to move Ryan Church along from second with nobody out. (Church would of course be marooned at third.) Lined out in the fourth, the inning in which no hit would fall. Hit into a double play in the sixth. Played a Pat Burrell liner into a double to start off the Phils' sixth, the inning that would show Johan Santana at his hold-the-line finest. And then, stuck on 0-for-16, he walked to the plate in the eighth inning of a tie game. On the mound? Just Brad Lidge, he of the lethal fastball and slider, he who was somehow invulnerable this year despite his home park being the size of a Pinto.

Was Daniel Murphy scared? When you know the strike zone and can make contact and have made a specialty of meaning business with a bat in your hands, you're not scared. And this was the night — finally! — for the Phils' bullpen to regress to the mean. Lidge unleashed a slider that flattened out instead of biting, and was redirected at high velocity down the right-field line. It meant the go-ahead run. It meant the continuing heroics of Carlos Delgado wouldn't go to waste. It meant we could all forget (as best we can) about seven-run leads that turned into nothing. It meant I let out a war whoop in the New Jersey night. And tomorrow it'll mean I go to breakfast here on LBI on a sunny day with my Met shirt on and a big smile for the Phillie fans who had big smiles this morning. Because, of course, it meant first place.

Tuesday night's was the kind of game that's worthy of intricate dissection. But if you attempted to dissect it, you'd just take the scalpel to your eyes in an effort to forget what you just saw.

You wouldn't forget a thing, however. You wouldn't forget how a 7-0 lead became an 8-7 loss across thirteen of the unluckiest innings in inhuman history. You wouldn't forget an offense that operated on bankers' hours, closing after four. You wouldn't forget that Damion Easley had the game of his life and that it was absorbed in a hostile takeover by the game of Chris Coste's life. You wouldn't forget a Hall of Fame starter undone by the schoolyard dimensions of the playground to which he was assigned for the evening. You wouldn't forget the double plays or the lefts-on-base or how three steely innings of Aaron Heilman dissloved into a long single to center off Scott Schoeneweis seconds after the world's first intentional strikeout by Brett Myers.

You'd just be missing your eyes.

So put down the scalpel and by all means protect your vision. You'll need it tonight to see what staff ace Johan Santana does to answer a question that, at Mets 7 Phillies 0, appeared ridiculous: How do we get even in this series and back into first place after probably the worst loss ever etched into the annals of worsts, losses, etchings or annals?

Do what you're supposed to do, Ace. After a Rollinsian debacle of Rogersesque proportions, we require all the help we can afford.

Emily and I knew our beach vacation would have to share mental space with the Mets, the Phillies and assorted opponents of the day. But yesterday I found myself pursuing another order of business — one I never thought would move me to action. I found myself on mets.com, ordering a pair of Shea Stadium seats.

If you're a veteran reader of this little blog, you probably know I'm not sentimental about Shea Stadium. I love the team that calls it home, of course, and any wedge of green grass and tan dirt used for the most beautiful game in the world will get a happy sigh from me. (Last fall, coming back from a long trip to Europe, the plane dipped down over Vermont, New Hampshire and upstate New York; looking down, I grinned broadly to once again see baseball diamonds — whether razor-edged and immaculate, vaguely diamond-shaped, or totally overgrown — dotting the landscape.) I have lots of wonderful memories of Shea, but they have to do with games and players and friends — to paraphrase Tom Seaver, the architecture's not part of them. Between its rusting beams, sticky floors, exploding bathrooms, sleeping vendors, bad food, and surly Aramark drones, Shea resembles a North Korean government building that happens to have a baseball game in the middle of it. I respect my friends who feel differently, but so long as the game is still played nearby, I won't exactly be sad to see the building go.

So given all that, what was I doing agreeing to shell out more than $900 for a pair of plastic seats from the old barn? Particularly when I'm in an, um, career transition? (Do you need a vocation to be on vacation?)

Practically speaking, I thought of our backyard deck and how it would be simple to take up a couple of boards of Trex, bolt down two seats and reassemble things. The seats would add a little character to the place, and we were always hauling plastic chairs back there for people to sit on anyway. People would get a kick out of the Shea seats, and run no risk of falling backwards into the vinca after a few too many, as has been known to happen with plastic chairs and the uncharted edge of the deck. As for Emily, she kind of shrugged at the idea — you might describe her as “accepting,” “acquiescent,” “indulgent” or even “resigned,” but she wasn't “opposed.”

But of course “practically speaking” never has much to do with the question of why one is buying expensive surplus baseball-park seats. So what was I doing?

I suppose it's this: While I'm happy about CitiField, I don't pretend that it won't mark a new era in the history of the baseball team I've followed my whole life. Parenthood has cut down on my Shea visits in recent years, and I know that'll be even more true at CitiField, at least until the novelty wears off for the city as a whole. I'm not particularly worried about being shut out: Rightly or wrongly, I figure I'll get by via StubHub and friends with plans and lagniappe, and soon enough I'll know the new place as well as I know Shea, from where the better food is to the quickest escape routes. (And where the Shake Shack outpost is — I'll have that one figured out after Visit No. 1.) But all this will take a while, and even then, with fewer seats, deciding to go to Citi will likely never be as simple as deciding to go to Shea. I'm pretty sure I'll be happy at CitiField, but that's not the same as knowing for sure.

The team that will play at CitiField will look more or less the same in terms of uniforms and fan-bestowed myths, and I hope the company will include many of the same people. But while the architecture won't be the focal point of those new memories any more than it is of Shea reminiscences, it will be different, and memories will inevitably be Shea memories and Citi memroies.

Which gets to the heart of the matter.

I saw my first games as a baseball-mad child at Shea, rooting for Mike Phillips and Joel Youngblood and Lee Mazzilli. Years later, having moved back to the area, I met my blog partner and good friend Greg Prince at Shea, no doubt outside Gate E, for Bill Pulsipher's major-league debut. Which kicked off a hell of a run in Queens: I saw Rey Ordonez introduce himself to New York with an unbelievable relay to home plate; John Franco get ejected for fighting and so not be available for a save opportunity on John Franco Day; Todd Hundley's 41st homer; Mike Piazza's first game; John Olerud erase weeks of frustration with a grand slam off Greg Maddux; Brad Clontz uncork a wild pitch that kept 1999 going; Pratt hit one over the fence; Robin Ventura's grand-slam single; the 10-run inning against the hated Braves; Benny Agbayani's extra-inning home run; Bobby Jones send Jeff Kent and the Giants home with a one-hitter; Timo Perez leap into the air to get us to the World Series even faster; and David Wright's major-league debut. (And I've left space for two more months of good things, should the baseball gods provide.)

Did Shea have a lot to do with these memories? Not really, though I did enjoy (with a touch of anxiety) watching the stands flex under 50,000 ecstatic die-hards. But it would be small-minded and mean-spirited to ignore the fact that these things happened at Shea. Those two green seats (because that's where I usually sat) will be an homage to all those times — and, OK, an acknowledgment that I'm a little more sentimental than I thought.

It was a much bigger night for Carlos Delgado and Mike Pelfrey than it was for yours truly, but I'm going to grab third star from Monday's contest for myself.

Delgado: Two homers, six RBI, beautiful first base defense, a drama-free curtain call.

Pelfrey: A second consecutive complete game masterpiece.

Me: My 400th game that counted* at Shea Stadium.

I have to share this bronze with my friend Ben (you know him, perhaps, as Student of the Game) who provided my passage to another Log milestone in 2008. Ben has committed to memory every high and low of the past three seasons, all the way back to Opening Day 2006, so he can appreciate a numerical obsession.

Did I know, Ben asked, that the Mets have started 12 different leftfielders this season? I did not. Could I name them now that I knew there were an even dozen? Alas, I could come up with only 11/12ths of them**.

But I can count to 400.

• No. 100 was May 24, 1996. It was a loss to the Padres. Fernando Valenzuela cruised for San Diego 15 years and a couple of weeks after I saw him cruise for the Dodgers. Fernando cruised Shea a lot in his day.

• No. 200 was October 1, 2000. It was a win over the Expos, the last day of the season. We required 13 innings and three Geoff Blum errors, including a bad throw to score Benny Agbayani to end it. I'd be back six days later for another cup of Benny Bean heroics.

• No. 300 was July 24, 2005, a win over the Dodgers and the first-ever game for young Alex Wolf. I suspect Alex, whom I failed to convert to the church of baseball, is stuck on 1, but I haven't checked lately.

• No. 400 was August 25, 2008. We handily beat the Astros, the same franchise that beat us on July 11, 1973, the Wednesday afternoon I sputtered to an 0-1 start, never daring to dream I could someday grow up to be 221-179 (211-176 regular-season, 10-3 postseason), never imagining anything beyond the hope that someday I'd get to Shea a second time and maybe see my first win.

You'll notice, if I haven't put you to sleep with my salute to numerology, that the time between milestones keeps shortening. I've been to 110 games at Shea since the dawn of Faith and Fear. I was actually fading a bit as a Sheagoer during the Art Howe era, but this blog revived me. The team got better, sure, and the urgency kicked up a notch once Shea had an expiration date affixed to its left field wall, but having somewhere to write about going to Shea, besides a ledger, proved the all-time spur for my personal attendance. And starting in 2005, I really stumbled into a pot of gold in terms of meeting Mets fans, a second wave akin to my early online days when Jason, then Laurie, then other wonderful folks proved themselves friends I hadn't yet met. Since '05, there've been people like Ben; people whose names could fill a few paragraphs right here and now; people who didn't exist for me before this blog took flight. They've become a big part of my baseball life and they're people I'm privileged to know, at Mets games and elsewhere. The pleasure is always mine.

Lots of pleasure for everybody Monday night, for No. 400. How could anyone with a home team-rooting interest not find pleasure in Pelfrey's lightning-quick transition from question mark to exclamation point?! From Delgado shedding his albatross status and picking up the mantle of team MVP? Who couldn't laugh a little, given the nine-run lead, that the primary culprit who kept this from being a complete game shutout was (Christ Almighty) David Newhan? Who would deny after where the Mets were in April and May and June that this has been a helluva summer to spend at Shea, that this has been — as a wonderful book about 1969 was called — a magic summer?

I'm a happy Mets fan these days. The happiness is tempered by who's on the DL (if not by who's finally off it). The happiness could be tapered by Wednesday night should the next August trip to Philadelphia take the course the last August trip to Philadelphia did. It's a tough row to hoe at the Cit and the Dolph and the Mill and I have no idea whether a Maineless rotation and a Castillo-laden infield will maintain the magic this summer has conjured at Shea. I'm far from saying “I don't care,” but…no, I do care. We've gotten too close to September not to. But this Mets club, this Redeem Team II if you will, has given us more than we could have expected amid the swirl of swill we were hopelessly stuck in back in late Randolph. They've given me a helluva ride going back to June 29, the final game of the final Subway Series at Shea Stadium. The Mets are 20-7 at Shea since then, with me on hand for 10-4 of that.

They look like numbers to you. They represent experiences to me. The numbers are etched into The Log for all time, no matter that the binding cracks and the pages start to yellow. The experiences loom as my Tennessee sippin' whiskey. Tonight I caught a buzz because we won 9-1. Someday I'll pour myself a taste of these 400 nights and days and every drop, I'm betting, will go down pretty damn smooth.

Ben and I talked about a lot of Mets matters Monday night, but the one note I think I hit as squarely as Delgado hammered Wesley Wright came after Reyes tripled and Pelfrey scampered home to make it 9-0 and all who remained stood and cheered. This place, I said, is so much better when everyone is happy.

Happy Shea Stadium.

Happy first place.

Happy summer.

Happy 400th.

*There were two exhibitions and one intrasquad affair way back when, but if they're not written down, they didn't “officially” happen.

**I came up with Pagan, Clark, Chavez, Alou, Anderson, Evans, Tatis, Easley, Nixon, Aguila, Murphy; the one I didn't get was one-game starter Andy Phillips. But hey, even Mike Pelfrey can't throw a shutout every turn.

We certainly had righteous fun tearing apart the 75 Greatest Moments at Shea ballot, but now that fan voting has trimmed the selections to the Top Ten, it's time to get even more serious. You have until September 1 to vote for any one of the following, with the Mets revealing the big winner during the last week of the season.

FYI, these weren't necessarily the Top Ten I voted for, but I can't say any of them are bad choices. Then again, there are no Ice Capades here.

In chronological order:

• August 15, 1965: Beatles' First Concert at Shea

–Well, they did have more hits than the Mets in 1965.

• July 9, 1969: Tom Seaver's Imperfect Game

–I get the feeling the first Mets' no-hitter wouldn't be as good as this.

• October 16, 1969: Mets Win the World Series

–There are no words.

• October 25, 1986: Mets win Game Six of the World Series

–There is, in fact, one word, and it's a proper noun.

• October 27, 1986: Mets are World Champions Again

–Until further notice, that's the last time it happened.

• October 9, 1999: Todd Pratt's homer clinches the NLDS

–Of course Pratt was playing — it was a day game after a night game.

• October 17, 1999: Robin Ventura's Grand Slam Single

–“Siphon votes from me, will ya?” Tank screamed at Robin as he tackled him short of second.

• June 30, 2000: Mike Piazza Caps Ten-Run Inning Against Braves

–It was Fireworks Night; the Grucci Brothers apologized for it being anticlimactic.

• September 21, 2001: Mike Piazza Returns Baseball to New York City

–The only night Chipper Jones wasn't booed at Shea Stadium

• October 19, 2006: Endy Chavez's Catch

–Doubling Jim Edmonds at first should probably be listed as an additional moment.

So…what're you gonna vote for? Remember, you have until Monday, September 1 to make your voice heard.

I've never completely understood the adage about not letting the other team's best guy beat you. He's their best guy. He's supposed to be the one who beats you if you are, in fact, supposed to get beaten. When Albert Pujols homered off Aaron Heilman in the fourteenth inning a few weeks ago, it wasn't fun, but it was Albert Pujols. It beat Yadier Molina beating us.

Likewise, I can accept Miguel Tejada or Lance Berkman pulling the trigger a lot less begrudgingly than I can the Astros' support crew doing us in. Brad Ausmus? Before today, he was a Killer B only by first initial. Darin Erstad? Power wasn't his game…before today. Good Major Leaguers continuing long careers, but not the guys who you picture crucifying your chances in the late innings.

But David Newhan? Christ Almighty, as David Newhan himself might think with total sincerity in the matter.

I was familiar with only two elements of David Newhan's biography when he signed with the Mets to become the new and hopefully improved Chris Woodward last year: 1) His father is a sportswriter of great renown; 2) he, like Shawn Green and Scott Schoeneweis, was represented by a card in my Jewish Major Leaguers set that these fine folks put out. As one who writes about sports and has been Bar Mitzvahed, I filed both facts under “couldn't hurt” and waited for David Newhan to perform utilityman miracles.

And I waited.

David Newhan's 2007 was one of the least inspiring of all Met 2007s. To put it kindly, he never quite got untracked. Hit a momentarily big homer against Milwaukee in a game that was ten minutes from devolving into a Brewer blowout. Contributed days later to the unlikeliest of ninth-inning rallies against the Cubs. And if he did anything else after May 17, I must have missed it. Willie Randolph kept sending David Newhan up to bat and, like Ricky Ledee (1 HR, 6 RBI, .222 BA), David Newhan (1 HR, 6 RBI, .203 BA) kept turning right around to reclaim his a seat on the bench. His unremarkable production as a bit Met was not unique. Utilitymen — whoever their father, whatever their lineage — are benchbound precisely because they are generally incapable of cracking a good lineup. It happened to Woodward. It happened to Joe McEwing before him. It happens to almost all of them. They also tend to wander through the desert seeking a 25th-man role on foreign rosters. Thus, David Newhan — erstwhile member of the organizations of the Athletics, the Padres, the Phillies, the Dodgers, the Rockies, the Rangers, the Orioles and the Mets — journeyed on after 2007, candles unlit in the Shea Stadium window regarding his return.

He came back this weekend anyway, not as a Newhan but as a new man — a man apparently bent on inflicting regret on those for whom he did next to nothing. Saturday night? A no-doubt home run off John Maine, his first of the year. Perhaps David, starting at second base, used his '07 pine time to really study Maine's arm angle in anticipation of someday swinging against him. Or maybe he succeeded as he did because Johnny's arm is perilously close to falling off.

Sunday? Sunday David Newhan stepped up as a pinch-hitter for the Astros. In 2007, as a Met, David Newhan batted .171 in pinch-hitting situations. In 2008, he'd tumbled far from that lofty perch. He was 1-for-21 (.048) as a pinch-hitter before facing Aaron Heilman in the seventh. Call it the rise of the new man; call it David Newhan's revenge; call it anybody could have whacked Aaron Heilman today. But David Newhan singled sharply to drive in the tying run for Houston (and might have eventually scored an insurance run had Astro third base coach Ed Romero not waved home dead duck Humberto Quintero).

Two days, two ringing hits, two darts fired at the Mets' slimming first-place lead. The Mets have seemed like a much better or at least much spunkier unit than their 2007 predecessors all summer long, not necessarily because David Newhan isn't a Met anymore but his absence, though largely overlooked, didn't hurt. His presence this weekend, however, sure has.

When I received my 2008 Jewish Major Leaguers update set, I was delighted to find portrayals of Scott Schoeneweis and Shawn Green in blue and orange that was authentic and not Photoshopped. But there was no David Newhan. I asked JML why Newhan as a Met was not included (if for nothing more than completion's sake) and was told that in light of David's chosen spiritual path — he considers himself a Messianic Jew, or what is referred to sometimes as a Jew for Jesus — “Newhan is considered 'out' in terms of current Jewishness.”

Funny, I thought. He was considered “out” by most pitchers every time they faced him last year.

Well, kind of.

Long Beach Island is so far from New York City in terms of feel that it's always a mild surprise to remember that it's not far at all in terms of distance: They get WFAN down here and SNY is on basic cable. Which makes it not unlike keeping track of the Mets at home, except here the game competes with the sound of the ocean instead of whatever the heck it is one's neighbors are doing.

I hope Emily and I can be forgiven for not following last night's game with razor-sharp intensity: We had to get a comically tired child fed, pajama'ed and into bed, unpack all our stuff and figure out what needed doing this morning so we can get down to the serious business of not doing much at all. (I was proud of myself that within half an hour on LBI I was oozing up Long Beach Boulevard at about 30 MPH, in no particular hurry to get anywhere. It used to take me a couple of days to force the West Side HIghway out of driver's muscle memory.)

Oh, and the fact that it was quickly 5-0 Astros took the edge off a bit, too.

And yet how far we've come: We kept watching, which was partially because that's what we do but also because these days you never think this team is done for until the 'F' appears. And indeed, with nobody out in the eighth it was 8-3, and then there stood Carlos Delgado with two on and two out, one good swing away from making it an honest-to-goodness ballgame again. (And if Duaner Sanchez hadn't been singularly unimpressive in attempting to clean up after John Maine, Carlos would have been the tying run.)

OK, so Carlos didn't get that one good swing — he was just off a hittable fastball from Tim Byrdak and then grounded out, and an inning later we'd lost. But man, what a difference a couple of months makes. Back then, if the Mets were up 8-3 I'd have been trying to figure out how they'd blow it. Now, they were down 8-3 and I thought, What the hey, we have a chance. I was wrong, but if you're measuring how far we've come, it really is the thought that counts.