The Mets were pretty darn fired up. And eventually they were ready to go…though by the time they were ready, a good bit of the thrill had already gone.

Mike Pelfrey, that ol' sonofagun, clear outpitched Brandon Webb Wednesday night. It was a performance to behold as I listened to much of the first eight innings on radio; the most explosive sound of the season had to be Howie Rose declaring “pitch count, shmitch count!” in lobbying Willie Randolph to leave him in to start the ninth.

Pelf earned it. You might even say he earned the chance to pitch out of trouble, if you consider a leadoff single when up by three runs a heap of trouble. Willie did and out went Pelfrey (8 IP, 5 H, 2 BB, 8 SO) after 112 pitches/shmitches.

Billy Wagner is supposed to be able to collect three outs with a three-run lead more readily than Pelfrey. Except Pelfrey was pitching better than he ever has and Wagner's been pitching about as badly as possible. Conventional wisdom says call on the closer and Willie, after five straight losses, wasn't about to get unconventional.

While listening on the radio, I heard Wayne Hagin non sequitur one of Howie's points by noting Frank Robinson was in the ballpark. I thought of that watching in the ninth when Wagner hit Mark Reynolds on the shoe and Jeff Nelson failed to find shoe polish on the ball. Frank Robinson's been around Shea for shoe polish incidents, you know. Reynolds was denied the base replays indicated he was entitled to. So what happens next?

Let's just say the Mets aren't always as lucky as they seem where shoe polish plays are concerned. Reynolds' having to stay at the plate didn't do Frank Robinson any good but it nearly sunk the home team to even deeper depths. Goodness knows the Billy Wagner Fan Club meeting broke up early, right around the second Reynolds' three-run bomb disrupted air traffic into LaGuardia. And boy did Shea go quiet. As Gary Cohen astutely pointed out, the Mets got runners on in the bottom of the ninth, potential winning runs, and the dugout was stone silent. The crowd, too. This might have been a good night to shut the automated cheerleading off. It was tacky.

It became one of those games after a fashion when somebody was going to have a worse relief pitcher than somebody else and for last night (with Jorge Sosa nowhere in sight), it was the Diamondbacks and Edgar Gonzalez, he who entered with a 6.87 ERA, served up a two-run game-losing homer to Carlos Beltran and left with his earned run average lowered.

Beltran circled the bases triumphantly and was met by crickets at home plate.

No, not really. There were a good three or four of his teammates waiting for him. All right, I'm exaggerating low. Jason tells me he TiVo'd it and counted a dozen Mets. That means a dozen Mets weren't there. That fact doesn't show up in the boxscore any more than half the roster didn't show up for the traditional plate jump, so it's probably a meaningless statistic. Still, only the 2008 Mets could bring us a thirteen-inning walkoff blast and have us groping around at how horsebleep they looked celebrating it.

Wonderful night for Pelfrey. Smashing night for Beltran. Winning continues to edge losing. But somehow, victory pried from the jaws of defeat pried from the jaws of victory notwithstanding, typical night for the 2008 Mets.

“Fuck this team,” my partner wrote to me minutes after they emerged atop what was technically a thriller. “One walkoff home run changes nothing.”

I tend to agree. I raised a fist for Carlos and churned acid for Pelf — it was probably as into a game as I'd been all season — but it was one grain of smooth sand against a tidal wave of tepidness. The Mets have been sucking for a long time and they're going to need more than thirteen innings to turn that tide.

Sometimes, said Freud, a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes, we find, a fantastic finish is not a prelude to a monster winning streak. Sometimes it's just a fantastic finish. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but sometimes you need to see a lot more to not believe the Mets are through sucking.

Until further notice, the Mets do not appear to be done sucking. Yet you know what I don't completely mind about it? The clarity it has wrought for me.

I have to admit that while I do by instinct still spout a stray curse word and occasionally pound a couch cushion when things go wrong for the Mets (which is almost invariably), it's really not eating away at my insides as bad stretches did in almost every other season I can remember.

For example, when the Mets dipped below .500 in June 1999, I was morose. I'd assumed we'd never win another game once our losing streak reached eight. I'm not kidding. I couldn't see a way out and I was miserable.

The Mets are below .500 in June 2008. I'm not morose. I assumed we'd win another game even though we'd lost five in a row and Billy Wagner pushed the envelope ridiculously close to a sixth. When they and we do break losing streaks, I'm less thrilled than relieved to the extent that I emote at all. I'm more like unmoved.

Don't take this as some sort of white flag of latent maturity on my part. I'm not going to tell you that I've suddenly discovered there are more important things than baseball, more pressing matters than the Mets. Screw that; there aren't. But in 1999, to continue with that example, I believed…Believed…the Mets were better than their Ralph Wiggum of a record. How could my team not be playing to its capabilities? Mets fail baseball? That's unpossible!

Pick another year and I'll tell you a similar story. The Mets were down and I couldn't and wouldn't accept it. That's been my M.O., my Metus Operandi since I was six.

It isn't at the moment, even a moment that includes a 5-3 win a little while ago and Johan Santana in fewer than a dozen hours.

The Mets suck. And I know it. And not only doesn't it really bother me in a transcendent way, I almost — almost — find comfort in knowing it.

This is not one of those 1979 scenarios in which I understand completely the Mets suck but I hate living in an epoch that is defined by hopelessness. This is not one of those 1993 situations from which the bottom has not only fallen out of the Mets but conked a polar bear when said bottom hit Antarctica. I hated having to be a fan of the 1993 Mets, but I never questioned that I had to cheer them on to each and every one of their 59 stirring victories. This isn't even a 2003 doppelgänger, the kind of year when I don't feel too terribly bad that they're losing a ton because it will mean the end of an arrogant general manager I don't want around and the dispatch of a malingering ballplayer I can't stand to watch. The best part of 2003 that didn't include Jose Reyes' promotion was the end of the tenures of Steve Phillips and Roberto Alomar. To maintain their dual elimination as sincere and abiding personal goals indicated I cared deeply about what happened to the Mets.

In 2008, I don't have that. I don't expressly want Omar Minaya and Willie Randolph dismissed, but I won't shed tears if they are. And while I'm not aching for any particular player to be released or traded, I don't particularly care if any particular player stays beyond tomorrow.

To be honest, no matter how bad I felt about Pelfrey's effort swirling down the Billy drain, I haven't cared with great conviction whether the Mets win or lose any given game this year.

There, I said it.

I'm not sure I understood until now that this is my 2008 Mets thought process. I've known something's been awry since Opening Day when my annual enthusiasm felt surprisingly forced, yet I've held back on taking this “Tastes Great!”/“Less Filling!” internal dialogue public. I'm aware that even as some of you are quite forthcoming about expressing your pointed dismay over the Mets' many shortcomings, there are others among you who prefer the positive be accentuated always. I don't think either camp is wrong in its approach to fandom. I'm often in both at the same time. I don't want to play Paulie Pollyanna and tell you I see great things in Mets baseball but I don't want to be Captain Bringdown either. My default position has always been “I just want the Mets to win.”

I still do…I guess.

Don't mistake this for “I've had it with baseball.” I haven't. Baseball's my thing. I wouldn't sit here and churn out however many words a week about baseball that I do, labor-of-love style, if it weren't. Trust me: I don't have anything better to do or anything I'd rather do. And don't mistake this for a resignation of my commission from the United States Mets Corps. It's not. I don't consider myself one bit less a Mets fan at this juncture of this season than I would say I was in any other season. God knows I'm not switching sides or doing anything repulsive like that. I can't even say that I'm giving up on 2008 per se. The Rockies of '07 were no better in their June, the Astros of '05 measurably worse, and see where they wound up.

Then again, their respective rebounds were considered quite unlikely.

Last month, Steve Keane of the Eddie Kranepool Society, in one of the thousands of angst-ridden posts conceived within the Metsosphere to attempt to explain away what the hell is wrong with the Mets, hit on the head the Mets fan's attitude for eternity and how it's been tested of late:

The manager and his players can’t get it through their closed minds that WE REALLY, REALLY ADORE THE METS. Now I didn’t say we adore the players but it’s the team, the whole Blue and Orange universe, that comes with being a Mets fan that we all embrace. I get a sense from fans I talk to that there is a real disconnect between Mets players and management and the fans a/k/a the folks who pay the freight. That comes from mismanagement by the higher-ups in management.

Yes, exactly. You find yourself irritated by the Mets, annoyed by the Mets, at odds with the Mets, but you never stop loving the Mets. You don't stop caring about the Mets even as you — I, anyway — discover you — or I — have stopped being bothered by the Mets.

I'm just not that moved by what happens to the Mets, even if my daily actions would indicate otherwise. I genuinely look forward every day to first pitch; I turn on every game at the appointed hour; I watch the action; I listen to the announcers; I think about what to write; and I write it with much gusto…but the results of the games themselves are not penetrating my head or my heart or my soul in any way that is familiar to my system. I maintain a vague preference for the Mets' winning and I disdain, in theory, the idea that the Mets would lose. But the wins, certainly the ones I'm not in attendance for, don't crackle for me. I may walk away from the television relatively satisfied with the Mets victorious, but I hardly ever leave it overjoyed. And the losses…they only bother me in the sense that I'm a Mets fan and the Mets losing is antithetical to the crux of that identity.

Yet my identity in my eyes is solid. It's so solid that it's never depended on cumulative wins and losses to reinforce it. It's now apparently so solid that I'm not disturbed by losses nor elated by wins.

It's weird but it feels kind of normal.

It's not that I don't care. It's maybe that I've maxed out on caring until further notice, as if something has short-circuited in my Met receptor. I click it on and off but it's not connected to anything. Maybe it flickers for a pitch here or a hit there, maybe it hums if stimulated by enough aural and visual cues when at the ballpark — but it doesn't last. It just doesn't.

How did this happen?

I don't think the possible causes are all that difficult to divine:

1) Last year never ended, particularly last September.

In one of my 50 or so postmortems to The Collapse, I attempted to gauge how miserably 2007 rated in comparison to its hard-luck Met predecessors. I made a reasonable case as to why 2007, no matter the horrors of its final chapter, wasn't so bad: at least we contended; at least we were in first place a lot; at least it was noisy; at least there was much on the line. What I never considered was that none of the good stuff would resonate whatsoever and that all of the bad vibes would carry over. As poorly as 1987 and 1998 ended, they were history by the time the springs of '88 and '99 rolled around. As bad as '79 and '93 and '03 were, at least there was next year, and next year is sacred. But 2007 just would not and has not gone away. As much as I try to shoo it from my consciousness, as much as I try to buy into one season being a separate proposition from another, it clings like bubble gum to the soles of my shoes. As an outside political consultant told a key White House insider regarding President Bartlet's mishandling of a grave matter on The West Wing, “You guys are so pissed at him you don't even know it.” A month had gone by on the show when he said it. Time doesn't always fly when you're pissed.

2) Indifferent play elicits indifferent response.

Geez, if the Mets can't pick themselves up, dust themselves off and start all over again, why should I? Why should I outcare them? The Mets are trying to motivate themselves through meetings and mottos. Their fightin' words are now “We B4 I”? I'd sooner they be hooked on winning than hooked on phonics, but whatever. Even if I don't subscribe to the notion that they don't care (they must) or that they're not trying (of course they are), they have a frustrating way of showing it. For how long can one be expected to accept the idea that they're just trying so darn hard that none of them — none of them — is delivering? Somebody in the chain of command by now should have told somebody down the line to stop gripping the bat handles into sawdust, to stop squeezing the baseballs until they squirt yolk. Somebody has to be better than they've shown. One player has played above his head in 2008 and now his head has finally been decreed off-limits from the playing field. While I now realize adding an acelike pitcher to an uncomfortably elderly and thin roster did not guarantee the comeback of the century for which I fervently hoped in February, I am still miffed at the stubborn mediocrity in our midst. This is the perfect sub-.500 team, if a sub-.500 team could ever be categorized as perfect. It is perfectly impossible to become energized or even enraged by that sort of packaging. No wonder so many of them didn't bother to greet Carlos Beltran at home. They suck too much to do well something so associated with winning.

3) A wrecking ball is aimed straight at my memories.

I fucking hate Citi Field. Perhaps one year from today I will be enjoying a Shake Shack burger and all the sparkling amenities the new world-class home of the Mets has to offer and I will wonder what I ever could have dreaded because this place is faaaabulous! I wouldn't necessarily bet against my adoring it on merit once I'm inside it. But right now, in 2008, with a proliferation of logos telling me that there will not be a 2009 where I've sat since 1973, I fucking hate Citi Field. I hate it and I resent it and I wish I didn't have to face it every time a fly ball is hit in its direction. I don't argue with the economic model that suggests a sports franchise will compete more effectively with a modern facility. I don't carry a brief that insists, even on its deathbed, that Shea Stadium is ideal for any activity other than freezing, shvitzing and standing in line for the men's room. I understand why it was deemed necessary to supplant a 1960s multipurpose stadium with a 2000s baseball throwback. But I fucking hate Citi Field for infringing on my psychic and Shea's physical space in the here and now. Why couldn't have they thrown a tarp over the damn thing 'til it's done? I don't like it staring down Shea. I don't like that for all its ballyhooed “intimacy,” its light stanchions are taller than Shea. I don't like that it's nudging Shea ever closer to its fate as Parking Lot A and concomitantly attempting to fray the bond I've shared with my team since the first time I saw my team on TV nearly 40 summers ago. By extension, I suppose I'm not happy with the people who are doing this clearly for their own interests first and foremost. Again, check back in a year. I may be 180'ing and loving it. Right now, I'm not.

Mad at the Mets for last year. Mad at the Mets for this year. Mad at the Mets for next year. Add 'em up and maybe it's just too overwhelming to overcome. But I'm not sold the answer's that easy because, even when enduring all the finished-basement basement finishes I lived through, I could at least throw my hands up forcefully and blurt “I've had it with them!” This doesn't feel like that. I'm unable to get my full Met on. It isn't really anger and it's not exactly apathy. I can't pin down why I've become so numb to the Mets' fortunes even as I don't for a second believe my fervor for the Mets has diminished.

Thus, while I'm confused to find myself wandering through a spiritual desert where the Mets are concerned, I also find myself having arrived upon an eerily calming oasis of clarity. I don't completely understand why I'm not spectacularly upset by a 31-33 enterprise, but I do understand that I'm not upset. I'm not really waiting for the big turnaround, the 2008 equivalent of the 40-15 revival that followed the 27-28 stutterstep in 1999, my favorite year of them all. I'll take it if it comes, sure. It may even snap me out of whatever funk I'm in. But I'm neither counting on it nor secularly praying for it. Actually, it seems kind of an insult to 1999 to even mention 2008 in the same breath.

Perhaps the clarity comes from knowing this is going on, knowing that another loss isn't going to make things materially worse, knowing that another win isn't going to make things materially better, knowing that I'm getting by either way, knowing that I still love the Mets even as I am compelled to confess that I don't really give a damn what happens to them next.

I don't know who should play here the rest of the season and who shouldn't. Despite my impulse to slot into the lineup every Nick Evans and Fernando Tatis who blows by like tumbleweed, the short-term solutions are ultimately unpleasing and ineffective. I couldn't tell you who to trade and who to keep. I don't feel much attached to anyone anymore.

The best I can come up with for next year is replace everything and everybody. It'll be just like starting over.

New ballpark next year? I've resisted its allure, but fine. New ballpark. The old one is obviously haunted by failure. Let's get moving on disappearing Shea Stadium.

But let's not stop there.

Fire the manager. We've been itchy to detach the pink slip from the pad for weeks, maybe months, so bye-bye Willie, Willie bye-bye.

Omar? You can't let Omar Minaya stick around. Adam Rubin broke down the GM's failings in damning detail the other day:

“You are watching the painfully slow demise of The New Mets, the vision Omar Minaya articulated four years ago but built as a house of cards.”

Omar's gone. Who else, then? Surely a team in this kind of mess rots from the head down. Lousy management ascends to ownership, so Messrs. Wilpon and Wilpon, please sell the team. Put in a deposit on seats at world-class Citi Field on your way out if you like, but next time you come to a Mets game, please use the rotunda.

You too, Saul Katz.

Tony Bernazard ain't stayin'. Nor is the crackerjack medical staff. Whoever decided black uniform tops were a grand idea can fold them up for good. The scouts haven't scouted so hot either. Scout out a new employer, fellas. You're yesterday's news, just like everybody in the front office, everybody in stadium operations, everybody who's ever run his hands up and down my sides at Gate E.

It's an epidemic. No one can be spared.

The players? In the name of Moises Alou's uncle Jesus (yes, he is that old), why would the players get a pass? They all go. David Wright…go be the face of another franchise. Jose Reyes…keep running so the door doesn't tag you on the way out. Johan Santana…use your J.R. Watkins Apothecary Liniment elsewhere. Billy Wagner…exit, sad man.

If we're gonna off the stars, the scrubs must surely follow. Pretty much everybody is a scrub on the 2008 Mets, so it's been nice knowing them (it hasn't; I'm being sarcastic). The whole 40-man is now no-man's land.

Empty roster? Oh well. We'll work with the commissioner on restocking. The White Sox overcame eight men out. We'll start even fresher.

So let's see…new ballpark, new management, new ownership, new players, new vendors, new ushers, new everything…am I leaving anybody out?

How about a new name? Mets isn't gitting-r-done anymore. Mets isn't Amazin', isn't Magic, isn't Miraculous. The new owners can hold a contest. Given that this organization has sponsorship deals with not one, not two, but three different banking institutions, I'm sure naming rights can be sold to a highest bidder. The Capital One Citi Sovereigns has as nice a ring to it as anything else — and only one fewer ring than the New York Mets (1962-2008) earned as the result of world championships.

Done and done. Let's Go Sovereigns!

But let's assume that won't happen. What then?

Ideally, the Mets will remain competitive through 2008. Did I say “remain”? I meant become. If they can avoid a 1993-style plunge through the earth's surface and achieve a level of plausibility for playoff contention — say five games out of the Wild Card on August 1 — I might be satisfied. The 2001 Mets pissed me off something awful clear into the middle of August, but when they began to pat themselves on the back for digging themselves out of the hole of their own slothful making (the Shea PA blared “Ain't No Mountain High Enough” after wins began, at last, to be strung together convincingly), I didn't scoff for too long at their gall for pretending to be scrappy underdogs one year after landing in the World Series. I patted them, too, and urged them on some more.

I doubt I have another round of Met backpatting in me, but who knows? Maybe I'll be that easy. Maybe I just want a little taste of plausibility before moving day arrives. Don't totally embarrass Shea. Don't totally embarrass me. Let us leave on a high note if I can't leave on the highest note. Don't send Shea into history with a chorus of Smashing Pumpkins: “Shakedown…1979.” Shake us down as you will, suck if you must, but ease up on the Hebnerian dismalness at some point, OK? I'm not asking for a pennant. I'm not even asking for a genuine pennant race. Just seem interested when you're tied in the ninth, exuberant when you win in the thirteenth, professional the rest of the time.

Play ball.

Dear Mets and Mike Pelfrey,

Wanna start converting some skeptics into believers? Beat the best pitcher in the National League tonight.

Your opponent, lifetime at Shea:

4 starts, 2 wins, 1 loss (a 2-1 affair in which Victor Zambrano went deep, throwing the game of his life), 29 innings pitched, 29 strikeouts, 5 walks, 18 hits, 1 earned run.

Brandon Webb's earned run average in those four Shea outings: 0.31

This year overall, Webb is 11-2, toting a 2.58 ERA and wielding a WHIP of barely more than 1.

Alou isn't available (the sun shifted imperceptibly this afternoon, requiring Moises to undergo an MRI). Chris Aguila is apparently up, Abraham Nuñez undeniably down. The Mets are riding 'round in a hole in the ground.

Want us to believe you're worth believing in tomorrow? Beat Brandon Webb or at least his team tonight.

Cordially,

F.U. in Flushing

F.U., of course, stands for Fired Up.

We should be careful not to read too much into an isolated incident, but it stood out for me as a metaphor for a Met career that had veered off track and still wasn't quite where it needed to be. On April 15, Jose Reyes was having one of his periodic breakout games, one of those nights when Jose was getting back to being Jose and all that Jose means to the Mets, one of those nights when the bat and the eye and the glove and the legs were all gearing into overdrive.

He singled to lead off. He doubled in the third. He tripled in the fifth. He singled in the seventh. He was both a home run shy of the cycle and a hit of any kind short of 5-for-5.

Who wouldn't want to see that? I know I did. So did Jason and so did Jon and Matt, the Mets By The Numbers authors who invited us to join them at Shea that Tuesday night. So did everybody in the park. We collectively urged Jose on to go for it.

He listened to us.

He swung at three pitches in his eyes.

Jose Reyes should have known better.

Today is Jose Reyes' 25th birthday, which seems impossible unless you decide 25 is the new 15, in which case, OK, Jose is something of a rambunctious adolescent when it comes to baseball. It's adorable when it works. It's frustrating when it doesn't.

Too much of the time, it doesn't. Too much of the time, Jose doesn't know better. Too much of the time, Jose Reyes has not grown into the ballplayer almost every one of us in Metland thinks he will be and probably thought he already was.

Happy birthday Jose. You've given us a great deal to consider ever since you reached your twenties.

When we first laid eyes on Jose Reyes, he was 19, hours from 20. His debut on June 10, 2003 came just in time to make him the last of ten teens who have played for the Mets. It's mostly trivia (Ed Kranepool, Nolan Ryan and Dwight Gooden stand out; Jim Bethke and Jerry Hinsley don't) but it tends to reinforce the notion of forever young where a player is concerned. How is it possible Jose Reyes is 25? He just came up when he was 19!

When will Jose Reyes be a little less young? When will Jose Reyes be not the kid who seems to have been called up five minutes ago but a player who's been in the big leagues five years now and shows that he has learned a great deal? When does a five-year, 25-year-old player qualify as a veteran?

Calling out erstwhile wunderkinder does not come easy for me, particularly where this onetime wunderkind is concerned. I loved Jose Reyes from the moment he got here, and an office decorated generously in Jose Reyes' image would attest to his ongoing status as my favorite active Met. I gravitated to Jose in 2003 because, as Murray Kempton once wrote of Mayor Lindsay, he was fresh when everybody else was tired. Jose Reyes personified the break from the surly present of the moment and represented to me the future when the only thing that looked good to a dying-hard Mets fan was the suddenly distant past. June 10, 2003 was the moment, I surmised, when we'd come together to remake this great franchise so that it would always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.

He smiled.

And he ran.

And he hit.

And he ran some more.

And he got hurt, but you knew he'd recover. You knew he'd get hurt again, but he'd keep on healing. And at the end of too many days on the DL, he'd be off and running unstopped and unstoppable.

2005 was that year. 2005 was when Jose Reyes wasn't hamstrung, wasn't striding uncomfortably. First he couldn't take a pitch. He didn't walk for a full month. But then he settled down…and then he lit it up. Jose made the move in-season, jumping three levels as easily as he legged out three bases. In April and May, it was maybe he'd be better off if he were sat or sent down. By early summer, he was showing signs of getting it. By the middle of summer, he absolutely got it and was off and running with it.

Straight into 2006.

Roughly around the time of his 23rd birthday, Jose Reyes became a star. Inside a month, he was a superstar. By September, he was a legend at Shea Stadium. Come October, he loomed among the best players in the game. Given the combination of tools and the electrical charge his personality and ability gave them, it wasn't insane to think of Jose Reyes of the New York Mets as maybe the best player in baseball.

2007 did nothing to abuse you of that notion if you were indulging it. At least not until the last of his 24th birthday cake was gobbled up. The candles were blown out on Jose Reyes Superstar in the weeks that followed. Jose had been demoted: from best there was to merely extraordinary; from extraordinary some nights to alarmingly ordinary on others; from ordinary to worse by September.

The Jose Reyes I knew I loved and thought I knew…he's been kind of missing. And I miss him greatly.

I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on statistics. I watch the Mets too much to seek guidance from data, so I was a little surprised when I looked up what Jose has accomplished to date in 2008:

61 Games

75 Hits

17 Doubles

5 Triples

8 Home Runs

29 Runs Batted In

42 Runs Scored

23 Stolen Bases

.288 Batting Average

.352 On-Base Percentage

.485 Slugging Percentage

The batting average is a bit off, but the other percentages align favorably with 2006. Prorate the cumulative numbers for 155 or so games and they don't look too bad for a full season. Through Sunday he had more extra-base hits than any shortstop in either league. Throw in his recent 30-game on-base streak, and his 2008 is by no means terrible. It's actually pretty good.

But it's not great. Couple it with watching him, and it's not close.

He still runs. He still hits. He sometimes fields spectacularly (even if he sometimes pulls boners that would make 1993 Tony Fernandez moan in agony — and not just because of gallstones). He smiles his Jose smile, but it just doesn't quite light up a room like it once did.

Am I being too hard on the kid or am I just tired of waiting for the kid to definitively grow up? It's less a matter of chronological age than five seasons in the books, and perhaps less about statistics and performance than stature. Now and again we hear about good influences on Jose: that Jose Valentin was a good influence, that Luis Castillo is a good influence. Jose Reyes been at this Major League Baseball enterprise since 2003. Shouldn't Jose Reyes — two-time starting All-Star shortstop, erstwhile bona fide MVP candidate, the only Met I can ever remember being serenaded by name over and over and over again — be influencing some younger player for the good by now? Granted, the Mets' roster is dead last in wetness behind the ears, but where's the maturity? Where's the leadership? Where's Jose Reyes from 2006 getting better while gaining wisdom?

OK, I guess it is about statistics and performance as much as stature. And I guess I wonder if two years ago was once in a lifetime. Jose's 2006 was arguably the most exciting individual season turned in by any Met since Dwight Gooden's 1985. No way I didn't expect the most exciting individual season after Doc in '85 wouldn't be Doc in '86, then Doc in '87 and so on. Didn't happen. It doesn't happen. They're called career years for a reason. I'm beginning to suspect Jose's had his already.

And maybe he is who he is and maybe that's who he'll be when he's five years older if not necessarily five years obviously wiser. Every individual should be accorded his own learning curve. But he has such an excellent example to follow in his left side compatriot.

We should be careful not to judge too much from an isolated incident, but three nights after Jose's swing-swing-swing and miss for the cycle against the Nationals, David Wright was in a similar situation in Philadelphia. He came up needing only a four-bagger to forge a 5-for-5 cycle. He calmly accepted a walk when the pitches dictated that's all he could expect. David Wright is almost as young as Jose Reyes yet in another demographic altogether regarding development as a ballplayer and, as judged from afar and through several filters, a leader.

Maybe it's different for David. He's been talked up as captain-in-waiting since he was all of 23. I've never heard anybody articulate a co-captaincy as Jose's destiny. Nobody puts Jose out there as spokesman for anything more substantive than Wise Potato Chips. Nobody expects him to take responsibility for anything but getting on base and then stealing another one. It's tiresome, frankly, to listen to Wright tell the media hordes every night that we have to “dig down deep and make a stand,” but it is also as admirable as the Mets' current drought is long that he so dependably takes one for the team. Surely Jose could dig down deep and wave a few of the reporters over to his locker and spout a few clichés of his own, thereby taking the pressure off his overwrought teammate.

I'm not wishing for Jose to assume the visage of grim death in the losing clubhouse. Or on the field. I was never in the camp that attributed September '07 to his creative and interactive gestures; it wasn't what he was doing with his hands that killed us — it was what he wasn't doing with his head and his bat (his head, his bat and the similar equipment that belonged to about thirty of his coworkers). It's good to see Jose building a decent-plus season. It's good to see him race as hard to first in 2008 as he did to third in 2006. It's good to see him smile at every opportunity.

It's not just great is all.

We're facing the Diamondbacks after sleepwalking (and sometimes plain old sleeping) our way through the Padres.

We're gonna lose.

Wait! Delgado came through with a clutch hit! And hustled to second! His uniform is filthy!

Then we're gonna get rained out.

Whoa, we're up 5-1 and will definitely get to an official game before the rain gets here!

Then the Diamondbacks will catch up.

Ugh! The Diamondbacks caught up! And here comes the rain!

I told you.

But radar indicates it'll blow through! We'll complete the game!

Then the — oh, you don't want to know.

Sometimes you must feel you didn't ask for this, that 2008-style Met mediocrity was thrust upon you. You don't remember seeking out the Mets, yet they came and helped themselves to your brain. You're a Mets fan for so long you can barely remember why anymore.

Sometimes it's helpful to hear from someone who sought it out, someone who made a marginally conscious decision that it would be more fun to go through life loving the Mets than being oblivious to them. That they seemed the obvious choice. If geography is destiny, a man named Alastair Burgess was destined to know nothing of the Mets, certainly not enough to get tangled up in them.

But he discovered them and now he's one of us.

Poor bastard.

Alastair, who says we can call him Al, must have been moved by our recent pitch to sell t-shirts, because he sent us a picture of himself looking quite sharp in one of them. But he also sent us his story. It is, by any Met standard, fairly Amazin'.

First off, Al's from New Zealand (sporting an accent that he says is “more Bret than Jemaine,” correctly assuming the only thing at least one of us knows about New Zealand is Flight of the Conchords). Not a lot of Mets fans in New Zealand, one would guess. Al grew up loving cricket, but as someone “exiled” in Japan for the past 15 years, there's not a lot of cricket available.

But there is baseball.

We hear every now and then about baseball and Japan in this country, mostly that they're nuts about it and that Bobby Valentine is revered for it. Al confirms that he has “my Japanese hosts to thank for my turning to baseball” in order to compensate for his cricket shortfall. What Japan didn't do is make him a Mets fan, at least not directly.

Yet, “I'm naturally a Mets fan. A Mets fan who's not set foot in New York yet, let alone Shea, but still a fan.”

If you're as puzzled as Murray Hewitt (FOTC's manager, who urges all New Zealanders coming to New York to take back alleys and thereby avoid the dangers that lurk in crowds), well, you're not alone. I was trying to figure out how a New Zealander migrates to Japan and winds up rooting for the New York Mets enough to “loyally” read a rather intricate, parochial blog about them, let alone wear its shirt, when Al set me straight:

“Had I been born in NYC, I'm certain I would have chosen the right team.”

Well, I can't argue with an intrinsic sense of right and wrong, but there's more to Al's choice than instinct.

“One reason was Nomo's move to the Dodgers” in 1995, Al explains. “I was then new to Japan, working afternoons and evenings so I could watch all his starts (morning Japan time) with Vin Scully's (for ages I thought he was Vince Cully!) commentary. I started to appreciate the game of baseball from then on.”

So he followed the downmarket Hideo Nomo and his enormous ERA to the Mets? Not quite:

“Nomo's catcher was Piazza and he quickly became my favorite player. For some reason, though watching the Dodgers every five days, I couldn't bring myself to actively root for them.” The trades that made Mike a Met in 1998 represented for Al a “lucky escape”.

We'll say. Piazza to the Mets via the Marlins, Al to our side, washing off the stain of Dodger blue as quickly as he could. As he learned more about the Mets, he got in deeper.

“About this time,” the late '90s, “the other NYC franchise was fluking a few World Series wins and the Japanese, being the worst bandwagon jumpers you'll ever meet, lapped it up.” But no succumbing to inner…inner city pressure where Al was concerned: “Bloody sickening it was.” Thus, he rooted for Mike and he rooted for Bobby V, of whom he'd been a fan since his first Japanese go-round, and he rooted for what were now his Mets.

“Other less compelling reasons,” Al reveals, “were Seinfeld episodes sent on VHS cassettes by friends in North America ('I'm Keith Hernandez'), and my birth year of 1969.”

Less compelling? For someone who has yet to swipe his first Metrocard at Willets Point, who will never shake his hands dry because the men's room behind Section 8 of Mezzanine ran out of towels three innings ago, who hasn't had to point relentlessly at the yearbook pile in order to obtain the desired item from yet another ill-trained concessionaire…I'd say for someone who has hitched his star to the Mets independently and half a world away, there is no such thing as a less compelling reason.

They're all Amazin'.

Al's one of us, no doubt about it. He's also one of the Hanshin Tigers' followers, rooting for the club “who brought you such greats as Tsuyoshi Shinjo and Kei Igawa” (one of out two ain't bad). The Tigers are historically a little Metsian in their approach to success: sporadic and overshadowed too often (stupid Yomiuri Giants), though “unlike the Mets, the Tigers are doing well this year,” we learn.

I'd say that makes me a Hanshin Tigers sympathizer, but I can't imagine choosing a team and sticking with it in some place I've never seen and will likely never go. I find it exotic when Mets fans tell me they have a favorite American League team. But to suddenly align oneself with somebody in the Central League of Japan? Or the Pacific League, where Bobby V is plying his trade with the Chiba Lotte Marines? That would be the equivalent of what Al is doing with the Mets…except I'd have to come into it with no background in baseball, starting from a country that had only cricket, and then be smitten beyond belief from about 6,700 miles away.

Not many could do that. Al can. That's why I've got to tip my cap as Far East in his direction as possible.

“I even like saying 'New York Mets,'” Al adds. “Is that wrong?”

No, Al, that's absolutely right. As right as can be.

Ergo, I don't think any of you will argue too strenuously when we declare Alastair Burgess today's Best Mets Fan…in the WORLD!

Wanna rate up there with Al? Then for Shinjo's sake already yet, buy a shirt!

4: Thursday, September 25 vs Cubs

Listen closely, ladies and gentlemen, to the following recording:

From beautiful Shea Stadium in Flushing, New York, the New York Mets are on the air.

That was the very first sentence ever spoken on a home team radio broadcast from this building. The second sentence from that momentous occasion tells you everything you need to know about whom we are proud to honor via the removal of number 4 in our Countdown Like It Oughta Be:

Well hi everybody, this is Bob Murphy with Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner, all set to detail every exciting moment of the historic opening of Shea Stadium as the New York Mets meet the Pittsburgh Pirates.

That, in two sentences, is the sound of home, the sound of the home team, the sound of Shea Stadium.

You didn't need to be at Shea to hear that voice, the voice of Bob Murphy; nor did you need to buy a ticket to hear the voices who joined him on April 17, 1964, Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner. These three sons of Oklahoma and Tennessee and California formed a brotherhood and bridged the gap from the ballpark in Queens to the Mets fan who, for whatever reason, couldn't be here. They painted the word picture of the first Shea Stadium opener, just as they did at the Polo Grounds, just as they would do on the road. They did it, no matter that they came from elsewhere, as true New York icons.

They did it together and they did it forever. Or so it seemed.

From 1962 through 1978 — a mind-boggling, heartwarming seventeen seasons of balls and strikes, wins and losses, ups and downs, missteps and miracles and always, you just knew, another Mets game — they did it brilliantly. The trio of Bob Murphy, Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner was beloved, of course. They were rightly celebrated, famous far and wide and esteemed in the ears of all of their colleagues around baseball. But did you, the loyal Mets fan, realize that when you listened to Bob and Linsdey and Ralph that you were part of history, as much a part of history as any of the 50,312 in attendance for Shea's first game? You were listening to the broadcasting triumvirate that endured as a three-man team longer than any in the annals of Major League Baseball.

If you grew up a Mets fan between 1962 and 1978, you never knew there could be another announcer. You didn't need another announcer. You had the three best in the world. You had the home team.

Nothing lasts forever, we know. The trio broke up at last after 1978 when Lindsey Nelson left for the West Coast. Other announcers, fine announcers, came and filled in. Other voices would weave themselves into the Met tapestry. But there was something about those first three that made them forever the home team at Shea Stadium.

Fortunately for Mets fans, the rest of the team stayed intact. Ralph Kiner and Bob Murphy may have taken on different roles for most of the quarter-century that followed Lindsey Nelson's departure; Ralph was television, Murph radio. But there was no doubt they defined home for the Mets as much as Shea did, as much as any player could have. When you dropped by Kiner's Korner or you reveled in the Happy Recap, you knew you were nowhere but at a Mets game. It was as if you had come to Shea for the day after all and were, as the song promised, guaranteed to have the time of your life.

“Plenty of good seats still available,” Bob and Lindsey and Ralph used to remind the motorists who might be tooling by on the Grand Central. Yet, we can now say without fear of undermining walkup sales, there was no better seat at Shea than the seat closest to the speaker of your radio or your television between 1962 and 1978. Taking in a ballgame with Bob Murphy, Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner was an experience not to be topped — only repeated into blissful perpetuity.

Lindsey passed away in 1995. We lost Murph in 2004. Ralph, thankfully, remains with us to this day. You have heard him on SNY in 2008 as you heard him on Channel 9 decade after decade; as you heard him on Opening Day in 1964 over WHN radio; as you heard him narrate the Mets' birth, the Mets' youth and the Mets' maturity as the Mets and you grew up in tandem.

Ralph Kiner, we know your Korner originated in left field at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh where you established your Hall of Fame credentials, but for tonight, we beg your indulgence as we ask you, Bob's wife Joye Murphy and Lindsey's daughter Nancy Nelson Wyszynski to pile into the backseat of our 1964 Cadillac convertible — what else for a home run hitter? — and be chauffeured out to right field by two of your most faithful protégés, Gary Cohen and Howie Rose. Number 4 was your number in your playing career and number 4 is for you to represent once more — for you; for your Hall of Fame broadcasting partner and brother Bob Murphy; for your Hall of Fame broadcasting partner and brother Lindsey Nelson; and for your family of an audience, the incalculable millions who joined you at Shea from wherever they sat year after year, whether you could hear them or not.

They sure heard you.

Number 5 was revealed here.

Number 3 will be counted down next Monday, June 16.

He overslept? Because he thought it was a 4 o'clock start local?

Oh Ramon, you do keep everybody loose.

Me, I'm theoretically in stitches because the Mets have passed the point of being a team I can truly stress over and are on the verge of being a team I have no choice but to laugh at. Or with. Whatever. It's all good. Or as good as it's going to get right now.

This is a silly, silly team. They lose three games by the exact the same score because they can't generate more than three runs total. Then they generate three runs in the first inning of the fourth game. Then they lose anyway.

And Ramon Castro overslept or didn't understand time zones.

Somebody hits a batter with the bases loaded and the game ends. Somebody on our side is safe on a rundown between home and third and we get almost nothing out of it. Somebody is sent into battle again and again despite two concussions despite a heartbeat in his head and finally he's definitively sat down. The other team has a runner run into a batted ball twice and they win those games. Finally, the backup catcher who doesn't play more than twice a week can't make it to the ballpark on time to catch a future Hall of Famer.

If it's not ha-ha funny, then ain't that peculiar?

The Mets are absurd. For all their ungoodness; for all their astounding lack of depth; for all the scoring they don't do when they pitch and all the pitching they don't do when they score; for all the name players that don't add up to what you could accurately call a team; for the seven of nine they somehow won before dropping four straight to the heretofore worse Padres; for their one rock of stellar performance who isn't shy about calling teammates out yet nailed the coffin of this trip shut by giving up a three-run homer to somebody who used to share a number with Mr. Met.

They are absurd. They're still working on lovable.

Addendum to Mets Stuff Worth Knowing About: You can meet No. 1 prodigal son Darryl Strawberry Tuesday night between 6 PM and 7 PM at the Best Buy Rockefeller Center store, 559 Fifth Avenue at 46th St. No, he's not the stuff in question (though he surely had the right kind in his day); rather, Straw''ll be signing copies of Essential Games of Shea Stadium and another DVD that sounds so cool that even I didn't know about it 'til just now (not to imply I'm at all cool): Shea Goodbye: 45 Years of Amazin'. Matthew Broderick narrates and it touches all the Shea bases, the big Met moments, the beloved Shea traditions (Banner Day!) and even the non-baseball stuff.

Sounds pretty good even without Darryl's signature.

MORE DARRYL: Strawberry's return to Shea as a Dodger is Monday night's Mets Classic on SNY, 7 PM. Spoiler alert: we win.