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.

Alou is heading to New York for an MRI (which stands for Moises Regularly Injured). Beltran hasn't played and is worried. Church failed to successfully cross paths with Marlon Anderson. Anybody seen Endy?

We need some outfielders besides Brady Clark and Brooklyn's Own Angel Pagan, we really do.

Well, how about these? Gilkey in left, Johnson in center, Everett around in right…plus Huskey to DH. For one game, you couldn't do any better.

They'll be in the lineup Friday night for a Mets Classic worthy of the name. The date was June 16, 1997. The starter was Dave Mlicki. The rest is pretty self-explanatory.

Fire up your DVRs and whatnot.

Get the Mets to a New York hospital.

My goodness: If it's not Ryan Church wearing sunglasses indoors because of a concussion, it's Ruben Gotay gimping about on crutches. Read this morning that in order to avoid some chronic problem El Duque is scrapping his leg kick, which is a bit like hearing BMW is taking its circular logo off the hood. Except if El Duque were a BMW he'd be an early 80s model missing most of its paint, with a trunk held closed with a bungee cord and an engine given to rackety wheezing — still cool, and admirable for its service time, but not necessarily one's first choice when picking a vehicle for a lengthy trip. (Such as, say, to October.)

There's all too much of that right now — I haven't even mentioned the various Mets sidelined with aches and pains of various causes and expected durations. (Wasn't it just a week ago that Duaner Sanchez was the feel-good story of the spring?) Normally at this time of year it's Greg who's struggling to warm up to a new team and the marathon of a long season; this year it's me, waylaid by the demands of work and various fuss but also by the unlikeliness of turning on a spring-training game and seeing actual major-leaguers, instead of guys with nosebleed numbers and no names on the back. I'm all for prospects, but to get the blood flowing in March, I need something with a little more narrative kick than Murphy to Tejada to Abreu.

I also confess to a certain anticipatory weariness about a seasonlong goodbye to Shea. Some of it will be great — I'm eager to see which icons of Met history will pay a visit for the inevitable countdown of home games, for instance. (Though I bet the parallel-universe countdown Greg's putting together with a bit of help from me will be far more satisfying.) And a hopeful early sign, for the faithful like us who care about such things: The patch the Mets will wear on their sleeves is a winner, acknowledging Shea's history in a way that's both iconic and stylish. For an organization with no great track record at being either, it's a good start.

It's Shea itself for which I can work up precious little sentiment. I'm not immune to the tug (or the Tug, if you wanna personalize things) of its history, and I haven't forgotten the many, many happy days and nights I've spent there in good company, watching Mets of various vintages win and lose in exhilarating and excruciating ways. But the on-field history is exactly that -– limited to the wedge of green grass and infield dirt and warning tracks. And the company was there because the Mets were there. Give me the same people and the same game to watch and I would have had nights to treasure at, say, a DMV that happened to have a baseball game on inside.

Which, alas, is a great description of Shea.

It was never a great baseball stadium, emerging in the first wave of multipurpose stadiums designed to accommodate baseball and some lesser game played by brutes in the winter, with the baseball audience getting the short end of the compromise that required. If it seems ungenerous to penalize Shea for the sins it shared with its now-vanished brothers and sisters, it also seems overly kind to excuse it for being one of the last ones standing. Since opening, it's decayed steadily, settling into decrepitude that no annual coat of paint can hide, from its 120-degree-angled seats and sticky floors to its fountaining toilets, rusty-drip girders and inert escalators. Has the city done a particularly good job keeping Shea looking its best? Only the most-determined bureaucrat could make that case, but even in tip-top shape Shea would be dumpy and miscast as a baseball stadium. For a long while, its only saving graces were that it had real grass and wasn't entirely a full donut, like the multipurpose monstrosities that followed it in the 1970s. But that was never much, and the retro-park craze has erased such advantageous comparisons.

Is there a certain sameness to the new retro parks? (Which now aren't so new.) I suppose there is. But as sameness goes, copying the quirks and angles of downtown parks is a lot better than echoing the interchangeable Soviet sameness of the concrete donuts. It's easy to be dismissive of franchise after franchise following the Camden Yards blueprint — it's always easy to sniff at herd-following. But it's a pretty good blueprint. Seats that are close to the field and properly angled for following at-bats? Concourses that let you buy your kid a hot dog without losing track of the game? Brick arches instead of concrete and increasingly exposed rebar? These should be givens in a stadium worthy of baseball, not new features to discuss.

I know Citi Field will be a tough ticket for a while, and an expensive ticket for a while after that. I know that at the beginning we'll be competing with an echelon of baseball tourists whose determined lack of interest in the proceedings will make us long for your average front-running camp follower. (Though perhaps not for the guy in zebra-striped pants who's smoking in the stands and braying through the lip foam of Beer #5 at every batter who dares to take a strike.) But those people will get interested in the new new thing soon enough, and the normal ebb and flow of wins and losses will settle things down. And then we'll have a park I'm confident I'll like — and not just because I get to see my favorite team play there in the company of friends.

The logo? Eh, it does look a little corporate, and uncomfortably like the Domino's Pizza box. But logos are the way of our world, and we've at least been compensated with a name that sounds like an actual place name from the age before corporations ruled the land – not to mention a stipend for one Johan-sized contract each and every year. Twenty million dollars buys a lot of soggy pretzels — if Citibank needs an outlet for a tenth of that a year, I'd be willing to discuss tattooing that logo on my bald head.

Is the seating capacity reduced, and have the Mets been a bit dodgy in their explanations of that? Yes and yes. But the Mets don't draw 55,000 a night — even in good recent years, most games at Shea have been played with acres of red seats in the upper deck. And yeah, I've heard a greater percentage of those seats will go to corporate accounts. But I've been a second- or third-hand occupant of innumerable corporate-account seats in my Shea tenure. I doubt that will change at Citi Field — once the novelty passes, plenty of those seats will find their way via StubHub and other outlets to folks who want to fill them. Including, I hope, me.

Will the Mets do embarrassing things in trying to make their new home glitzy and zingy? Probably — the Mets usually do. Take the apple, for instance. I'm heartily glad that there will be an apple to greet home runs at Citi Field — I've come to appreciate Shea's apple for its mangy, high-school shop-class charm, though it always seems faintly pathetic when seen quiescent amid dust and broken parts in the DMZ beyond the outfield wall. I doubt the current apple would survive the move or fit in at Citi Field, but the prospect of a steel apple on steroids depresses me. I understand why the Mets won't keep the same apple, but I hope they keep the apple the same.

But that's an apple, not a park. I don't begrudge my co-blogger his increasing reluctance to let go of Shea, or some Met friends' longtime attachment to the place. While we all root for the same team, we root in different ways, and find ourselves struck to the quick by different associations bound up with the Mets and their history. I won't shed any tears for Shea, but I'll understand when others do.

And in the end, I'm confident that our shared glue — this team, with all its accumulated glory and tragedy and hope and despair –- will mean far more than whatever we see differently. It's hard to pick a single memory from so many days and nights at Shea, but here's one: Todd Pratt sends the Diamondbacks into winter with an unlikely homer.

Steve Finley, who's pretty much death to flying things, stands at the wall, stretching, reaching. Pratt, for some reason, is exhorting and pointing and staring instead of running. Rey Ordonez is doing much the same, for similarly not very good reasons. 55,000 of us are trying the difficult task of screaming and holding our breath at the same time.

You remember. I remember. But what do I remember? What happened on the field, of course — how Finley came down and looked in his glove and finally hung his head. Pratt floating around the bases, mouth agape and fist raised. Rey Rey leaping in the air. The mad scene at home plate. And other things too — hugging Emily as hard as I could, then finding myself hoisted into the air by Greg and realizing, “Whoa, this is one strong dude,” then trying to hug everybody in range and finally aiming my head at the sky and screaming even though I knew I wouldn't be able to talk above a whisper for a few days. And I remember the simultaneously impressive and somewhat-frightening sight of the upper deck and the mezzanine flexing under all those thousands of people jumping up and down and hugging and screaming, too.

I have faith that sometime in 2009 or thereafter, a backup player will hit another unlikely home run in a huge spot. Perhaps he, like us, will be so caught in the moment that he'll watch instead of run. Perhaps a runner ahead of him will do the same. (And admit it, you can totally see Ramon Castro and Jose Reyes pulling that one, can't you? Maybe Andruw Jones is the one left hanging his head, heh heh.)

When that happens, I have faith that the players will raise fists and leap and dogpile and roar with all the same fervor they did in '99. I have faith that we'll hug just as hard and scream just as loud as we did in '99. And those will be the keys to that memory, just like what I remember from '99.

And you know what? If Citi Field's upper deck holds still, I think I can live with that.

One afternoon five years ago, I'm walking by a desk occupied by a writer for the magazine I was editing in those days.

“Hey,” the writer asks amid several sheets of legal pad paper (none of which have anything to do with the magazine we're supposed to be producing), “which uniform number would you guess has the most homers in Mets history?”

Immediately thinking Darryl, I reply, “It's not 18?”

“18 is up there, but there one's that higher.”

“Uh,” going from career Met home run champ Strawberry to single-season Met home run champ Hundley, “9?”

“Good guess. 9 is up there, too, but that's not it.”

“Hmmm,” the wheels grinding so as to add HoJo plus Agee plus current unfortunate occupant Jeromy Burnitz, “20?”

“Yup, 20. More Met home runs have been hit by players wearing 20 than any other number.”

So forgive me if I'm not blown away when I open Mets By The Numbers to page 107 to learn that the three most powerful numbers in Mets history are 20 (384 homers through 2007), 18 (377) and 9 (314). It's not because I had the sneak peek five years ago, though — it's that I think about this stuff, albeit in a less specifically numerical way than does the book's co-author, Jon Springer. He is my former co-worker and a longtime friend but someone with whom I would feel a baseball kinship even if I'd never actually met him because of the way he writes about our team.

But don't for a second think that I'm not blown away by this book, Mets By The Numbers, because it is perhaps the most incredible repository of Mets data, Mets trivia and Mets Zeitgeist you will ever find between two covers. And, in all sincere immodesty, if someone like me can be blown away by this kind of Mets book in this manner, I can only imagine the absolute tsunami effect it will have on Mets fans who are every bit as committed as I am, maybe just not as…let's say obsessed.

We speak often in this space of our regard for the Web site Mets By The Numbers. When Jon told me he and Matt Silverman, author of last year's excellent Mets Essential, were going to create a book based on it, I was excited at the potential outcome but just the least bit wary. The site was already the blue and orange standard. How could a book, static in nature, compete with that?

Answer: It doesn't. It somehow exceeds it. Jon and Matt have burnished the best of MBTN and built on it. All the vital info is there, but so are new stories and fresh perspectives. It's part almanac, part encyclopedia, part bible for Mets fans. If you love the Mets the way I do, it's practically the Komiyama Sutra.

Why? Because it gets it. It totally gets what being a Mets fan is about, even though it is not specifically about the Mets fan experience. Every word, however, is informed by the Mets fan experience, and Jon and Matt are experienced Mets fans, falling inside that blessed demographic that came along when the franchise had already taken root but not too late to absorb most of its history already in progress. Like Jason and me, they listened to Bob Murphy and fastened their seatbelts. They've been along for the wild ride of Mets baseball for more than 30 years and now they steer us across more than minutiae. It may as well be a way of life.

Theoretically, the publishers could have hired two crack researchers and said “go find who wore every Mets number” and a handy reference guide might have resulted. But that wouldn't be this. That wouldn't have 1/58th (58 for Luis Rosado, natch) the soul that Mets By The Numbers brings to the Picnic Area table. That's why I love this book as I've loved few Mets books. It was so obviously written by Mets fans. It's not cheerleading, mind you. It's one loving but clear-eyed micro-biography of one Met after another, and if that Met disappointed, Jon and Matt don't pretend he didn't. If, on the other and rarer hand, he ignited, he thrilled, he lit our candle, then he gets his due.

And we find out what number he wore, and why, and why it was important. Let's not lose sight of the mission of the book. You don't need a book to tell you Mike Piazza wore 31…you may not even need to be reminded Mike Vail wore 31 (I mindlessly place him in 23 for his incandescent rookie hitting streak)…but it sure is sweet to have it all in one place. It's explosively gratifying to open to a chapter titled “#10: THEY BROUGHT THE FUNK” and think without even thinking, “Shingo Takatsu!” It would be too much in any other setting to read “#19: HE'S CRAFTY” and wonder, “Beastie Boys…Bobby Ojeda…right?…right?” but not here. Would it be too much to expect an in-depth examination of the Willie Mays/Kelvin Torve controversy or the evolution of the patches on the Mets' sleeves or which numbers have been worn by the most catchers?

Nope, not here. That's what you get in Mets By The Numbers. There isn't a Mets fan alive (certainly not among Faith and Fear readers) who won't be happier because they read this book. Honestly, you would be poorer to live without it.