Santana — we haven't got!

Dan Haren — we haven't got!

The D-Train — we haven't got!

What've we got?

Good question. If we eliminate heart — and based on the events of September 14-30, you'd kind of have to until further notice — we've got OK starting pitching, maybe even more than adequate starting pitching. We've got Pedro, more formidable and less of a question mark than we could have envisioned during his layoff; John Maine and Oliver Perez, who entered 2007 as maybes and go to 2008 as definitelys if not perfects; El Mysterioso Duque, who will likely have a fine two-thirds of a season; the Pelfrey-Humber Experience…or inexperience, if you will. One of them is bound to be pretty good if draft position and scouting reports ever mean or meant anything.

There's Mulvey down there somewhere until we are told that, oh no, he isn't actually much of a pitcher. There's Heilman, who could probably give it a go if asked — and by give it a go, I'm thinking run over his grandmother and grab the ball if told he gets to throw it in the first inning. There's some Japanese expatriate the organization is high on, isn't there? Or am I thinking of Yusaku Iriki, the guy who was suspended (and deported for all I know)? And yes, there's Livan Hernandez, destined to be a Met starter eventually, given his wear, his tear and his stubborn mediocrity, though the dude can hit.

Could be worse. Could be better. What else is new?

As of now, we don't have whoever it is we were supposed to be spending our Citi bonus on. Fearless forecaster that I am, I'll go out on a limb and predict either we will or we will not have that guy by Opening Day. We'll trade for one of those aces or acelike pitchers or get by with what we've got and the likes of Livan. Give me maybe three extra outs per start from Maine and Perez, something resembling staying power from Pelfrey/Humber and enough innings from one Hernandez to make up for the presumed partial absence of the other, plus a full season of Pedro, and I'm not going to sweat the rotation in advance of it actually decomposing.

Call me a wildly wide-eyed optimist, but I don't think our starting pitching is so horrendous that it requires the undignified lengths to which we've collectively been willing to throw prospects and stars at the feet of those who hold the contracts of other pitchers. The process reeks of desperation, as if the Mets are post-divorce Kirk Van Houten trying to score a phone number.

Let's trade Carlos Gomez.

Let's trade Carlos Gomez and Fernando Martinez.

Let's trade Gomez and Martinez and Pelfrey.

Let's trade Gomez and Martinez and Pelfrey and Humber.

Let's trade Gomez and Martinez and Pelfrey and Humber and Mulvey.

And we'll throw in Aaron Heilman!

And Carlos Beltran!

And Jose Reyes!

I've never been all that protective of prospects. Shoot, I didn't think Kazmir for Zambrano was the end of the world at the time. I had seen way too many Mets prospects not pan out for about thirty years to automatically throw myself on that kind of trade proposal like it was a live grenade. But the rush this winter to hypothetically include in trade talks everybody we've ever heard of…well, forget for a moment that almost every package that has been pitched for pitchers like Santana, Haren and Bedard has been returned to sender. It's the general willingness to just give up so quickly on anybody who might grow into the job, who might rise to the occasion, who might mature as a Met and not cost a zillion dollars and half the farm system that's added yet another dispiriting overtone to this offseason.

Whatever happened to patience? To reserving judgment? To that word at the top of the page, faith? I don't think it's Pollyannaish to hope the Mets will try to improve from without while not automatically throwing in the towel on what they've got within. They've already done it once this winter by sending Lastings Milledge down I-95. Do they have to do it again and again? Do we have to be nothing more than an agglomeration of wealthy rented strangers?

And that's just the prospects. What has also poisoned the atmosphere by my reckoning is the willingness, stated by many, to trade away just about anybody who isn't David Wright (and just wait a couple of weeks). Heilman? OK, not untouchable, but you better have a dependable replacement in mind for his innings. Beltran? I can't believe how often I've heard his name floated. Does anyone remember that one of the 119 million reasons he left Houston was the Astros' refusal to give him a full no-trade? And that the Mets gave him just that? Why exactly would Beltran waive it, other than to not hear himself come up in absurd rumors?

As for Reyes as a possible chip, even for Santana…that Jose would even be mentioned shows mental illness runs rampant in our streets. What is it about the Mets that inspires those who are theoretically looking out for their best interests to suggest trading their starting shortstop, leadoff hitter and, unless you've got Hanley Ramirez in your back pocket, immediately irreplaceable cog? Did you notice that when the Twins were entertaining offers from top American League teams that those clubs' fans (as far as I heard) weren't offering up their marquee starting position players?

Why the hell should we? What is wrong with us? What's in the water that makes anybody think it's a good idea to give up 24-year-old extraordinarily recent franchise pillar Jose Reyes, lousy September notwithstanding, for a pitcher who will pitch once every five days? Why do Mets fans (some; not all; enough) race to the edge of the cliff without being pushed?

Then there was the alleged Dontrelle & Pudge deal that was allegedly kiboshed because the Tigers insisted Rodriguez would have to go with Willis, and Rodriguez would, in turn, insist on an extension on his already lucrative contract. I heard Joe Benigno rail at the Mets for not grabbing at this alleged straw. Granted, Benigno's a weather vane with three hours to fill, but I've found his “JUST DO IT!” philosophy fairly common among Mets fans of late. Thus, let's say the Mets gave up whatever it was that would get them Willis and Rodriguez, thereby acceding to the catcher's demands for more years and presumably way more money. The Mets would be into Pudge for more than $30 million into the 2010s, I'm guessing. He's been a wonderful player, but he's 36 and he's a catcher. Even if he's an exceptional catcher, he'd be an albatross waiting to happen. Think that would go over big ten minutes after his inevitable decline kicked in?

I admit I'm wading onto hypothetical shores here, complaining about a trade that didn't and probably isn't going to happen, but I believe this kind of talk is just one more indicator over how screwed up our thinking has become. We're not worthy! We're not worthy! Take everybody we have and give us whoever you deem necessary! There's one Johan Santana. He merits intense consideration in terms of barter. Everybody else…be very, very careful, because whatever the benefits of getting a Dan Haren (whom I have to admit I confuse with Rich Harden) or Erik Bedard or Dontrelle Willis, somebody's gotta play short this year and left and right next year and pitch on all the other days every year. I think this radical brand of strategizing is called building and maintaining a ballclub.

OK, quick quiz: If I told you that the Mets had just swung a deal in Nashville (they haven't), and included a link where you could find out the details, what would be your emotions as you clicked through?

If you chose “anxiety,” “despair,” “dread” or a similar word as your answer, welcome to the 2007 offseason.

I mean, honestly. Somehow the Collapse of Sept. 30 has only grown since that terrible day, slowly becoming an avalanche wiping out everything in its path. I thought the excision of Tom Glavine, whom any sane person knew could never wear blue and orange again, might cure it. It didn't. I thought the simple passage of time might do it. It didn't. And this offseason of discontent certainly hasn't done it.

I don't know if Lastings Milledge will be the next Manny Ramirez, Rondell White or Alex Escobar. None of us do. But I do know nonsense when I hear it, such as when Omar Minaya stammers that he's improved the pitching staff by adding an old catcher who can't hit and a platoon corner outfielder. Omar referenced the Kris Benson trade in counseling patience, and in doing so accidentally touched on the probable reason for Lastings' exile: off-field issues. But there's a big difference between the Benson deal and the Milledge deal. We all knew Kris Benson's probable future, because we'd seen all too much of his present: At the time (in what may be, for other reasons, the most-trafficked post in Faith and Fear history), I compared him to “a bath that took 20 minutes to fill at the end of an exhausting day and was lukewarm the second you got into it — not so cold that you pulled the plug, but not warm enough to keep you from repeatedly dunking your knees until you realized you were enduring what you thought you'd be enjoying.” Benson was an overpaid, brittle, eminently replaceable journeyman — his mouthy wife may have been the reason he got run out of town, but his essential uselessness was the reason I didn't care about seeing him go.

Did Milledge have his own off-field issues? Sure, from “Bend Ya Knees” to getting suspended to stupidly waking up the moribund Marlins. When it comes to baseball mores there's a thin line between exuberance and obnoxiousness, and you could usually find that line by locating Lastings and then moving a couple of steps back. Granted. But he was also 22. He had demonstrated enticing ability on a big-league ballfield, he was cheap, and his future was yet to be written. How that kind of player yields a no-stick catcher and a corner guy who needs to stop listening to Bible thumpers is absolutely beyond me. If Omar turns around tomorrow and trades Estrada and Church as part of a package for Erik Bedard, I'll quiet down fast. But do any of us really believe that's coming? Or does the Milledge deal smack of the bad old days, of a hypersensitive ownership that would rather have a mediocre team of controversy-free nobodies than the occasional back-page blowback of a team with an actual personality? This feels like the dismantling of the late-80s teams, like the dead-ass early 00s squads where everybody was whispering in ownership's ear. Milledge is gone, Lo Duca is gone, and I have trouble believing that what we're witnessing are purely baseball decisions.

What's next? What will Omar return from Nashville with? And what will he pay to get it? Will Carlos Gomez and Mike Pelfrey and Philip Humber — all far too young to write off in my book — vanish from our ledger? With Santana, Bedard, Haren and the others seemingly out of our reach, what retread with a dull present will their futures be sold for? (Think that's pessimistic? If I'd told you Milledge had been traded to the Nats for two players, would Ryan Church have been in the top five players you picked? And would you have ever guessed Brian Schneider?)

At least there's the free-agent market. Come on down, Livan Hernandez! Plop your indeterminedly-aged body between whatever's left of Moises Alou and Luis Castillo, the oldest 32-year-old in baseball. Luis is here for the next four years — at which point he'll be playing second base with a walker. Seeing how you're supposedly under 50, Livan, I'm sure we've got at least two years for you too. (Seriously: When we sign Livan Hernandez, just kick me in the head so I'll be in the proper frame of mind to react.)

I'm a Met fan. I've been through plenty of lousy seasons. I've seen a couple of Septembers turn to ash in the final days. But I've never seen an offseason where I found myself bracing for a punch in the gut every time I saw my team's name on the Web. The solution to this, as with so many of life's problems, is for baseball to hurry up and return, even if it's only the sublime pointlessness of spring training. But we just got the first snowfall. It's not even Christmas. And I find myself scared to think what will come by the time we get to Valentine's Day.

Many Mets fans have fervently hoped for years that Gil Hodges would gain induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Now it turns out that by being denied access, the honor is all his.

After yesterday's newly rejiggered Veterans Committee subcommittee election results were announced, we learned a plaque will hang in Cooperstown for Walter O'Malley. This is who the Hall of Fame sees fit to deify: not someone who brought joy and grace and runs batted in by the boatload to the loyal borough of Brooklyn, but someone who packed up the plantation and shipped it to Los Angeles.

Walter O'Malley is a Hall of Famer like the Ayatollah was Time's Man of the Year. His impact was undeniable, but that's Nook of Notoriety stuff, not the hallowed Hall we spend so many hours idealizing and so many more hours figuring out how to get to without hitting a deer or anything. You don't schlep through dark roads and miles of highway anxiety to stare at a plaque devoted to a man who destroyed so much collective and individual happiness. If he bested Brooklynites with a big bat like Musial's or a live arm like Spahn's, OK, that's fair, that's baseball. But he did it with an airplane and a fleet of moving vans.

That's just wrong.

Pete Hamill is the spokesman for the half-century of heartbreak, anguish and disgust that defines the post-1957 Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and in today's Daily News he nails most magnificently the injustice of Walter O'Malley's enshrinement in Cooperstown:

For some of those people who roared and cheered, the hurt would last a lifetime. Many felt like naïve fools. Baseball wasn't a secular religion after all. It was a business, as cold as any business. That disillusion was permanent.

If O'Malley made money on the West Coast, then he got his reward. He got richer. If baseball grew more lucrative because it forged a footprint on the Pacific Coast, then O'Malley's peers and business descendants have already collected their honor. They got richer. That's worthy of praise on some level, some ledger somewhere. Just not in the Baseball Hall of Fame, an institution I once wished would accept Gil Hodges but I now understand is no longer worthy of association with a truly great icon of baseball.

The Veterans Committee subcommittee on executives also elected Bowie Kuhn yesterday, proving there is hope for errand boys everywhere.

It's not losses in October or September or April through August that try Mets fans' souls. It's what goes down in the offseason. It's Lastings Milledge for Brian Schneider and Ryan Church and all the rationalizing one is forced into when it happens.

Hey, Schneider's a pretty good defensive catcher. He gives us strength up the middle. He can handle a pitching staff. And Church? He sprayed doubles all over RFK last year. Get him in a less cavernous setting and who knows what kind of power numbers he'll put up? Also, he was probably naïve and didn't mean anything offensive when he said the one thing anybody remembers him ever saying.

Yup — nothing like a steady diet of chicken salad and lemonade to get you through the winter.

My crystal ball is completely fogged up so I can't tell you how much, how little or how not at all we will regret the departure of Lastings Milledge. He could be as multifaceted and dynamic as his flashes of brilliance have suggested or he could be a hopeless head case forever baffled by the intricacies of the curveball and the niceties of clubhouse decorum. There is ample anecdotal evidence to support either possibility. Don't know and won't find out with the Mets. I suspect a little of each is probably what the Nationals will get.

I would have liked to have found out here, though. I would have liked to have watched a 23-year-old rightfielder who we've seen dash around first and hit into gaps and make circus catches and throw out baserunners try to do a little more of that on a fulltime basis. I would have liked to have discovered how jaunty his home run homages would have become…or observed how he toned them down as he grew older. But I would have liked to have seen the home runs. What I don't like is that a kid, yes a kid, with as much talent as he's shown has been shown the door based on personality — probably the simple misdeed of having one.

Know your place, rook, indeed.

That's gotta be why Lastings Milledge is a Washington National. It's not because two partial-season auditions didn't yield Rookie of the Year stats or automatically secure a corner outfield job. It's not because of a couple of complex handshakes. It's not because “his stock has dropped” as a performer. Who can tell what his stock is at 22? He had his ups, he had his downs, but he still has his future. He couldn't bring you the mythical frontline starter just now? That means he had to bring you two middlebodies instead of perhaps developing into the kind of player others call you to obtain? You give him up for a catcher and an outfielder whom, intuition suggests if they were such hot stuff, would have been picked off by a smart team that saw their value long ago or deemed building blocks by the Nats and thus stubbornly maintained? Without having at hand the transcripts of every dialogue every GM has been having with Jim Bowden, I can't say for sure that no other team went looking for Brian Schneider and Ryan Church. But I wouldn't bet there was a huge market and I would bet recent top prospects weren't offered in exchange.

Listening to Omar explain the heretofore hidden desirable attributes (perfect Met fits, it turns out) of Schneider and Church on Friday was more painful than cramping up at Twister. Schneider is gonna give us that strength up the middle we've been so yearning for…though I don't remember “strength up the middle” even once entering the conversation as a dire need to be addressed in the past two years. And Church? He's a gem — a gem! — Omar tells us. He's just what we were looking for and we didn't even know it.

What's that old bromide about baseball general managers, lying and lips moving? I don't expect Omar to come out and declare “somebody didn't like Lastings Milledge, thought he was a bad seed, decided he was never gonna grow out of it and we had to get rid of him pronto à la Carl Everett for John Hudek; Schneider and Church were who I could come up with on short notice, and it turns out they play positions where we have holes at the moment, know what I'm sayin'?” But the lines weren't that tough to read between. Unless this was a trade made on perceived merit, in which case…Brian Schneider and Ryan Church in exchange for a tooled-up outfielder who in no way had played himself out of further consideration and who will not be 23 until April?

Come now, Mr. Minaya.

With the caveat that this offseason has been rife with making cases for or against infielders and catchers who aren't or were never going to be 2008 Mets, thus maybe we ought not take any projections involving Church or Schneider too seriously, what's done is done. If we wanted to root for a team that had no chance of giving up on young talent for older mediocrities, we should have devoted ourselves to fantasy baseball. Otherwise, our club (any club) will occasionally bring you players you weren't seeking, give away players you anticipated enjoying and engineer trades that make you miserable at worst, rationalize at best. The gamest among us can Google VORPs and whatnot to detect the positives in Chruch's production or suddenly remember the time Schneider nailed Reyes at second when it appeared Jose had the base stolen cold. The rest of us can stew, brace for the genius move coming next and take not a little solace in the knowledge that we've been known to be plenty wrong about plenty of trades before.

That was the last time Titanic saw daylight.
—Rose DeWitt Bukater

I remember reading a quote from a young man who worked for the Al Gore campaign in 2000. The Supreme Court decision that halted all vote-counting in Florida came down on December 12, a Tuesday night. For months after, the kid confessed, he felt haunted on a weekly basis. Every Tuesday night reminded him of the night of December 12, the night the high court handed the election to the other candidate. A little melodramatic, I thought, but passion and disappointment will do that to a person.

Today is November 30, the last day of the month, the first time a month has ended on the 30th since September 30.

On September 30…do I really have to mention what happened?

The next time a month ends on the 30th, it will be April, a Wednesday. The Mets will, as they did in September, be playing an afternoon game at Shea. The Pirates will be the visitors. It will be the 27th game of the 2008 season, barring postponements. By then, with a record somewhere between 0-26 and 26-0, we’ll have fresh concerns. Knowing a month is ending on the 30th won’t mean anything in particular where baseball is concerned.

This afternoon, the 30th lingers for me as I suppose it has at least once every waking hour since September 30, 2007 became September 30, 2007. At this moment two months ago, I was watching some Marlin walk, or not be out on a potential double play, or reach base in advance of other Marlins doing more and worse damage. The variables, the villains, the victims…no need to go into them again.

It was the last baseball game we watched with a sense of overriding purpose. No wonder it sticks in the mind’s eye.

Last week, Stephanie and I were in Stop & Shop stocking up for Thanksgiving. The store’s music system played “This Is It” by Kenny Loggins. I’ve always liked that song. It’s No. 348 in the Top 500, in fact. I nodded when I heard it on September 30 in a large outdoor setting somewhere west of Stop & Shop.

You think that maybe it’s over

Only if you want it to be

Wow, I thought. That’s pretty appropriate for today, September 30.

Are you gonna wait for your sign, your miracle

Stand up and fight

Yes, absolutely…stand up and fight!

Your back’s to the corner

This is it

Don’t be a fool anymore

Uh, yeah…like I said, very appropriate.

This is it

The waiting is over

Funny thing about a song, even if you like it, even if it’s on the nose at the moment you’re hearing it: It can go on too long. And the more I heard “This Is It” before the first pitch of September 30 with all its admonitions that you Mets better be ready for what’s ahead, the more I began to worry. When you’ve lost 11 of your previous 16 and seen a seven-game lead turn into a first-place tie, a four-minute song played to completion gives you a lot of time to fret.

“This Is It” would in short order segue into That Was That, and we know how that went. Now when I hear “This Is It,” as I did in the supermarket last week, I get a little queasy.

Four months and a day to Next Year. Whatever it brings, it can’t start soon enough.

OH — AND WE SEEM TO HAVE TRADED LASTINGS MILLEDGE TO THE NATIONALS FOR SOME ODD REASON.

We get Brian Schneider, who’s been catching for a while (bye bye Johnny), and Ryan Church, the last batter John Franco ever faced as a Met and someone who apparently takes his last name a little too seriously.

The Milledge era is over too quickly to assess him as a finished product. We probably take our own prospects too much to heart to evaluate them in terms of their value on the market as a whole. But at 23 next year and with plenty of tools still in his shed, this doesn’t seem like a lot to get back. Maybe he really is attitudinally damaged goods in more eyes than not. Maybe Omar’s building something more than we can see. But at the moment, trading Lastings Milledge today hasn’t really upgraded my opinion of months that end on a 30th day.