The long-rumored Faith and Fear Shea Stadium Final Season Countdown is taking its swings in the on-deck circle. We articulated the concept here, but there are a few things worth noting besides (because stuff is always more fun when somebody explains it to a fine pulp).

• That figure or group you're sure is deserving of recognition? The one more deserving of it than whomever we are recognizing at the moment? Please indulge our sense of drama and stab at delineation with patience. Chances are he/she/they will get his/her/their due soon enough.

• There is no more wonderful Mets book to own than Mets By The Numbers (buy it if you haven't, already yet), just as there has been no more vital Mets Web site since 1999 than mbtn.net. Our caps remain permanently tipped in the direction of creator Jon Springer and co-author Matt Silverman, who together have covered the whole who-wore-what vibe so thoroughly and brilliantly that we ourselves are not worried about matching the numerals from our mythical right field wall to the digits on anybody's actual uniform. We know there are numbers closely associated with particular Mets, but for our counting-down purposes, we will not necessarily be anchored to that angle.

• While this is a virtual countdown, we opted to make it as real as possible. We took into account the 81 games the Mets are playing at Shea in 2008: the opponents, the dates, the occasions. If somebody appropriate for number-peeling seems a good bet to be in the house for a particular series, chances are that somebody will get the call during those days. We thought about who might be available and who might not be. We want this to be the ideal celebration of Shea Stadium, the one we're not remotely confident Shea will be given, so we want it to take place within the realm of reasonable possibility. That said, there are exceptions to every rule.

• Unless otherwise indicated, you should hear Shea Stadium public address announcer Alex Anthony introducing each guest of honor.

• The one question we were asked repeatedly by those in a nominating state of mind was, “Does somebody have to be alive to qualify?” The answer was maybe. That answer stands.

• We received many terrific reader suggestions on who should be included in our countdown, and several of them found their way onto the final list. Thank you to everybody who cared enough about Shea Stadium to have contributed thoughts and ideas to this admitted flight of fancy.

The countdown commences Wednesday and will keep rolling until we have accounted for all 81 home games and the lifetime of a ballpark. So keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the loge.

Tonight at 8, the The Happy Recap is scheduled to host four bloggers — from the Eddie Kranepool Society, Mets Merized Online, Mets Geek and, yes, Faith and Fear in Flushing — for a chat on the upcoming season and all things Met. Please join us there if you get the chance.

Y'know, I was about to be extraordinarily hindsightful and ask why we couldn't have kept Johnny Estrada around in case both our catchers were to be found grabbing their groins and such come mid-March, but I just checked and I see Johnny Blue Jeans is sitting with tendinitis, so maybe catcher is just one of those things we can't have for a while. It happens once a decade or so. Maybe Tim Spehr isn't busy. Maybe we can hold the fort with him and Alberto Castillo and Rick Wilkins and Jim Tatum and Todd Pratt until the third week of May until we can acquire Mike Piazza should we become impatient for the reactivation of Todd Hundley.

Maybe if this were ten years ago.

What's up with this? We'll all be guzzling Schneider Schardonnay if nobody's capable of stepping up and squatting down. Ron Darling said Ramon Castro is in the best shape of his life this spring. Ramon Castro's life hasn't been about shape up to now, so that wasn't reassuring, especially after watching Castro lash a ball into the left field corner and seeing him struggle his way to first. Ouch.

Lots of ouch around here. Had been getting the idea that Carlos Delgado was finding his groove (I did a lot of that last year) only to look up and see him escorted off the field by a man in a golf shirt. He was standing off third when Brady Clark's bat shattered and sliced his arm good. Only in St. Lucie, kids, only in St. Lucie.

Not that it's all bad news from the town of Tradition. Pedro Martinez threw four shutout innings yesterday, his first four innings that weren't simulated; the more Pedro that is actual, the better. Matt Wise appears to be the real deal — or as real as a middle reliever can be — and Scott Schoeneweis is hinting he may truly be the effective lefty the Mets thought he was when they generously lined his pockets the winter before this one. Plus nobody else, as far as I know, was attacked by Brady Clark's bat Sunday. Maybe things will be all right. Maybe we're just one inoffensive (though hopefully not too inoffensive) Molina away from fielding a full roster.

In the meantime, Lenny Dykstra is still happy. Good for him.

The Faith and Fear Shea Stadium Final Season Countdown is almost at hand. Watch this space. Until then, contemplate a true Shea Stadium original and wonder why nobody's called Ron Hunt home lately.

What's so funny about a ballplayer sitting on the bench with someone else's bubble gum, fully tumescent, affixed to button of his cap? I'm not arguing that it's not funny (because, viscerally, it's hilarious), but why, when we've all seen it a hundred times, does it not fail to delight?

Luis Castillo, who's been sitting and hopefully healing rather than playing, was the victim of the time-tested childhood prank his fellow well-compensated adults pulled on him yesterday. Ramon Castro allegedly did the chewing and the blowing and the sticking…twice. Every Met looked satisfied with the result, except for Castillo, who appeared oblivious. Keith Hernandez and Kevin Burkhardt were certainly delighted. And it's pretty much the only thing I remember from Wednesday's exhibition game — and I watched chunks of it twice.

Perez finally pitched the kind of game that won him big bucks in Ollietration and Angel Pagan smacked his 75th homer of the spring while not being traded for Coco Crisp and J!4 tripled and Fernando Martinez did not dim his prospects. But by this weekend, I won't remember much of their exploits because none of them count. I will, however, remember the bubble that materialized over Luis Castillo's head. Given his state of awareness, one senses it wasn't a thought balloon.

Mets By The Numbers continues its hiatus from matters of significance with Part 2 of its bizarre conception of what constitutes a Met-Lovin' Big Shot

Mets By The Numbers: No longer picky about whom they interview.

While I'm not crazy about the concept of Barry Bonds joining the Mets, I will confess a fondness for Will Ferrell movies and anything pertaining to the ABA, so when Semi-Pro dribbled into my neighborhood cineplex, I was there quicker than you can say Bill Melchionni.

Unless you share the same two weaknesses, it's a flick you can skip, at least until it's on Starz. But man do I love seeing that red, white and blue basketball in action, even the fictitious kind.

A decade ago, I bought from Mitchell & Ness a New York Nets t-shirt with the beautiful logo that identified two American Basketball Association champions. I wore it to a few Mets games and it always — always — provoked a question or a comment, usually along the lines of “Where can I get one of those?” or “Yeah!” The Nets of Long Island and the ABA of 1967-1976 represent a package deal that gets better with age. They reside in that comfort zone where abandoned radio station formats and demolished ballparks go to live out their best days. You don't actively remember that Musicradio 77 played too many commercials or that Comiskey Park's concourses were cramped and dark. You remember the fun.

I remember the ABA as great fun, if not as much unadulterated fun as Semi-Pro makes it out to be, nor as preternaturally doomed as the league's definitive oral history, Loose Balls by Terry Pluto, makes clear it was. The movie implies the whole thing was an excuse for coaches to wrestle bears. The book revels in forehead-slapping tales like the team owner who thought he was drafting exactly to his GM's specifications only to learn the depth chart he was working off of was not ranked for basketball potential but listed alphabetically. To me, as a kid whose world revolved largely around spectator sports, the ABA was the genuine article, the real McGinnis if you will. Basketball was my favorite pre-puberty non-baseball sport and the Nets were every bit as authentic and competitive to me as the Knicks and the NBA were. The Nets were on Channel 9. The Nets played in playoffs. The Nets' standings appeared in the papers and their games were covered by sportswriters. I never for a second considered the ABA any kind of a joke.

The thin strand of plot to Semi-Pro involves which ABA teams get to be absorbed by the NBA. It still makes me sad the mini-merger that rescued the Pacers, Spurs, Nuggets and Nets ever happened. I loved having the ABA around. I loved that ball. I loved the three-point shot and the 30-second clock and the 84-game schedule and the defense-optional ethic and the Nets' rivalries with the Kentucky Colonels and the Virginia Squires and the Spirits of St. Louis, all of which I took as seriously as any Mets-Cubs or Mets-Pirates series (at 12, I sat in my bedroom, tuned in to WGBB and cursed out the likes of Louie Dampier for hitting too many threes down in Louisville). I idolized Dr. J before I'd ever heard of Dr. K, and loved as a matter of course Nets stalwarts like Melchionni and Rick Barry and Billy Paultz and Brian Taylor and Larry Kenon and Super John Williamson. I loved that a major sports team called Long Island home. You knew the league was newer than the NBA, that it wasn't as popular as the NBA, that you could hear the red, white and blue ball bounce on television because the Carolina Cougars weren't exactly packing 'em in, but it never occurred to you this league wasn't worthy of your attention.

Leagues don't just materialize out of thin air anymore, not the kind with major ambitions. I caught only the tail end of the AFL, didn't cotton to the WFL, didn't care about the WHA and never quite bought into the USFL. But the ABA transcended all that alphabet soup during my formative years. The ABA was the big time.

I've never quite gotten over the disappearance of the ABA. Whenever the subject arises, or whenever the New Jersey Nets are momentarily worth considering (minus Jason Kidd, I sense that will be increasingly infrequently), I feel a twinge for when we were kings, a phantom pain where a particular rooting muscle used to thrive. The New York Nets were my team, held in esteem not all that distant from the regions of my heart reserved for the New York Mets, definitely in concert with the affinity I felt for the New York Knicks before their chronic dry rot set in. The Nets were twice the best team in their league, hands-down the most vibrant league the 1970s had to offer. Then the league was no more and Dr. J, as far as Uniondale was concerned, was no more and — after a single desultory NBA season — the New York Nets were no more. Between October of 1969 and May of 1976, I celebrated a World Series and a National League pennant plus two NBA titles and two ABA titles. I had no idea I was living inside a golden era.

One night at Shea in 2001, I was wearing my ABA Nets shirt and Jason asked me if there was a Mets-Nets symbiosis the way there was and still is, for many, a natural Mets-Jets alliance. I thought about it and said not really, except for the rhyming. The Continental League was purely a ploy, so baseball never went for rebel outposts. You could make the argument that given the Mets' New Breed beginnings amid the heady days of the New Frontier that the Mets of the early '60s fit right in with the pioneering us-against-them spirit of the Titans/Jets and the Americans/Nets, though when you picture George Weiss at the helm, you tend to believe this was an establishment operation in training from the word go. The Mets were well-funded by Joan Payson and built on a proud National League tradition in New York. Not very rebellious.

On the other hand, it wasn't too terribly long after Marvelous Marv didn't touch first and somebody forgot to clue Frank Thomas in to how they shout “I got it!” in Spanish and Craig Anderson couldn't stop losing that the Nets moved from Teaneck to Commack to West Hempstead, each facility worse than the one before it. The Nets wore their winter coats on the bench because it was too cold not to. The Nets held a gerbil night from which the gerbils attempted a jailbreak. The Nets brought a million-dollar check, underwritten by the entire ABA, to a meeting whose express purpose was enticing young, impressionable New Yorker Lew Alcindor to join them and their league, but didn't bother to show the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar the money. The Nets didn't trade their version of The Franchise, Julius Erving, for four lesser players; they sold him to the 76ers before entering the NBA, guaranteeing they would never, ever be what they were in the ABA. Hell, at least Joe McDonald salvaged Zachry, Henderson, Norman and Flynn for Tom Seaver. If the Nets ever do limp to Brooklyn, they will surely arrive unburdened by a third championship. They are now the Nets who sold Dr. J and, for good measure, traded Jason Kidd.

Maybe there's a little more ets-hood at work here than I suspected in 2001.

Will Ferrell doesn't need a plug from us, but these causes are certainly worth your attention:

• So many blogs dance on the head of a Mets pin and we will update our sidebar in short order to reflect the embarrassment of riches at our fingertips, but one I wanted to highlight right now is The Serval Zippers Sign, not just because it's thoughtful and well-written but also because it comes to us courtesy of FAFIF's own CharlieH. We've sat next to him in the upper deck, on the LIRR to Woodside and out in Jersey. Now we're happy to share a little corner of cyberspace with him and suggest you peer off into the distance and check out that Serval sign.

• I join Charlie in expressing admiration for Metsblog's Matt Cerrone's recent foray into blogging from St. Lucie. Through his association with SNY, Matt gained credentials and access that none of us have ever had and I loved how he put them to work, giving us a fan's eye view of how Spring Training functions from the inside, never losing that fan's eye. Matt's the last blogger who needs a plug from us, but we sincerely tip our caps to him.

• Before there were bloggers, there were beat writers. OK, there still are, but there was only one Jack Lang, who began covering the Mets at their outset and kept at it in one way or another nearly until his passing in early 2007. Hotfoot has let us know that the Mets are honoring Lang's memory with Jack Lang Day at Shea, which, via the sale of tickets set aside for the event, will serve to raise funds for the Epilepsy Foundation of Long Island. More information is available here.

• The Happy Recap is hosting a pair of blogger roundtables tonight and next Tuesday at 8 PM. Each session will feature a quartet of your favorite Mets bloggers chatting with THR readers on the upcoming season, answering questions and generally counting the minutes 'til Opening Day. Faith and Fear is honored to be slotted as a part of the second roundtable a week from tonight, March 18, and thanks Hoovbaca for the invite.

• We also thank It's Mets For Me for some very kind words recently and our pal Matt Silverman for making the Faith and Fear t-shirt forever a part of the New York Times archives. We look forward to reading his new book 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die, even if we don't necessarily look forward to dying (having already done that last September 30, once is plenty for now, thank you very much).

• One more wholly unsolicited note as regards the Silverman editorial empire: Meet the Mets, the 2008 preview that renders the likes of Street & Smith's obsolete, has been spotted at area (my area, anyway) CVS and King Kullen stores. It's a great companion to your Mets experience…and not just because it includes two articles and intermittently competent proofreading from yours truly.

• If poetry is your thing, it may not be much longer after reading this mangy doggerel at AOL Fanhouse, but somebody asked for it, so there it is.

• Finally, we are pleased to report evil should cease to exist in the world after Thursday because malevolent wickedness will likely reach maximum critical mass at a site whose very name would seem to encourage the despicable and the diabolical. It will be ugly, all right, but the good news is the scenario taking shape in Tampa will probably never be surpassed for its sinister assault on the senses.

Moises Alou is 41 years old.

In baseball terms that's old, but age is never the issue with Moises in a couple of different ways. He will always have the bat speed of a 25-year-old and the physical resilience of a 55-year-old — a 55-year-old leper in a minefield. He's out until May, and if you really believe May means May when an Alou return is what's being discussed, you've apparently forgotten all about last year. (Which I acknowledge wouldn't be a bad idea.)

Between now and Moises' return, the Mets will apparently fill the left-field job with some combination of Endy Chavez, Angel Pagan, Damion Easley and Marlon Anderson. Oh boy. Endy is a superlative defender and dear to our hearts, but he's a fourth outfielder who'll be exposed — as he has before — as a regular player. Pagan is much the same player, with less superlative defense. Neither Easley nor Anderson is a natural outfielder or likely to develop into much of one. And there's no help in the pipeline — Carlos Gomez and Lastings Milledge are gone and Fernando Martinez isn't ready to arrive.

The Mets have a young core, but they also have a fair number of key players (Delgado, Castillo, El Duque, Pedro, Wagner) that are old and/or infirm, making the stakes especially high for this year. The difference between the NLCS and the World Series was agonizingly small in '06; the difference between ignominy and the playoffs was agonizingly small (as well as just plain agonizing) in '07. Given the state of the NL East in 2008, we could easily be looking at the wrong side of another razor-thin margin this year — only to find ourselves with a team that's forced to retool in '09. In a situation like that, in the right spot, seems to me that you go for it — especially if the going for it doesn't demand an enormous commitment.

What does going for it mean? You probably guessed already: employing Barry Lamar Bonds.

Buster Olney started the talk; since he works for ESPN, that turned this into a story. Witness David Lennon addressing it today.

I know, I know: Barry's 43, has Castilloesque knees, is being pursued by the federales and is, well, a jerk of rather astonishing dimensions. But his on-base percentage last year was .480. He hit 28 home runs. He slugged .565. That's a heck of a replacement for Alou, let alone Chavez/Pagan.

There are all sorts of objections, I know. (Emily's reaction: “What? Do you want Clemens to pitch, too?” No, I don't.)

What if he gets hauled away in a paddy wagon? Well, then we're back to Pagan and Chavez — which we will be anyway when in July or August Moises pulls a hamstring or falls out a window or whatever insane thing will inevitably happen to him.

But isn't he awfully old and a lousy left fielder? Indeed. You also just described Moises.

What about the effect on clubhouse chemistry? Chemistry? Really? Last year's team spent four months playing bored, lackadaisical baseball when they weren't needlessly provoking umpires and pissing off the other team. That's not exactly the clubhouse chemistry you figure out how to bottle. Lennon quotes one veteran as saying he wouldn't want to be “answering for Barry all the time.” Fine, Mr. Veteran — let's talk some more about how you were two games under .500 after Memorial Day. That sound better?

Bonds knows this would be his last go-round. He knows — or, one presumes, would quickly find out — that there's no room beneath Shea Stadium for a row of lockers and a recliner and a pack of hangers-on. The prospect of his own baseball mortality isn't going to turn Bonds into Cal Ripken on a farewell tour — he wouldn't be Barry Bonds if he contained such possibilities. But he's no longer the man who held the San Francisco Giants hostage, and it's lazy to automatically make comparisons to that.

Would Bonds be a mercenary with a noxious relationship with the media and a difficult relationship (I'd guess it would equal parts cheers and boos at first) with the fans? Well, yeah — he's Barry Bonds. But we're not talking about bringing in Bonds through 2012 and making him the face of the franchise. We're talking about a one-year deal, with all the escalators and escape clauses you can imagine, and if Barry finds that beneath his dignity he can go back to swatting away court orders. His name and ours wouldn't be tied together for eternity — that link would be more the stuff of last-campaign trivia, like Babe Ruth as a Boston Brave or Hank Aaron as a Milwaukee Brewer. (And like you were going to remember the late-aughts as the Moises Alou era, anyway.)

I'll confess to complicated feelings about Bonds — two years ago I called his story the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy, and while I don't like him and will never like him, I'll stand by that. Part of what motivates me, I confess, is something I know must motivate Bonds: He has 2,935 hits. For a lot of fans, Bonds's 762 home runs will always come with a king-sized asterisk. Three thousand hits, though, would be harder to dismiss. I don't want that goal for Bonds's sake — I don't particularly care what he wants, or think he deserves any sort of reward for anything. But he's a player we're going to be discussing and remembering and arguing about for our entire lives, and I do think we'll come to regard him somewhat differently, as we get more of a grasp on the steroid era. We won't necessarily regard him any more kindly than we do today, but we will look at him differently.

Is he a cheater? Only the most-committed fantasist would say otherwise. Was he the best cheater in an era of rampant cheating? I bet that description will come to fit Bonds. A player with Hall of Fame numbers if he hadn't cheated? That will come to fit him too. With that in mind, it makes me uneasy to think he'll be kept short of a milestone because he was blackballed and made the scapegoat for an epidemic of cheating. It's not unfair — Barry's karma is pretty godawful — but somehow it doesn't sit right with me.

And more simply: He wants at least 65 more hits. We could use those hits on our ledger. He wants a ring. We want a bunch of those too. He's a left fielder, and still a pretty good one, all things considered. And man could we use a left fielder.

I know it's not as simple as that. But given everything at stake and the alternatives, I think I'm willing to live with a year of it.