You know that Kozy Shack they hand out outside our own cozy shack of a stadium before some games? Next time you accept one, you can spoon yourself with the reassurance that you're sampling the Official Pudding of the New York Mets:

The creamy treat, available in rich chocolate and original rice pudding flavors, will be on sale at Shea Stadium throughout the baseball season, adding a delicious natural choice to the menu of popular, classic stadium snacks, like hot dogs, pizza and peanuts.

The turnstiles (which remind some of us by the squeezing we do to get through them to lay off the creamy treats) were already emblazoned with the Kozy Shack logo. I was wondering if that was a renegade action. Nope, it's official. We've got ourselves our own pudding…the Roy Hobbs kind.

Natural.

The Phillies long ago had a player named Puddin' Head. Tonight let's not play his descendants as if with tapioca stuck between our ears.

Perfect. Perfect bookends to a perfect year. Waking up on July 4, 2008 to read that Jose Reyes reportedly engaged in a “heated” confrontation with Keith Hernandez on board the Mets' flight a few nights earlier from New York to St. Louis — Keith didn't like the way Jose reacted to his throwing error during the final Subway Series game and let it be known in the course of that day's telecast — could only remind the overwrought Mets fan that we'd been down the what's-up-with-Reyes? road almost exactly a year before.

It was on the field, not on a plane…and in plain view, not via conflicting accounts…that we saw Jose Reyes tap a weak grounder down the third base line in the eighth inning at Minute Maid Park on July 6, 2007. Reyes thought it would go foul. He didn't run to first. Mike Lamb fielded the ball fair and threw him out by 80 or so feet. Willie Randolph immediately pulled him to teach him a lesson. Jose didn't look too happy about being schooled in so public a fashion, but he said more or less the right thing afterwards.

“It's my fault there,” Reyes declared in accepting his medicine, “but that thing can happen to anybody.”

Funny the things that happen to and around Reyes since then.

On a team for whom no more than half ever seems to go right, Jose Reyes' past year has veered to disaster far more often than not. That's taking into the good and wonderful stuff that's occurred since July 6, 2007: the All-Star laying on of hands by Willie Mays which seemed so appropriate in the emotion of the moment; the leadoff home run right out of the gate to open the second half, a sign — it seemed — that the momentary lapse of judgment in Houston was more molehill than Tal's Hill; the August crime spree of 17 consecutive successful steals, one of them setting the team record for thefts in a single season with more than a month to go; and this season's post-April statistical renaissance, culminating in current batting, on-base and slugging totals legitimately comparable to Jose's sainted 2006.

But who remembers any of that now? Now that Jose is…

• The guy who had to be benched because he didn't hustle;

• The guy who went into the tank in Philadelphia in late August and never climbed out for the balance of 2007;

• The guy who tried to steal third with Wright up and two out and there, hindsight says, went the season;

• The guy who didn't steal anything else except his paycheck the rest of the way;

• The guy whose intrinsic joy for the game was processed in too many quarters as chronic immaturity;

• The guy who celebrated too much or not enough;

• The guy who welcomed his new manager with a top-of-the-first tantrum;

• The guy who got himself picked off second by Andy Pettitte;

• And the guy who not only pulled Delgado off the bag on Melky Cabrera's grounder but took it out on his glove and his wristband on the field for all to see.

Now he's the guy who allegedly got into it with Keith Hernandez. I say allegedly because this was reported by the same beat writer who blew up Jerry Manuel's silly “fertilizer” remarks into a front-page scandal and I say allegedly because calmer, more reliable observers say that while Jose indeed expressed dismay to Keith and Keith took issue with Jose's interpretation, it didn't exactly amount to a Met melee among the clouds (I'm thinking it's telling that this happened Sunday night yet didn't make the paper in question 'til Friday).

But something did happen, and it happened to or around Reyes. Reyes worries about what somebody told him an announcer said. Reyes leans too far toward third. Reyes doesn't listen to Jerry Manuel. Reyes dances to his own beat without regard to consequence. Reyes raises his rabbit ears a little too high. Reyes runs to first now but didn't run then.

It's been quite a year for Jose Reyes since that Friday night in Houston. It is said as he goes, the Mets go. Over the last year, the Mets have gone nowhere.

Well, that one might be shown as a future episode of Phillies Classics.

The rain didn't really show up (I had visions of Gavin Floyd, Xavier Nady and Aaron Rowand), but neither did the Mets' bats. Johan Santana showed up all right, pitching a dazzling game … with the exception of that sixth inning. For all his wonderfulness, Johan seems to have these occasional mini-Leiter episodes, two-batter or one-inning spurts in which his location goes on the fritz and he seems as puzzled as you are by it. (Maybe it was that he was wearing a patriotic-looking cap that clashed hideously with his uniform. Seriously — if you tried to leave the house wearing that color combination, your wife would call you back in a no-quarter tone of voice.)

While we're dwelling on Santana's (very small) faults, he also arrived with a reputation as a Hamptonesque hitter. And when he came up with the bases loaded and none out in the fifth, I was sure his Mike Hampton moment had arrived. He was going to hit a double up the gap, maybe even channel his inner Felix Hernandez, and tomorrow's papers would be all about how Johan had figured out the way to win was also to do the hitting. My baseball radar was off all night. Instead, Santana turned in the kind of saucer-eyed at-bat you'd expect from a pitcher just arrived from the American League. Reyes, Chavez and Wright managed to scratch out two runs when we should have had more (Wright and Beltran looked overanxious all night, I thought), and it was bite-your-nails time. Johan's Leiter episode followed, Chad Durbin was masterful in relief, and Duaner couldn't find that third out. Ballgame.

The other night, in that back-and-forth game against the Cardinals, Wright tripled with one out in the eighth and the Mets up 7-5. Beltran struck out looking and the score stayed 7-5. I briefly mourned the duck who'd been allowed to keep paddling around on the pond, but I figured it was OK. We were going to win, right?

We weren't. We didn't get the run home then, just as we didn't get it home tonight with Reyes on third and one out in the first. There's a valuable reminder in that of the meaning of baseball life, I suppose. If you'll allow me a little Monty Python, every run is sacred, every run is great. If a run is wasted, the baseball gods get quite irate.

And so, I imagine, does Johan Santana.

ST. LOUIS (FAFIF) — Mike Pelfrey credited the latest in a string of strong performances Thursday night to the guidance he's received from an individual Mets fan.

“Greg's been on my ass all year,” Pelfrey revealed. “He's been pushing me to pitch better for quite a while. It finally started to sink in. I should just pitch better and maybe he'll get off my ass.”

And pitch better Pelfrey has, winning his last four decisions and lowering his ERA by more than a run since Greg saw him on Memorial Day night.

“Yeah, Greg wasn't too happy with me then, all that nibbling I tended to do,” Pelfrey said. “He let me have it but good. I thought he was being a little hard on me earlier in the season when I pitched pretty well. I was like, 'hey, I threw five or six innings, I didn't walk too many, isn't that good enough?' Greg said it wasn't, and he was right.”

The toughlove approach seems to have truly worked on Pelfrey, now pitching the best sustained baseball of his Major League career. Against the Cardinals, he put up seven innings of one-run ball, allowing six hits and two walks while striking out six.

“When I have a lead like I was able to get tonight,” Pelfrey said, referring to the Mets' offensive onslaught, “Greg said I should just relax and throw strikes. As usual he made more sense than all my pitching coaches combined.”

It's been an up-and-down season for Pelfrey who ended Spring Training as the Mets' No. 5 starter by default and showed flashes of progress in April but was held back in May by an inconsistent approach.

“Trust my stuff, Greg said,” Pelfrey recalled. “He was getting tired of the uncertainty that just dripped from my face. I'm a big guy, I throw hard, just go for it…that was his message. Message received, Greg. Message received.”

“Pelf's got all the ability in the world,” David Wright said. “All that was missing was listening to Greg. I know it did me all the good in the world when he told me to lighten up a little and not fight Jerry on taking a day off.” Noting the possible tweak to his back during the final game of the Mets' just-completed four-game split at Busch Stadium, Wright added, “I wanted to stay in, but Greg thought with a big lead I should just get the hell out of there and sit the hell down — his words. With the wonders he's worked with Pelf, you think I'm not gonna listen to Greg?”

Next up on the Mets' schedule is a critical four-game set in Philadelphia against the first-place Phillies. Greg is advising the Mets keep their heads on straight and start winning a few games in a row. “Greg's got a point there,” said shortstop Jose Reyes. “If we start listening to Greg, no telling how far we can go this year.”

In a game that you lead 7-5 in the eighth but lose 8-7 in the ninth, you've got to have quite the silver-lining detector to come away from it feeling anything but utterly defeated. And yet…

• Yes, that was a horrible way to surrender a night that had been taken back so emphatically, from down 4-0 right away to up 7-5 at long last. But we came back! When do the 2008 Mets come back from three runs down to win? According to Elias, as noted during the Snighcast, never, making us the only team in the Majors not to engineer anything close to a long-range comeback this season. As clunky as our rallies tend to be, it was good to see a couple executed.

• Yes, Pedro Martinez was conked on the head for a how-do-ya-do in the first with four runs, but after the rain delay, it was like one of those old 7-Up commercials in which the showers poured down on him and gave him back a portion of his mojo. Pedro went out afterwards (itself a small victory) and turned the Cardinal offense, save for the mystifying Rick Ankiel — he has more home runs than David Wright? — into Uncola. Granted, swooner that I am on his behalf, it doesn't take much for me to see light at the end of the Pedro Martinez tunnel, but the determination he expressed after the game (“if I was to quit right now, I'd be a coward”) left me with more confidence than his dreadful lines of late should allow. It's not much to hang one's Pedro hat on when the hat carries a size 7.39 ERA, but it beat last Friday's pitch-tipping festival and the Rocky Mountain meltdown the Saturday before that. I find it all vaguely reminiscent of the way Al Leiter stunk up joint after joint in the first half of 2003 before recovering and returning to routinely brilliant form (albeit for a team going absolutely nowhere) in the second half. Pedro hasn't done the hard part yet, but he can't be nearly as bad as he's shown. He just can't.

• Yes, Pedro Feliciano couldn't have had worse timing in the eighth with that first-pitch gopher to Chris Duncan. But Feliciano (and Heilman) wouldn't have been on in the eighth had Duaner Sanchez been available, and Duaner Sanchez would have been available had Yadier Molina not zetzed him on the knee the night before. Maybe there is something to this “roles” talk about the bullpen, which frankly I don't understand. You can't pitch when you're told to pitch? Facing a batter in the eighth is so different from doing so in the seventh? And wouldn't the world be a better place without Yadier Molina?

• Yes, Carlos Muniz (or Muñiz, which is how his uniform has it even though the ñ is never pronounced…like I should take my cues from the back of a Met uniform) gave up the gamewinner to Troy Glaus, but a) you knew Muñiz/Muniz would be Zephyrbound anyway and b) you know that every left-for-dead power hitter the Cardinals have picked up since Cesar Cedeño (as opposed to Cedeno) has done something like this to the Mets. Cripes, Will Clark, ten minutes from retired, hit a home run off Bobby Jones in the 2000 playoffs. Glaus had never done a thing to the Mets before last night. He was due from a cosmic sense.

• Yes, Carlos Beltran is not getting it done, which is why it's wonderful that Jerry Manuel is probably going to give him the finale of this series off. Look what an off-day did for David Wright. For the first time all season, the rested Wright — average up 22 points in the eight games since getting a blow — appears unstoppable at the plate. Is it a stretch to believe one off-day for one player means another off-day for another player will clear out the other player's cobwebs? Is it a stretch to believe the Mets, who haven't been over .500 in almost a month, are in a pennant race because they're only 4-1/2 back?

• Yes, the Phillies won again, allowing them to creep incrementally further ahead, but look whom they've been beating the last two nights: the Braves! Atlanta losing a) keeps us in third place and b) can't help but make a Mets fan smile. We need the Phillies to lose but we want the Braves to lose. You choose need over want in September. Before the Fourth of July, I'll go with what I want.

• Yes, the rain pushed the game into Mountain Time, but instead of intently watching Beer Money (and I'd need a court order to make me do so), I flipped around and found ESPN Classic running You Can't Blame, its series that delves into well-chronicled sports missteps and pretends to take a fresh look at them. I say “pretends” because there's nothing there you couldn't infer yourself if you gave the matter any thought. The YCB I stumbled upon was Bobby Cox, as in, “You can't blame Bobby Cox for steering the Braves into so many playoff losses over the years.” Whether you can or not, an entire half-hour devoted to the sourpuss Braves shrugging off October defeat after October defeat (even the ones at the hands of the one franchise more insidious than their own) was like sitting in a covered section of Mezzanine during a downpour. When the sun shines, we'll shine together; until then, you can stand under my umbrella of Chippenfreude.

• Yes, the Mets lost in painful fashion, replete with the punch-to-the-gut misery that comes from staring at the other team (the whole team) lovin', touchin', squeezin' at home plate at your expense. But y'know what? That was the first time this season, even taking into account the slew of debacles that defined April, May and June, that I really and truly felt awful that the Mets had lost. Not annoyed, not frustrated, not offended, but absolutely awful. There was no meta to this, no running commentary in my head that I'd rather we win but the loss serves some kind of purpose in delineating the depths to which this organization has fallen and thereby we can use this as an opportunity to take a cold, hard look at what needs to be done to clean up this mess. Fudge no, I was just 100% sorry that we'd lost, like a fan is supposed to feel. Even though I can't unquestioningly take seriously as a contender a team that leans on the valiant Damion Easley as its second-base salvation, I was even — Brave-bashing and all — actually concerned we'd lost ground to the first-place Phils. It took me 84 games, but I think I've found my groove again. Me and Pedro, we'll figure this out in the second half.

A very sweet story from Jim Baumbach in Newsday about a very sweet man, the late Jimmy Plummer.