It was neat.

That's the word my vocabulary sent up to describe the sensation of watching Billy Wagner retire Mike Fontenot and secure Tom Glavine's 300th career (and 58th New York Mets) win Sunday night. Some round numbers are more spherical than others and this one is a perfect circle. Perfectly neat.

The guy's career began 20 years ago this month. He goes out approximately every fifth day, skipping the Disabled List altogether, and posts an average of 15 wins annually. Perfectly consistent, too. I remember when one of the pitchers who was on the verge of 300 wins in the early '80s neared this mark, Warner Wolf said to put it in perspective, imagine a pitcher winning 14 games a year for 20 years: he would still need 20 more to make it to 300.

You don't need to go to the videotape to know baseball has been populated by awesome pitchers who did not manage this perfectly neat number. Nobody's pulling the plaques of Bob Feller or Sandy Koufax or Bob Gibson or Juan Marichal or Jim Palmer or Catfish Hunter or Ferguson Jenkins for not getting there; nor should anybody think any less of Tommy John or Jim Kaat or Bert Blyleven for finishing a bit short (or Randy Johnson if he hangs 'em up 16 shy as back problems may dictate).

But getting to 300 certainly merits extra credit. Every starting pitcher would love to win a 300th but only 23 have achieved it even though we're talking about the most single-minded creatures on the diamond in any game they play. They help their teams when they win but they help themselves first. They revel in getting the W. They express gratitude for being taken off the hook. They can barely force a smile if their good work is not personally rewarded.

Quick, what's Jose Reyes' won-lost record and how does it rank among shortstops? How many wins did Cleon Jones accumulate in his career? Was Ray Knight ever no-decisioned?

It doesn't work that way. The whole “pitchers aren't players” line Keith Hernandez doles out every night isn't simply the raving of a mad Mex. It is different for starting pitchers. Their schedules are different. Their metrics are different. Their responsibilities are different (though let us forever note that the first run of Tom Glavine's 300th win was driven in by Tom Glavine). With few exceptions, you — a family member, a teammate, a fourth-estatesman — can't talk to one of them on the day he pitches. Imagine David Wright or Carlos Delgado telling a reporter, “Sorry, I don't do interviews when I'm starting.”

Their near-term goals are different, too. When Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez went dry in their quest to get off of home runs 754 and 499, respectively, it made perfect sense. Their job has never been to go up and swing for the fences. It's to hit the ball somewhere fair. They have the talent and ability to hit it far and sometimes the damn thing travels out of everybody's reach. When Bonds and Rodriguez started to think about it, they had to have adjusted their thought processes from “see the ball, hit the ball” to “must…hit…next…home…run.” With that attitude, it's not surprising each of them was going to hit nothing more than a figurative wall for a week.

Starting pitchers, unless they're aiming for a strikeout record, one supposes, don't have that problem. Their job is to get an out, any kind of out, to get at least 15 outs with their team ahead or as many outs as it will take to rate a win. As we've discussed a bit of late, it's kind of a silly statistic. A starter can throw nine brilliant innings and be pinned with a loss. A reliever can enter an inning with two outs, pick off a runner and exit for a pinch-hitter and eventually be credited with a victory because his teammates score a passel of runs on “his” behalf. Thus, on a case-by-case basis, whoever gets one win is sort of irrelevant.

Whoever gets 300 of them, however, must be doing something very well for very long. That sounds a lot like Tom Glavine.

Since we began this blog, Tom Glavine has been something of an odd figure in its pages. For a while, we called him The Manchurian Brave, as some combination of Questec and his own stubbornness seemed to have turned him into a mediocre pitcher, one whose struggles just reminded us of his dominance wearing that other uniform. (Not entirely his fault, but that's fandom.) Then Glavine finally listened to Rick Peterson and to what his own stats were telling him: He had to change. He did so, reinventing himself in mid-2005, at a stage in his career where refusal to do so might have won him grudging plaudits for staying a very successful course even if it had needed a late course correction that didn't come — he did it his way and all that. That adaptation won us over, and we started referring to him as The Eventual Met.

But it's true that neither Greg nor I could ever quite get into his corner, leading to the rather odd scenario of a New York Met — an honest-to-goodness New York Met — chasing his 300th career win while two of the biggest Met fans on the planet tried to rally themselves to be truly excited about it. Greg chronicled his feelings last week; by the time I got to a set for Glavine's first attempt, the main attraction had yielded the field to the relief corps.

Today was going to be a baseball doubleheader. Joshua and a number of his classmates descended on Keyspan Park with all the energy a gang of sugared-up, excited four-year-olds can bring. I'm glad to say Keyspan is still standing. I'm happier to say that Sandy the Seagull visited, mugged for pictures and was generally charming, which mollified Emily enough to put aside her two-year-old grudge. Joshua, meanwhile, took a bizarre liking to the Aberdeen Ironbirds' centerfielder that Emily and I refused to share or even countenance. (Matt Angle, if you somehow get stuck with the nickname Li'l Boopy, I apologize. It doesn't make sense to me either.) Fortunately, there were numerous Cyclones runs to celebrate — a Cyclone and an Ironbird hit balls over the right-field fence, something I'd never seen even once at Keyspan due to the stiff wind usually blowing in from the ocean. After the game, Joshua ran the bases, without dad's accompaniment. “I'll meet you at home plate — you remember where that is, right?” I told him as he got ready to run from first. If a four-year-old could have scoffed, he would have. Perhaps he might have mentioned that he knows Carlos Gomez is actually faster than Reyes, so shut up about home plate, old man. Or perhaps he might have pointed out, more practically, that he'd have to be pretty obtuse not just to run where the other kids were running. On the way out, Joshua and his friend Nicholas saw one of those inflatable batting-cage things where you can see how hard you can throw and decided they wanted to do it. The other people in line and assorted bystanders weren't particularly thrilled by this, but they cheered after Joshua reared back and tossed the first one right through the hole in the center of the catcher's mitt. Kind of a mini-eephus pitch (the gun recorded it at 12 MPH), but still.

I have no idea where these genes come from.

So we got into the Zipcar for the bottom of the first of the main event, and followed Glavine's quest through car radio and handheld radio and upstairs and downstairs TVs. I shook my head to realize that Glavine had been sent to the showers by a double from Angel Pagan, once upon a time a Brooklyn Cyclones heartthrob cheered by us from the Keyspan stands. Whether you're talking baseball history or just your own personal subset of the same, the only surprise should be when such connections don't appear. Baseball provides them for anyone paying the least attention.

Despite my own lukewarm feelings about The Eventual Met, I found myself sitting bolt upright in bed for the last several frames of Glavine's pursuit of 300, exhorting Mota and Feliciano and Heilman and Sosa and finally Wagner along. Part of it was for Glavine, of course — and not just the laundry he wears, I'm pleased to say. (Not thrilled, but pleased. Hey, I'm trying.) One of the reasons Glavine's never connected with many Met fans, I think, is that he's so bloodless about how he does things. It's a detachment that can be taken for aloofness. But he wasn't bloodless in the ninth — he was nervous and smiling and fidgety and a host of things we've rarely seen him be. Christine Glavine's anxious vigil helped, too — if you didn't respond to her mostly suppressed tears as the margin turned to a few outs and then a few strikes, you've truly got a heart of stone.

But there were other things that had me sitting bolt upright. Like not wanting to endure another round of questions and bullpen mea culpas and assorted distractions for five more days, when we've got other goals to pursue. Like wanting to beat the Cubs at Wrigley, of course, because who doesn't ever want to do that? And like knowing that the Phillies and Braves had won, so there was business to be taken care of.

All of these considerations were right and proper — a Met's milestone, a father and husband and son's quest, a team's need to keep the eyes on the prize, the numerical reality of the standings. Whatever proportions we each felt them in, as Met fans and baseball fans they were there for all of us.

This from the AP recap of Saturday's game regarding the turning point in the third inning:

With two outs and runners on second and third, Theriot hit a grounder to shortstop Jose Reyes. Reyes fielded the ball on the infield grass, but first base umpire Marty Foster ruled Reyes' throw was late to first, allowing Jason Kendall to score. Replays showed Reyes' throw just beat Theriot, but Mets manager Willie Randolph didn't contest the call.

“Why?” said Randolph. “It doesn't make [any difference]. Would he change it? It's pretty obvious so I have nothing to say. I would have gotten thrown out of the game. What does that accomplish?”

Oh. Of course. No reason to let an umpire know he's not getting them right. They don't revoke their mistakes.

Except maybe they'll understand they might have blown one and they'll be more vigilant next time it happens to your team. Maybe you get a makeup call, baseball's two wrongs sometimes equaling a right. Maybe an umpire or an umpiring crew will be a little less likely to take advantage of your apparent disinterest in the outcome of an individual call.

Does an umpire actually think, “Randolph's not gonna give me guff, but Piniella will, so if I want to save myself some hassle, I'll give the close calls to the Cubs”? Doesn't sound likely, but who the hell knows? But if you see a wrong committed in your field (we're not talking about saving the world here, just saving a run), why wouldn't you say something?

Willie's correct in that “safe” probably to almost certainly would not have become “out”. There is such a thing as false hustle, even among managers. But squeaky wheels, sadly, get greased more often than the silent kind. Willie Randolph runs out and tells Marty Foster, “I think you blew it, ask for help,” and at worst he gets tossed. At least he's made a statement. Willie doesn't have nearly the portfolio as a manager to play the calm-and-sturdy card as much as he does.

I don't need Lou Piniella out there tearing up bases and rearranging dirt. I don't need Bobby Cox setting records for obnoxious behavior. I don't need Joe Torre acting priggishly offended that a decision would ever tilt away from his entitled charges. But I could use a little more of a proactive nature from Willie Randolph. It's silly for any of us to judge his demeanor unhelpful when we're not on the bench or in the clubhouse, but watching a call that was, yes, fairly close, but even to the naked eye close enough to obviously wrong elicit zero reaction from our manager…it's very discouraging.

Get in somebody's face, Willie. We deserve your engagement.

P.S.: Barry Bonds is giving the most gracious press conference you could imagine in the wake of him hitting No. 755 in San Diego, sending warm wishes to Alex Rodriguez, our own Tom Glavine, the Padres fans and Henry Aaron. So in that spirit (even if the charm is a bit disingenuous), congratulations to him on tying a helluva historic record. Cap tip to Rodriguez, too. Let's get another milestone taken care of tonight, shall we?

After watching what happened with two out in the bottom of the third Saturday and the score nothing-nothing, we can definitively say John Maine knows how to throw the ground ball that will get him out of trouble.

He always seems to have that uncomfortable stretch early, though. Saturday it was in the third. Second and third after Lilly's bunt and it's not looking good. But he gets Soriano, the big out, and we held our breath on Theriot's weird grounder off the mound. But Reyes makes a sweet grab and a strong throw and nips the runner at first to escape with no damage. Ball beat the runner and the first baseman is on the bag and the ball is caught. That's it. Very close play, but credit Marty Foster for staying with it the whole way and not being swayed just because Theriot called himself safe crossing the bag. Credit Delgado, too, for making the stretch and holding on to the the damn thing. He's not the greatest fielder in the world, but he got the job done.

The third was the turning point. After that, the Cubs didn't score and Moises Alou's two solo homers carried the day. Thanks to Reyes' glovework — the replay showed just how nip and tuck it was, but the guy was clearly out — Maine could settle down. Lilly only gave up those shots to Alou, but it's not like the Cubs were putting anything on the board after the second.

What a nice 2-0 win for the Mets under this scenario. I'd hate to think what might have happened had that call at first in the third gone the other way.

I don't have any of the quotes at hand because I haven't saved what I've read or transcribed what I've heard. But I'm pretty sure at various times this season, I've read or heard or both from experts and would-be experts that the Red Sox or the Tigers or the Angels are the class of baseball, never mind the American League. And that the Dodgers or Padres or Brewers or Braves are mortal locks of some sort in the N.L.

The Mets? They've been hyped up and hyped down and hyped out. I sense another hype cycle beginning. We can handle the Mets on our own without listening to outsiders.

Have you checked the standings lately for everybody else's performances? All those lock teams are pretty ordinary lately. The Red Sox are the only club that has held its own (we're all probably pretty happy about that, at least in a second-hand way) and they haven't been particularly torrid. The Tigers with all the young pitching and explosive offense? They just dipped into second behind the Indians who were recently teetering on the brink. The Angels? They're barely holding off the Mariners of whom you've barely a word since John Olerud was making Steve Phillips look dim (not that Steve needed much help). The Padres were fading until they stopped. The big bad Dodgers wouldn't be in the playoffs if the playoffs started today, the scheduling of which would be a shame since we'd have nothing to do by October.

The Brewers last night took back the lead they gave away to the Cubs. The Cubs were dead earlier. They're plenty alive now. The Diamondbacks weren't going to be that much of a factor. They're in first place. The Rockies were no factor at all. Now they're closer to first in their division than the almighty Braves are in ours. They're also a tick closer to the Wild Card — remember that? — than Atlanta, which is also behind Philadelphia, another team that wasn't going anywhere but hasn't gone down in flames as of yet.

I'm not here to offer any reliable forecast for the next two months. I wouldn't write off the Yankees, for example, because that seems like a pretty good formula for disappointment. The Cardinals don't seem likely to make much noise, but they're still within hollering distance where they sit. Do the Twins ever recede quietly? Don't take your eye off them. By next week everybody I've mentioned could all be in the thick of it or barely clinging to the thin of it, hot as coals or cold as ice. It will mean something because wins and losses add up like crazy over the big One-Six-Two, but it will also mean little when prognosticators and pontificators try to tell you this one here's the obvious favorite while that one there's doubtlessly done.

Somebody's bound to be right once the stopped-clock equation is invoked, but I won't believe a word of it until I see an “x” or “y” or whatever you choose to use to denote a clinch next to somebody's name. There is little to be gained by coronating or dismissing anyone right now, including us and our five-game lead. I'd rather have it than not, but by next week our margin could shorten, could lengthen, could stay inert.

Who knows? Nobody, that's who.

Why don't more writers and broadcasters get that? There is no great honor in circling a particular name in early August and bleating “AH HA!” just as there is no shame in not knowing until late September the outcome of an extremely long campaign. I signed up to watch all 162. I can wait 'til the end to find out what happens.

One of the biggest sins of realignment is that it separated us from the Cubs, for years one of our best rivals. One of the biggest virtues of baseball is that every summer brings a game like today's — a tense, back-and-forth Wrigley Field affair under blazing skies before a packed house. Sometimes they end badly, whether it's Sammy Sosa beating John Franco or a Paul Wilson gem turning into a cubic zirconia or Derrek Lee victimizing Heath Bell. (Not all summer affairs played in sunny weather, but you get the idea.) But sometimes they don't. Sometimes you get a hugely entertaining, walk-on-air win that leaves you with absolutely no doubt about why Ernie Banks wanted to play two.

I'm not sure a lot of us expected to get a win out of this game, particularly not the way Carlos Zambrano was throwing. But El Duque was just as good — the eephus pitch he dropped on old friend Cliff Floyd was a treasure, and I enjoyed his long-legged origami exit over the dugout railing after one inning. (Duque! You're like 52 years old! Use the stairs!) After Ramon's stand-up-and-shout bolt into the left-field seats (Is Lo Duca hearing thunderous footsteps yet?), somehow I knew we were going to win. The boys looked like they'd dialed up the intensity for Zambrano, and they kept it up after his departure, working counts and finding the pitches they needed. (Incidentally, I don't mind Zambrano's histrionics, as long as he saves his roars and fist pumps for the close of innings.)

I loved the shot of Billy Wagner's cooler-than-cool reaction to Delgado's double scything down the line past him; I loved the shot of Wright scoring and pumping his fist more. Though the ensuing two-out peppering of Ryan Dempster was nice, too, interspersed with shots of Lou Piniella telekinetically setting things on fire in the Cub dugout. And then the fatal double play hit into by Jacque Jones — is there anything crueller in baseball than watching the enemy shortstop slicing across the second-base bag, ball in hand, and knowing your chance has gone? Cruel when it's your team's hopes being snuffed out, of course — when you're on the shortstop's side, well … let's play two!

P.S. From the Schadenfreude Department, it was hard to beat this sentence from yesterday: Clemens was booed off the mound after he allowed eight runs and nine hits in 1 2-3 innings. I mean, read that again and see if you don't start to drift off to a happy place. I'm only surprised the sound didn't transform him into a cloud of sulphurous steam that then dissipated wanly, Sauron-style, over the rooftops of the Bronx.

Oh, and this Dugout is the best summation of Yankee fans I've ever read. My goodness I love baseball.

It's an unqualified good day when your tenth starting pitcher of the season acquits himself satisfactorily for a win while your ace in exile kicks ass in an ad hoc intramural scrimmage.

Brian Lawrence had a good day. Pedro Martinez made sure we had a great one.

Lawrence was solid for five innings. Chris Capuano was harassed for six. Damion Easley ran like the wind — or at least a stiff breeze — in becoming the third current Met, alongside Marlon '05 and Jose '06, to have homered for the Mets while not wasting a baseball in the process (doesn't it always surprise you that an inside-the-park home run counts the same as a Prince Fielder moonshot?). Everybody but Luis Castillo got on base and everybody but Luis Castillo hit with everybody but Luis Castillo on base.

The Mets pounded the squabbling Brewers, yet that was only the co-best news of the day. In Port St. Lucie, Pedro threw 67 simulated-game pitches, the vast majority of them strikes. He left feeling good, which should leave us feeling very good as it contributes, at the statistical two-thirds mark of the year, to a tentative up-arrow on our team's Conventional Wisdom watch.

It oughta be indisputably up. We head into Chicago to face the first-place Cubs as the first-place Mets (first time those two statuses have coincided as far as I know). Regardless of what happens at Wrigley, we'll be the first-place Mets when the Terrible Teixeiras tote their annoyningness to Shea on Tuesday. We've been in first place every single day since May 16. The idea is to be there on September 30, but it helps to maintain it early and often.

Yet our worldview as Mets fans seems mostly informed by the 47 losses, not the 61 wins thus far found in the '07 collection. We're spooked by that horrend-o stretch when we dropped 13 of 16 in June. We remember losing three in Colorado and two more in Houston. We can't let loose of the shame attached to splitting four with the Nationals.

We took two of three from the Brewers? What you mean is we lost a chance to sweep.

I think I understand why we look at our first-place Mets as such a severe disappointment. I'm spooked by the losing, too. Hence, I'll take it upon myself to be our spooksperson and try to figure out why we think the way we do, though ultimately I suppose I can only spook for myself.

This is me, 2007, the long view on my team:

How can you be so pessimistic about these Mets? They're in first place. They've got two still-rising stars on the left side of their infield who are beginning to regain their consistency. They've got one of the best all-around players in the game, when healthy, in center. They've got a closer pitching up to his notices in a way no Mets closer has in ages. They've got solid starting plus a surefire Hall of Famer who's supposed to be back by September. They've got a lineup capable of getting hot all at once — in fact, they're due for a hot streak and maybe they're on it already. They've got an ownership that's far more willing to pay for a winner than most teams. They're good. They really are.

This is me, 2007, in the moment with my team:

AAAUUUGGGHHH!!! SHUT UP WITH YOUR OPTIMISM! YOU'RE GOING TO RUIN EVERYTHING! AAAUUUGGGHHH!!!

That's my eternal internal conflict. I Gotta Believe. We all do. But I can't believe anybody can expect anything specific that's going on in real time to go well. I can't believe anybody would even suggest the next pitch or the next swing will result in a positive development. I can't believe anybody would pencil in wins against lesser opponents or count on a couple of runs in the bottom of an inning. I can't believe everybody doesn't believe what I believe when it comes to rooting very, very carefully.

Maybe it's devout adherence to the “don't offend the baseball gods” rule, as if a celestial committee comprised of Nino Espinosa, Clem Labine and Hot Rod Kanehl — chaired by Uncle Bill Robinson — is Upstairs deciding our fate based on how deep I dare to assume Carlos Delgado will belt the next delivery from Tim Hudson. (Greg's thinking a little cocky tonight. That settles it. Delgado's grounding out.)

Maybe the entrance — call it the Exit 6986 off-ramp — to the nook of my brain where I've stashed away all the thousands of instances in which things went well is hopelessly blocked by heavy traffic at the intersecting cranny (Exit 777879…) of my brain where all the things that ever went wrong always seem to be speeding straight into a spinout.

Or maybe I'm just a muffinhead and don't know how to be overwhelmingly happy or reasonably rational between first pitch and final out.

I'm not sure what it is. I just know that I have, to date, ingested 108 Metropolitan cocktails this year.

How do you make a Metropolitan cocktail?

Easy. You mix one part long-term calm assurance with one part constant nagging anxiety and you shake like the upper deck during an NLDS.

Two-thirds of the 2007 season complete, I'm drinking Metropolitans as if I'm from another era. I resemble those ad guys in Mad Men, except I don't smoke cigarettes, wear suits or chase skirts. But I do insist on having my cocktail. Sipping a well-mixed Metropolitan is the only way I can unwind and get through the stress of this year's Mets.

It's different from drinking the Kool-Aid, but not wholly.

In years not nearly as good as this one, when there is only remote promise of progress, I can still picture success. Even in the sad campaigns, I see some improvement materializing somewhere down the road. That's the Gotta Believe part. That's living The Principle, as Bill Henrickson might say if he were one of us. You can't be a Mets fan if you don't think you're eventually going to receive your heavenly reward. But I contend you can't be a Mets fan — or a baseball fan — if you're sure it's due you right away.

It's a tangled web I've weaved, but it truly works for me. I'd like it to work for everybody.

Tuesday night, when Glavine was going for 300, I whiled away possible history in an IGT — an in-game thread for you non-board types. Geographically dispersed Mets fans watch or listen or monitor the game online and weigh in with an observation here or there. I've rarely made more than a token appearance in an IGT, but on Tuesday I just kind of got hooked. The back-and-forth typing pretty accurately reflected any group of Mets fans of which I've ever been part, whether at Shea, at play or at my computer. In broad strokes, I detected three kinds of people in this thread:

• Those who stuck strictly to describing the action (“Milledge caught it!”), posting a reaction (“WOW!”) or unleashing entertaining tangents (“Does anybody really name their dog Fido?”).

• Those who projected that what could go wrong would go wrong.

• Those who were offended by what one IGTer called the prevailing “'woe is us' vibe”.

I was in more or less in that middle group even though I saw the point of the third. For example, I didn't really believe the sight of Scott Schoeneweis warming up elevated the Brewers to new levels of overconfidence even if I said so. And I didn't really think Moises Alou had forgotten how “I got it!” works when he snatched a catch away from Lastings even if I said so. I wasn't even willing to write off the entire season because Geoff Jenkins walked off all over Aaron Sele even if I felt as beaten as our bullpen.

One of the other IGTers, meanwhile, threw his hands in the air and dismissed the result with “that was predictable,” a blurt that led to a literal response about how it wasn't predictable which, in turn, led to one of those ugly “no, you're a horse's patoot!” spats that killed whatever buzz might have lingered after 13 innings of baseball camaraderie (the moderator stepped in and all lived virtually ever after). No epithets needed to be hurled, but I was on the side of whoever berated whoever thought a Mets loss was fait accompli. In my code of ethics, it's OK to tell yourself the Mets are going to lose, yet it's completely out of line to act as if you were expecting it.

Does that make sense? If you're a Mets fan, it should.

I wouldn't hold what is said or typed in the heat of battle against anybody; emotions run as high as a Luis Castillo pop fly during Mets games. There are no casual Mets fans. You either care like hell or you don't care at all. And if you really care, you will keep your head up conceptually and tamp your enthusiasm down anecdotally.

What else are you going to do? Walk around with that dratted “woe is me” vibe? No, don't do that. It's repellent, especially when your team is the first-place Mets. We're not long-suffering fans — we bleed buckets' worth and wail in legitimately searing pain, but we're not long-suffering fans. The fans of the first-place team we play this weekend…they're long-suffering fans. Royals fans and Reds fans and, assuming such a species exists, Devil Rays fans are long-suffering.

We're short-suffering fans. We're not doomed. We're never doomed. We should never look at life (life = Mets) as we're always going to lose/we're always going to blow it/we're always going to feel humiliated. We're not, not always. We could lose. We could blow it. We could feel humiliation. But it's not a done deal. What we have isn't chronic. It's acute. It hurts like Hebner when it flares up, but it usually subsides.

If we were as long-suffering as we thought we were as recently as 2004, we wouldn't have been in the playoffs in 2006 and be as likely as anyone in our league to be there again in two months.

Yet don't go whistling past the ballyard either. It doesn't help matters to be a supreme situational optimist, a cock of the walk as it were. Has it ever worked? Have you ever known it to work? How many times have you decided “it's in the bag” only to find the bag has broken and the cling peaches have rolled into the gutter? How many times has the otherwise lordly Gary Cohen told you something encouraging like “the one thing unlikely to happen here is Jose Reyes bouncing into a double play with Carlos Gomez on first” only to watch Jose Reyes bounce into a double play with Carlos Gomez on first? Heck, I've twice in the last week listened to Diamondbacks announcers puff up the invincibility of Jose Valverde just before the Arizona closer gave up a game-tying run in the ninth.

It's not just announcers either. A fine fellow I know recently calculated for me what the Mets' July record projected to based on the “good chance” of winning three of four from the Nationals and the first game in Milwaukee. Only because I really like the guy did I not explicitly tell him:

AAAUUUGGGHHH!!! SHUT UP WITH YOUR OPTIMISM! YOU'RE GOING TO RUIN EVERYTHING! AAAUUUGGGHHH!!!

The Mets did not win three of four from the Nationals, nor the first game in Milwaukee.

It didn't have to be predictable.

But it was.

One third of this season remains. It looks good, except when it's going on. Then it's a disaster in the making. Until it's not. Y'know?

Y'don't?

Well, I guess what I'm saying is I've figured out nothing and probably communicated to you even less. But I will take that cocktail now.