Ah, Phoenix.

That was a game to savor, one whose reversals just felt like plot points in a larger drama, even with Endy having struck out (for the first time!) in the ninth against Jose Valverde. The fences are just too close at the BOB or the Chase or whatever it's called today for a one-run deficit to feel fatal until the final flat-lining. And our recent history there is just too spectacular to overlook.

That was the kind of game that creates folk heroes — welcome to the inner circle, Damion Easley! And it was the kind of game that's so full of incestuous baseball connections that you just shake your head. Shawn Green, former Diamondback, gets on base thanks to a play not made by Tony Clark, former Met. Paul Lo Duca, widely expected at one point to be laundered into a Diamondback, follows with a walk. Easley, former Diamondback, puts down 415 feet worth of hammer for a 6-4 lead. (And then David Wright, who hopefully will never be a Diamondback or anything other than a New York Met, makes it a laugher.)

This was the kind of game we'd wanted to put on the 2007 ledger, so later we could smile at the memory of it and draw strength from it in anxious ninth innings to come — a game in which the Mets stayed cool, waited for their opportunity and then not only won but unleashed hell.

Is the Daily News kidding?

Look, I understand its sports editors are addicted to the crack pipe of Yankee BS. I understand that every series with the Red Sox blots out the sun. I understand that there is a perception that the Yankees losing to Tampa Bay is novel. I understand that Phil Hughes being called up was a milestone. I understand that Phil Hughes nearly pitching a no-hitter was quite noteworthy. I even understand, in a twisted way, that George Steinbrenner not firing Joe Torre and Brian Cashman qualifies as a development.

But last night the Yankees didn’t play. They were rained out. The only thing that happened on their beat was the dismissal of someone on the training staff, the director of performance enhancement. That sounds kind of shady, like he was the in-house dispenser of pills to (allegedly) Jason Giambi. But he was just the guy in charge of stretching or pulling hamstrings or something. And because Hughes came up lame and because a bunch of his teammates recently did the same, the strength & conditioning dude was axed.

And that, not Oliver Perez’s 10 strikeouts versus the Marlins, is what covers the back page of today’s Daily News.

I give up. It’s a losing battle. The 2007 Mets are universally recognized as one of the best teams in baseball. The 2007 Yankees, who are likely to recover to some extent from their poor start, are still in last place. Yet in “New York’s hometown newspaper,” it’s 1961. It’s 1927. The Mets don’t exist, at least not in any manner comparable to that of the Yankees.

I thought it was an abomination last Sunday when my edition of the Times had nothing — nothing — on the Mets in its sports section. My edition wasn’t the earliest but it wasn’t the latest. It was the one distributed to most of Nassau County Sunday morning. Usually in those situations you can depend on reading one of those stories that was obviously written to fill the gap in between, why this player is doing so well or why that player is in a slump, something featureish. But there was nothing. Saturday had been a huge sports day and the Mets, whose heartstopping comeback versus the Nationals ended after deadline, got bumped. I didn’t like it, but I understood that choices needed to be made.

But this? The guy in charge of stretching is scapegoated? That’s what gets the majority of the back page? Not the Mets’ win over the Marlins, not the Devils’ playoff loss to the Senators, not something about something that actually happened yesterday? The dismissal of Marty Miller, whom nobody outside the Yankees’ clubhouse or the Miller household had ever heard of, is judged the biggest New York sports news of Wednesday?

Disgraceful. Absolutely disgraceful.

Listen, I get it. I get that Cashman firing a strength coach symbolizes Steinbrenner throwing his weight around and that more heads could roll and shape up or ship out and…blah, blah, fricking blah. This is the same dull, pointless story we’ve been fed as “news” for years. Decades. An actual event would be “Yankees go about their business quietly.” Everything else is white noise.

What do the Mets have to do? Win a lot? Play exciting baseball night in, night out? Run nip and tuck with their archrivals for first place? Send compelling stars out on to the field every day? They do that. Hell, David Wright was accommodating enough to fall into a deep struggle at the plate, which was bad news, but news with a tinge of controversy nonetheless.

But no. The Daily News does not care to cover the defending division champion, contending Mets as if they’re a defending division championship or contending for another one. The editors of that newspaper’s sports section choose not to shine a light on the fine work their Mets reporter Adam Rubin does on a regular basis (Roger Rubin filled in yesterday) nor play up the interesting Met sidebars by Sean Brennan or the worthy columns written about this team by excellent writers like Lisa Olson. Most days of late, the Mets are reduced to a red snipe in the lower right-hand corner of the back page. Today they made it all the way above the name plate. PEREZ & METS SINK FISH AT SHEA is there in a little box. YOU’RE FIRED! With angry Boss’ blessing, Cashman pulls plug on strength coach accompanying a picture of a testy Steinbrenner takes up most of the available space. The ratio of pages devoted to the two teams inside the paper is similar to what we see on the back.

I’ve long enjoyed buying the Daily News and reading it from cover to cover, continuing to do so even in this Internet age of ours. Suddenly, however, I find a surfeit of quarters in my front pocket.

The sooner it stopped being April, the better life got for David Wright and Mike Pelfrey. The David's power numbers for May already dwarf those from the previous month, while Pelf used May Day to keep Willie from screaming “MAY DAY!” toward his well used bullpen. That's something.

Not much in the service of attaining a Metropolitan victory Tuesday night, but small steps are better than no steps at all. Where the phenoms of late summer 2004 and early spring 2007, respectively are concerned, they only seemed to be stepping backwards in April. They certainly weren't stepping up. Against the Marlins, they found a preferable direction to follow.

In David's case, the Wright direction may be within his grasp again. Three hits, two runs and a ball that mysteriously flew off his bat and over the fence does not necessarily signify detonation of his doldrums, but the schneid always looks better in the rear view mirror. His homer was to the opposite field which says something for the authority of his swing. I guess he bats second again later today.

Pelfrey? His first inning was characteristic of what he's been, his next 5-1/3 was happy and uncharted territory, hopefully a sign of Mike to come. After Josh Willingham buried him, Pelfrey made like Pepsi, his young career bubbling out of the grave (or something like that if you believe the urban advertising legend). Good for him. And good for Willie who, whether by toughlove or dint of bullpen shorts, wouldn't send him to his standing appointment with an early shower. This could be a night Pelfrey looks back on with satisfaction, knowing he lost a decision but notched a professional hash mark.

If choosy mothers choose Jif, baseball fans choose stats, trends and whatever data that's handy to prove their assertions. Here's a line that sticks to the roof of my mouth: since busting out of the gate at 4-0, the Mets are 11-10, barely .500 during the 84% of the schedule that is most recent. Of course you could also say the Mets are 0-10 in losses and make it sound really disturbing. Every game counts, so let's say they're 15-10 in 2007 and still neck and neck with the Braves. But there is something undeniably underwhelming about their inconsistency of late.

I don't mind that they had to dig deep to quell the Nationals. The Nationals are professionals even if they play in a city too long run by amateurs. The Rockies, who allegedly don't amount to a pebble in our spikes, were also more of a handful than paper would have you believe. On paper we should have won six straight coming into this series. On paper the game is not played. We took four of six from two last-place teams. That's livable.

I do mind not beating the Marlins once in two games at Shea Stadium. No disrespect to the Fish, but that's lame. Even if one game was overshadowed by Chan Ho Park's crisis deployment and the other represents a granite building block for Wright and Pelfrey, it's still two losses to a perpetually rebuilding team that we crushed just two weeks ago in Florida, the second of them to erstwhile Met pin cushion Ricky Nolasco. It's four losses in six games overall, six losses in eleven games.

Maybe that's all it is, a 5-6 stretch in the midst of a 162-game span. There was a 3-7 run in May 2006, the yips of which were snowed under by a quick 8-4 response and the Mets went back to being unstoppable. Maybe there's another wham-bam 4-0 in our near future like the one we laid on St. Louis and Atlanta at the year's outset or even a punishing 3-0 along the lines of what we did in Philly and Miami.

Or not. If Wright and Delgado are finally breaking loose of the stranglehold futility has had on them, will they burn as hot as Alou and Green did in April? And can you imagine for a second that Alou (already slipping) and Green will scald any hotter than they have? That they'll come close to keeping it up? No Valentin for a month, no Duque for who knows how long, no Heilman except of the Aaron-go-blah variety…something's creaking in my closet of baseball anxieties for the first time in 2007.

Hopefully it's only a figment of my imagination.

Oh, how this evening seemed idyllic when it was abstract. Mets at home, last day of April, Emily and me with a chance to take in a game without putting an ice-cream-crazed child in a headlock or checking in with a babysitter. What could go wrong?

How about Jose Valentin turning out to have something partially torn in his knee? How about El Duque turning out to have some new kind of old-person ailment, and then turning into Chan Ho Park? (And now Moises is having an MRI! Goddamn it!) That stealthy sound I heard around mid-afternoon was idyllic slipping out the door and taking to its heels. Oh well. At least it was a beautiful summer day. Or at least it was until the sun went down, the temperature began to drop, and the wind began to really blow.

And until Chan Ho took his cue from the wind.

Let the record show Park started out like a ball of fire, then got unlucky on Miguel Cabrera's liner off the top of Easley's glove and two balls that were ticketed for the Bermuda triangle when they left the bat. “You're booing physics,” I advised one particularly enthusiastic and lunkheaded youth. And then I started booing Cabrera, who should have scored. Two outs, a ball that clearly could land between the infielders and the outfielders, and you can't go first to home? Miguel Cabrera is down there with Andruw Jones in the ranks of terrible great baseball players. His laziness and disrespect for the game are beyond shameful, and it's a pity that there's no one on the Marlins with enough seniority to call him out. I wish Reyes's bad-hop double had busted him in the nose as a love tap from Abner Doubleday.

Anyway, Park was unlucky in the third, but that wasn't bad luck in the fourth. That was nearly 900 feet of bad pitches redirected so quickly and violently by Amezaga and Ramirez that everyone in our part of the mezzanine knew where they were headed before they cleared the infield. I didn't even bother watching Ramirez's ball land. OK, perspective: Apparently Omar made a promise to Park, Philip Humber probably isn't ready, and I'm more inclined to believe in the lousy Jorge Sosa of Port St. Lucie than the apparently superb Jorge Sosa of New Orleans. Fine. But let's please differentiate between a chance for Park and a job for Park, unless things change in a hurry. Because it was Lima Time out there tonight, and I sure didn't feel like dancing. (Judging from his post-game comments, neither did Willie — when a manager talks about a veteran pitcher losing his concentration, safe to say he isn't pleased.)

The rest? Well, the Mets fought back bravely enough, Beltran looks locked in, Delgado got an excuse-me hit and had a nice at-bat in the ninth off old friend Henry Owens, and Reyes was Reyes. Beyond the crappy pitching and the bad luck, the grim part of the night was Wright getting it from the crowd after a miserable night at the plate. That wasn't fun to hear, but to me the boos felt perfunctory, more We Don't Really Mean This But We're Willing To Hear How It Sounds boos than Hey That's Bobby Bonilla And He Just Knocked That Little Girl Down And Ate Her Hot Dog boos. I heard more fans in our section objecting to the razzing of Wright than joining in. (Speaking of Bobby Bo, we did get to do some eating: We drank beer and ate hot dogs and cracker jacks and I had ice cream in the eighth inning, which was witless, but provided a momentary illusion of warmth when I was no longer eating it.)

As for Shea, it was its usual ragged, clueless self, for better and for worse and for the two being so mixed up that you couldn't tell one from the other. Small example among many: I think they showed highlights from every baseball game except Braves-Phils, which was the only game most of us cared about. Shea being Shea, I would have been shocked if they'd done anything differently. Emily noticed the apple was dusty from all the construction at looming Citi Field, and that almost made me sentimental for the Big DMV — until it occured to me that Shea being Shea, it's entirely possible no one's bothered to clean the thing since last fall.

Aw, heck. You know what? First trip to Shea for Emily and me this year. We spent a spring night together watching reasonably exciting baseball in reasonably good company in the great outdoors. Idyllic? No, not exactly. But I've had many a worse night.

Some of you FAFIF old-timers might recall this post, which described a day at a Mets-Cubs game when practically everything seemed surreal. You're in the middle of it and you realize it and you decide there's nothing you can do about it and you just let it ride and see where it takes you.

Well, I am at the tail end of another one of those days. I'm hoping it's done, actually, because it's been extraordinarily weird. As little of it has to do with baseball (save for an unexpected appearance of sorts by everybody's favorite high-rolling, youth-dating catcher), I'll spare you the details. Except for this:

I watched Chan Ho Park mow down the Marlins in the first. I heard him overwhelm them in the second. In the third, Stephanie and I entered a supermarket. When we came out, Stephanie pointed out the full moon above, suggested it was messing with me and I said “that means tonight's the night. Chan Ho Park is going to pitch a no-hitter.”

Then I got in the car and the Mets were down 5-0 in the third. Before we got home it was 7-0.

Finally, normality.

My co-blogger is a wise man. And as a wise man, one bit of baseball wisdom he's finally gotten through my fool head is this: Style points don't matter.

From a statistical standpoint, that was a pretty unsatisfying two out of three. Ice-cold bats, poor situational hitting, runners not moved up, and the heretofore anonymous pitchers of 2007 Washington looking like Walter Johnson. We were told we were supposed to sweep; failing that, we were expected to at least dominate. There was no sweep; when there was lumber in our hands, there wasn't a lot of domination.

And yet, two out of three in the W column, and the Mets back in first place above those pesky Braves. (Which is such a nicer way of thinking of them than the old way, with palpitations and angst and finally, horror.) Two out of three, first place. That's the bottom line, and the bottom line is good.

Sure, there are things to stay up late about. Where's Wright's power? Delgado's bat? What's wrong with Aaron Heilman? Does Mike Pelfrey need more time? What will the doctors have to say about Stache and El Duque? Given all these questions, an extra-inning win and a 1-0 victory aren't nearly enough to keep the stomach from doing flip-flops.

And this is where the style points come in.

Good teams win. There's infinitely more to it than that, of course, but that's the baseline fact you can fool yourself into missing. Good teams win.

How they win, over the course of even a small part of a season, defies generalization. They win when rookie catchers are out of position and when ancient first basemen expand their position's definition. They win when the setup men can't set 'em down and when the enemy closer is due for something less than perfection. They win when an umpire suits up as the other team's 26th man. They win when three regulars are resting or injured. They win when a corner guy can't find the fences and a pinch-hitter can. If it comes to it, they win when key guys go on the DL and when kids aren't ready. When they don't win…well, then they win the series. Good teams find a way, and they don't sweat style points or fans squirming in their seats.

Monday night is my '07 Shea debut — Emily and I are going, something we haven't gotten to do in the better part of forever. I don't know who'll pitch. I don't know who'll play second. I don't know if the bats will come to life against Scott Olsen, or if he'll look like the immortal Jerome Williams and Jason Bergmann. I don't know if we'll win.

But I do know this: We're a good team. And knowing that makes not knowing the rest a lot easier to accept.

Was thinking this Monday night in the blissfully cheap seats and then stuffed a sock in it so as not to jinx the protagonist, but since he finished April undefeated and practically untouched, here goes:

And warming up in the bullpen, the starting pitcher for the National League, number thirty-three from the New York Mets…

One year ago, John Maine was an emergency starter with some decent stuff and little clue as to what to do with it. Today he's one of the best starters in the entire Senior Circuit, rapidly evolving into the ace of the Met staff and not too many months away from becoming the anti-Nolan Ryan.

Tonight's AFLAC trivia question: Who was the pitcher the Baltimore Orioles received in exchange for John Maine? Whoa, that's a tough one!

Maine is for real as far as one month of his first full season in the bigs is concerned. If he gets much realer, Omar Minaya gets a boulevard named in his honor because swapping ol' whathisname to the Orioles and receiving young, high-heat-hurling John Maine as a throw-in should go down as one of the great heists in modern baseball history.

Exaggerating? Just giddy after his seven scoreless innings and eight commanding K's against the Nationals? A little giddy, but not telling tall tales. Here's why I think this trade shapes up as so particularly spectacular.

Let's step back a few months to the free agent season. To what pitcher did the Mets give tens of millions of dollars and many years of commitment? None, that's who. Not Meche, not Zito, not Suppan, not Weaver, nobody. Woe was us!

Or was us? Minaya did not empty out his piggy bank to overpay for a pitcher nor did he trade any of his jewels in a desperate lunge for a name to quiet his critics. He did his work a winter earlier. Well, Omar and Anna Benson teamed up, but only one of them likely read the scouting reports real closely.

If Johnny Maine continues to be Johnny Maine (I've already promoted him from the impersonal John), then what does the quietly brilliant (sure, he thinks so now) trade that brought him here tell us? It tells us that making pitchers rich just because you've heard of them is not a formula for rotation success. It gives us pause for the months ahead when Carlos Zambrano possibly comes on the market. It makes us think that this Minaya character may not say much when he gives interviews (honestly, have you ever learned anything of value from anything he's uttered?), but he sure is doing his job.

Maine pitched a whale of a game in Washington Sunday and let's tip our caps as well to the man who got the save, Julio Franco. Oh, the S in the boxscore is affixed to Wagner, but Franco made two plays worthy of Rescue Me, one on a bunt (charge, throw, out at third), one on a bases-loaded grounder (up his arm, stayed with it). This came an afternoon after Julio lined a death-defying single in the ninth to keep Saturday night's affair alive and just a little more bizarre.

As I never had any particular faith in John Maine when he first appeared in our midst last May, I've been just as wrongheaded about Julio Franco's value of late. Had you been in our living room last evening, here is the approximate dialogue you would have heard between my wife and me when he stepped to the plate:

ME: I'm Julio Franco. I don't do anything anymore. Can I have a roster spot anyway?

HER: Only in the clutch.

I love when the Mets shut me up.

Maybe you remember a game between the Pirates and the Yankees from two years ago, the one Jason Giambi won with a tenth-inning home run, signifying his return to the good graces of his loyal fans in the Bronx after he apologized for nothing in particular. Don't know if you recall the circumstances that sent that game into a tenth inning. Here is the AP report from that night, June 15, 2005:

Trailing 5-4, New York caught a big break in the ninth. With one out and a runner on first, Gary Sheffield's smash up the middle appeared headed toward center for a single. But it deflected off Mesa (0-5) to shortstop Jack Wilson, who tried to start a double play that would have ended the game.

“I've come to learn that arguing gets me in trouble for some reason,” he said.

Two days later in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it was acknowledged that mistakes were made:

Ed Montague, a 30-year veteran, acknowledged that first-base umpire Tony Randazzo incorrectly called the New York Yankees' Gary Sheffield safe on what would have been a game-ending double play in the ninth inning. The Yankees went on to tie the score that inning, then win, 7-5, in the 10th on Jason Giambi's home run.

How comforting it is to know that Major League Baseball has not raised its umpiring standards one iota in two years.

Yay, of course, that the Mets came back and beat the Nationals in twelve innings. But let's not let Tony Randazzo off the hook. Tony Randazzo's umpiring was a black mark on this baseball game. Tony Randazzo made four horrendous calls at first base at RFK Stadium that tangibly impacted the outcome of a Major League game. The fact that the fourth helped the Mets' cause does not excuse the first three that nearly doomed them. There's no excuse for any of them, actually.

Bad calls at first occur all the time. There was a howler of a miss on Wednesday afternoon in which Beltran was ruled out despite clearly beating the throw. Presumably because it was the final out of a game the Mets trailed by six runs, nobody argued it, but it was an obvious miss. There was an obvious miss that went in the Cardinals' favor on the first night of the season in St. Louis, but it didn't figure in the outcome, so I pretty much forgot about it.

I don't want to forget about the unprofessional, incompetent performance turned in Saturday night by Tony Randazzo. It would be easy enough to kick back and revel in the several and varied contributions of Tom Glavine, Julio Franco, Damion Easley, Jose Reyes, Aaron Sele, Carlos Beltran, Shawn Green and the indefatigable Endy Chavez. It was the second succulently sweet twelve-inning triumph in five nights and it allows us to feel much, much better about our the perseverance factor of our recently stymied attack.

But I can't forget the shameful effort put forth by one Tony Randazzo, especially since he has a track record in this area. It is a pox on the house of baseball and why this sort of ineptitude is permitted to flourish wildly is completely beyond my understanding as a fan. Even allowing for the imperfections inherent in the human element — if they can build a robot to do the same job, by all means build it — it was embarrassing to watch. It embarrassed the Nationals, it embarrassed the Mets, it embarrassed the sport.

What's that? Umpires get most of them right? Their job is to get them all right. Or get them all right and be forgiven for one here and there that goes wrong and in general not be noticed. Anything beneath that standard is not worthy of the position. Tony Randazzo was not close to that standard Saturday night. Not even in the same ballpark.

Ryan Zimmerman, despite a great effort, did not throw out Damion Easley at first in the fifth inning yet Easley was called out. Despite another great effort in the same inning, Zimmerman did not throw out Jose Reyes at first, yet Reyes was called out. Likewise, Felipe Lopez did not beat out Easley's throw to first and should have been erased on the back end of an inning-ending double play in the sixth. But he was ruled safe and eventually scored. And to be fair, Easley was nipped by a hair at first in the ninth with two out yet he was called safe. Instead of the game ending, it continued and the Mets took advantage (praise be).

Four plays at first, all close, all blown by the same umpire, an official who did not exhibit the professionalism to turn and walk away when Willie Randolph (finally) bolted from the dugout to argue the third of those travesties. Sunday afternoon, Tony Randazzo will move behind the plate and calls balls and strikes.

What a system.