It's the Mets' first two-game winning streak since they and I were in Philadelphia. Momentum ho!

With a weeklong westward journey whose manifest lists seven grueling tests of Methood ahead, one can only hope.

We don't get fooled again here, or at least we don't get turned around that fast. Jason held his applause Saturday night for a 2-1 win that was long on Glavine, short on hitting. I feel compelled to do the same, even though:

• The return of Oliver Perez was huge.

• The injection of Lastings Milledge is life-affirming.

• The everyday presence of Ruben Gotay (who will someday learn to make routine plays at second) appears stabilizing.

• The revivification of Jose Reyes as a daunting combination of power and hustle is underway.

• The genius of Billy Wagner is unquestionable.

I'd like to be excited. I really would. I don't build my summertime world around this team so I can be restrained about their success. But I also don't track their progress lightly enough to live too much in the moment. So two in a row over the Reds is lovely for two games. Now give me a third in a row over the pitching-laden Padres after a cross-country flight and we can uncurb a little more enthusiasm on the Mets' behalf.

Toughlove '07 — we do what we have to.

But some things I can express qualms-free happiness about, like the way people enjoy Faith and Fear. So here are a few hearty shoutouts from Friday and Saturday night at Shea…

• To JerseyJack for stopping by and showing off your SASSER uniform top. I assumed the “Jersey” was for where you were from. Maybe it's for what you were wearing.

• To Dan who has made the retired numbers his go-to garment and to Asher who had never seen the Mets lose prior to Friday night. Don't worry about it, young man; that defeat will only make the next win more sweet.

• To the H's of the Upper Deck who gave me a brief respite from the Norris Hopper Festival of Yo! Always happy to see Charlie, doubly happy to meet Sarah. Welcome back to Shea, madam.

• To Greg (no, not me), the first FAFIF shirt-wearer I've run into at Shea who turned out to be a total stranger except for reading us — which makes you not a stranger at all in our book. As I said Friday night, thanks for your support.

I want to tell you about Ralph Kiner Night. I really do. But first I have to tell you about Norris Hopper Weekend.

Norris Hopper is the Reds' centerfielder. He plays Ken Griffey's former position and wears Ken Griffey's former number. That's all I knew about him as of the first inning Friday.

Well, that's not entirely true. I also had a very strong hunch that he would provide, through no fault of his own, heckling fodder for Joe, my uncommonly intense Mets companion for many a Mets game over many a Mets season. Joe wants the Mets to win. Joe wants to help the Mets win. Thus, Joe goes after the other team with whatever he can muster. He finds what only Joe can find and he pounds away at what he perceives are the vulnerabilities of an individual opponent.

For example, some random Marlin might remind him in some random manner of some random actor from some random '60s sitcom, let's say, and for the next nine innings, Josh Willingham becomes — I don't know — Jerry Van Dyke, as in Hey Willingham! “My Mother The Car” SUCKED! Invariably, Joe will scream this at every Josh Willingham plate appearance and Josh Willingham will hit for the cycle and the Mets will lose 11-3.

Joe's default position when he doesn't see an obvious (to Joe) angle is to take shots at the first thing that jumps out at him…a player's first name. Never heard of Norris Hopper? Uh-oh. That can only mean I'm in for an evening of…

NORRIS? WHAT KIND OF NAME IS NORRIS FOR A BASEBALL PLAYER?

Though Joe thinks he is psyching out every non-Tom, Dick and Harry with that kind of observation, it never, ever, ever works. Friday night in the first inning, Norris Hopper, whatever the derivation of his first name, bunted his way on. Two batters later he crossed the plate.

In a later at-bat, Joe only got madder.

NORRIS! WHAT KIND OF NAME IS NORRIS FOR A BASEBALL PLAYER? NORRIS! YOU'RE A NERD!

Norris the Nerd singled and later scored.

Clearly the psyche-out had backfired. Karmically if not actually (given our distance from home plate), Norris Hopper heard Joe's taunt and shoved it right up John Maine's and Mike Pelfrey's respective two-holes.

I hate when Joe does stuff like that not only because it's bad — or at least weird — sportsmanship, not only because it is so destined to produce opposition runs, not only because it gets those uninitiated in the ways of Joe staring at us, but because how the hell do I know there isn't another Norris, perfectly proud and terribly touchy, sitting right behind us, having come to Shea just after his late-afternoon workout at Gold's Gym or perhaps a swing by the nunchuck store? Maybe the Norris one row back will fail to see the humor or utility or Joeness of these barbs and accept them good-naturedly. In other words, as I suggested to Joe in weaving this hypothetical scenario to him Friday, perhaps he should shut the fudge up with this line of Norris-baiting.

Joe professed not to be worried about another Norris materializing in the mezzanine and beating our asses to a bloody pulp for making fun of his name. But he did, blessedly, give “NORRIS!” a rest.

It's 24 hours later. Joe and I are at it again, back-to-back nights. We wanted our Endy Chavez (Joe's a bobblehead fiend) just like we wanted our Ralph Kiner. Ralph's ceremony, which I will delve into in a later post (because I don't want to sully him by association with this sordid tale), is concluded and the game is on. The first inning has passed without incident. Brandon Phillips has homered in the second — move over, Pat Burrell. A moment or two later, three fans arrive in our section of the loge. Two men, one boy. Their leader is a fellow in a white tank top, the kind of garment unfortunately nicknamed for one who would abuse one's spouse. He has many tattoos. He is very hip-hop in his bearing. He is, as the Offspring so memorably phrased it, pretty fly for white tank top guy. As he and his party take their seats one row behind us, I instantly hear his story in full with 30 seconds of his pulling out his cell:

“Yo! I'm in Queens! I'm at the Mets game! I'm here for my boy Norris Hopper! I know Norris from the 'hood! Norris was supposed to leave us tickets! I had to buy tickets! I'm sitting in the blue shit! Like 30 rows back! Norris was supposed to leave us tickets! He's supposed to sign a ball for my son! I wanna get a ball! I'm not even a Mets fan! I'm a Yankees fan! I don't even care though! I'm here for Norris Hopper! That's the only reason I'm here! Norris is my boy! I know him from the hood! He was supposed to leave us tickets! He's gonna leave us tickets tomorrow! He's gonna sign a ball for my son!”

Holy Wayne Krenchicki! A variation on the situation that I speculated, purely theoretically, could exist DID exist! Apparently, based on the white tank top in Row H's description, Cincinnati Red Norris Hopper — Joe's “nerd” — was a homeboy, a New York Red. He had friends here, friends who were all about Norris Hopper. What's more, he had friends in the “orange shit,” as the cell phone guy termed field level. One of the recipients of his many cellular transmissions was another hip to Hopper who in fact had been left seats, better seats, just two rows behind the third base ump by No. 30, playing center for Cincy.

“Do you hear this?” I asked Joe sotto voce. “This is like what I was talking about last night. So go easy on the Norris Hopper stuff, would you?”

Joe may appear oblivious, but he occasionally plants two feet in the real world.

“Why do you think I've shut my mouth about him?”

I was tempted to ask this guy one row behind us about Norris Hopper, where exactly he's from around here, how you know him, what kind of player is he, but…nah, didn't seem all that good an idea. I didn't really want to engage the white tank top. The thing about being a Yankees fan was a turnoff. More so was the thing about NOT SHUTTING UP about Norris Hopper from the second to the seventh inning. That summation he gave over the phone? He gave it over and over again. He gave it to everyone in his Your Five, in his Your Fifty. He told it to his similarly white-tank-topped 13-year-old son (a boy initially presented as proof of age to the beer vendor as in “I've got a 13-year-old son, that's my I.D.!”), a preteen (looked younger than 13) who seemed not impressed and not a little bored. He told it to his friend, some kind of D.J. it was implied. He told it to anybody within listening range. He told it to the air.

It is no exaggeration to say by midgame I had come to be a player-hater and that the player I hated was Norris Hopper. I wanted every Met to hit every ball at Norris Hopper and I wanted Norris Hopper to make every conceivable sort of error. I wanted Norris Hopper's nickname to become E-8. I could look past Brandon Phillips' one-man demolition job and Ken Griffey's eight-year-old refusal to accept a trade to us and Mike Stanton for being a Yankee when he was a Met and David Weathers for being a Met at all and Pete Rose for what he did to our Buddy and Joe Morgan for announcing so poorly and every transgression ever perpetrated by a Red, past or present, against our team because all I could wish was ill on Norris Hopper.

It wasn't just the yo!norris!myboy!fromthehood!getaballformyson! loop that was getting on my nerves nor the incessant, overdone Norris cheering for every Met fly ball to center that wasn't mishandled. This guy was simply bad news. He received his vended beer and then some. He grew louder. He told various members of Row H and Row G and Row F he didn't care for some stray characteristic of theirs. He thought it hilarious to have turned “Lastings Milledge” to “Lasting Mileage” (thus making Joe sound like a Nobel Laureate taunter by comparison). He divined his boy Norris must be good because he was batting second “just like Derek Jeter”. Somewhere along the way, he admitted he wasn't much of a baseball fan at all, that he preferred football, that after his boy Norris gets his last at-bat, yo we're outta here.

I'm a little fuzzy on what transpired next. I heard him telling his son over and over that “you're my son, you understand?” (I could imagine the kid wanting to forget that fact.) I saw him and his D.J. friend heading downstairs for more beer or something harder. I noticed their return. And then, out of nowhere, appeared about a half-dozen Shea security officers.

“You're leaving,” their supervisor told him.

There was lots of “huh?” and “wha'?” and “why me?” but the security force brooked no sass. “Your night is over,” the supervisor said. “Let's go.”

Wow, I thought. I didn't know being an annoying Yankees fan could get you thrown out of Shea Stadium.

As the merry trio was led away, a cloud lifted from over our section. Row H…Row G…Row F…all liberated from the idiot. We were confused as to why it happened, but we were elated that it did. Theories were pieced together, one centering on the guy putting his kid in too tight a headlock when giving him the “you're my son” spiel after the son acted up, leading somebody to alert the authorities; and another involving a fan not from our section who trailed the security guys up the steps — he may have run into some unpleasantness with the white tank top in the concourse that soared beyond obnoxious chatter and decided to do something about it. Whatever motivated their dismissal from the premises, the seventh-inning stretch, the XM Singalong and, especially, the bottom-of-the-eighth rally (capped by Lasting Mileage) were bristling with uncommon energy in Loge 15.

“Enter Sandman,” too. Our crowd was frenzied not just for a Mets win, but a Reds loss. Norris Hopper was due up fourth in the ninth. I of course wanted Billy to mow Cincy down one-two-three, but oh, is there any way Norris Hopper can make the last out? Didn't come to that. Had to settle for a 2-1 win and the white tank top's boy Norris left stranded in the on-deck circle.

Great night for Ralph. Great night for us. And a great night to stick it to Norris Hopper, who went straight to the top of my enemies list…until I got home.

I had to check. Where was Norris Hopper from in the New York area? What “hood” had yielded this blight of a friend of his for us to enjoy? And would this jerk be allowed back in Sunday now that Norris was leaving them tickets like he was supposed to, yo?

Guess what — Norris Hopper is from Shelby, North Carolina.

He was born there. He graduated from high school there. He was drafted by the Kansas City Royals from there. He'd been knocking around the minor leagues for seven years before making the Reds last year. I checked the Reds' media guide, I checked every source I could think of. There is no evidence that Norris Hopper has ever lived in New York. If it exists, it is most certainly well-hidden.

Furthermore, there was nothing to suggest the slightest southern charm about the guy in the white tank top. That is, I don't believe the “hood” that gentleman spoke of is or was in North Carolina. What I do believe, therefore, is that, duh, this dope DOES NOT KNOW NORRIS HOPPER!

I'm also thinking there was nobody on the other end of any of those phone calls.

I have absolutely no idea why a person would pretend to know a person he or she does not. OK, let me rephrase that lest you think me sadly naïve: I know there are dishonest and/or delusional people in this world, particularly those who have things about celebrities. Sports seems to create these faux-relationships by the bushel.

I have heard tell of at least one young lady in the Metropolitan Area who claims against all overwhelming evidence to the contrary that she is the steady girlfriend of a certain third baseman we all love but probably don't actually know.

I know of two separate women who claim thoroughly unlikely relationships with a shortstop of whom we aren't particularly fond.

There is a lady who was legendary in certain circles of Shea Stadium for insisting she was the niece of the owner of a rival team.

And to make sure this isn't just a knock on crazy women fans, I once read of a man, a Philadelphia Eagles fan, who bragged to some fellow golfers that he was mighty tight with then-head coach Rich Kotite — only to have Rich Kotite himself wander into the 19th hole (and be kind enough not to blow the liar's cover when he figured out how thin the truth was being stretched).

But Norris Hopper?

Somebody in New York would fabricate a friendship with Norris Hopper who is from North Carolina and plays for Cincinnati? Somebody who needed his buddy and his son to help him divine where to find the score on the scoreboard would enter Shea and then spend his entire abbreviated stay dropping the name Norris Hopper whose entire Major League playing career is 82 games long?

You can make all the excuses and explanations you care to — he wanted to be a hero to his son; he wanted to choose somebody so obscure that nobody could challenge him; he is preternaturally pathological and was pretty damn drunk — but Norris Hopper?

You mean I chose Norris Hopper as my own personal Rocker because some nitwit in a tank top bragged he and Norris were from the same neighborhood when, in fact, they appear to be barely from the same time zone?

Yo! I'm sorry, Norris. You're not a nerd and you're not a lowlife with a lowlife pass list. You're just some random Red. Based on that alone, I can't say you're a bad guy. In fact, based on that alone, I can't say much of anything about you. But beware, Mr. Hopper, there are actually people who would.

And for what it's worth, I think Norris is a fine first name.

Not for Tom Glavine, who thoroughly earned No. 298 by baffling every Red who wasn't named Brandon Phillips. Glavine gets claps until my hands are sore. Same for the Mets' defense — the back-to-back sparklers from Gotay and Reyes will get the highlights, but David Wright had another quietly impressive game in the field. (Though given all that he's been through, Lastings Milledge should really, really make sure he knows how many outs there are.) Oh, and Ralph Kiner gets applause on his night, of course. I'll leave the word picture of the night at Shea to Greg, who was there.

But the offense gets nothing but a frosty stare. You want applause, fellas? Sorry. You made Matt Belisle look like Tom Seaver, somehow converted 11 hits into two runs, and a bloop double and a bounder single were all that kept Glavine's superhuman performance from going down as a monumentally frustrating 1-0 loss against the second-worst team in the major leagues.

Perhaps Lesson #1 from Howard Johnson can be about working a count, particularly with runners on. (Let Rickey pitch in — that man worked a count better than any hitter in the history of the game.) The Mets started out fairly well in this regard — in the first, Beltran, Wright and Delgado saw 20 pitches between them in that situation. But things went downhill from there, until the Mets were playing like they had a one-run lead three outs from an official game and the rain was tumbling from the sky. Green hit a weak pop-up to the shortstop in the fourth with Lo Duca on first; Delgado flied out to left in the sixth with Wright on first; Reyes flied out to center in the seventh with Glavine on first. Three lead-off runners left exactly where they were a pitch before. Yes, I know Milledge won the game on a first-pitch single, but a lot of times that's a comebacker to the pitcher and more boos. You can fall out of a window into a giant pile of unclaimed money, but that doesn't make swan dives from apartments a good idea. As for the booing, I don't think the fans were booing specific players (the Carloses sure heard it, but so did Wright) as much as they were booing the lack of an apparent game plan from the hitters. And I don't blame them — I was sure booing from the comfort of my couch.

Maybe this is an ungrateful reaction and I should be jumping up and down over what could be called a taut 2-1 win. But this team's not playing well enough to earn that — we've all seen too many such wins followed by torpid performances or blowouts. (As my blog brother chronicled so ably and chillingly one post back.) So, sorry — I'll hold my applause pending further evidence of actual decent baseball.

Would Daffy Duck or Yosemite Sam or any not-quite-doomed cartoon character who runs off a cliff stay aloft if his nemesis didn't point out he was no longer on solid ground but in fact trying to maintain his footing amid thin air? You don't want to think about the answer for too long because before you know it, the laws of physics will send you plunging.

In the cartoons, you take a mighty fall yet return good as new in the next scene. In baseball, you simply fall. And for a team that's supposed to outrun all nemeses, the Mets sure do get blown out a lot.

Technically, an 8-4 final like Friday night's doesn't scream blowout. My own rule of thumb is a seven-run margin equals a blowout, probably because seven sounds like a lot more than six (don't call me unexacting in my measurements). But when you trail by four runs after four batters and seven runs after six innings, the game, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.

I can remember two or three instances in 1986 of the Mets being out of games early. I can remember scores going very much the wrong way fast and/or late against the 2006 Mets once in a while. It happens to the best of them and these two editions were most assuredly pillars of that group. But it's happened a little too often in 2007 to write it off as just one of those things that happens to the best of them. As the Mets have definitely proved since early June, they are not even close to being among the best of them.

Here's the first batch of evidence.

April 25: Down 11-0 after six, lose 11-5 to Rockies.

April 30: Down 8-1 after six, lose 9-6 to Marlins.

May 7: Down 9-1 after five, lose 9-4 to Giants.

May 12: Down 4-0 after four, lose 12-3 to Brewers.

May 15: Down 9-1 after six, lose 10-1 to Cubs.

After that last game — on the last night the Mets didn't get to the close of business in first place — I began to get suspicious that five losses in which the Mets trailed by at least seven runs at some point was characteristic of something horribly awry. In the first two, they made late charges that made me believe our boys never quit (I half expected rousing comebacks). The third was a little fluky if you remember San Francisco. The fourth got out of hand late. The fifth was essentially Scott Schoeneweis at his Scott Schoeneweisiest. Plus, the last three losses in this quintet were followed up by what one would have to call resilient wins. So maybe on five occasions in their first 38 contests the Mets were just having one of those days.

But five occasions of essentially being noncompetitive in the span of 19 contests…it troubled me a bit. Teams that are supposed to greet the October moon don't give up that many games. Again, these weren't just losses. These were beatings. It's one thing to get nipped or edged. It's another to be semi-regularly stomped.

The Mets got through May on something of a roll, concocting enough crazy wins in the second half of the month to make me forget the string of blowout losses. When June began to disintegrate, it wasn't really a matter of getting whacked as described above. The losses were listless yet not impossible (the Shea Phillies series excepted, choking away late-inning leads hasn't really happened this year — knock wood, not Wagner).

Then the blowing out recommenced.

June 10: Down 10-3 after five, lose 15-7 to Tigers.

June 13: Down 6-1 after six, lose 9-1 to Dodgers.

June 17: Down 6-0 after five, lose 8-2 to Yankees.

June 19: Down 9-0 after five, lose 9-0 to Twins.

Four ugly losses, all trailed by seven at some point (including the 8-2 loss to the Yankees in which it was 8-1 after eight), in a span of just nine games. This doesn't count two slugfest defeats (8-7 to the Tigers, 11-8 to the Yankees) that nearly got completely away. The Mets were playing all kinds of bad for three weeks in June. We know that. But they weren't just crappy 3-0 bad. In the above four games, played within close proximity of each other, they were, on average, 10-2 bad.

As the 2007 Mets tend to do, they got their act together just long enough to make us look past the unpleasant fact that not a single position player is having a career year or an impactful year or a year anything on a par with last year. They won seven of eight and the inclination was to say they've solved whatever was bothering them. They're gonna get going.

Then they made the mistake of going west.

July 3: Down 11-3 after five, lose 11-3 to Rockies.

July 4: Down 12-4 after five, lose 17-7 to Rockies.

July 8: Down 8-0 after four, lose 8-3 to Astros.

This doesn't even include the Rockies opener in which the Mets fell behind 6-0 (final 6-2) in the third and the Friday night game in Houston that was so lost at 4-0 in the eighth that the team's most dynamic and exciting player had to be benched for the ninth because even he had lost interest in the affair.

Now throw in…

July 13: Down 8-1 in the sixth, lose 8-4 to the Reds.

Friday night made it four of the last eight games that turned into anti-Met blowouts. One of them took place after an exhilarating 17-inning win built on the kind of resolve that should inspire a team the next day, not flatten them. Another, last night's to a last-place club, came on the heels of an uplifting start to the second half of the season. Two nights in, it's like they never revived or refreshed themselves whatsoever.

Since April 25 (which was also after one of the most brilliant wins of the season), a stretch that covers 70 games, the Mets have trailed by seven or more runs in 13 separate contests. That means the Mets have been in the process of being blown out at some point almost once every five games. They are 0-13 in those games, which figures since only twice in their entire 46-year history have the Mets overcome deficits as large as seven runs.

It's happened against good teams, bad teams, hot teams and cold teams. It's happened to good pitchers, bad pitchers, hot pitchers and cold pitchers. It's happened quite a bit.

I'm fond of referring to the old adage that you're going to lose a third of your games no matter what just as you're going to win a third of your games no matter what — and that it's the other third that decides your season. Fair enough. But there's nothing in the pithy statistical sayings of baseball that implies you're going to get blown out in a quarter of those unwinnable losses (assuming they're not the losses you collect in the decisive third of your season), especially by mid-July. And there is no logic whatsoever in a team that's blown out 13 separate times in its last 70 games spending, as we speak, 60 consecutive days in first place.

“Getting blown out a lot” is a symptom of what's wrong with the Mets, not the disease itself. If there were a pill that would prevent a team from falling behind by seven runs, from simultaneously not hitting, pitching, fielding and thinking well, I'm sure 25 of them would be distributed in the clubhouse at once. This pill does not exist and neither, I have begun to conclude, does the Mets' intestinal fortitude to remain elevated in their lofty National League East position. It's fine to oust Rick Down and designate Julio Franco and wait for Moises Alou and Endy Chavez and Pedro Martinez to heal. But something tells me something bigger is necessary before none of it matters.

If he promises to remove Reyes, Wright, Beltran, Maine, Perez (coming back Sunday) and Wagner to a holding pen for safe keeping, Omar can deal anybody he likes or anybody he can on the active roster with my blessing. All this season I've thought I've been watching a division champion, a first-place squad and a team capable of going all the way. I now mostly see a bunch of underachievers who have allowed themselves to be blown out 13 separate times in their last 70 games. There are guys I'd just as soon hold onto for the short term or nurture for the long term or keep on hand simply because I dig them, but the 2007 Mets are destined to fall out of first, to not repeat as champs of the East, to not even make the playoffs with this whole lot of uninspired, uninspiring fellows. So I'm no longer clinging to most of these Mets.

Therefore…

If you could somehow divine a way to replace the gritty incumbent catcher who rarely drives runners home, go ahead.

If you could upgrade over the accomplished first baseman who has shown zero consistency and less mobility than that, please do.

If you can find a rightfielder with an eensy bit of pop as opposed to what we're extracting from a stone, bring that person in.

If you can somehow find a second baseman or a leftfielder at all, that would be novel.

If one of the promising youngsters currently healthy has to go, have him go.

If the one or two spare parts with some value can be packaged and exchanged for something of greater worth, make the exchange.

If veterans on the cusp of grand milestones could bring us something, say goodbye to them and send them a Tiffany's bag when they reach their personal goal.

I'd sooner expect Shea Stadium to stand past 2008 than I would wholesale changes be made to our Major League personnel during the remainder of this season. But make no mistake about what we've been witnessing. The 2007 Mets are on top on borrowed time. Their lease of first place is close to expiring. They have almost no legitimate claim to the great position which they now barely grasp. They may be the first team in baseball history that will aim to make a run at respectability while leading the pack.

I'm concerned about the Braves and Phillies but I'm more worried about us. The Mets' give-up-and-get-out style of play, which has routed them 13 times, is their stiffest competition. And they're dangerously close to losing everything to it.

The Mets are in first place and the ship is not listing. But what ails this team is something that is sensed more than it’s been seen. Something is out of kilter — perhaps an approach to hitting, an approach to competing, an approach to winning.

That was Bill Rhoden in this morning's Times, and it was well-said. Not being able to put your finger on exactly what is wrong with this team doesn't mean you don't know something's amiss. And tonight was an example. Taken piece by piece, the loss doesn't seem so dire. Brandon Phillips had a career night. Maine hadn't pitched in forever. Lo Duca's hitting in lousy luck. Gotay hit in lousy luck. Hey, Harang's their ace. Milledge looked good again. Mota and Schoeneweis and Heilman all had decent outings. And did you see that play Wright made?

Finding all the positives, you might miss the pesky little negative: That we lost, 8-4, and are now a bad weekend away from second place. Which is our last line of defense — take away first place and you might indeed start saying, “Hey, cap'n, this ship seems to be riding a little lower to starboard than it is to port.”

Over the last week I repeatedly stopped and started a post grappling with the question Rhoden alludes to. My premise was that what's wrong with the 2007 Mets is really nothing more than the fact that they're not the 2006 Mets, that that season's runaway success sprinkled pixie dust in our eyes and made us fail to appreciate this season, in which a first-place team will be reinforced with a brace of important players returning from the DL, among them one Pedro J. Martinez.

I think I know why I never finished that post: On some level I knew it wasn't true. As a wise man once said, you could look it up. On June 2 the Mets were 34-18, 16 games over .500. Today they're 49-40. In between, the record is a putrid 15-22. Thirty-seven games is nearly a quarter of a season — time enough to say that yes, something is wrong. We can argue about what that something is, but it's pretty clear it's more than just an absence of pixie dust.

Go somewhere.

Hit traffic.

Run late.

Sit in car.

Turn on game.

Reyes homers.

Gotay homers.

History made.

Traffic eases.

Get there.

Do thing.

Get back in car.

Wagner closes.

Mets win.

Save for crawling on the Cross Bronx and missing the middle seven innings, may the rest of the second half be that simple.

Tonight the Mets will kick off the remaining 75/162th of the season at Shea, against the Cincinnati Reds. Bronson Arroyo will face Orlando Hernandez. Lastings Milledge may be patrolling left.

If I close my eyes I can imagine what Lastings' face will look like between his cap and the top of his jersey — a little bit of bravado, a little bit of uncertainty. I can easily picture El Duque's chin tucked against his shoulder as his knee scrapes the sky. Whatever role he's in, I can picture Rickey Henderson laughing in the dugout, still looking like he can play. (And telling anyone passing by the same.) I can see Jose regarding the pitcher with his mouth slightly open as his bat moves lazily back and forth. I can conjure up Wright rubbing his nose in his jersey and giving his head a little shake as he regards his bat. It's easy to think of Lo Duca squinting out at the pitcher, already vaguely annoyed about something. I can visualize Delgado's smooth, deceptively placid practice swings. Give me a minute and … yep, I've got Beltran looking still and imperturbable at bat. I can smile at how Shawn Green's always all elbows and knees. I can shake my head predicting that Jose Valentin's batting helmet will fold down the top of his ear. (Doesn't that hurt?)

I can see all these little quirks that you pick up over weeks and months and years of watching the players on your team through innumerable at-bats and defensive positionings and moments collecting themselves outside the batter's box. But there's one thing I can't see with any kind of accuracy, no matter how hard I try.

I have no idea what the Mets will be wearing tonight.

Black unis? White uniforms? Pinstripes? Black caps? Black and blue hats? The all-blues?

Kind of scrambles those mental images a bit, doesn't it?

It's been a long time since the Mets added a bushel of new variations to the uniform that had been good enough, names on the back and numbers on the front and racing stripes and a tail and drop shadows and an orange button notwithstanding, to wear since 1962. I'm not against change — if anything, I err on the side of rushing it in before it's quite ready. By now I'm used to the black uniforms, added in 1998, and the white ones, introduced the year before. (Though not to that wretched black cap with the blue bill, which needs to join the ice-cream cap and the METS with a tail in the dustbin of sartorial Met history.) What I am against is the sheer randomness of the Mets' uniforms, the way they take the field wearing this one or that one or the other one without apparent rhyme or reason. (See here for a history of Mets uniforms from Ultimate Mets Database.)

Howie Rose paints the word picture ably, just as Bob Murphy did, or Gary Cohen before SNY came calling. But no matter how good Howie is, there's a moment early on in his broadcast when I'm thrown out of the whole proceedings. And that's when Howie (or Tom McCarthy) describes “the Mets wearing their [insert one of many uniforms here].” In baseball, painting the word picture is about one-third keen observation and two-thirds summoning up, through time-honored shorthand, what the listener is already picturing in his or her head. When Howie has to stop and tell me what uniform my favorite team is wearing, the whole facade teeters for a moment. My recalibrating my mental images to show the correct uniform is the like being at the theater and noticing the backdrop's just painted and you can see hands tugging on cables in the rafters, and then having to yank your attention back to the story.

It's a uniform, for Pete's sake. The very word means it's supposed to be the same. Or at least predictable. What the Mets have now is a … there isn't really a word for it. A cacophon? A cluster … oh, let's just say it's a mess is what it is.

It doesn't have to be this way. Allow me, if you will, a modest proposal. And it is truly modest — it doesn't excise uniform variations (well, except for those stupid black and blue hats) or demand things be the same as they were in 1965 or 1986. It shouldn't endanger the slightest percentage of revenue from merchandising. It merely seeks to restore a certain sanity to what should never have become so complicated in the first place.

Here they are, the proposed uniform rules for your New York Mets:

Home night games: Pinstripes and blue caps.

Home day games: White uniforms and blue caps.

Weekend night games and holiday games: Black home uniforms and black caps.

Road night games: Gray uniforms and blue caps. (Or black. Monochromatic on the road works for me. But pick one.)

Road day games and holidays: Black road uniforms and black caps.

It may not be perfect. But it restores the traditional uniforms to what I see as their rightful role. They'd once again be the norm, while allowing plenty of chances to cash in on the current mania for variations that's infected clubs with lineages far older than ours. (Those red Braves uniforms, my God.)

Exceptions would be allowed. If the team wins five in a row and the players aren't inclined to mess with a winning streak, every fan would understand. If Pedro's convinced the black unis will end a five-game skid, listen to the man. And building on this foundation would let unique days feel actually unique, instead of just like an additional throw of the equipment-manager dice. Negro League uniforms are always cool. Wearing the various agencies' caps on September 11th makes for a quietly moving tribute. Break out the '86 unis every September 17th. And why stop there? Stars-and-stripes uniforms for the Fourth of July (the Binghamton Mets did it), camo togs for Memorial Day, pink unis instead of just bats for Mother's Day — I could live with all of that, if only the rest of the year were predictable. What If? nights with the Mets wearing concept designs for the Meadowlarks, Burros, Continentals, Skyliners and what-not. Heck, have “The Natural” night with the Mets in the yellow-and-white uniforms of the New York Knights — I just made that one up. I could even hoot cheerfully at the return of the Mercury Mets, as long as the leadoff hitter isn't given a third eye.

On second thought, that last one's too much.

Of course Rick Down had to go. Dude got a whole lot dumber once Moises Alou got hurt.

Funny how little we hear of hitting coaches when the hitters are hitting. They’re a hundred times less visible than their pitching counterparts. We don’t even notice how regularly they wear their jackets. As one of our sharpest blolleagues, JAMMQ at The Mets Are Better Than Sex, asked during a recent teamwide offensive torpor:

Why is it only pitching coaches are allowed to go out to the mound? Why aren’t hitting coaches allowed to do the same thing for batters? Since 1954, when the Supreme Court established that “separate but equal is inherently unequal,” we believe a grave injustice is still on-going in that hitting coaches and managers aren’t able to run out to the batter’s box and settle down a hitter in much the same way a pitching coach is allowed to go to the mound and settle down a rattled pitcher.

Great question. I haven’t the foggiest as to the answer.

It occurred to me sometime last summer that Down must have been doing an aces-high job given how little his name seeped into our consciousness. After all those midseasons of the air thickening with calls for the ouster of Tom Robson or Dave Engle or Don Baylor, it was both refreshing not to see fingers pointing and discouraging to realize the guy nominally responsible for a teamwide offensive bonanza wasn’t reaping substantial public credit. Mind you, I have no idea how much credit Down was legitimately due, but if everybody’s going to jump ugly on the hitting coach when ohfers abound, it seems only right to say he was The Man when the lineup was clicking.

First word Wednesday night (issued as I fell asleep from watching HBO’s anesthetic of a two-hour documentary on the Dodgers — Larry King grew up in Brooklyn you say?) indicated the job will fall to Rickey Henderson, though a later report said Henderson’s definitely en route but Howard Johnson may become hitting coach. HoJo has been talked up as David Wright’s guru while Jose Reyes’ upswings have been traced to Rickey’s tutelage (Jose apparently works well with No. 24s).

Hmmm…maybe Down was too closely identified with Ricky Ledee.

If it is Henderson — even if it’s not Henderson and he’s here to coach first — it’s remarkable to realize what a winding road (albeit via the same Minaya shortcut that keeps Julio Franco off the coaching staff and on the active roster) Rickey took to get back here. He was disgraced within the organization when he was released in May of 2000. That was one of Steve Phillips’ decisions — signed off on by Bobby Valentine — that I was in complete alignment with. On a Friday night against the Marlins, Rickey launched a ball to the base of the leftfield wall and Rickey wound up on first. For someone whose entire career was predicated on running…Rickey wasn’t. And it wasn’t the first occasion since the previous August ln which Rickey’s dance card eschewed the hustle. The next day, in a rare show of Met front office resolve, he was sent packing; he’d be the only 2000 Met, counting even cameo men like Ryan McGuire and Jim Mann, begrudged an N.L. championship ring by the general manager.

Seven years later, Rickey is far more welcome in Flushing than Steve Phillips. Who’d have figured?

The one thing everybody seems to remember ruefully from Henderson’s Met tenure was the card-playing during Game Six in Atlanta. I have to admit I didn’t get riled up about that (other than being disappointed someone would choose to hang with Bobby Bo). Though I imagine ESPN could do a nice job of dramatizing it should they ever turn the ’99 Mets into a stilted miniseries, Rickey (like Bobby) was out of the game by then. Something tells me if Rickey wasn’t Rickey but still shuffled the deck while his team was battling for its life, he’d be held up as a charming example of old school superstition. It’s the durndest thing, I tell ya. Henderson was dealing hearts while the Mets were tying the Braves. What a character! But you could also argue if Rickey wasn’t Rickey…ah, y’know what? Rickey did pretty well being Rickey. Let’s hope he can teach the good parts. He is, when all is said and documented, a card-carrying legend.

The most infamous coach-sacking in Mets history was the triple-execution of June 6, 1999 when Bob Apodaca, Randy Niemann and Tom Robson took three for the team. Tom Verducci recaptured Henderson’s priceless take on the situation and perhaps the value of hitting coaches four years later when the ageless wonder was hanging on with the Newark Bears:

Henderson saw reporters scurrying around the clubhouse and asked a teammate, “What happened?”

“They fired Robson,” was the reply.

“Robson?” Henderson said. “Who’s he?”

Rickey’s Enriched Learning Center for Gifted Children is in session…discover your desks, people. See, Rickey isn’t old school. Rickey’s a magnet school. Rickey’s what they called, when I was in third grade, open school. In Dr. Rickey’s progressive classroom, if he is indeed named head of the batting department at P.S. .268 (P.S. .252 with runners in scoring position), I doubt we’ll have trouble remembering the identity of the hitting instructor for very long.