For those of you who missed the West Coast final:

Phillies 1

DODGERS 3

The Phillies got themselves swept out of Chavez Ravine, enabling the Mets, who for once treated a last-place team like dirt, to retake first place all by their splendid lonesomes.

Question then: Are the Phillies that lame? 'Cause I suspect we ain't quite that good.

Oh, we're all right, all right. We're capable. We pitch with confidence for seven or so innings most nights. But we're also coming off a three-game series against the Washington Nationals, a unit so bereft at this time they should be demoted to Regionals. Last time we played a non-National entity, we gave back a 5-1 lead — and we're playing that bunch all over again. Yes, the Pirates are technically underwhelming, but we know better, don't we? We know what happens when the Mets go to Pittsburgh. We play our worst baseball in the league's best setting.

In 2005, they left us hospitalized.

In 2006, they were party killers.

In 2007, they forced us to erase history.

I love PNC Park. I hate the Mets playing there.

Meanwhile, the talented Phillies of Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Pat Burrell and Shane Victorino (among others, though few of the others are pitchers) drag their tails to San Diego. The Padres are about as dismal as the Nats, yet that didn't stop the Pads from brooming us in June, which is to say anything good or bad could happen to anybody in the N.L. from here on out. I would choose to get comfortable alone in first place but I wouldn't necessarily plan on it.

Since when does that work?

Wham! Biff! Pow! Sock!

The Mets were finally doing what they're supposed to do to teams like the Nats, the torrential rains that threatened to engulf New York had spared D.C., and Oliver Perez was looking unbeatable, benefiting from absurd movement on his pitches, overaggressive Nats hitters and a generous strike zone. I extracted some bitter amusement from Carlos Delgado hitting one over Willie Harris's head — earlier in the night SNY showed Harris in a Brave uniform robbing Delgado, a short-circuited comeback that Joshua and I witnessed at Shea last year, and that still struck me as deeply unfair. (How DARE you deny a four-year-old boy's belief in happy endings, you Brave fourth outfielder! The NERVE!) Only thing of note on the night's schedule was I had a 35th-birthday affair for a friend in lower Manhattan.

Ah what the hell, I thought when Emily returned from Pilates for the handoff of parental duties. It's 5-0 and Oliver looks great.

So I blithely headed out into the suddenly rain-free night, and what's more — this is the point where I'm pretty sure the baseball gods looked down from the diamonds of Olympus and frowned — I decided not to take the radio. Um, because I was already carrying an umbrella, or something, and there wasn't room for a radio in the giant pair of cargo shorts with all the extra pockets. As if Monday's freaking disaster — I was not only in attendance for but also kept score for the first time in years — was something that happened years ago.

So I walk into the Tribeca Tavern and it's 5-3. As in “no longer 5-0.” If baseball were a fishing trip, 5-0 would be reeling in flounder and the humidity's low and the bugs aren't an issue and perfect song after perfect song is coming in on the transistor radio. 5-3 is different. 5-3 is warm beer and the boat is leaking and the fish aren't biting and you have Deet in your eyes and you've got an uneasy feeling you screwed up the tide tables and so matters will soon be worse.

“Goddamnit — who blew it?” I demanded somewhat anticipatorally of a luckless guy in a Met hat who seemed to be looking at the TV. (Points to the Tribeca Tavern for consigning the Olympics to the little satellite TVs, BTW.)

“Oliver got tired,” he said.

“Not the bullpen?” I asked, genuinely shocked.

No, not the bullpen.

Chastened, I settled down to my proper station and the business of willing miscreant relievers across the finish line. (What the hell, Tim had about 8,750 hours to get used to being 35.) Joe Smith's slider wasn't going anywhere near where it should have been going. He was excused. Duaner escaped thanks to a nifty jai alai pickup by David Wright. And then the Nats commenced to play stupid, and that was that. But I wasn't so much pleased as I was relieved. The baseball gods had proven their point, we were safe, and no one — even if it would have just been me in the privacy of my superstitious little soul — could claim it was my fault.

There's a phrase I use almost as frequently as “oh boy, the Olympics!” and that would be “I love me some Los Angeles Dodgers!” But I do love me some Los Angeles Dodgers (!), for it is they who have won three consecutive games — including two in resounding late night walkoff fashion — over your Philadelphia Phillies. And with your Philadelphia Phillies stumbling around in the dark, your New York Mets have reconvened a first-place tie in the National League East.

Joe Torre…we love it!

Brad Penny…we love it!

Sure, why not? Pennant races make strange bedfellows when it's after most decent East Coast people's bedtimes (I, of course, was wide awake when Nomar Garciaparra took Clay Condrey deeper than the night, stronger than the north wind blowing; I, of course, make no claim on decency). Should it all come back around to another Mets-Dodgers playoff series…well, talk about carts and horses all out of sequential whack. For now, we've got one more game in which we love us some Los Angeles Dodgers (and, for that matter, some St. Louis Cardinals in Miami). Brett Myers is pitching for the Phillies tonight. With Brett Myers on the hill, the repressive forces of communist China would look sympathetic.

Meanwhile, little-known American swimmer Michael Phelps strives desperately to garner the tiniest bit of attention within the vast shadow cast by the worldwide phenomenon that is Daniel Murphy. Phelps has won five gold medals, albeit in total obscurity, this Olympiad. Murphy, as the nonstop headlines and newscasts constantly remind us, is batting .467 in his first thirty Major League at-bats. NBC has left behind a skeleton crew in Beijing to record the remaining swimming events on the off chance anybody's still interested. Matt Lauer, Meredith Vieira and Al Roker are broadcasting live this morning from in front of Murph's hotel room in Washington. Can't they let the poor kid excel in peace?

Faith and Fear does occasionally have some business to attend to, so periodically your bloggers get together to exchange blog-related news and ideas. (“Faith and Fear: The Interpretive Dance” will blow you away with both its kinetic nuance and its rococo wardrobe.) But tonight we were wary that the Olympics would squeeze the Mets off the TV in various bars and pubs, so we opted for a sit-down at my house. And thus it was that Greg and I held down either end of the couch and passed papers back and forth with the Mets as backdrop.

And what a backdrop! While we were chewing over our agenda for the night, Mets kept hitting and running around and getting walked and the score kept climbing. “You know,” Greg said finally, with cheerful disbelief, “I just realized that the Mets have been up since I got to your house.”

If only it were always so easy. I actually felt sorry for Jason Bergmann, left in to absorb a fearful beating for no apparent reason. Soon enough Keith was doing his usual blowout thing of all but ordering SNY's viewers to turn off the game and do something more interesting with their evening (they must love that in the truck), the two of us and Emily were comparing the horrible local ads that run in Kings County with the horrible local ads that run in Nassau County, and the only suspense was whether Brian Stokes would earn a rather ludicrous save. Well, unless you count whether any Nats fans would be left above the loge. If there were, I tip my cap to them. The Nats had four hits and are now 33 games under .500 — at the risk of getting all Mex on you, that's devotion, even on a nice summer night.

These games are the flipside of fiascos like Monday's implosion against the Pirates, which was the kind of game that's like letting the water gurgle out of the warm bath of the soul. Except we tend to go into cruise control during laughers, chatting and reading and attending to household business, while bullpen meltdowns and ill-timed offensive brownouts and other varieties of cruel defeat leave us stretched out on the rack, helplessly focused on the awful things that are happening to us. Or, to borrow from some writer preoccupied with something other than baseball, laughers are all alike, but every bitter defeat is bitter in its own way.

Well, they showed us. That bullpen of ours — they sure don't stink!

For one night they did all right, Smith and Feliciano in particular. Was it all because Jerry Manuel called them out, challenged them, questioned their intestinal fortitude? Because Jerry Manuel, as smooth an operator with the press as any Mets manager, is smart enough to call it as it truly is? Because sooner or later you're going to have the roulette wheel spin your way?

Is that what it takes to get six outs around here?

I don't know if I ever dreaded the Mets holding a lead the way I was dreading it all day Tuesday. Even the thought they'd hold a lead frightened me. One run? Three runs? Ten runs? It wouldn't be enough. I knew it, you knew it, everybody knew it.

Except for that plucky band of bullpeners who met before the game at the behest of temporary relief corps captain Scott Schoeneweis and decided that enough simultaneous sucking and blowing was enough.

Manuel had made it clear (as if it had to be clarified) that the performance on Monday was abysmal and that a change was gonna have to come. It would come from Eddie Kunz if necessary; it would come from Sammy Starter if it had to. I don't know about Kunz, the backpack-toting rookie, but apparently the notion that one of those hothouse flower boys from the rotation would be sent to the 'pen to right the sinking ship seemed to offend the delicate sensibilities of those paid handsomely to get an out here, an out there. Other Pedro answered afterward to Kevin Burkhardt that yes, it was something of an insult. Schoeneweis, the beat writer's temporary designated go-to reliever (Feliciano gets the save, Scott gets the questions; what was that Lo Duca said about other guys on the team speaking English?), revealed he had called a crisis meeting before the Nats game. With Wagner out, he took it upon himself to be their leader. Leader of a lost and troubled tribe at least before Tuesday. And like Feliciano, Schoeneweis all but spat with rage (albeit nicely) about how wrong it would have been for a Perez or a Pelfrey or, once activated, a Maine to be cast among them.

And not because it would be a blot on a Perez or a Pelfrey or a Maine to associate with the likes of Schoeneweis, Sanchez, Heilman, Smith and Feliciano.

You have to admire the relievers' chutzpah, acting as if their exclusive club is too good to be breached by men who sometimes have to throw six, even seven innings. Now I don't know if Ollie or Pelf or the recovering Johnny Maine could adjust to life among the specialists. Once in a great while, however, a starter takes one for the team and it sends a great message. Twenty-nine years ago, Goose Gossage had his thumb broken by Cliff Johnson in a clubhouse tiff and defending Cy Young winner Ron Guidry stepped in to serve as Yankee closer. It was a remarkable gesture and it even worked for a while. That was 1979. That was Billy Martin managing. Still, that was chutzpah.

Maybe Manuel's threat that if you fellas don't clean up your act, I'll be sending a new broom down to the 'pen to clean it up for you breached their weird sense of entitlement. Maybe it occurred to the lot of them that, as Schoeneweis put it of their arsonist ways, “Enough was enough.”

So they couldn't have had this fantastic meeting before the loss to the Pirates?

So. Whew.

I know we're all in this together, but forgive me: I needed that one. Me. Jason Fry.

Because yesterday sucked.

The silver lining of Day 1 of unemployment turning into a Shea Stadium matinee turned out to be a downed power line. And it had been a lovely day — the game got off late and it drizzled early, but then the sun came out bright and strong, without the usual August humidity. My seatmates were civilized. David Wright hit his 120th home run and Robinson Cancel hit his first. Pedro, until he got tired and his location drifted, looked like the Pedro we hoped he'd become — no longer physically more talented than his opponents, but so much smarter that it didn't matter. I enjoyed the goofiness on the Diamondvision, the speedy little swifts chasing each other around the concourse, the occasional thrums of saws from Citi FIeld, and of course the game.

And then the bullpen did that, right in the punchbowl.

Regarding our bullpen's execution, I had to say I was in favor of it. Smith sucked. Feliciano sucked. Sanchez sucked. (I know the box score suggested he didn't, but they hit rockets off him.) Heilman sucked. Schoeneweis sucked. The Pirates have been stripped of Jason Bay and Xavier Nady; what took the field wearing their uniform resembled a minor-league team and sure played like one in the early going. But a minor-league team against our bullpen is a fair fight these days.

So, another night, another supposed pushover team. Only this time it was worse, because it was Johan turning over another perfectly fine pitching performance (not a dominant one by any means, but a brave scuffling) to Vandals & Failures Inc. When we were tied, I told Emily and our friend Jeremy (an Oriole fan by trade, so not unacquainted with disaster and dismay) that we'd lose in the 10th on a bloop. When we took the lead, I debated projectile vomiting immediately to get it out of the way. When Joe Smith walked Kearns, I knew we'd lost. When Kearns stole second while various Mets slumbered, I knew we'd lost in humiliating fashion. At least this time Johan had had the good sense to hide in the clubhouse, where his agonies would be private.

Except … we didn't lose. Smith righted himself and dismantled an overeager Lastings Milledge and Jesus Flores with sliders, then got Ronnie Belliard to ground out. Pedro Feliciano showed a worrisome aversion to the strike zone, but got Harris, Nieves and Bonifacio without incident. I still don't quite believe it, but the box score swears it's true.