One blogger wrote this, about the catcher who came to a new team in 2006 and helped spark them to the playoffs:

You have Lo Duca, a guy who enjoys being a Met, and has repeatedly said (begged?) that he wants to remain a Met, and that he loves being a Met and he loves the fans.

Another blogger wrote this, about the catcher who came to a new team in 2006 and helped spark them to the playoffs:

Sometimes it’s nice to know that the guys we root for care just as much about winning as we do.

Two very nice tributes to Paul Lo Duca, don't you think? Except the second one was written by Dan Lucero of Up in the Rockies (link courtesy of Metsblog). He's sorry to be losing the fellow we're gaining, catcher Yorvit Torrealba.

Torrealba? You mean the guy almost no Mets fan is excited about signing as a free agent? The guy who isn't really known for hitting, fielding, throwing or anything outside of Denver? The first blogger above, the indefatigable Metstradamus, expressed his and probably all our doubts about the best/only damn Yorvit who ever played in the bigs and concluded why we're winding up with him:

[T]he only formula that the Mets are looking at is TH + E…otherwise known as the Distraction Factor. Yorvit's Distraction Factor is near zero, if not exactly zero. Lo Duca's Distraction Factor? It's about 105. TH + E, if you must know, is Tabloid Headlines + Ejections. Too high a distraction factor does not jibe with the Wilpons, who want to have a team of “oh golly gee” guys who aren't going to rock the boat…it's the Distraction Factor that is keeping Lo Duca from returning. Because heaven forbid the Mets have any players that show some emotion and actually care about baseball a little bit more than your average run o' the mill robot.

Now back to Dan in Colorado:

I’m sad to see Yorvit Torrealba go. I’ll miss the emotion and the passion he brought to every game behind the plate. It really felt like Yorvit was the representative of the die-hard Rox fan on the field. When we exulted, so did he. Some players seem almost robotic as they go about the 162-game grind. Not Yorvit, especially not during this year’s stretch drive.

Wait a second…isn't Torrealba the robot and Paulie the passionate one? Lo Duca's the heart & soul guy, right? Yorvit's just another rented stranger in a long line of rented Met strangers, right? Metstradamus says so characteristically brilliantly:

It's really no wonder that other franchises regularly have players who come out and say that in their heart they'll always be a member of that team, while the Mets regularly have players like Tony Tarasco, who teach young pitchers how to smuggle hooch in peanut butter jars.

Hold up — this is the same problem that has perpetually plagued the Rockies, according to Dan:

In past offseasons, Rockies players would come and go. They’d stop in for a year or two, put up nice numbers (if they were a hitter) or ugly numbers (if they were a pitcher), and then they’d move on. There was no time to make a connection to those players as a fan, and no real significant memories that those players left us with.

And you know how, whatever our feelings about Lo Duca's skill sets, we really don't want the intensely nondescript Torrealba? Guess what — our Rockies blogger is ambivalent about Torrealba's long-term prospects but doesn't particularly desire “one of the Barrett/Lo Duca/Kendall Triumvirate of Veteran Backstop Mediocrities”.

Geez, it's like looking in a mirror.

Part of all this quoting of these two fine bloggers is to say let's not write off Yorvit Torrealba before we have a chance to fall in at least like with him. After all, who the hell was Paul Lo Duca before he became a New York Met in December 2005? He had a little longer résumé than Torrealba does now, with a couple of All-Star selections to his credit, but otherwise, the man was no Mike Piazza. Now there was an irreplaceable catcher!

Within eight months, however, your resident bloggers here were telling you that with all due respect to Piazza, Paul was now totally The Man when it came to Mets catchers. If we weren't exactly Mike Who?, we had definitely moved on.

And we will again. We will discover endearing qualities about Yorvit Torrealba the person and the catcher. We will perk up when we hear his music, we will groan when he takes a foul tip off the finger, we will roar when he disagrees with an ump. With any luck, we will be stuffing the ballot box on his behalf come June. When his reported three-year contract expires or his welcome is worn out, we'll look back on the Yorvit Torrealba Era and wonder where it went, why it ended as soon as it did and, of course, how come we can't get anybody as good if not better to replace him.

Both Metstradamus and Dan were in independent agreement on one item about ballplayers: we don't want robots. Yet we do tend to treat them as assembly-line models — and who doesn't love a good factory-tested Fiery Catcher? Out west, they enjoyed driving their second-hand Torrealba to the World Series; in Queens, we fell hard for our used Lo Duca. It got great mileage its first year, less so in the second. And boy did ours act up at the strangest times. But it gave us a good, fun ride there for a while, didn't it?

I'm not saddened by losing a 35-year-old catcher who did generate one too many off-field headlines, did throw one too many on-field tantrums and did not rub the right people right way long enough to remain a New York icon. I'm not saddened to lose the games Lo Duca missed last year from injury (though all catchers lose games to injury) nor will I miss how his OPS plunged nearly 100 points — 39 doubles one year, 18 the next — from his first Met season to his second.

But I do miss the idea of Paul Lo Duca. I do miss “Volaré” and “Stayin' Alive” and even his name as ready-made chant. I miss that he wore 16 better than anyone since Dwight Gooden, that he wore a chest protector over his number as well as anyone could have after Mike Piazza and that a national magazine told us he was Captain Red Ass in the best way possible.

As recent as it was and as incomplete as it may have been, I miss 2006. I miss the Intrepid Mets celebrated by Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci, embodied as they were by the catcher in the middle of the cover shoot and everything else:

For his part, Lo Duca seems ever in search of an argument, whether getting in the grill of his pitchers when they lose focus, spiking the baseball in a fit of anger at the feet of umpire Angel Hernandez or barking at Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez for styling too much after hitting a home run. “That's just me,” says Lo Duca, whom Wagner refers to as Captain Red Ass. “Must be the Italian blood.”

In 2007, Lo Duca spiked and barked and bled all over the place, too, but it felt old and ineffective; it felt like 2007. The sophomore version of Paul-Luh-DOO-Kuh! sounded misplaced no matter how sincere the serenade. I couldn't quite put my finger on it while I sat and chanted along gamely, but it no longer felt of the moment. I now understand why.

It's because you can't have 2006 every year.

Paul's not the first 2006 Met to be kicked out of the nest, but to my mind he's the first Met I readily identify as an integral 2006 Met to be leaving us. And that's who and what I'm gonna miss. I'm gonna miss everything from that nontag of Alfonso Soriano he sold on Opening Day to those two tags he laid in rapid succession on Jeff Kent and J.D. Drew to start the NLDS to that ninth-inning walk he coaxed from Adam Wainwright to earn the Mets' final base of the year. That beautiful Met season was Paulie's Met season. It was a team effort, but I could swear the division title and whiff of a pennant was brought to us by Paul Lo Duca just about as much as by anybody.

I assume every ballplayer prefers to win. Lo Duca, you could tell, wanted to win. There shouldn't be a difference. But there is.

2007 was not 2006, and 2008 will have to be something else altogether. Seasons do not come off an assembly line. They are handcrafted. Whether unscrewing a Lo Duca and replacing it with a Torrealba represents nifty construction or faulty workmanship is something we will learn pretty soon. I'm willing to give the new catcher a shot. I'm willing to give the roster an extreme home makeover, actually. 2007 was so far removed from 2006 that if I could, I'd dump just about everybody associated with its defining denouement. Lo Duca's certainly not exempt from my lingering and probably permanent disgust. In 2006, he was the unforgettable fire; in 2007, we could choke with or without him.

I don't know if jettisoning Paul Lo Duca makes baseball sense or if it's politically motivated or if those particular clubhouse and front office politics are justified. I do find myself relieved that both 2006 and 2007 recede a little further into the past with his departure — 2007 for obvious reasons, 2006 because I sincerely believe it cast too long a shadow over 2007. Except for Godfather II and Rocky III, the sequel hardly ever lives up to the original. It's time for a new script.

2006 now really becomes New York Mets history and Paul Lo Duca a wonderful and crucial historical figure for us. I'd rather him be that than just a cranky, creaky catcher who grounds into too many double plays.

Hmm. What's on the various flavors of HBO?

FLIP FLIP FLIP FLIP FLIP

Jeez, maybe I should use the guide.

DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN

“48 Hours,” hmm.

Waitaminute, there's an ESPN on channel 173? What's that it's saying? Is that BASEBALL?

SELECT

IT IS BASEBALL! IT IS! LOOK! IT'S “ZUL” VS. “CAR!” “ZUL” IS UP 4-0! IT'S BASEBALL!

YAAAAAAY!!!!!

Man, these Venezuelan League uniforms look ridiculous. Is that guy's name Coca-Cola? Of course not — it's an ad where the names usually go. Is it a conflict that the umpire has Pepsi logos all over him?

STILL! IT'S BASEBALL!!!! YAAAAAY!!!!!

I wonder if I'll know any of these players. Not this guy. Or that guy. Or those guys. Wait just a second … who's that on deck?

Roger Cedeno?

ROGER CEDENO!

FUCK THAT! I AM NOT DESPERATE ENOUGH TO WATCH FUCKING ROGER CEDENO! NOT YET! NOT IN NOVEMBER!

FLIP

[lots of gunshots]

Man, Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy are going to totally get Ganz and that big Indian guy.

[more gunshots]

Roger Cedeno. As if.

How far have your juggernaut, dynasty-in-the-making New York Mets fallen? So far that we can't even be patronized properly.

Last March, I shared with you a delightful piece of junk mail from the Danbury Mint, one that sucked us to up the way we should be sucked up to. It went like this:

When the greatest sports franchises are counted, the New York Mets are always at the top of the list.

Obviously, it would have to have been one of us doing the counting, but I liked the tone and the implication. The Mets were great, we were great, everything was great…buy an end table.

One historic collapse later, the newest pitch from Danbury indicates we are not great anymore. We are something else, according to the current come-on for the exact same pricey Sheacentric tchotchke:

The New York Mets are one of the most beloved franchises in all of sports.

We are beloved — not great, but beloved. We've also been downgraded from “one of the most successful teams in all of sports” to “one of the most storied teams in Major League Baseball history”…of course to properly express the most recent chapter of that story, you would be advised to place your hands over your children's ears.

As much as I love the New York Mets in the institutional sense, I don't want anybody to call us beloved. I want us to be feared, loathed, resented, envied. Call us Bad Guys if you must, as long as the Bad Guys Win again in my lifetime.

But no. We're beloved. We're chums. Or, to speak in homonym, we were chum to the Marlins. And chumps for the Phillies. And churned by the Nationals. We choked that lead of a quantity so familiar in a time frame so ingrained to memory that it's no longer necessary to specify either the quantity or the time frame. So if we want to be sold that end table that we still do not need (yet is still pretty sharp), we will not be romanced with word of how handsome and powerful we are; we are instead informed that we are the fans whose team other teams rub the heads of for luck.

The Mets are beloved? That strikes me as code for “the Mets are lovable losers,” which expired as an operative phrase around here by 1965 at the latest. Losing rarely makes you lovable, not when it is done frequently, not when it is committed at a crucial juncture, not as you were stashing your playoff tickets in your wallet.

The smoldering wreckage of September 2007 is still visible in my rearview mirror. There is nothing in particular to look forward to, save perhaps for engaging the services of Yorvit Torrealba. Thus, I have to ask the Danbury Mint:

What's to belove?

You have seven weeks to get done what Stephanie and I hadn't gotten around to until yesterday. You have seven weeks to make your way uptown to the Museum of the City of New York and take in the glories of Glory Days: New York Baseball 1947-1957. You will not be disappointed.

While I can't say I learned a whole lot new Saturday on a broad subject whose many facets I've been studying for 35 years, it was fantastic to see so much of it on display. Lots of mementoes, lots of memories, lots of context, lots of Giants, lots of Dodgers, not too suffocating an amount of Yankees and, for completion's sake, a legitimate dollop of Metsies at the end. This exhibition held old men who lived it and little kids who hadn't the vaguest in its thrall. Us too. MCNY always puts on a great show. This one runs to the end of the year. If you like baseball enough to read this blog, you'll will want to make it to this museum.

And goodness knows you will want to drop 20 bucks in the gift shop or online for a book called Shea Stadium: Images of Baseball by Jason D. Antos. This is not a coffee table book and it's not a factually flawless history, but it's awesome to look at and Amazin' fun to read. It's loaded with black & white pictures from across the decades, particularly the building of Shea and what was there before there was a Shea.

Shea, too, is a subject I've been studying for an awfully long time yet I learned things that I never knew before. I didn't know from Ned's Diner or the coal plant or what the concession stands looked like under construction and I hadn't seen a WAPP-FM backstage pass for the Who or Louis Armstrong in a Mets cap or what everybody was wearing to the Flushing Boys Club Luncheon in 1975. Antos, a chronicler of Queens history, pulls in the underdiscovered wonders of the Corona-Flushing neighborhood and Shea's multiple purposes and arranges his own enthralling exhibition…probably the best exhibition involving the Mets since the first Mayor's Trophy Game.

There have been some pretty convincing articles on the breathless subject of A-Rod and the Mets of late, even if they contradict each other. The ever-popular Tim Marchman came out against on Wednesday; the ubiquitous and solid Howard Megdal weighed in for on Thursday. They both made compelling points. There has also been a Harper's share of immensely inane takes on the subject, ones that swear you easily distracted lemminglike Mets fans must have Alex Rodriguez right now if you know what's good for you.

I'd prefer to A-Void A-Rod. I don't mean not sign him, but not write about him. What am I going to tell you that you haven't already considered for yourself? That he hits really well? That he plays two positions that we have well covered into the next decade? That's he's going to be six-star hotel expensive? That he's kinda creepy? That he's one of the all-time offensive machines? That he's Alex Rodriguez and all that implies?

We don't need A-Rod, but we could always use a bat like his. If he could catch, I'd say give him the new stadium, the rotunda and every darn brick on the Fanwalk. But he's a shortstop/third baseman and I do believe we're set there. His presence might have accounted for those couple extra wins we required last season, but there's no guarantee (though John Harper would have you believe otherwise) that he would lift us over the top on an annual, dynastic basis. One man, even if he's one of the greatest of the greats, is still one man, especially if he can't pitch into the eighth inning. Plus, given the franchise's general well-being — collapse notwithstanding — we don't need a map-putter-onner for 2008. Call off the cartographers; we're on the map. We're not all waiting for ownership to trade for George Foster or the GM to lead us out of the woods by way of Pedro Martinez. We're more secure than that. If local columnists are worried we don't get enough back pages, they should talk to their editors.

Then there's the money. While I don't doubt books get cooked to a crisp in baseball, I nevertheless prefer my team not commit hundreds of millions of dollars to a single player who a) is guaranteed only to get older at this stage of his career and b) has shown a predilection for wanting out of every situation he's been in. It's not our money except when our club demurs on bidding for the next pitcher or player it really needs…and digging deep for tickets and concessions at Citi Field figures to be an onerous enough task as is.

Let's get A-Rod at this time seven years ago. Or let's be a little worse in 1992 so we can draft him No. 1 overall in 1993* as the Mariners did. The A-Rod we've intermittently watched out our side windows since 2004? The one who waltzed into an allegedly ideal landing spot yet leaves it richer but no better off? Give him fill-in-the-blank million over too many years? So somebody who deserves better can play out of position? While the best-compensated team-sport athlete in the history of civilization inevitably presses too hard to live up to his deal, elicits boos instead of buzz and scans his contract for another brilliantly crafted opt-out clause?

This is a twist on “if you have to ask, you can't afford it.” This is “if you have to think about it, do you really want to think about it?” Alex Rodriguez practically produces by himself in a year what the Met lineups of my youth produced en masse. That should be all a fan needs to know: We can get the best hitter in the game? DO IT! But there is too much to think about it and too much to pay if you have to think that hard.

*Actually, it occurs to me that the A.L. and N.L. switch off in drafting first, with the odd years belonging to the American League's worst team from the season before, so no, we could not have drafted Alex Rodriguez in 1993 no matter how bad we might have been in 1992. Then again, we didn't have to use the eighth pick in the nation in 1993 to select Kirk Presley, did we?

I have two questions regarding the Gold Glove awards:

1) How is it that Keith Hernandez won so many of them (11) yet refers to them on broadcasts as “Golden Gloves”? They're Gold Gloves, not Golden Gloves. Golden Gloves is boxing. But Keith is Keith.

I guess I just answered that question.

2) How did David Wright win a Gold Glove as the best defensive third baseman in the National League in 2007?

Damned if I know.

I'm all for Mets winning awards, starting with the Commissioner's Trophy and working down from there. Short of the big prize, I'll take all the middling trinkets available. Better in Met hands than other hands. Putting a Gold Glove in David Wright's hands is a far safer bet than giving Marv Throneberry a piece of birthday cake (“we wuz gonna give you one,” Casey Stengel is alleged to have told his buttercream-fingered first baseman, “but we wuz afraid you'd drop it”), but it's not the first thing you'd think to do.

Carlos Beltran won a Gold Glove, too. Of course he did. He's a terrific centerfielder. His instincts are nearly flawless, his execution remarkable, his grace amazing, his catches often spectacular. I could watch Carlos Beltran track fly balls all day.

David Wright brings to mind none of those qualities at third base. He tries hard and that occasionally translates to the Web Gem reel. His barehanded grab at Petco Park in 2005 was an instant classic. He made the reflex stab of the year in 2006 when he turned a potential ninth-inning game-ruiner in Philadelphia into a 5-4-3 double play. He made some big-time dives this past season as well and no, he didn't throw the ball away every time he got his hands on it. He's not bad. He's no butcher. He's pretty good, actually.

But a Gold Glove? For 2007? When bracing and cringing were automatic when it came to watching him fire to first? When his throws sailed? When too many balls to his left found holes when David didn't or couldn't react? When he made some of the plays but not nearly all of them?

Are they sure these weren't the Silver Sluggers in the wrong envelope?

Scott Rolen was injured much of the year and Robin Ventura — my and six times Rawlings' ideal of a Gold Glove third baseman — is retired, so maybe David was as good as it got in the N.L. I've looked at the fielding stats for hot cornermen but I never know what to make of them. Fielding percentage, which David didn't come close to leading, can be misleading. Should he be penalized for 21 errors, only two fewer than lazy lunkhead Miguel Cabrera, or rewarded for encountering 452 chances, second only to his highly regarded buddy Ryan Zimmerman? I've looked into zone ratings and range factors but they, too, are inconclusive.

Am I, as usual, being way too hard on a player I watch every day? Maybe, but I watched Ventura just as closely in '99 and never doubted he should win his Glove. He was simply awesome at every facet of his position. I occasionally read and hear references to what a wonderful defensive third baseman David Wright is. I don't see it. I just don't. And believe me, I do pay attention.

If it's just a popularity contest, well, fine. David deserves to be popular. He's the one Met who's been making the rounds in the wake of total team disaster. He carried himself with grace on The Daily Show and The Big Idea when the question of The Worst Collapse Ever comes up. He looks like he wants to kill himself (and probably several teammates), but he answers the Jon Stewarts and Donny Deutsches like a pro with a heart. While most of his teammates have scurried back to wherever collapsed Mets go once they've blown their lead, David's promoting his foundation so he can help others. Gosh, he remembered to thank Sandy Alomar, Sr. for hitting him so many ground balls and thus improving his defense.

I feel like such a Grinch with this kid. I should be waving banners for him but all I can do is think of the Gold Gove Mets of the past and how every single one of them back to Agee and Harrelson and Flynn and Mex and Darling through the Ordoñez/Ventura epoch of excellence right up to Carlos B. really and truly rated this honor. And that David Wright's a fine young man with an explosive bat and a winning smile.