“We needed to care more about each other if we're going to be the kind of team that wins a championship,” an unidentified Met told John Harper in today's Daily News. “I think we kind of took that for granted. The meeting made us realize that.”

So…can we safely assume Billy Wagner and Carlos Delgado spent the boarding process of the charter flight to Atlanta unfailingly caring for each other?

“Take the window seat, Carlos.”

“No, Billy, I insist — you enjoy the view.”

“But you find the vistas so relaxing. Perhaps gazing out the window would replenish your soul and, as a result, your swing.”

“Why thank you, Billy. Can I at least grab you a pillow on which to nurture your valuable left arm before we settle in?”

“That is a most thoughtful gesture, Carlos. Muchas gracias, amigo.”

“No dear friend, thank you.”

Maybe that's not what One Met meant, but whatever it was about the most momentous meeting since Yalta that, to use Ryan Church's phrase, “relaxed” the team, well, keep it coming, loves. It's proved a more effective let alone more palatable solution to busting up a team slump than passing around a gold thong (brrr…).

Will the Era of Good Feeling Last? Do these eras of good feelings ever last? How many times last season were we reassured in deed or words that whatever was bugging the Mets last week was past them now? How many good weekends gave way to blues by Tuesday? How does beating a last-place team after getting beat by a last-place team reknight us a first-place team in waiting? How will we know if the Mets are going to stop being ungood and, by god, start being real good?

Atlanta would be a good place to start finding out for the positive. And Colorado would be a good place to continue. Then home for Florida and Los Angeles and so on. It's way too early to make over-the-hump assertions just as it was too early to decide Washington had buried our 2008 in irredeemable mediocrity (though, to be fair, mediocre would have been a step up from what we witnessed in three of our last four National League games).

The Mets for the past decade, maybe longer, have always struck me on some level as an exercise in unadmirable restraint. Even before Willie brought calm to a new state of placidity, the Mets tended to veer toward not panicking too much for my tastes; yours, too, probably. No one game is ever worth getting excited about. No one rival is ever worth getting overly amped for. No extended morass ever sets off alarm bells, not even for something as benign as a team meeting. Perhaps the fierce urgency of now finally tapped the Mets on the shoulder and shook them from their maddening complacency. Two good games don't change everything. But two wins are far better than two losses. Even the Zennest team of them all would have to cop to that much.

If you'd like a little precedent to hang your cap on, I've got something. It doesn't involve the same players, it doesn't even come from the same century, but let's assume there are some common bloodlines pumping between Mets then and Mets now.

Hark back with me to the beloved year of 1985, the year when we all cared about each other. Every Mets fan who was around in 1985 will, on substance if not bottom lines, take it as the year to remember over 1986. 1986 was awesome, but 1985 was beautiful. The success of those Mets, to paraphrase Joey “The Lips” Fagan in The Commitments, was irrelevant. The '85 Mets raised our expectations of life, lifted our horizons. Sure we could have won championships and had parades and stuff, but that would have been predictable. This way — 98-64, unaided by Wild Card after a 162-game struggle to the death against the dreaded Redbirds — it was poetry.

What's generally forgotten about that unbannered year is that the Mets stumbled badly for an uncomfortable portion of it. Not long after a swift 8-1 start, the Mets, almost every damn one of them, stopped hitting. Speaking for himself in If At First…, Keith Hernandez referred to it as being lost in a dark forest. By the end of June, Darryl Strawberry had been out for more than a month-and-a-half and the whole lineup experienced a power shortage. Mike Lupica made his columnist bones with zingers like a Met rally is when one of them works a three-and-one count.

The joke was easy enough to construct. Keith was batting .251 through June 30. Gary Carter had sunk, after a brief surge, to .271 (with a paltry 33 RBI for nearly a half-season's work). Darryl, everybody's answer, came back and dipped immediately from .215 to .208.

Mookie Wilson — .263

Rafael Santana — .251

Wally Backman — 246

George Foster — .237

Howard Johnson — .186

Ray Knight — .171

After a flickering mid-June boost in which the Mets won five straight and jumped from 3-1/2 back to a first-place tie with the Cardinals, the forest darkened to pitch black. They finished the month with seven losses in eight games, scoring four in the ten-inning loss that started the slide and then not tallying more than three runs in any of their final seven contests…the last three of which were head-to-head defeats in St. Louis that put them five out. The Mets hung up exactly three runs on the Busch Stadium board in 29 torturous Missouri innings that weekend.

Could it get worse? Sure seemed to on the first night of July when the Mets returned to Shea and lost to the last-place Pirates, 1-0. This dropped the Mets to 38-35, or 30-34 since they sizzled out of the gate. All around New York, the Mets' 1985 chances were penciled in on the endangered species list. Would they ever break out? Would they ever start winning? Would they do anything at all?

In a word, yes.

Yes, they would break out: five runs on July 2, six on July 3, sixteen in the legendary July 4-5 game. Yes, they would start winning: nine in a row and ultimately thirty of thirty-seven into mid-August; a 30-7 mark to obliterate the 30-34 forest. Yes, they would do plenty. They would go toe to toe with St. Louis into September, through two bloodletting series versus their archrivals, right down to the final weekend when all of us stood and cheered the most valiant runners-up we could imagine and none of us uttered a disparaging word about what we just saw. The Mets finished three back and out of the playoffs. You couldn't have divined that from how good we felt about the season played out.

I thought of this last night after the Mets had won all of two in a row against the Yankees because it, too, came on the heels of a discouraging 1-0 loss to a last-place team and it, too, came after weeks of hand-wringing about the Mets seeming incapable of scoring or winning or doing anything at all. Granted, the '08 Mets don't have vintage Dr. K, but modern-day Johan Santana may just be warming up. They don't have late-prime Gary Carter, whose production (21 HR, 68 RBI) from July 2 on was Hall of Fame-worthy, but they do have guys who have been known to get seasonably hot for reasonably long stretches. They don't have Keith Hernandez except in the broadcast booth, but would you put it past a David, a Jose or at least one Carlos to enjoy a .392 month the way Mex did July '85?

“Four in a row,” Keith wrote in his diary after July 5, the win that followed the Independence Night marathon. “The mood on the team has turned completely around. A week ago I was worried. Worried. Now I have that old feeling again about this team and this season.”

It's just one potential precedent. I could probably dig up a 1-0 loss from 1962 that would show a perceived nadir can easily bottom out and bottom out again. But damned if I didn't think of the midsummer revival of 1985 after this truncated Subway Series sweep at Yankee Stadium.

Every year I tell myself that the Subway Series doesn't mean what it used to. This year, the initial evidence seemed to agree: I woke up at 1:30 on Saturday, glanced at the clock and realized with what fuzzy horror I could muster that the game had already started. (I'd completely missed Jeter giving the Yankees a 2-0 lead, but I did get to see Moises Alou get picked off while I was trying to wake up. Hooray!) When neither half of Faith and Fear in Flushing can wake up for first pitch, we are a long way from Dave Mlicki.

But then came tonight. When Carlos Delgado's pole-clanger was declared foul on unnecessary further review (nothing good ever happens to us in that corner), I began a slow burn. And then, when Delgado persevered with a run-scoring single, it erupted.

“FUCK YOU, YANKEES!” I screamed at the TV. “FUCK YOU, MORON UMPS! FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE FANS! FUCK YOU, FORD EDGE! FUCK YOU, SUZYN WALDMAN! FUCK YOU, STEINBRENNERS!”

Hmm. Maybe next year.

The Mets are, of course, welcome to play a crisp game with minimal mental goofs whenever they want. (This one wasn't spotless: Jose was lax in a rundown and Oliver started thinking about cartoons or something for a half-inning, but 5 RBI in two games and 7 2/3 of solid pitching, respectively, will forgive a lot of sins.) But I think any Met fan will agree that these two well-played games were particularly timely in talking all of us in off a very high ledge. (Though we have four with the Braves in three days, the first one against T#m Gl@v!ne, so we've still got the window open.) By the late innings tonight I was comfortably ensconced on the couch, thumbing through the remnants of the Sunday paper and entertaining myself by surveying the crowd and playing Spot the Yankee Fan. It's nice being relaxed in a Subway Series game, as that means the alternatives — vein-popping tension or existential despair — aren't necessary.

Not that I feel the least bit sorry for them, but without A-Rod and Posada, the Yankee lineup is pretty naked — that final five of Giambi-Cano-Cabrera-Gonzalez (who?)-Some Molina Brother wouldn't particularly scare the Zephyrs. While I maintain we needed Friday's rainout, the game that went missing will probably feature both missing guys when it returns as part of yet another two-stadium doubleheader. It's a wonderful idea, marred only by the fact that terrible things happen to us during them.

But that's for later. For now, we can take heart in finally beating a last-place team in convincing fashion (third time's the charm, I guess) and happiness that said dispatched last-place team was Them. We did it with luck (the pailfuls of garbage we hurled at Andy Pettitte in the fourth inning Saturday) and with pluck (Delgado's determined at-bat tonight). Provoked by the sins of diabolical umpires, we put our faith in Church, whose weekend included a couple of nifty catches, a great throw, one no-doubt-about-it home run and five runs scored. I should have done this a couple of weeks ago, but I'd like to take this occasion to officially apologize to Omar Minaya for this post. Lastings Milledge may still become a star, but Church is far more than a platoon outfielder, and Brian Schneider can hit just fine.

Heck, even Joe Morgan was fairly tolerable. (Everything's tolerable when you win by nine. Except, maybe, ESPN's silly new video decoupage tools. What the hell was that crap?) OK, his Song to Shortstops was ridiculous — the difference between Reyes and Jeter isn't that one's a tailback and one's a fullback, but that one has range and the other doesn't. Still, I didn't hear a single reference to Odalis Perez, and that's something.

As a postscript, one final note about Jeter. Remember Saturday, when he tried to stretch a single into a double and got gunned down by Beltran? Jeter was lying in the dirt, hand not even on the base with Castillo holding the ball on him — and Alfonso Marquez called him safe. Castillo looked amazed. So did Jeter. And so did I. And then I hung my head in despair. He's Derek Jeter, the beaten-down little-brother part of my brain whispered. Against us, he gets called safe even when he doesn't touch the base.

But then Marquez, quite properly, called him out. Jeter picked himself out of the dirt and trotted back to the dugout. Matsui struck out. We won. Once in a great while, things aren't actually as bad as you think.

Stephanie and I whiled away the pre-Subway Series hours at the Liberty‘s first game of the 2008 season this afternoon. The bad news is the Liberty lost to the Connecticut Sun pretty convincingly. The good news was Jimmy Rollins was nowhere in sight. Score one for the WNBA where home openers are concerned.

One idea the Mets will not want to adopt from their distant, distaff New York sporting cousins at the Garden: before tipoff, the scoreboard encouraged us to “stand and clap until we score.” A drumlike sound effect pounded home the point.

THUMP!

The Liberty don’t score.

THUMP!

The Liberty don’t score.

THUMP!

The Liberty don’t score.

Bottom — THUMP! — line is this ostentatious admonition continued for the first 2:04 of the game while the Sun jumped out to a 5-0 lead. The THUMP!ing paused during a Connecticut free throw, but otherwise underscored just how embarrassing it was to promise your fans a bucket and not deliver.

By the time the Libs sunk one, not too many were standing or clapping…and a quarter of the crowd was composed of preadolescent girls who are prone to doing that stuff anyway.

All I could think, naturally, was I’m sure glad the Mets didn’t urge us to do the same this past Thursday when we could have stood, clapped, taken up aerobics, twisted ourselves into pretzels and screamed our heads off for nine innings waiting for the Mets to score and we would have gone home very tired, very achy and very disappointed.

I mean more so.

First thing I heard when drifting from my Saturday sluggishness was Howie Rose telling me Derek Jeter had just homered against the Mets.

“Hey, hey, hey!” as I used to hear through habitually half-asleep ears on early Saturday afternoons — it's the Subway Series! And from what I could tell, it was another repeat. Jeter was homering, Pettitte was in command, the Mets were immediately in arrears and I wished I could turn over and resume napping.

“Subway Series, they should call you tedious.”

“'Cause you the same thing year in, year out.”

OK, I'm no Bill Cosby when it comes to producing punchlines, but the 61st episode of this intermittent weekend staple had a few surprises more than I could have inferred from its unpromising start. Hey, hey, hey, it turns out, you can always learn something from the Subway Series.

Lesson 1: It doesn't have to be tedious.

The blessed soul of Dave Mlicki notwithstanding, my impression of Subway Series games at Yankee Stadium is the Mets give up five in the first and then slowly fall away. Obviously we've had a few successes since 1997, but my perspective is tinged mostly by the one SS@YS I took in personally in 2000 — on a Saturday afternoon, no less:

Them 13 Us 5, me and Rob Emproto again squirming away before it was over. Pettitte started and won. Jeter went 3-for-5 and homered. Some yutz sitting behind us in left yelled at Jason Tyner “hey TYNER, make an ERROR” and, by cracky, that's what he did. (Ah, good times.)

It doesn't have to be that way. Saturday afternoons at Yankee Stadium can be beneficial to the human race. Saturday afternoons at Yankee Stadium have actually had their moments through the Subway Series years. We were, to my surprise, 5-4 on Saturday afternoons at Yankee Stadium coming into this Saturday afternoon at Yankee Stadium. More shockingly, most of the wins were of the uncompetitive variety. We won four of them by impressive scores like 11-2, 8-1, 10-3 and 8-3. They didn't make up for that 13-5 beatdown (they never do), but they felt good when they were in progress.

Today's was different. Today's was an actual good game, a good competitive game, one in which we came back and one in which we staved off. I'll always take the Us 11 Them 2 romps, but for unbiased entertainment scintillation, you could do worse than seeing all your pieces — starting, closing, hitting, running, fielding, throwing, blocking, sheer winning — coalesce for Us 7 Them 4.

Lesson 2: It's nine innings, not one or four or seven.

I was distressed in the first. I was defiant in the third and fourth. I was ebullient in the seventh. I was still uncertain in the ninth, until Billy Wagner righted himself against Shelley Duncan and Morgan Ensberg (and if you can't right yourself against Shelley Duncan and Morgan Ensberg, nobody wants to hear what you have to say about anything else). It took nine innings for the Mets to put away the Yankees. It took watching 40 games to see them play one that merits mini-classic consideration. It took two days to forget how annoying they can be.

The FAN has been playing a promo in which Paul Lo Duca unexpectedly calls Joe Benigno and Evan Roberts and gets on their case for harping on Jose Reyes' recent shortcomings. Lo Duca's reasoning: “It's May!” Say, he's right. It is. No wonder many of these Mets run to work out or fill their buffet plates after games. It's May! Just as there's no penalty for being behind in the first and no prize for grabbing a lead in the fourth or enlarging it in the seventh, there's nothing definitive about what you're doing in May, especially when you're right there with everyone else in your division.

Our eyes don't deceive us. They are lethargic a lot. And the numbers don't lie either. 21-19 isn't world-beating material (and 76-76 since May 30, 2007 is damning). But the season lasts beyond the most recent pitch thrown. The next pitch thrown might be hit into the gap (no!) but it also might cut off by the rightfielder (yeah!), might reach the second baseman quickly (Yeah!) and might be fired to the catcher who blocks the plate like the defensive wizard we were told he is (YEAH!!!). Likewise, the perennial opposing lefty might be treating our bats like used Q-tips for three innings, but that doesn't mean we can't gut him out for 41 very long pitches in the fourth.

The Mets had some good innings there in the middle of the game. It guaranteed them at most a chance to be in decent position to win at the end. I'll take that on a Saturday afternoon like this.

Lesson 3: Good pitchers should pitch as often as they can, particularly the best pitchers.

Johan Santana has pitched on more rest than any starter in the big leagues this year. Johan Santana has been pitching on almost as much rest as Mark Bomback's been getting in 2008 — and giving up about as many home runs as Boom-Boom did back in his day. But pet gopher notwithstanding, we know Johan Santana's better than that. He needs to be employed as steadily as he is paid. Once he found his groove today, he was that guy who had us doing our Avery the Cat on the Bed impression (rolling around in total glee) when we learned he agreed to take oodles of Met money to pitch for us until I'm in my fifties. If he's gonna get paid anyway, for cryin' out loud, find a way to give him the ball every fifth day. Unseed the clouds. Institute a drought. Do something, as someone I admire said Friday.

Santana versus the Yankees, admittedly, was worth the extra day skipping him against the Nationals cost us (not that it really cost us in terms of having to settle for Pelfrey). His record against New York (A) aside, I figured he'd want to stick it to the team he probably thought was going to make him an absurdly rich man, just like Carlos Beltran seems to have that thought in mind when he travels to the Bronx. Beltran, like Santana, was “supposed” to become a Yankee. It was his moneyfest destiny. Now he reminds them that he could have been tripling and tracking down balls everywhere for, just as Johan reminded them today that he's a much better bet than Generation K, Jr. to lift them out of last place.

Lesson 4: Shut up and play.

In I guess it was the second, Gary, Keith and Ron (who make a helluva t-shirt or two, FYI), along with trusty Kevin Burkhardt, discussed at length the Wagner-Delgado controversy from a couple of days ago. It was typically enlightening, including a niblet about how the Mets clubhouse has physically changed since Hernandez's and Darling's career — how the room where Charlie Samuels used to store equipment is now given over to the “eats” and how nobody but nobody used to lift weights or ride bikes once a game was over. Logistics as much as anything have enabled players who don't think talking to reporters is crucial to not talk to reporters.

I found this fascinating. But by the time Church to Castillo to Schneider kept Damon from scoring and by the time the lineup batted around and Alfred Hitchcocked Pettitte (drip…drip…drip…) into submission and by the time Reyes and Wright were homering and especially by the time Delgado was showing Joba Chamberlain a rope, I didn't give a damn who talked to the media and who didn't; who bolted from the clubhouse and who didn't; who said who should have been by his locker and who didn't. Honestly, I didn't and tonight, in the glow of glorious victory, I don't.

My hope for my team, beyond its capabilities relative to its opponents, is that it's not populated by cadres of jerks and they don't say stunningly stupid things about each other or us the fans. It would be reassuring to know they're considerate of reporters on deadlines, but…eh, it's like what my partner once said about having lots of homegrown players on your roster. It's the equivalent of good posture: it's nice, but you won't fall over if you're walking around without it.

These guys (the Mets, not their beat writers) have been driving me nutso this year and last for the way they don't win enough and the way they don't play baseball to its optimal state, but the 2008 roster doesn't bother me at all in terms of personalities. There's nobody here I don't like rooting for. Even if the media remains my filter, I don't get the sense I'm clapping for a single bad guy. For that matter, the media loved to death T#m Gl@v!ne, whether it was for without fail being available to them or because he was “a good teammate,” but I couldn't stand him. There's not a single Gl@v!ne, not a single Mota on this team. I can live with that and their puncher's chance at the title as long as it's May.

Lesson 5: Beating the Yankees is beating the Yankees, always and forever.

The Subway Series snuck up on me this week. I needed to see the schedule to know it was to begin Friday. Usually I'm at full froth by the preceding Monday. This year, I didn't give it an ounce of additional thought. The Mets had to prove themselves by proving themselves every day, not in some mythical bat-measuring contest against some mythic enemy. It didn't help (or hurt, depending on how you look at it) that the Yankees have been pretty wan themselves in 2008. I haven't watched them much and I haven't paid attention to their travails even a little bit.

I can't argue that Jeter's career has been completely overblown by sycophantic hagiographers, no matter that he will always be a sneering weasel in my book. I can't attribute all of Pettitte's good fortunes to a vial he wasn't using to gain an edge. As much as I cringe at Jason Giambi's thongular revelations (Keith's referral to fundamentals as “fundies” made me think he was referring to the Giambalco's funderwear…brrrr), he's still good for a long ball now and then. As dumbfounded as I am that Chamberlain has been hyped to high heavens — well, I'm just dumbfounded that anyone that young and that fresh has been penciled in for immortality already, even by the Daily Snooze. Anyway, it's quite possible I've matured to a point where the vertical swastika isn't so readily the red cape to my bull instincts. Maybe I'm ready to accept that the Yankees exist and won't, as I've been deep-down hoping since 1970, move to Utah.

But they are the other team in town, and beating that never gets old. It just doesn't. Maybe I never grow up where that's concerned. So be it. We won the 61st game of the Subway Series today. We beat the Yankees. Whatever else was wrong with us before this particularly Saturday afternoon at Yankee Stadium, it's not a problem tonight.

Hey, hey, hey!

Mets, Yankees, fans, bloggers, media guys … we were all better served by not having nine more innings of baseball to chew over last night, and not just because the weather clock seemed to have suddenly turned six weeks backwards.

The Mets held their meeting, as teams do. The Mets said the meeting was good, as teams do. The manager said things will turn around, as managers do. The general manager said he had faith in the manager, as general managers do. The guy who said things he shouldn't have said his remarks were taken out of context, as guys who say things they shouldn't have said do.

This is baseball kabuki in times of trouble, and it neither means much of anything nor is a particularly accurate representation of reality. Very few team meetings ever solve anything, and the Mets took a long time to reach the same conclusion every team that holds a team meeting reaches: Now we know what we need to do, we found that out as a family, and we're going to tell you guys less. Willie Randolph said his faith in his team is unshaken, and I suppose a more-charitable person than me might admire a faith so strong that it's unshaken by a streak of mediocrity that lasts 150 games. You also had to admire Willie's brass, in talking to an oddly gentle Mike and the Mad Dog, in edging right up to saying Billy Wagner had been misquoted without actually going there. That's hard to say when the quote is taken from videotape, but again, Willie's faith is a powerful thing. Omar Minaya's faith in Willie, we can all guess, is somewhat less powerful, but that drama is still playing out. Oh, and through the healing power of jock magic, Billy Wagner's callout of Carlos Delgado was transformed into an oblique criticism of the media. He meant the pesky reporters, and we're all dummies for not getting what he wasn't saying. Oh, and he's not a racist. I don't think many people thought he was a racist, but making that an issue was a clever way to redirect the conversation away from whether or not his being a loose cannon is a problem, which is a tougher debate to table.

If all this makes you tired, me too. But that's not entirely a bad thing. It was good to have 24 hours to cool off before the players' meeting, and good to have 20-odd hours more before a pitch is thrown in anger once again. By noontime I venture all involved will be heartily sick of Thursday and its aftermath, and perhaps ready to move on.

So hey, there'll be baseball in a few hours. Mets-Yankees, pretty exciting. Big crowd. Relax, have a ball out here. This game's fun, OK? Fun, goddamn it.

A day-night two-stadium doubleheader is likely to be played during the second Subway Series to make up for Friday night's rainout.

Concomitantly, the worst day of the season is slated to take place on whichever day the twinbill is scheduled.

I wish I could share my co-blogger's pluck, his acceptance, his relative calm. But I can't. The only comfort I can take from yesterday's disaster is that Willie Randolph's firing may have gone from an “if” to a “when.” But how much agony do we have to endure before then? How many losses? How many boos? How much dismal baseball? How much finger-pointing?

And that's without even mentioning the controversy that's about to engulf this team. Billy Wagner all but openly called out Carlos Delgado, with collateral damage for Luis Castillo and Carlos Beltran. I believe Billy when he says he isn't talking about color but about individual players. But I also believe the talk-radio hyenas will blow this up into exclusively a question of color. And it's not just Delgado and Castillo and Beltran whom the fingers are pointing at. Which slumping player is the target of endless psychoanalysis and rumormongering? Jose Reyes. Who was the last guy called out by Wagner for being flighty and unmotivated? Oliver Perez. Who's now been called out by the press for ducking the media before his start against the Yankees? Johan Santana.

Let's be clear about this. I don't know who on our roster tries and who doesn't. I don't know what motivates or doesn't motivate Carlos Delgado — just as I don't know what motivates or doesn't motivate Aaron Heilman, or what was in David Wright's head as he wandered in the general direction of first base this afternoon. I'm not remotely qualified to guess how much players not talking to reporters has to do with language and cultural barriers, though I bet there's some of that — reporters whose first language is English gravitate to players whose first language is English because it's easier, and players whose first language is Spanish find it easier to duck pesky reporters by exaggerating the language barrier, just as players whose first language is English would if the roles were reversed. I wish none of this were happening. But it is, I can guess how it will be portrayed, and there's a real risk of it getting awfully ugly.

It would be a shame if that were the immediate cause of Willie Randolph's ouster, because there are so many other reasons for that to happen — most notably that his expensive, talented players continue to routinely do moronic and/or lazy things while in uniform.

Witness the frozen-in-amber shuffling of Castillo and Wright on the ball Austin Kearns dropped in the third. I don't know if Castillo would have scored on that play if he'd been at least running, but I do know he would have had a better chance than, say, Reyes did going to third a few innings later. I do know Wright damn well should have been on second. In a game that close, with everything that's gone wrong so far in this infuriating season, that's absolutely inexcusable. And spare me announcers making nice: Keith said that happens and you learn from it, but if the Mets have shown one thing since last Memorial Day, it's that they don't learn. As for the excuse of Castillo's leg, he'd bunted for a hit the previous at-bat. If he's got a bad quad that plagues him on random plays, put him on the DL. Otherwise, tell him to at least attempt to earn his absurd contract.

But for sheer baseball stupidity, the bottom of the eighth was worse. Reyes made a dumb play, as he does all too often lately. (Is it too early to suggest that Reyes, for all his electricity and thousand-watt smiles, is a dumb player?) But what really burns me is why Castillo was bunting. You've got six outs left — why on earth would you give one up when the guy on first is that fast? I understand having Reyes run and then bunting him to third with none out — Castillo may as well sacrifice, seeing as how he's otherwise useless — but with Reyes on first that play is idiotic, stone-age baseball. Even if it had worked, it would have been stupid. (And if Ryan Church had bunted with Beltran on first in the ninth, I really might have taken a cab to Shea Stadium and gotten myself arrested.)

The rest was miserable luck, from Willie Harris's latest dagger-in-the-heart catch to Delgado's ankle-high liner to Beltran being erased on a contact play. (That's the irony of Delgado's apparent refusal to talk — he hadn't done anything wrong.) But luck, as they say, is the residue of design — and this team desperately needs a redesign. If you've watched more than a few years of baseball, you can smell death in the air. The manager has lost his clubhouse. Too many of the players aren't accountable. The clubhouse is turning toxic. The press is out for blood. The fans have turned on the team. (And you can blame them less and less each day.) And we can expect no mercy from the 29 other teams, starting tonight with the Yankees — our third last-place team in a row, but that hasn't gone so well this week. (The Yankees at least have plausible excuses for being bad right now.)

Fred and Jeff, it's up to you. It's your $137 million lining the pockets of players who aren't earning it. It's your final hurrah for Shea that's rapidly turning into a bitter farce. If neither of those things moves you, consider how you'll feel opening your gorgeous new park and hearing the fans shower a catatonic manager and his uncaring charges with venom. That's where were headed. If you want to stop it, you need to do something very quickly.