Maybe the Mets get blown out tonight. Maybe pitchers dropping throws and middle infielders letting balls go through them aren't so easily dismissed around 11:30 tonight. Maybe we've used up all Bannister-like escape artistry available to starting pitchers. It's baseball, after all.

But for now, let's just enjoy this baseball siesta. Let's bask in the afterglow of a game that went from tense and interesting (Dan Giese throwing darts, Mike Pelfrey watching bloops and dinks and parachutes dent his ERA) to not at all tense and very enjoyable. Pelfrey got progressively less impressive after the first inning (he sawed apart Jeter despite a non-call from Tim McClellan, the Human Rain Delay of umpires), but he wiggled out of trouble. Our wretched-on-paper lineup (Nixon-Anderson-Tatis-Schneider is a lot of dead wood) proved more than equal to their softer-than-usual lineup. (Wilson Betemit? Justin Christian?)

And there was Carlos Delgado. At this point, no one familiar with Delgado or the 2008 Mets would put money on this being the start of the turnaround for either of those entities. (Heck, Babe Ruth hit three dingers in his twilight as a Boston Brave in May 1935, and it meant they lost 115 instead of 116.) But man, wasn't that fun? The double off Edgar Ramirez in the fifth was the smallest blow but the most-heartening development: With a 2-0 count and the game tied, Delgado stepped out to gather himself and all of us watching (from the stands or in front of the set) leaned forward, aware that this was a Big Moment and hoping that Carlos would find a way to convert. The grand slam was the big exhale, the blow that rendered the game safe. And the three-run homer was pure happiness — no sooner had Gary Cohen got out that Delgado had a shot at the club RBI record than Carlos made it so. Baseball's at its best when the tension ratchets up excruciatingly with each pitch and foul and flashing of catcher's signs, but sometimes it's also a lot of fun when everything happens very quickly.

OK. Whew. Exhale. We don't know what the future holds — we never do — but the day's been fun so far and it's a nice summer night. Let's play two!

Some months ago I found myself watching Mask, the 1985 movie about the good-natured kid with the terminally misshapen face and Cher for a mother — a pill-popping mother, at that. Its relevance here is the lovable but doomed kid, Rocky (Eric Stoltz), is a big Dodgers fan, so it's a big deal when his grandparents show up and surprise him by producing tickets to that afternoon's game. A kid like Rocky, growing up amid unfortunate circumstances, doesn't get to Dodger Stadium every day, so it's a huge, huge thing that he's suddenly being whisked away to Chavez Ravine to see his favorite team. Other than serving as a device to get him out of the house so Cher can go on a binge, the Dodgers game has no significance in terms of the overall plot. But watching Rocky open the TV listings where his grandfather has cleverly hidden the tickets…it gave me the biggest vicarious thrill. There is nothing like being a kid and finding out you're going to a baseball game.

That's how I've been feeling this week for Dave Murray.

Dave is Mets Guy In Michigan. His circumstances are not at all unfortunate. He's got a grand life in Grand Rapids, writing for a living, raising a family, all, despite missing what he calls “the Homeland,” he could ask for. He doesn't, however, get to Shea Stadium every day. In fact, he hasn't been to Shea Stadium since 1991.

That changes this Saturday. Dave is returning, with his father and his cousin, to the Homeland. Dave is going to his first game at Shea in seventeen years. That it's a Subway Series game and that it's Shea's final season and that Dave, despite rendezvousing with the Mets on the road from time to time since the early '90s, hasn't seen the Mets win in person in any capacity since his previous trip to Shea makes the anticipation all the more tingly.

To me, that is. I know Dave is excited but I find myself excited on behalf of his excitement. I'm more worried about how the Mets will do on Saturday when Dave is going than I am about how they will do on Sunday when I'll be there.

Dave, in addition to being a heckuva human being, is my almost exact demographic contemporary: mid-40s, Nassau County upbringing, Mets fandom forged in the heyday of Tom Terrific, Yankees hater by nature and common sense. This weekend, however, he's a kid, no older than Rocky, whose trip to Dodger Stadium in Mask was a junior high graduation present. Dave, to use a phrase I found myself applying a few weeks ago as I critiqued the latest Mets debacle's effect on my well-being, is not made of cotton candy. He's been around, he knows his stuff, he's no ingénue about baseball or life. But he's not bothering with that on Saturday. He's not cynical or blasé about going to Shea Stadium for a Mets game. He's not 44 in the hours leading up to first pitch. He's 15 or 11 or 9. He's looking at the clock and then peering out the window and then watching the pot to see if it's started to boil and then maybe checking up the chimney. This is Christmas Eve for Dave. When's it gonna get here? When? WHEN?

All week long, Dave's blog has been a countdown to Christmas Morning, Christmas in June. He's making lists of things he's determined to do at Shea, and may Mrs. Payson's ghost have mercy on the overly officious usher or incredibly dopey Yankees fan who gets in his way. Dave's Shea is way better than the real thing. Dave's Shea isn't the Shea he left in 1991. It isn't the one his grandmother took him to on Opening Day in 1975. It's surely not the one the air has hung heavy over in 2008. Dave Murray's Shea Stadium is the one of Dave's wildest dreams. Only a Mets fan has wild dreams involving Shea. Maybe only a Mets Guy In Michigan, deprived of Shea's company for seventeen long years, is capable of truly appreciating and expressing how special a trip to Shea on a Saturday in June will be, regardless of what ensues after the first pitch is thrown.

I find myself so excited that Dave is breaking out of Michigan for the weekend that, like Red in The Shawshank Redemption, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a Mets fan can feel for another Mets fan. Or maybe it's just that there's nothing like being any age and finding out somebody who really relishes going to a baseball game is, in fact, going to a baseball game.

Joshua and I came back from the piney woods of Maine tired, happy and full of food courtesy of his grandmother. Oh, and ready to watch some baseball.

Maine is a wonderful place, except for the fact that in my folks' summer house across the river from Wiscasset baseball is strictly a nighttime affair. Not “nighttime” as in we're busy during the day — the whole idea of Maine is to remember what it's like not being so darn busy — but nighttime as in WFAN only comes in after the sun is well and truly down. Day game? Forget it. Night game? Depends when it starts. A 10:05 start on the West Coast (oh, sorry Omar — that's a 7:05 start and I'm creating a negative perception) can be listened to more or less as you would at home, except for the wow and flutter of random atmospheric phenomena. A 7:10 New York start, though, is going to be nothing but static until the middle innings at the earliest.

Over the years of our visits I've gotten used to this — it's the way things are, so you accept it as part of vacation time, and even come to enjoy it as a departure from the home-front hurry-up. It's getting dark, the dishes are cleared, the chipmunks and turkeys have given way to mosquitos tapping at the screens and big moths thumping at the windows. Let's find out how those Mets are doing.

Except they weren't doing well. Saturday's game was assessed via a quick listen before going out to dinner (if it had been a Western, I would have heard the part where Pedro's horse threw him, he landed on a rattler and slid rapidly toward the edge of the cliff) and confirmed later via a text message to Google on the cellphone. Sunday's outcome was discerned in the car on the way back from a restaurant in Rockland, with general happiness in Howie Rose's voice and the brief phrase “back to .500” emerging from the static to answer the what if not the how. I sat by the radio for the final inning of Monday night's debacle. Tuesday night I reported for duty late, after letting Joshua stay up two extra hours to chase and capture fireflies. (All later released — we're kindly sorts.) The FAN told me Ibanez had hit a homer just over Trot Nixon's head, which was clearly bad. I wondered what the score was before I realized I was hearing the recap, and soon enough the grim duty in Wayne Hagin's voice strongly suggested the Ibanez shot had not been an isolated blemish.

In this age of MLB.TV and Extra Innings and HD and GameCasts and blogs run by multiple obsessives it's briefly fun to go back to the way it used to be, to rely on your knowledge of the pitch of announcers' voices and your ability to piece together a narrative from one word in four to follow a ballgame that's taking place on the edge of radio range. And it's easy to forget how much has changed. One night about 15 years ago, during an ill-advised marathon drive, I listened to the Mets win on a car radio in the Georgia hills, FAN turned as loud as it would go, the faintest bits of syllables sneaking through borderline-explosive fusillades of static. Last fall I watched the Mets lose on a laptop computer while pondering the lights of France across Lake Geneva on an autumn evening. That's a long way to come — and all of it in the career of, say, Carlos Delgado.

But this evening the time for nostalgia was over. Joshua and I had missed our Mets, even with all their maddening habits. And so at 7:10 there they were — and why, we could barely understand what the fuss had been about. Jose Reyes ran wild. A rather perky-looking David Wright swung heavy lumber. The Mariners showed no particular inclination to field or, for a while, to hit. (And didn't it seem for a moment like this might be the night? John Maine stepping on a losing streak, the Mets refusing to get swept, the Mariners about to hit the road? But of course it's never the night.) The umpires umpired peaceably. The fans did not resemble bags of fertilizer, even to the newshound with the most overly sensitive nose. What had been all the trouble we'd heard rumor of from afar?

OK, so perhaps it's that the bats went eerily quiet after the early doings and the team's still under .500 and the third fourth installment of the Worst Day in the History of the Baseball World is about to be upon us. There's all that, I suppose. But after piecing together news by technological hook and static-ridden crook and finding the dispatches almost universally grim, we felt welcomed home.

CharlieH has alerted us that the late George Carlin is visiting Kiner's Korner right this very minute, right here. It's a rain delay clip identified as having run in the summer of '89 (though a reference in George's and Ralph's conversation makes me think it's from a year later, but whatever). It's also nine minutes of bliss, both men in tip-top baseball-talkin' form. I'd say it belongs in the Hall of Fame, but it's probably too good for Cooperstown. A YouTube where corporate copyright hounds keep their pants on would suffice, because these are nine transcendent Met minutes that deserve to be played in a loop for all and for all time.

As wait-out-the-tarp fare goes, it surely beats Beer Money. When it comes to rain delays and men named Carlin, accept no substitutes.

Kudos to archivist extraordinaire jphilips41 for fighting/flaunting the power and getting this up there. Kudos to the Brooklyn Dodgers fan from White Harlem who stuck by the Mets for many a decade. Kudos to Kiner just for being Ralph.

Life is more lively under Jerry Manuel, no doubt about it. He's a fun listen, a great gaggle interview. Let nimrod tabloids have their way with his words. I'll take Jerry's way.

That said, if it were as easy as switching managers for the Mets to materially improve, they wouldn't have had to have switched managers, would have they now? The previous manager wasn't helping matters, but it wasn't like the players were sitting on their talent just waiting for the right man to make like Hellmann's and bring out their best.

Monday night the New York Mets could have been managed by the Hand of God and it wouldn't have mattered. The Hand of God can't swing those bats, not against King Felix, nor against his court of random relievers. The Mets are still the team for whom adversity can be overwhelming on any given night; statistically speaking, it blows them away approximately every other night.

On Monday night, they were, to borrow a phrase from Casey Kasem, ponderous, man — bleeping ponderous. Figured, though. Shea Stadium was torpid, humid and a failure as a proving ground in the Mets' quest (if indeed they really care) to show they are ready to become anything more than a .500 team.

But at least it was refreshingly quiet.

Felix Hernandez was living up to the legend he is building in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. He toyed with the Mets and outshone Johan Santana, who more often than not has pitched this year like a pretty good, sometimes very good pitcher but almost never like the kind of ace Felix Hernandez was pitching like. (Funny, but wasn't Santana that ace before he was a Met?) King Felix crowned Johan in the second by closing his eyes — Johan's description — and swinging with the bases loaded and two out and driving in four runs, including himself.

Lima Time, apparently, lives.

Maybe it was too weird a night to read anything into. You don't see an American League pitcher slam too often. If form holds, it won't happen again until 2045. You also don't see that same pitcher, already throwing and hitting beyond reproach, field like a novice and get himself rolled right out of the game one out from qualifying for a win (which, trust me, he was en route to). Carlos Beltran showed admirable hustle from third on Hernandez's fifth-inning wild pitch which didn't trickle very far from home. Hernandez, I suppose, showed admirable hustle in trying to cover the plate. He should have covered his ass instead, because Beltran got him inadvertently, right in the ankle. Ouch!

Mets fans are so screwed up right now that they cheered when Felix was writhing in pain (a cosmic no-no, of course). I don't think they were cheering the pain, rather merely approving the idea that Hernandez's invincibility had been pierced, with a run no less. When his limping evinced genuine injury, the cheering didn't stop but at least it lessened. Our karma was in the crapper from there on out.

Santana persevered for seven and saved the bullpen some miles (is that why we got him?). Wright…well, Wright's getting a day off, which is good. David Wright was actually booed, not immediately after the error that extended the second long enough for King Felix to reign around the basis, but upon striking out in the sixth. It wasn't the DP. It was the error still simmering in the mind's eye. Misplaced anger, if you ask me. Does David need a blow? Absolutely. Is David a fielding liability? For one Willie Bloomquist grounder he was, but he's been remarkably improved defensively this season. To blame him for Santana's four runs, even if three were unearned — that's fertilizer thinking.

Hernandez exiting in the fifth didn't make things easier on the lineup, which garnered all of three hits off his Seattle successors, only one before the ninth when it fell to ancient Arthur Rhodes to finish off what little sapling of a rally the Mets fleetingly contemplated nurturing. The sole moment of encouragement was the organic chant of LET'S GO METS! that went up as the home team suddenly decided to attempt to make a bit of a game of it. Understand, this wasn't any LET'S GO METS! This arose from the throats of fans who were not encouraged by public address overkill or DiamondVision cue. It was as if, despite the cheering of Hernandez's physical misfortune and the castigation of favorite son Wright's humanity, somebody somewhere was giving us credit for being intelligent.

I got to my seat as the top of the first was ending and detected a certain flatness in the park. Maybe it was the moisture that literally filled the air. Maybe it was the specter of King Felix figuratively suffocating the offense. But I wasn't hearing the hum I was used to. Eventually it hit me: none was being manufactured. Nobody's urging us every three seconds to clap our hands, nobody's suggesting we make some noise and nobody's accompanying our batters to the plate with a stentorian soundtrack. All my fondest wishes for Shut The Fudge Up Night were actually coming true. Not completely — the sponsored stuff was still carried out, and late in the game, the A/V crew couldn't help itself and just had to dump Kevin James' atonal mangling of our credo in our laps, but mostly they shut the fudge up. It took a bit of acclimation to appreciate 21st century baseball without blare, but it's something to which I could grow accustomed.

The game was a donut, no question, but the occasion, it should be remarked, was an absolute cupcake: a treat. I was at Shea Monday night at the invitation of Metstradamus and his brother Fredstradamus (it's true, those are their real names). Fred lives elsewhere and was in town only for a bit, so the 'Damii made the most of a fertile opportunity and convened a Monday night group big enough to rate a scoreboard mention. We were listed as Cincinnati Fred & Mets Bloggers, and that's as fine a Metsopotamian assemblage as I've been in in quite a while. Kindred blog spirits My Summer Family, Pick Me Up Some Mets, Toasty Joe and Riding With Rickey, loyal opposition gadfly Darth Marc (who came in peace), peripatetic blog reader Dykstraw and FAFIF commenter emeritus/transcendent Shea denizen Laurie were all on hand. A couple in our gang even scooped up Bubba Burger boxes (they contain t-shirts and coupons, no meat). Thanks to all of them, along with the 'Damus brothers, for the superb company, the kind words and the questions about my cats.