The black uni tops made their first 2007 appearance Friday night. They'd been gone long enough so they had a decidedly welcome and retro feel to them. Maybe a relic of the late '90s of Piazza and Leiter and Luis Lopez, they nonetheless looked good on Julio Franco (don't you dare call him a relic) and Mike Pelfrey (he's five) and several relievers (one more effective than the other) and, if you can forgive a little projecting, the two best players to ever wear any combination of black, white, blue and orange. Led by Reyes and Wright, the Mets are back.
Back in black.
Back in first.
Too soon?
Indeed, the final 152 are often the hardest, but still, it was a losable game to the allegedly lousy Nats — what is Ronnie Belliard doing haunting the middle of our diamond? — won on a night when the Braves got flogged by the Fish. Mike and his mechanics may have been taken in by the cold that never ends, but he never committed the full Ollie and he left affairs in a manageable state for the relief firm of Feliciano, Heilman, Shoney and Wags. Julio had made several appearances this season but had forgotten to bring his batting average. No more. It's a cool (very cool, almost icy) 1.000 after breaking the 2-2 tie. Props as well to Carlos Delgado for continuing to be unstubborn and occasionally going the other way. His summer slump didn't dissipate until he discovered left field in 2006. Bunting or hitting away, I'm glad he's rediscovered it.
Jose? He just keeps getting on and coming around. How close am I to being spoiled? When he advanced to third on a wild pitch in the first I was ever so slightly disappointed because it meant he couldn't steal the base. Pretty good batch of boxscore from J.R. doing what he does anywho: 1 hit, 1 walk, 2 runs, an eventual steal, a couple of nifty grabs in the field and one annoying strikeout to prove he's human.
David? He's built of more than wax. This two-season hit streak is beginning to feel real, real, real. Two more hits for him, a well-timed steal (coordinated with a heads-up swing from Greenie) and the run that got it won. Like every Mets fan who can handle neither prosperity nor the lack of loads of it, I'd been a little nervous since D-Dub started this skein. He may have hit in 12 straight at the end of last year, but there was a fairly ineffectual postseason after and a somewhat disappointing August before and not the most convincing of road trips recently. As 24-year-old superstars with 22-game hitting streaks go, I think he may be living up to our standards again.

Tom Glavine and Jamie Moyer had never faced each other despite having 85 years, 543 wins and 7518.2 innings pitched between them. Seems incredible, but it isn't really — Moyer came up with the Cubs but only overlapped Glavine for a year and change before relocating to the AL, where he stayed until late last year. (Of course, as Jayson Stark will surely note, Glavine and Moyer are now scheduled to oppose each other in their next starts. Isn't that always the way baseball works?)
You get older, you admire different things. Brains over brawl. Guile over flash. Finesse over bull-in-the-china-shop. Tonight seemed like it would be a pitching clinic and a celebration of all of the above: Two smart old lefties who changes speeds, outthink hitters and would die on the mound before giving in.
Instead, it was kind of a mess, with the cold playing havoc with location and rhythm, leaving two smart old lefties trying to MacGyver their way out of a corner. Glavine looked like a dead man walking early, wreathed in his own breath when he wasn't scattering it with uncharacteristic shows of anger; according to the man himself, he realized he was rushing and managed to slow things down. (Can you blame him for wanting to hurry up and get the hell back in the dugout on a night better suited for yeti?) Moyer almost managed to make a win out of duct tape and toilet-paper rolls and Jimmy Rollins home runs, but was undone by his defense, his teammates' slumbering bats and the buzzsaw that is Jose Reyes 2.0.
So in the end, what you got was a study in perseverance. Which, in a way, was a lot cooler. Anyone can ooh and ahh about 96 on the black and 12-to-6 curves. An old guy finding a way to win and another old guy keeping his team in the game on a night neither would describe themselves as anywhere close to masterful? That's to be appreciated on a different level, but it ought to be appreciated nonetheless.
As for Jimmy Rollins, I tip my cap. I was proud of the Opening Day crowd for giving him both barrels (as I was proud of tonight's sparse crowd of diehards for applauding Lastings Milledge's last AB for a while), but he recovered from an enormous public humiliation to play two pretty fine games in enemy territory. By now it's well-known that the Mets and Phillies are neighbors who've barely noticed each other over 40-odd years. But it shouldn't be that way. There should be rivalry and respect and rancor between these franchises and cities and fan bases, and Rollins may have finally helped it into being. I mean, why not Philadelphia? They took Chicago and St. Louis away from us, leaving us with Atlanta. But Atlanta's too far away and their fans don't show up for playoff games. Where's the fun in that?
Of course, if Rollins continues to be the only one who comes ready to play, there won't be much point.

Nice Q&A with David Wright from Player Magazine.
There was also a profile of New York's best-selling player in New York last week.
And though I know nothing about video games, I'm gratified he's on the cover of MLB 07.
You probably heard he's on display at Madame Tussauds.
Coming up:
• The David Wright nickel replaces the one with Thomas Jefferson. “David is No. 5 and the nickel is five cents,” a U.S. Treasury Dept. spokesman says. “What did Jefferson ever do anyway?”
• The David Wright stamp will be issued by the postal service when its first-class rates rise in May. “David is first-class,” according to the nation's postmaster general, adding the third baseman is a “better and more contemporary representative of the American way” than stamps bearing flags or eagles.
• All religious materials have been replaced by the Wright Scriptures. “It seemed like a a no-brainer,” admits God. “But I did ask David for Guidance and He said it was OK with Him.”

Oliver Perez had an awesome 1-2-3 first inning.
Oliver Perez walked three in the second, but surrendered nothing.
Oliver Perez retired the first two batters in the third, gave up a single…and didn't survive the frame.
So it's hard to write it off as just a bad night.
This was the other side of Ollie, the one you get along with the upside. This was the side that we hadn't seen much of since some meaningless night late in the clinched 2006 season. And even in his three or four decidedly unstellar, hopeless Met starts previous to finding himself in October, his control may have escaped him, but it never deserted him like it did tonight.
Seven walks. Worse, four consecutive walks in the third — sixteen balls that changed the game and gave the Phillies life. Seventeen balls if you count hitting Rod Barajas at the end of the line.
And that was that. Even with Aaron Sele gamely holding the fort, the Mets didn't do anything of note with Adam Eaton, wasting Jose's leadoff magic — single, steal, wild pitch — on third in the opening inning (you should always score when you've moved the ball into the Reyes Zone) and never really recovering. You can cope with that for an evening.
But Perez? Falling apart five nights after mastering the Braves? Two innings after stymieing the Phillies? That's an alarm bell. That's a tumble down the mountain that might (might) take some serious reclimbing. That's staying after school with Professor Peterson and hoping a lesson takes. The kid didn't sound panicky after the game but he didn't sound too sure about what just happened.
Oliver Perez at his best is awesome. The Mets have nobody like him at the moment. But Oliver Perez at not his best is mostly worthless. He could use a little middle ground on nights like this.
Good news…any? Only tangentially.
• Jerry Koosman was a welcome visitor to the booth. Ron, Keith and Kooz overlapped in a way that makes you realize those of us who watch the game intently have little idea of its intricacies. Experts talking their craft without pretension…beautiful. I loved the story about how Tom or Jerry would sit on the bench when Jerry or Tom was pitching and if the spectating hurler recognized something wrong, he would signal the guy on the mound. Instead of shoehorning stuff like into one-run games, SNY should figure out how to get these guys in a booth and just talk…not have a talk show, not have them be interviewed by one of their hosts, just (somehow) spur them into baseball conversation. It would be better than any non-Mets game programming they have.
• The orange-and-white kitty who bolted through left field…neat! One hesitates to imagine what his little hidey hole over the side fence leads to (though somebody long ago did).
• Congratulations to the Dillon Panthers on their Texas state championship, attained after overcoming yet another impossible deficit at the half. Clear eyes, full hearts, get renewed.

As noted in passing Monday, the pizza at Shea is terrible and obscenely overpriced. You don’t go to a ballgame for the pizza, but how tough is it in New York to serve up something remotely appetizing for your money? As my partner put it characteristically accurately two years ago, Shea used to offer “dispiriting but edible DiGiorno” personal pies and then replaced those with “a lank, oddly colored slice of something”. That was Cascarino’s, which may or not have been a severe step down from DiGiorno (both of which, in my estimation, lagged behind previous rights holder Pizza Hut…which is Pizza Hut, for crissake), but at least it was local. When in doubt, Discover Queens.

Alas, Cascarino’s slices have apparently gone the way of Kahn’s Hot Dogs and Breyers Ice Cream’s chocolate-vanilla cups and the short-lived but lovingly recalled Rusty’s barbecue sandwich stand down the right field line. Unless things are different elsewhere from the way they are on the third base side of mezzanine (and I wouldn’t dismiss that possibility, Shea operating as it does across at least three psychic time zones), if you want pizza at the ballpark in 2007, you will pony up $5.25 for a square of Sbarro.

Sbarro. As in Sbarro from the mall food court. As in Sbarro where the Fat Boys dined in Krush Groove. As in Sbarro, Eric “E” Murphy’s previous employment prior to managing his movie star pal Vince’s career in Entourage.

As in Sbarro makes terrible pizza that is obscenely overpriced at Shea.

Five dollars and twenty-five cents! For a square…a small square shoved into a triangular box so when you open it you are dismally surprised by how little you’re getting for your 42 bits. (Aramark must have been up against it as a child when asked to hammer certain-shaped blocks into particular-shaped holes.)
Word to the wise: Take your Sbarro money and reinvest it. I won’t tell you what to eat or from where to bring it; you can figure that out for yourself. But I would like to advise you to squirrel away those Sbarrobucks so you can buy a couple of better things.

For the price of fewer than four Sbarro squares, you can buy the Mets 2007 Media Guide. Twenty bucks well spent. I found it in the 42nd Street clubhouse shop a couple of weeks ago and snapped it up. Though we decry the modern-day yearbook as a charmless marketing tool when compared to its home-baked ancestor, one must give props to the media guide which, despite the occasional nagging and inexcusable errors that somehow got into print, is way more infopacked than its predecessors. It’s 556 pages thick and just about every page contains some nugget that will fascinate you to Kingman come.
Examples?

• Jonathan Hurst, who pitched in seven undistinguished games a Met, and Dan Murray, who logged a single appearance in 1999, are both pitching coaches to our minor leaguers, imparting wisdom in Savannah and Kingsport, respectively.
• The Mets haven’t swept the Dodgers a doubleheader since 1971.
• Lastings Milledge tied for third among N.L. rookies in outfield assists last year.
• Billy Wagner reached or topped 100 miles per hour five times in 2006, more than any other National League pitcher (Jorge Julio did it twice).
• The Blue Jays haven’t traded with the Mets since swapping John Olerud for Robert Person in 1996.
• Vince Coleman is still one of the top ten all-time Mets base stealers — and Ed Kranepool still ranks ninth in team triples.

This is all public domain info and probably attainable via the Web, but if your procrastinatory gene isn’t kicking full-force, you probably won’t make the time to find this stuff. The media guide is a worthwhile alternative and an ideal trivia-spouting companion.

Don’t want 500-plus pages of Mets trivia at your fingertips (you weirdo)? Then for a little more than three squares of Shea Sbarro, you can buy The Team. The Time. The 2006 Mets. DVD just released by Shout! Factory. We only get one of these when make the postseason and it’s a pretty nice reward (though I for one miss the highlight films that played up 99-loss campaigns as landmark learning experiences if not the 99-loss campaigns themselves).

Don’t want to give away the ending, but let’s say this disc glosses over certain unpleasant developments (what Called Strike Three?) and accentuates the positive, the positive, the positive. The likes of Cliff Floyd and Steve Trachsel and others among the departed appear only incidentally but there’s so much Reyes and Wright and Beltran (et al) that the show will be almost over before you notice the historical revisionism. All the great plays are in here. Want to watch Endy demonstrate the strength to be there again and again and again on your big-screen TV? That privilege alone is worth the price of admission.

It may be propaganda, but it’s our propaganda. Tim Robbins narrates with a seriousness usually reserved for play-by-play of The Rapture. Carlos Delgado is keeping kids in school. And that trip to Japan is far more significant than you would have dreamed. In other words, this is the DVD for us.

Want something cool and your awful pizza, too? (Don’t worry, the Sbarro is plenty cool by the time you open it.) There’s always your buddies at the blogs who don’t charge you nothin’ but your time. It’s my pleasure to note a new one from an old friend. Please check out Metsie! Metsie! by recent FAFIF regular Andee. It’s a uniquely left coast look at our favorite team from a heckuva southpaw writer. With Metsie! Metsie!, The Ballclub and Blastings Thrilledge up and at ’em among many worthy newcomers, Joe Smith’s not the only promising rookie on the Met prowl this April.

Sbarro, on the other hand, should be left to the Sand Gnats.

Someone go check on the Times' normally sensible Selena Roberts, because something is seriously amiss.
Her off-day column began with the inevitable Yankees comparisons (Wright is “a Jeteresque pinup darling” and yesterday's victory was accomplished “in vintage Yankee style”) that I've loathed for years but learn to ignore as the sportswriter's equivalent of throat-clearing. But it's all in service of an idea so profoundly loathsome, so foul and misguided, that it should leave any sensible Met fan shuddering in horror.
The Mets should feel worthy enough to ask, “Why not us?” should Roger Clemens hit the sales rack.
Yes really.
Roberts does get around to enumerating some of the objections to this idea. The Mets don't play in Houston, hometown of His Loathsomeness; weren't his employer on his ascent from the pits of Hell; and don't offer him the kind of comforts the Yankees could — said comforts apparently being a) the fact that that clubhouse is so suffused with backbiting and bitchiness that the temporary employment of a mercenary wouldn't cause a ripple; b) absolution for drilling hitters; and c) gobs of money in the part-time pursuit of hardware.
That mismatch is undoubtedly enough to sink the idea, thank Christ, but let's keep going. In the 10th paragraph, Roberts notes that “Clemens, in the eyes of Mets fans, is remembered for two things. First, knocking Mike Piazza nearly unconscious with a pitch to the head in 2000 interleague play and then turning the barrel of Piazza’s broken bat into nunchucks during that World Series.”
For us, the fact that that oversized, semi-literate troglodyte nearly beheaded the heart and soul of our franchise in a vengeful seizure is Paragraph 1, not Paragraph 10, but Roberts then idly waves that little detail away.
But no player is left from the 2000 Mets. And fans slip in and out of loving and loathing with uniform changes.
And there, all you kids who want to grow up to be sportswriters, is the terrible danger of the press box. Maybe it looks like that when you spend years watching athletes come and go from locker rooms and maybe it sounds like that when all you can hear is the loudest and the drunkest baying below the press box. But the fact that no 2000 Met remains doesn't mean a thing to me, or to any longtime fan worthy of the name. We're still here, and the image of Piazza crumpling to the dirt hasn't receded in memory. I remember it very well, thank you, just as I remember Todd Pratt red-faced with rage back at Shea, the jaw-dropping farce of Clemens and the bat, the tragicomedy of Shawn Estes' semi-revenge, and the Schadenfreude of Clemens getting shelled in the All-Star Game with Piazza as his unwilling receiver. Real fans don't forget these things, and it's insulting to suggest that we do.
Uniform changes? Yes, we can adapt — Orlando Hernandez and Tom Glavine have found acceptance at Shea. But we're not so cheaply bought. There's no room in the orange-and-blue heart for the likes of Jeter or Chipper or Clemens. And there never will be. Hell, I'm happy that cheap little Ty Cobb wannabe Michael Tucker has been excised from my Met universe. Real fans have long memories and longer-lived loyalties and enmities than Roberts seems to think, and we don't give them up as easily as she suggests.
Roberts gets a quote from Wright (“I know in this clubhouse we don’t have cliques. We go to dinner together.”) in noting that the Mets don't have Yankee psychodramas. But not having psychodramas isn't like not having cable. Having escaped them, why on earth would we want to import some? As far as I know, my fridge doesn't have flesh-eating bacteria, but that doesn't mean I'd like you to FedEx me a jar of it. Would the Mets' clubhouse really be improved by importing an aging mercenary headhunter who shows up when he feels like it and is motivated by a combination of Neanderthal rage and lust for another hunk of metal to stick in his trophy case? The Mets, Roberts writes, “can offer Clemens image reclamation”. But why on earth does he deserve that? And why on earth should we be his Argentina?
Selena, here's a message from this Met fan: I hate Roger Clemens. And I don't mean I hate him like I hate when it's drizzling — I think he's a vile human being and wish him ill, up to the limits of whatever human decency I can summon up in this case. Do you know why I hate him so avidly? Because I'm a Met fan.
Needless to say, I don't want him anywhere near my team. Needless to say, if he somehow became a Met, I would not cheer for him. You know what? If that somehow happened, it's possible I might not cheer for them.

Even with just one eye on the set at work, it was clear that Opening Day 2007 was the next Mets Classic. This one had everything: pomp and circumstance, sudden reversals, mild controversy, tension, comedy and a boatload of karma.
It's very, very late and I can barely see, so I'll just let memory be my guide through the highlights. There was Ryan Howard knocking poor Abraham Nunez for a loop after the Phillie infielders chased Cole Hamels out from under Jose Reyes' pop-up, after which Howard looked at his fallen third baseman and threw his hands up like a man who's just whacked into a display of wine glasses at the mall and is very, very sorry — a play that nearly became a 75-foot triple. There was Ambiorix Burgos winning the kind of epic pitcher-batter battle against Chase Utley that Met pitchers never seem to win — only to have all his good work unravel on a single splitter that young Mr. Howard nearly hit into Citi Field. There was the meltdown of Geoff Geary, who seemed strangely and a bit disturbingly unmanned by the situation and his surroundings, and the grim mop-up work of John Leiber, who may have Aaron Heilman beat as most disgruntled bullpen draftee. There was Carlos Delgado's sneaky bunt (clever and satisfying, though it eliminated all possibility of a double up the gap — cue a debate at least as old as Ted Williams vs. Cleveland) and his sneakier slide home by way of the pitcher's mound, a mildly controversial call that the ump got right. (As the umps did on Wright's little dunker that at first looked like a trap.) There was Pat the Bat spitting out chunks of chaw after the end and Charlie Manuel sitting by his lonesome in the dugout long afterwards, like Pedro Martinez all those years ago when he was on the wrong team.
But most of all there was karma. Earlier this week, asked for what must have been the 9,000th time about Jimmy Rollins and his description of the Phillies as the team to beat in the NL East, Paul Lo Duca noted that “in this game, talking usually comes back to bite you.”
A veteran fan could tell you that as surely as a veteran: The baseball gods do not generally approve of woofing and predictions, even if they're made to shake up a team with a long history of not being able to get out of its own way. That said, the baseball gods usually don't bring the karmic hammer down quite so obviously or as forcibly as they did today. First Rollins grounded into a double play with the bases loaded. Then he booted the ball that let the Mets tie the game. Then, the floodgates having opened, he stood there while 56,000 taunted him. In a movie, the studio would have sent that back to the writers as too ham-handed a comeuppance. Hell, if Rollins had looked down in the eighth and found himself playing in nothing but his jock he might actually have been relieved. Oh man, this is just a terrible dream. Whew! Think I'll pinch myself and wake up now.
Nope. Sorry Jimmy — it was all too real.