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.

Last Sunday evening at Shea Stadium, jockey Kent Desormeaux threw out the ceremonial first pitch to Willie Randolph. Saturday each shared a problem: They had no horse.

No Triple Crown for Desormeaux's mount. Three consecutive 2-1 losses for the Randolph's stallions. Big Brown finished last. The Mets are running well out of the money and the remainder of their course looms longer than that at Belmont.

Do the Mets appear capable of pulling from the back of the pack to nose ahead of those Phillies at the wire? What is it horses say again? Oh yeah…

Naaaaaay!

I know nothing about horse racing except that a horse with a crack in his hoof probably isn't poised to win the most challenging race of his life. That and every time they tell us this is the year there'll be a Triple Crown, it means it won't happen.

I'd like to think I know a few things about baseball, but I have no idea when the Mets are going to start scoring some runs again. None at all.

I might have bet on Wright in the third at Petco, galloping as he was when that old nag Delgado set a fast pace by doubling to the right of the right field jury box. Wright could have cantered home given Brian Giles' throw from the pole position. Alas, Sandy Alomar was as cautious as Kent Desormeaux and pulled the reins in on David. Fernando Tatis then put the inning — and the Mets' offense — out of its misery for the rest of the night.

The Mets trotted into San Diego winners in seven of their previous nine starts knowing they wouldn't have to face Maddux or Peavy or Young. They've scored one run every night anyway. What were the odds of that happening?

Short, apparently.

Why haven't the Mets placed Ryan Church on the DL? Why do they schlep him on flights east, west, north and south like he's the title character of Weekend At Bernie's when every single night Gary and Keith come on and inform us that he doesn't look quite right, that he's still a bit glassy-eyed, that it's telling that he's not starting or pinch-hitting? They do not seem to be alone in their analysis of his state.

What is to gain by allowing a concussed player, even if he was your best player before taking a knee to the head, to linger in anything close to semi-twilight? Shouldn't Ryan Church be allowed to rest fully and heal as best as he can without the extra pressure of these road trips? I'm not a doctor and I don't play one on this blog, but I find this near negligence of his well-being (in June, not late September when you could be all competitive about it and demand all hands on deck) a mite disturbing. Does Ryan Church say he's OK? Then tell him, OK, you get better than OK.

Maybe he strides to the plate tonight and goes 3-for-4 and homers as he did on Sunday against the Dodgers before he had to board his third long flight since the collision in Atlanta. Maybe he's so close to swell that his situation is being misread by amateurs and managers. But we're now almost three weeks removed from his second concussion of 2008 and there has been no indication that every little thing is fine.

Fifteen or so days without him now may be doing him and us a big favor as the season unfolds.

UPDATE: Church is shut down for “a few days,” reports John Delcos of the Journal News, because he's been feeling pressure akin to “a heartbeat in my head”.

So I ask again, why is he not simply disabled so this matter can be attended to thoroughly?