Well, we survived Augie Ojeda (7 for 14 in the series!), today's installment of Bullpen Roulette (“Some Met will be ineffective! Which one? Don't you wish you knew!”) and an OK but not sky-high effort by Johan Santana (yeah, he needed nearly 120 pitches to get through six, but the Diamondbacks are freaking good, and wise beyond their years in the batter's box) to win two of three against the NL's best team.

This was shaping up to be a stinker, with Joe Smith's giving up the lead in the seventh prelude to Pedro Feliciano hurling Chris Burke's bunt down the right-field line, which was clearly leading to a Diamondback on second and nobody out in the eighth. But as has happened frequently this year, Ryan Church stood between the Mets and a meltdown. Felicitously, Feliciano's throw to Carlos Delgado was so terrible that it wasn't a bad throw to Church, who fired a strike to David Wright, waiting in mock idleness to pounce on Burke and erase him. (Somewhere, Pedro Martinez smiled.) Then, just as we seemed to be settling in for the long haul, Conor Jackson fired a ball three feet over Stephen Drew's head, and the Mets pummeled Chad Qualls into submission, making us briefly forget they'd been punchless much of the day. About time we had a game in which we weren't the much-heralded National League team that lost after commencing to play stupid.

In our house, this was one of those busy Sunday games that unfolded as everything else happened. Saturday was our annual Kentucky Derby party, which over the years has come to include a larger and larger percentage of children. The kids are now old enough to be turned loose downstairs with minimal intervention while the adults drink bourbon and beer upstairs, but they're also now large enough to reduce the downstairs to rubble within a couple of hours — our house looks like it's hosted a cruise missile by the time we're done. When the game started things still hadn't been entirely put right, so the first few innings were kept track of on various TVs while surfaces were vacuumed and swabbed and washed and otherwise put right. (Well, except for a cobblestone in the backyard that the kids somehow fractured into three parts. I have no idea how they accomplished that and am not certain I want to know.)

With the house once more functional, it was off to the park with Joshua, who'd been foolishly promised a game of wiffle ball when the cleanup looked like it would only take a couple of hours. In deference to his feeble father being hobbled by a hurt toe, Joshua agreed he'd be both the Mets and the Tigers. (I don't know why he picks the Tigers. Occasionally the enemy team has been the Cardinals. We once had a showdown because I flatly refused to be the Yankees, even for pretend. I'm nearly 39 and don't know why you're asking.) While the virtual Mets and Tigers did battle, I kept track of the real Mets and Diamondbacks with a single headphone and my ancient radio. When I told Joshua that David Wright had hit a home run and it was now Mets 2, Diamondbacks 1, he looked baffled and reminded me it was Mets 8, Tigers 2.

When the babysitter arrived Emily and I headed out for a We Survived Derby Day dinner and restorative liquor. Normally a 4 p.m. start would see us go around the corner to the bar to see the rest of the game (I love my wife), but today basketball was claiming the TVs. (Stupid basketball.) So we decided to walk the 40 minutes or so down to Red Hook and the Good Fork, our favorite restaurant in the city, sharing a headset and only occasionally moving out of sync so that one listener or the other had earpiece and game suddenly ripped away. (By the way, walking single-file through a construction zone while sharing headphones, exhorting Met hitters and tapping out a text message … it's difficult.) Wright popped up with the bases loaded near the Moonshine; Burke committed his sin of overeagerness near the Hope and Anchor, and with Jorge Sosa arrived on the mound we settled in at a table in the Good Fork's garden, under a slowly darkening early-evening sky. Figuring al fresco was casual enough for subtle al radio, I sneaked an update every 30 seconds or so, announcing the bottom of the ninth with raised fingers, as if I were the shortstop and Emily an outfielder.

One finger … two fingers … and reach for the off switch.

“Put it in the books?” Emily asked.

“Put it in the books,” I said.

One year ago tonight, Julio Franco homered off Randy Johnson, right into that silly pool at Chase Field. One year ago tonight, we loved Julio Franco.

One year later, Julio Franco has hung the proverbial 'em up.

He didn't reach his goal of making it to 50 as a player. He fell about four months short. He barely made it to 49 in the Majors last summer, cut by the Mets, picked up the Braves, dazzling no one by September. He was hanging on this spring in the Mexican League with the Quintana Roo Tigers.

They were the last stop in a professional career that began in 1978, when he was 19, and included stints with the Butte Copper Kings, the Central Oregon Phillies, the Peninsula Pilots, the Escogido Lions, the Reading Phillies, the Oklahoma City 89ers, the Philadelphia Phillies, the Cleveland Indians, the Texas Rangers, the Chiba Lotte Marines, the Milwaukee Brewers, the Angelopolis Tigers, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the Samsung Lions, the Atlanta Braves and the New York Mets.

Now Julio Franco is done.

He told Mexico's sports daily the Record that retiring “was the hardest decision in my life. I always said I would be the first one to know the exact moment. I think the numbers speak for themselves, the production speaks and this is the right moment. I understand that my time has passed and the great men and athletes know when to say enough.”

Given that he left the Mets fairly isolated from his teammates, I don't know that Julio Franco would qualify as a great man, but you can't argue the athlete part, not when he lasted for more than 30 years in professional baseball, not when he was playing in the big leagues in 1982 and was still playing in the big leagues in 2007. Though his vaunted clubhouse influence seemed to have waned or turned sour between the beginning and the end of his Met tenure, he seemed like a pretty good guy to have around in 2006 when so much was going so right so soon for his new club. His teammates then called him Moses, not Methuselah.

I'm a little more than four years younger than Julio Franco. I began getting published as a writer the same year he began getting paid for playing baseball. I get to keep writing as long as I like. I hope somebody will continue to pay me for it, as it is my primary marketable skill. Thanks to the Internet, I get to be published as long as I like (Buzz Bissinger's indignant sputterings notwithstanding). There is nothing remarkable about a 45-year-old writing for a living, or a 55-year-old or a 65-year-old.

It is astounding that a few months shy of his 50th birthday, Julio Franco was playing baseball and doing it competently and drawing a check for it. He'd been to bat 128 times for the AAA-caliber Tigres de Quintana Roo and was hitting .250. He homered once and drove in 15 runs. Carlos Beltran, whom Julio famously urged out of the dugout to take a franchise-altering curtain call two seasons ago, has driven in 13 runs over 96 at-bats in his league. A slow start at age 31, however, is worlds apart from any kind of start at age 49, no matter how amazing any kind of start at age 49 should be considered, no matter how tough it has to be say “enough” to doing what you have always done, doing what you have always loved.

The Mets played like a champ today. Or, more accurately, looked like a load of big brown.

No offense to the horse that took a couple of minutes to do in Louisville what the Mets couldn't come close to achieving over three-and-a-half very long hours in Phoenix. Our nag stayed a nose behind for a few innings, but eventually finished six lengths back and completely out of the money.

Quick, Billy Wagner — say something helpful about Mike Pelfrey and his dry fingers.

On the plus side, the Mets aren't just taking a dive. They're taking many dives. Ryan Church dives. David Wright dives. Sometime they come up with a ball or keep a runner in place. Sometime it's just a matter of belly-flopping into the abyss. But their efforts are appreciated, however sporadically they pay off.

Except for one well-pulled swing by Carlos Delgado and one impressive gut check by Aaron Heilman (were his shoulders always so stiff that he had to shake them loose before every pitch or is it just the weight of the world crushing him?), nothing. Nothing about this apparently reluctant Fox game of the week — we swear, Sprint Cup Racing from Richmond is coming up next — indicates the 15-13 Mets entered this game a single Brian Wilson mistake from first place. This was the best team in the National League versus what is, at this moment, the eighth-best, a unit that is glaringly middle-of-the-pack, mediocre and, because it's such a damningly accurate Metric, 70-70 since last May 30.

They're not thoroughbreds, but perhaps the Mets might give Nascar a whirl. It seems to feature lots of going in circles.

P.S. Help us Johan-Wan Kenobi, you're our only hope.

Nah, it doesn't save Willie Randolph's job in my view — going one game over .500 since last May 30 isn't nearly enough for that, particularly when it comes on a night when Willie's reaction to a Met actually calling out a teammate for a poor effort was disappointment about it not being handled in-house. Fine in theory, but in-house ain't worked for 11 months, Skip. Better by far to tell Billy Wagner that having aired out Oliver Perez publicly, he's got about 20 more players left to discuss on his radio show.

That said, the Mets played the kind of game they're capable of playing, and it was fun to watch. There was Reyes running wild from the first pitch, playing good defense, paying attention and not getting himself killed at home plate after Sandy Alomar got a hair too excited. When the second triple came, I was downstairs comforting Joshua after a bad dream, and could hear this vague big commotion from the TV upstairs. Even before I did the lineup math I knew it was Reyes. Remember when you automatically knew vague big commotions from the TV upstairs meant Reyes?

And he wasn't alone. There was Wright turning in a key at-bat late, shoving the Mets into a more-comfortable lead at a point where too often his teammates have lapsed into sleepytime and awoken too late. There was Ryan Church, continuing to offer Omar some job security in trying times. (I still think exiling Milledge was very strange, but Church sure looks like the solid player we were told he was. And boy do I not miss Shawn Green chugging in to field yet another moderately struck pop-up on the first bounce.) There was the returned Moises Alou, which should be nice until sometime later this month, when he pulls/tears/strains something, is bitten by a shark, steps on a mine, or whatever will befall him. And there was John Maine struggling through another mildly confounding outing, but at least struggling through instead of letting the Diamondbacks into the bullpen after five.

And since Willie is in no realistic danger yet, whatever Tim Marchman and Brooklyn Met Fan and I and a bunch of Faith and Fear readers and half of MetsBlog's commentors think, kudos to Willie for sending Maine back out there for the sixth instead of robotically following the book, and for putting Luis Castillo where he could damage the offense as little as possible. Please, for the love of God, just leave Church in the 2 hole.

P.S. Just heard a radio spot for a John Feinstein book chronicling the 2007 season as lived by Mike Mussina and Tom Glavine. No offense to Mr. Feinstein, but as a Met fan I'm going to skip that one. I'm sure I'll be forced to read it several thousand times in Hell as part of the All-Glavine Library, probably while “The Most Deranged Victory Calls of John Sterling” blares on continuous loop from a radio hardwired into the outlet and missing its knobs.

Lying in the dark after the Mets got the bejesus beat out of them by the Pirates, I came — reluctantly — to a conclusion. Even started working up the post in my head. And then wavered. Memorial Day seemed like a better time to make the point. Even though I doubted anything would change by then. Which means I shouldn't have wavered.

Tim Marchman's not wavering. And I agree with every point he makes.

It's time.

11: Wednesday, September 10 vs Nationals

Ladies and gentlemen, tonight our Countdown Like it Oughta Be takes us back to an event in the history of our nation and our city that was undeniably tragic. But it also reminds us of how we as a people can unite and lift ourselves up from rubble when brutality confronts us.

It was seven years ago tomorrow morning that the skyline of New York was irreparably ruptured and the United States' sense of its security was forever challenged. The acts undertaken by despicable human beings on the morning of September 11, 2001 will never be forgotten by any soul who witnessed them or by anyone unfortunate enough to be touched, closely or remotely, by them.

But out of tragedy, there was uplift. And it began at, of all places, Shea Stadium.

In the days that followed the attacks of September 11, a baseball facility was converted into a vital staging area for humanitarian response. Those who sped to New York to help in the immediate and necessary municipal recovery operations were directed here.

They gathered supplies here.

They loaded trucks here.

They helped in any way they could here.

They rested here and then they went back to work here.

Many were called. Many more came. They were joined, as no more than concerned citizens, by members of the New York Mets, on- and off-field personnel alike, all of whom put in their own long hours to help their neighbors. Everybody gave of themselves and none sought fanfare for doing so. In the wake of those sad September days, as George Vecsey so eloquently put it in the New York Times, Shea Stadium was “sanctified”.

And that was before a single pitch had been thrown in competition in New York City after September 11. It is now the stuff of legend to recall that the first major sporting event New York saw, ten days after those dastardly attacks, was a game here at Shea, the Mets defeating the Braves 3-2, the crowd roaring not just at the result but at the fact that a game was being played at all.

Shea Stadium was where the road to normality in this city commenced on September 21, 2001. We won't forget the horror that came directly before it nor the immediate response of New Yorkers, Americans and good people everywhere to it. We will long remember the game as well; the players who played it under trying circumstances; the famous and the unknown who lent their labors to make the night extraordinary; and the thousands to whom we rightly referred then and refer now as heroes.

Any number of men and women connected to the recovery efforts that followed September 11 have a place with us on the sanctified grounds of Shea Stadium for this occasion tonight. It is to slight no individual or group that we have asked only a single person to walk out to right field and represent those collective contributions on behalf of all of them. No one in baseball and few in any endeavor were more committed to aiding his fellow New Yorker in the weeks, months and years that unfurled in the wake of this city's worst day.

Ladies and gentlemen, returning from Japan to remove number 11, please welcome home the manager of the 2000 National League Champion New York Mets, Bobby Valentine.

Number 12 was revealed here.

I don't know. At a certain point it was so off-the-chart bad — it got funny. My central nervous system was telling me something.

—Aaron Altman, Broadcast News

Let's be clear that these things happen in the course of a season, no matter how good a club is. Teams lose badly sometimes. It can happen with no warning, even at home in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. The Mets have a history of such degradations falling out of the bright blue sky and onto their heads — even the really good Mets.

The 1969 Mets were spanked hard in a daytime doubleheader July 30, a Wednesday afternoon at Shea, by the Houston Astros, 16-3 and 11-5; things got so unseemly that Gil Hodges marched straight to left field to legendarily inform Cleon Jones he was injured. The 1986 Mets, behind Dwight Gooden no less, took it on the chin and probably up an orifice or two from the Reds, 11-1, on the Wednesday afternoon of July 9.

It happens. It doesn't necessarily reflect your overall operation. It doesn't mean you are what you ate, even if you just ate it big time.

Sometimes, of course, it does. I don't know that the Mets losing this afternoon, another Wednesday, by an undeniably embarrassing tally of 13 to 1 means they are the kind of team that is barely good enough to beat an otherwise lousy Pittsburgh Pirates one night and horrid enough to get their heads kicked in by them the next day. I do know that since the truly scintillating evening that Armando Benitez balked Jose Reyes around the bases and Carlos Delagdo took him deep into the Flushing night, your New York Mets are a strictly break-even proposition: 69 and 69 dating back to May 30, 2007. That's 138 games. That's 84% of a full season, all managed by Willie Randolph, all masterminded by Omar Minaya, all featuring the stars David Wright, Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado, John Maine, Oliver Perez, Billy Wagner, Aaron Heilman and others.

69 and 69 is more alarming than 13 to 1. 13 to 1 is just plain ridiculous. Take it from one who witnessed nine frigid innings of it from Section 1 of the upper deck.

Yes! Yes, I went to this abortion of a debacle of a fiasco of a game! Yes, this was my chosen midweek afternoon in the sun! And yes, this was the absolute worst pounding I ever saw the Mets absorb at Shea Stadium in 36 seasons of Logging such matters. Except for one night in Detroit in 1997 when I was more concerned with the ballpark than the ballgame, I had never seen the Mets lose by as many as a dozen runs.

I have now.

Statistically, it was the worst home loss I ever experienced. Emotionally, it wasn't in the same ballpark as the Day of Devastation exactly seven months earlier, but having sat through September 30, 2007 and April 30, 2008, I detected some eerie parallels:

• Seven runs in an early inning off a starting pitcher who showed no gumption as things got worse and worse.

• Luis Castillo unhinging the starting pitcher with a fumbled double play ball.

• Luis Castillo making the last out.

• The Mets looking like amateurs against a team allegedly not on their level.

• No crowds to fight through on the way to the exits.

Differences? That was a numbing afternoon for reasons that have been exhaustively documented. This was just farcical. Also, today was like 40 degrees colder and the entire season was not at stake. Plus, we didn't start on time this time. I was with my friend Rich whose wife is expecting in about six days. Her water has yet to break, but the Mets' did. Add “been at a game delayed because a ruptured main wouldn't allow hosing of infield” to my lifetime attendance record.

Either way, the Mets delivered a twelve-run, bouncing loss.

Omar help us if there are any more days like this at Shea Stadium, but I mildly pity anyone who hasn't sat through one of these from late start to silent finish. Seriously. This was one of those days when you could really understand the instinct to boo, but after the umpteenth Met miscue, you didn't have the energy to take part. This was one of those days when you remembered what 1978 felt like every day, when you imagined what 1967 felt like all year. It was blustery and sparse and bad but not the end of the world because it wasn't the end of the season. You can handle this a little better in April, even on the final afternoon of April. This was one of those days when the Nikon Camera Player of the Game was either the school group that kept up a LET'S GO METS! chant as the innings grew late and the sun grew elusive or the school group that filed out after the eighth but not before shouting toward the field, BYE METS!

I hope we're not all saying that soon where the 2008 season is concerned.

Some nights we invoke Bob Murphy and offer a happy recap. Some nights we channel Gary Cohen when the big hit is outta here! Some nights we are thrilled to make like Howie Rose and put it in the books! Some nights we even have to agree with Fran Healy that Shea Stadium is rocking!

Tuesday night brought to mind the unlamented Steve Albert because the Mets won a game he might have called scintillating — except unlike Steve, we make no pretenses about our sarcasm.

That was not one of your more scintillating walkoff wins. But the key, after eleven innings, is it was a win and 187,932 fans or whatever fictional figure they posted as the paid attendance left less unhappy than they might have had it not been. Surely it could have gotten surly late.

But don't call me surly. Even if Santana's gopher is still nibbling a little too heartily. Even if Sanchez and Wagner have forsaken perfection as their guiding principle. Even if Reyes' sextet of on-base appearances was overshadowed by his inability to keep one Pirate off base at the worst possible moment. Even if Heilman…ah, you know from Heilman. And even if Delgado was burdened by no vexing decisions regarding curtain call or not to curtain call. Don't call me surly, because a win is a win is not a loss.

Let us not accentuate the negative. Let us glory instead in Ryan Chruch's lefthanded jacking, which can be impressive. Let us note the six times Jose Jose'd his way on base. Let us remember why we fell in love with Endy Chavez those two years ago, first and foremost for the offensive spark we see again now that Endy is playing and regaining traction (at least until Moises Alou returns and inevitably winds up in traction). Let us not forget that the only homers Johan surrendered were soloists and that he was otherwise clean. Let us hand it to Scott Schoeneweis for covering home as he did and to Raul Casanova for shoveling Schoeney the 2-1 assist that cut down Jose Bautista at the plate in the seventh. Let pause and ponder what kind of manager sets the wheels in motion so someone named John Wesley Van Benschoten can pitch to someone named David Allen Wright with the bases loaded in the bottom of the eleventh with less than two out.

I'm not sure, upon reflection, how that could have been avoided once Endy was balked to second and bunted to third, but it sure seemed more fait accompli than it had to. You put on Reyes, you let him take second and you then pitch to Castillo who walks. Could have the Mets, even our hard-to-hug Mets, not cashed in? Against the Bucs? David comes up, the annually feisty if perennially futile Pirates go down. One pitch, one fly ball, one win that couldn't be avoided, done deal. For Pittsburgh, he says at the risk of offending the gods, I suppose simply asking somebody to retire Wright and Beltran was not an option.

The vengeful spirit of Hans Wagner notwithstanding, what really spooked me was the matchup that had Duaner Sanchez facing Xavier Nady in the eighth. July 31, 2006 and everything after flashed before my eyes. Sanchez gets into a cab; Nady gets onto a plane; Oliver Perez comes into and out of his own; Guillermo Mota and Shawn Green arrive with much baggage; '06 grows less certain; '06 just misses being a year for the ages; '06 becomes '07; '07 becomes '07; '07 becomes '08; '08 becomes the year we look for excuses to be relentlessly pissed off at our team…or the excuses seek us out on their own. Maybe all that arguably sprung from the events of that red-letter date in Mets history is why even walkoff wins around here can sometimes seem a little less than scintillating.

But we'll take them. And don't call me surly.