Well, it's past 1 a.m. and the Mets showed very little in a 5-1 loss.

Oliver Perez missed Brian Schneider's mitt by three feet on his third pitch of the game, resulting in a Rafael Furcal home run, a 1-0 Dodger lead and a stare from Willie Randolph that could have frozen magma. And it was vaguely downhill from there: Oliver hung around out there to make matters worse with a blah effort that won't get him or Rick Peterson off the hot seat. Oliver, being paid a lot of money, will get time to work things out, but the Jacket has painted a target on his back at a time when ownership may be itching to squeeze off a few rounds. If it was bad when it turned out Peterson was ducking the scribes, it got worse when Jay Horwitz flatly contradicted his excuse that writers suddenly and mysteriously had to go through media relations.

Keeping with the ledger of frets and fears, what's wrong with Carlos Beltran? (Sentence with unspoken, uncharitable but inevitable addition: “What's wrong with Carlos Beltran now?”) Sometimes you need a psychiatrist, mediator and a soothsayer to interpret Beltran's physical condition: There are times he doesn't play because he's only X percent healthy, and long stretches in which it turns out he played when he should have been on the DL. Between his batting average and oddities on the basepaths tonight, you have to wonder if we're not back to the latter problem. Why didn't Sandy Alomar send him home on Delgado's third-inning double? He sure looked like he could have scored, and of course Schneider struck out and Luis Castillo did what he usually does, wasting a chance to pull within 2-1. (From a neutral, baseball-first perspective, kudos to the Dodgers for not robotically walking the eighth-place hitter and so letting the Mets clear the pitcher.) Then, in the sixth, same question in reverse: Beltran made a stop sign of his own at third despite Alomar waving him home. To paraphrase an old baseball tale, did Carlos think Sandy didn't mean it? I wonder if something beyond post-surgical aches and pains is wrong with Beltran's legs — and if so, if anybody is going to find out what and deal with it.

All in all, ample reason to get to bed early rather than go into the night watching a mediocre team get beat on the other side of a big continent. So why am I writing this now?

Well, most immediately because I went to sleep a little after eight for nearly two hours. But beyond that, because it's what we do when the body is willing. Our team's playing somewhere, so we watch, hoping that our vigil will be rewarded.

Was it? Not particularly. And yet absolutely.

No one will remember this game very long, but it had its moments. Like the leather flashed on both sides. There was Furcal's nifty stop on the backhand in the outfield grass, after which he threw out David Wright (a reasonably speedy runner) by a full stride; the awkward but effective dance between Delgado and Perez to beat Juan Pierre to first base; and the double play started by Wright, kept alive by a balletic pivot by Castillo and completed with a nice scoop from Delgado. There was the sight of Joe Torre in new colors, the absence of the Vertical Swastika from his head miraculously transforming him in one observer's eyes from surly, gimlet-eyed and unwelcome to calm, reflective and familiar. And there were the misadventures of future DH Matt Kemp — tell me the sight of the bewildered ballguy retreating farther and farther into fair territory (and lugging his chair!) as Kemp floundered after Beltran's triple wasn't worth at least a smile.

Little things, but they'll all go into memory, to be subconsciously retrieved and analyzed and fussed over and made part of the storyline for a dozen games yet to be played over the coming years. Is it crazy to watch your team lose a not-so-great ballgame when you could be sleeping? On the contrary — it's the rest of the world that's crazy. It's spring and the Mets are playing baseball — who cares what time it is? Besides, from November to March there's nothing much to do but sleep.

10: Friday, September 12 vs Braves

Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, we honor a Mets team whose exploits are too recent to have been forgotten but whose accomplishments may have dimmed given the rush in which we inevitably find ourselves to reach the next game, the next win, the next season, the next park. But we should pause and ponder one more time at Shea Stadium the club that made this place the place to be for Mets fans and sealed shut a void that drifted far too deep and stretched far too long.

We speak this evening of the 2006 National League East Champion New York Mets. They were the last Mets, as far as we can say with certainty at this moment, to bring postseason baseball to Flushing — the last Mets who could post a marker of any kind above the right field wall. For what the 2006 Mets did in reaching the heights they achieved, we salute them now.

In advance, we thank the organizations that currently employ some of our '06 Mets for graciously allowing them to return to us tonight. As this is the Countdown Like It Oughta Be, we felt they oughta be on hand.

Without further ado, then…oh, but wait, there will be further ado, for it might take this first 2006 Met a little while to reach the mound. But Mets fans should be used to him taking his time. That's probably how we are destined to remember him, but maybe we should recall instead six seasons of steadfast service in the blue and orange and the slick work he put in on the night of September 18 when he earned the victory that clinched the Mets' first divisional crown in eighteen years. How about an appropriately languorous round of applause for Steve Trachsel?

The final out in that milestone game came on a fly ball to left field, caught by another Met mainstay who preceded the 2006 revival. His best — and healthiest — year was 2005, when his monster season foretold, perhaps, the good things that lay ahead for the franchise. Welcome back to Shea, Cliff Floyd.

Although the Mets fell a little shy of closing out 2006 on the most desirable terms, nobody could say the Mets didn't know how to close out games throughout that 97-win season. When the bullpen gate flung open, confidence generally followed in the stands. How about some recognition for a pen that wrote the end to 92 wins in 2006? Say hello to long reliever Darren Oliver, specialists Chad Bradford and Pedro Feliciano, veteran presence Roberto Hernandez, set-up men extraordinaire Aaron Heilman and Duaner Sanchez and the Sandman himself, Billy Wagner.

A playoff team is only as good as its bench and the 2006 Mets had a fine one. Tonight we acknowledge the roles of three key reserves: infielder Chris Woodward, catcher Ramon Castro and the ageless wonder himself, Julio Franco.

Thanks to too many injuries to count, the Mets' rotation had a bit of a revolving-door feel to it two years ago, but these three pitchers helped stabilize matters and turned in some memorable outings, in-season and/or postseason. You know them as Oliver Perez, John Maine and El Duque, Orlando Hernandez.

It was a formidable lineup that ate up National League pitching early, late and often in 2006 and we have three of the hitters who helped make it happen: first baseman Carlos Delgado, rightfielder Shawn Green and the utilityman turned everyday second baseman who proved so vital to the Mets' success, Jose Valentin.

One of the most unforgettable baseball personalities of this generation, his pitching proved every bit as charismatic as his personality when he brought his act to Shea Stadium in 2005. He was one of the biggest reasons the Mets stormed out of the gate in 2006 and he remains a fan favorite for all time. His name says it all: Pedro Martinez.

Mets fans knew their organization had grown serious about winning and winning soon when management courted the prize of the 2004-05 free agent market, a speedy, slugging, Gold Glove-caliber centerfielder who brought to Shea heretofore unknown meaning where the phrase “five-tool player” is concerned. In 2006, he put up some of the best results any Met ever has: 41 home runs, 116 runs batted in and one body given over on innumerable occasions in pursuit of victory. He promised the world there would be a “new Mets” and he delivered. He still does to this day, Carlos Beltran.

Finally, to lead the 2006 Mets to the right field wall to remove number 10, we call on two of the most special players in team history, the tandem whose spark lit up the faces of Mets fans everywhere just as their talents lit up every ballpark they played in — particularly this one. If the crowd wasn't chanting for one of them, it was singing for the other. They lead us not only to this juncture in the final season countdown but they lead us as well toward what we believe will be a thrilling future in the park next door. Ladies and gentlemen, your starting shortstop Jose Reyes and your third baseman David Wright.

Number 11 was revealed here.

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.