Steve Trachsel is a hard Met to love. He showed up here as an afterthought, introduced himself with incompetence and has done his best work under suspect circumstances. Even when he has succeeded, he has engendered little to no loyalty. There are no T Tallies to record each of his pop outs. There is no section of Steven's Stevedores, loading and unloading baseballs in his honor. Fans don't clap when he gets two strikes on a hitter. They look at their watches and wonder when he'll attempt to throw strike three. The lack of feeling is mutual. The next commercial in which the pitcher invites fans to “come out and get on the winning Trach with me!” will be the first.

There was never a Steve Trachsel bobblehead day per se. Instead, the Mets gave out his nodding likeness to a random row of patrons during his home starts. I think it was in his contract.

The Steve Trachsel oeuvre has been pretty well summed up in his past three Shea starts, all of which I've witnessed first-hand. On September 10, he didn't make it out of the third inning and was mostly booed. On September 18, he shut out the Marlins into the seventh en route to the Mets' clinching their division and was given a standing ovation. Yesterday, he plodded his way into the sixth before he was removed, trailing 3-1. He was mostly grumbled at.

In all three cases — pitching terribly, pitching brilliantly, pitching OK — Trachsel left the mound quietly and without acknowledging what was going on around him. Even when positioning himself as the first star of the game on the night the Mets became N.L. East champions, he kept his head down and kept walking.

That's Steve. Whether it's because he's ridden the rollercoaster of “who have you struck out for me lately?” far too many times or because he hadn't forgotten being unloved eight days before being showered in adulation or because he's steady as he goes, you're not going to get a lot that is warm or fuzzy out of Trachsel.

Check out this picture, the one appropriately entitled Joy. Carlos Beltran has just launched a two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth to defeat the St. Louis Cardinals 8-7. At one point, the Mets were down 7-1. In what was then considered a National League Championship Series preview, the Mets had gotten the best of their most serious opponent. There was no stoppin' us now.

Beltran, not the most animated centerfielder on the block, is enraptured. His teammates are rushing home plate to embrace him. Dave Williams, a Met all of five minutes at that point, is joining in. And on the outskirts, lightly applauding as one might at the opera? It's Steve Trachsel, the longest tenured Met. Steve was pitching the next night. Maybe he didn't want to risk injury in a dogpile. Or maybe that's just Steve, a man who hasn't lasted as long he has in one place by getting too high or getting too low.

If you catch a replay of Mets Weekly this week, there's a ton of neat footage of the clinching celebration, lots of tape of the players frolicking on the field after they sprayed themselves silly in the clubhouse, lots of champagne bottles being swigged from. And there's Steve Trachsel standing off to the side, small smile creasing his face, holding a champagne flute. Ever the dedicated oenophile, Steve — the first Mets pitcher to win a division-clincher since Ron Darling — wasn't going to drink his sparkling wine in any way but the correct one.

Again, he was just being Steve Trachsel. The way he carries himself, the way he acts and doesn't react, the way he takes his time with runners on base, the way he gets little support when pitching exceptionally well, the way he gets loads of support when pitching a little too typically poorly…that's Steve Trachsel. There may not seem to be a lot of there there, but there he is: here.

When the Mets won in 1969, Ed Kranepool had seen it all, going back to the Polo Grounds. When the Mets won in 1986, Jesse Orosco could tell you what it was like in the last, dark days of the de Roulet administration and Mookie Wilson could add a few sentences on how far the team had come since the crowds barely equaled quorums. When the Mets made it back to the playoffs in 1999, all eyes turned to John Franco and the longevity he symbolized through a slew of bad and embarrassing seasons. In 2006, the Met who's been around longest is Steve Trachsel with six seasons of service. Yet there's nothing about him that suggests legendary perseverance or smacks of “this one's for Steve!” He signed a series of contracts starting in December 2000 and the latest one is still in effect. Result? Longest Met tenure. Save your tears for someone else.

He's pitched well over the years. Rarely great. Occasionally awful. He began about as badly as one could. In his first 7 starts, his ERA topped 8. He accepted a demotion to Norfolk and, in layman's terms, got his shit together and pitched like a professional for the rest of 2001. He was better in 2002 and 2003, but the Mets got worse. When his team turned a corner in 2005, they did so without him. By the time he was recovered from surgery, he was an afterthought. He was back for 2006 because his option was a relative bargain. He has taken every start this year because he's been healthy, the only starter from the original rotation of Martinez, Glavine, Zambrano, Bannister and Trachsel who's been able to say that.

Trachsel has the second-highest amount of wins, 15, among National League pitchers right now, one behind Brandon Webb, Carlos Zambrano and Brad Penny. His ERA, 4.97, is 34th among 39 qualifiers for the N.L. title. He has struck out 79. He has walked 78. This season, he has passed Bobby Ojeda, Craig Swan and Rick Reed on the Mets all-time victory chart. Steve Trachsel is now No. 10 among all Mets pitchers ever in wins. Bobby Ojeda was a World Series hero, Craig Swan won an ERA title, Rick Reed a two-time All-Star.

Steve Trachsel is Steve Trachsel, y'know? It's not even a matter of Good Trachsel and Bad Trachsel. There's just Trachsel. Sometimes what he's throwing works, sometimes it doesn't. He'll have one more start in the regular season and will probably be handed the ball at some critical juncture in the postseason. He will pitch and we will hope he succeeds not because he is Steve Trachsel but because he is on the Mets. However he accounts for himself next month, whether he produces a stifling conquest of the other team's batting order or an utter implosion that gets the bullpen cranking immediately, it will probably be the last we see of him. His contract is up, his manager doesn't seem terribly attached to him, his potential successors in the organization and on the open market are already looming.

And that will be that.

Before anyone goes blaming the prevailing doofusdom I encountered in my section of the mezzanine this afternoon on beer and front runners, understand that I witnessed no overpriced suds consumed and no clueless interlopers. I was surrounded by what appeared to be sober, loyal Mets fans. Doesn't mean they couldn't be moronic.
Behind me was a family or two — whatever their relationship, they were enmeshed — whose matriarch was a raspy yeller in a Wright shirt. Reminded me of a neighbor we had when I was growing up, one who'd threaten to call the cops if somebody parked in front of her house. She just figured out that Trachsel works slowly and informed her children of this…over and over and over again. She took great delight in the Devil Rays' pounding of the Yankees and chanted “Let's Go Rays!”…over and over and over again. When Trachsel or the parade of relievers that followed him managed two strikes on a National, she led her brood in “Strike Him OUT!”…over and over and over again. Oh, and when a brief shower sent those sitting to our south scurrying for shelter, she started a “Who's got the cover? We do!” call and response that fortunately fizzled as fast as the rain.
Her or whoever's kids they were specialized in kicking seats. A kicked seat doesn't have to be yours for the kicking to be irritating as psoriasis. For those of you don't have it, psoriasis is extremely irritating.
A couple of rows in front of me was a Jets fan. I suppose there were lots of Jets fans at Shea. That's fine. I'm a Jets fan in my spare time. But this Jets fan — COLES 87 jersey, Mets cap — wanted to be Fireman Ed east. He listened intently to their game with the Bills on a transistor radio and whenever the Jets scored, he turned around and raised his arms to signal a touchdown. The raspy lady, after protesting that the Bills are the only “real New York team” (I'd never heard that!), got caught up in this, too, and intermittent J-E-T-S spelling was added to her repertoire.
While all I did with the kicking kids was turn around and tell them to STOP IT!, I found myself strangely emboldened to heckle the Jets guy. It wasn't so much the updates from another sport infiltrating our national pastime that got me (though a harumph of “baseball gentlemen, baseball” never seemed more in order). It was the solemnity with which he carried out his dispatches that struck me as inappropriate. The hands over the head for a few beats too long elicited a “WHAT ARE YOU, TOUCHDOWN JESUS?” from me. And when the Shea scoreboard offered the final from Orchard Park before he could — about an eighth of the crowd was already applauding — he started to tell us that hey, the Jets won. “WE KNOW,” I said, “BUT THANK YOU FOR DOING SUCH A DUTIFUL JOB OF KEEPING US INFORMED ALL DAY!”
Forgive me for telling the story with me as the de facto hero, but I got a very positive response from at least a couple of Mets fans who came to the Mets game to watch the Mets game.
So I was not crazy about those behind me or in front of me. Next to me? Joe. As in my pal Joe with whom I've gone to five games this year and with whom I am now Joe and five. Not much to say here about Joe and me at Shea today except we sure do wish we could have seen the Mets win a game together in 2006.
Except for this:
While I was settling in to my seat, with the raspy lady and the Jet correspondent making themselves evident early, Joe was completing the triangulation of my day by harassing Ryan Zimmerman. With Reyes up in the first, Joe shouted, “HEY ZIMMERMAN! YOU'RE NOT PLAYING IN ON THE GRASS…YOU FOOL!” over and over and over again. Reyes singled, which meant Joe was going to scream at the Nats' third baseman during every single Met at-bat for the rest of the day, several times per at-bat — or until it was proven that it wasn't working. Took a couple of futile innings, but he got off it, though not until the raspy lady wanted in. “What about the grass? Why are you saying that?” Joe didn't acknowledge her. Good man.
All that was missing from this discomfiting 5-1 loss was some idiot in a Yankees cap. As if on cue, one appeared, a guy in his teens in the company of his similarly aged Mets fan friends. The sight of the vertical swastika raised everybody's ire into a good, old-fashioned “YANKEES SUCK!” Natch, the kid did the thing where he points at the vertical swastika with pride. “TAKE HIS HAT! TAKE HIS HAT!” swelled in response.
The Nikon Camera Player of the Day was clearly the kid's buddy, a dude who actually did take that crappy Yankees cap and actually did fling it logeward. A huge cheer ensued.
So really, a good time was had by all.

Before anyone goes blaming the prevailing doofusdom I encountered in my section of the mezzanine this afternoon on beer and front runners, understand that I witnessed no overpriced suds consumed and no clueless interlopers. I was surrounded by what appeared to be sober, loyal Mets fans. Doesn't mean they couldn't be moronic.

Behind me was a family or two — whatever their relationship, they were enmeshed — whose matriarch was a raspy yeller in a Wright shirt. Reminded me of a neighbor we had when I was growing up, one who'd threaten to call the cops if somebody parked in front of her house. She just figured out that Trachsel works slowly and informed her children of this…over and over and over again. She took great delight in the Devil Rays' pounding of the Yankees and chanted “Let's Go Rays!”…over and over and over again. When Trachsel or the parade of relievers that followed him managed two strikes on a National, she led her brood in “Strike Him OUT!”…over and over and over again. Oh, and when a brief shower sent those sitting to our south scurrying for shelter, she started a “Who's got the cover? We do!” call and response that fortunately fizzled as fast as the rain.

Her or whoever's kids they were specialized in kicking seats. A kicked seat doesn't have to be yours for the kicking to be irritating as psoriasis. For those of you don't have it, psoriasis is extremely irritating.

A couple of rows in front of me was a Jets fan. I suppose there were lots of Jets fans at Shea. That's fine. I'm a Jets fan in my spare time. But this Jets fan — COLES 87 jersey, Mets cap — wanted to be Fireman Ed east. He listened intently to their game with the Bills on a transistor radio and whenever the Jets scored, he turned around and raised his arms to signal a touchdown. The raspy lady, after protesting that the Bills are the only “real New York team” (I'd never heard that!), got caught up in this, too, and intermittent J-E-T-S spelling was added to her repertoire.

While all I did with the kicking kids was turn around and tell them to STOP IT!, I found myself strangely emboldened to heckle the Jets guy. It wasn't so much the updates from another sport infiltrating our national pastime that got me (though a harumph of “baseball gentlemen, baseball” never seemed more in order). It was the solemnity with which he carried out his dispatches that struck me as inappropriate. The hands over the head for a few beats too long elicited a “WHAT ARE YOU, TOUCHDOWN JESUS?” from me. And when the Shea scoreboard offered the final from Orchard Park before he could — about an eighth of the crowd was already applauding — he started to tell us that hey, the Jets won. “WE KNOW,” I said, “BUT THANK YOU FOR DOING SUCH A DUTIFUL JOB OF KEEPING US INFORMED ALL DAY!”

Forgive me for telling the story with me as the de facto hero, but I got a very positive response from at least a couple of Mets fans who came to the Mets game to watch the Mets game.

So I was not crazy about those behind me or in front of me. Next to me? Joe. As in my pal Joe with whom I've gone to five games this year and with whom I am now Joe and five. Not much to say here about Joe and me at Shea today except we sure do wish we could have seen the Mets win a game together in 2006.

Except for this:

While I was settling in to my seat, with the raspy lady and the Jet correspondent making themselves evident early, Joe was completing the triangulation of my day by harassing Ryan Zimmerman. With Reyes up in the first, Joe shouted, “HEY ZIMMERMAN! YOU'RE NOT PLAYING IN ON THE GRASS…YOU FOOL!” over and over and over again. Reyes singled, which meant Joe was going to scream at the Nats' third baseman during every single Met at-bat for the rest of the day, several times per at-bat — or until it was proven that it wasn't working. Took a couple of futile innings, but he got off it, though not until the raspy lady wanted in. “What about the grass? Why are you saying that?” Joe didn't acknowledge her. Good man.

All that was missing from this discomfiting 5-1 loss was some idiot in a Yankees cap. As if on cue, one appeared, a guy in his teens in the company of his similarly aged Mets fan friends. The sight of the vertical swastika raised everybody's ire into a good, old-fashioned “YANKEES SUCK!” Natch, the kid did the thing where he points at the vertical swastika with pride. “TAKE HIS HAT! TAKE HIS HAT!” swelled in response.

The Nikon Camera Player of the Day was clearly the kid's buddy, a dude who actually did take that crappy Yankees cap and actually did fling it logeward. A huge cheer ensued.

So really, a good time was had by all.

The Mets finally hit a lot while they pitched enough. That part Saturday was swell; the end of the world — nigh after a three-game losing streak by our division champs — has once again been postponed.
Mostly, I hope Nick Johnson of the Nationals is up on his feet soon and attempting to torment 14 other National League teams in 2007. As horrified veterans of collisions from Hahn & Theodore to Cameron & Beltran, all we can do is hope the human being in the other uniform with the broken right leg recovers soon.
What a bad break toward the end of a season for a guy who was hustling all the way for a last-place team. Him and Kearns, the guy he got tangled up in. In a perverse way, it makes me laugh at those who think highly compensated ballplayers don't really care about the game.

The Mets finally hit a lot while they pitched enough. That part Saturday was swell; the end of the world — nigh after a three-game losing streak by our division champs — has once again been postponed.

Mostly, I hope Nick Johnson of the Nationals is up on his feet soon and attempting to torment 14 other National League teams in 2007. As horrified veterans of collisions from Hahn & Theodore to Cameron & Beltran, all we can do is hope the human being in the other uniform with the broken right leg recovers soon.

What a bad break toward the end of a season for a guy who was hustling all the way for a last-place team. Him and Kearns, the guy he got tangled up in. In a perverse way, it makes me laugh at those who think highly compensated ballplayers don't really care about the game.

Sure was nice of us to not clinch in front of Pedro Astacio.
Oh wait, we already clinched. We've clinched all there is to clinch. There is no pressing reason to win baseball games so, apparently, we have chosen not to.
Uh, not to be ungrateful in this new and exciting era of having that little “x” next to our name in the standings, but shouldn't these games come with a rebate? If the Mets aren't trying to win — and they're not exactly going out of their way to emerge victorious — can we get like 10% of our ticket price returned to us? Don't worry, I'll put it right back into the kitty. The $25 DIVISION CHAMPIONS shirt I'm wearing as I type is indicative of how willing I am to spend in the name of this team's success. If Fred was willing to invest in great players, I'm fine with throwing down currency for overpriced merchandise full of happy logos.
Surely I would have taken this deal in February, the paying for meaningless games in exchange for why they're meaningless. They're marvelously meaningless. I look above the right field corner and I see the first version of what I hope will be a very special banner. I look behind home plate and I see the Mets insignia has been enhanced by a descriptor of what they've been since Monday night. Success hasn't spoiled this Rock Hunter.
But going to this game and Wednesday's game, both enveloped in offensive torpor, is tough stuff. It's a fleeting quirk of circumstance, I understand, but it puts into question the concept of the Mets as a destination for the entertainment dollar. There was little entertaining about watching the Mets losing to the last-place Nationals, especially losing to alumnus Astacio, a guy I'm guessing most fans without a fantasy roster had no idea was still pitching.
Oddly, if this had been a crummy loss at the tail end of a crummy season, I'd probably be penning paeans to the beauty of baseball, even futilely fought baseball, noting that autumn is at hand and the icy grip of winter is limbering up and…hey, screw that. Still, on the heels of a couple of lame losses that do not really matter, I find myself growing snippy and impatient after schlepping to Shea for another subpar game.
New York Mets fans, welcome to the big time.

Sure was nice of us to not clinch in front of Pedro Astacio.

Oh wait, we already clinched. We've clinched all there is to clinch. There is no pressing reason to win baseball games so, apparently, we have chosen not to.

Uh, not to be ungrateful in this new and exciting era of having that little “x” next to our name in the standings, but shouldn't these games come with a rebate? If the Mets aren't trying to win — and they're not exactly going out of their way to emerge victorious — can we get like 10% of our ticket price returned to us? Don't worry, I'll put it right back into the kitty. The $25 DIVISION CHAMPIONS shirt I'm wearing as I type is indicative of how willing I am to spend in the name of this team's success. If Fred was willing to invest in great players, I'm fine with throwing down currency for overpriced merchandise full of happy logos.

Surely I would have taken this deal in February, the paying for meaningless games in exchange for why they're meaningless. They're marvelously meaningless. I look above the right field corner and I see the first version of what I hope will be a very special banner. I look behind home plate and I see the Mets insignia has been enhanced by a descriptor of what they've been since Monday night. Success hasn't spoiled this Rock Hunter.

But going to this game and Wednesday's game, both enveloped in offensive torpor, is tough stuff. It's a fleeting quirk of circumstance, I understand, but it puts into question the concept of the Mets as a destination for the entertainment dollar. There was little entertaining about watching the Mets losing to the last-place Nationals, especially losing to alumnus Astacio, a guy I'm guessing most fans without a fantasy roster had no idea was still pitching.

Oddly, if this had been a crummy loss at the tail end of a crummy season, I'd probably be penning paeans to the beauty of baseball, even futilely fought baseball, noting that autumn is at hand and the icy grip of winter is limbering up and…hey, screw that. Still, on the heels of a couple of lame losses that do not really matter, I find myself growing snippy and impatient after schlepping to Shea for another subpar game.

New York Mets fans, welcome to the big time.

Welcome to Flashback Friday, a weekly feature devoted to the 20th anniversary of the 1986 World Champion New York Mets.
Twenty years. Forty-three Fridays. This is one of them.
In the days following the Mets' clinching of the 1986 National League East, much was made of the horrible shape the field was in and the horrible shape the starters were in after a night of reveling. Luck would have it that the first game after the clinch was a day game. Pete Flynn's grounds crew worked all night to create something playable and it worked. The Mets rolled out what in later generations would be called an A-minus lineup that beat the Cubs 5-0.
CF – Stanley Jefferson
2B – Tim Teufel
1B – Dave Magadan
RF – Kevin Mitchell
LF – Lee Mazzilli
3B – Howard Johnson
SS – Kevin Elster
C – John Gibbons
P – Rick Anderson
For the most part, that's not a bad lineup; makes you think the 2006 version (Ledee, DiFelice, Julio Franco playing third and batting fourth) was graded on a curve. A future MVP, a future biennial 30-30 man, a future .300 hitter, an ace pinch-hitter and half of what was then the current second base platoon occupy more than half of it. Of course Teufel never started against righties and a righty was pitching for Chicago, so that was different. The righty happened to be Cubs rookie Greg Maddux, but then he was just some kid making his fourth start (identified in one Daily News account as his brother Mike). And even if he'd been Greg Maddux, so what? The Mets had just clinched. Rolling out the A-minus lineup was apparently accepted protocol; then-scrubs Rod Gaspar, Bob Heise, Duffy Dyer and Amos Otis started after the 1969 clincher. However he rated his sudden elevation to the cleanup slot, Kevin Mitchell took his insertion as karmic payback for his excessive celebration.
“I may overdose on Tylenol…I can't drink tequila. I didn't even know where I was.”
The game would be closed out by Randy Myers, who one year later, right around the same time, would emerge as the Mets' main man out of the pen and go on to become a three-time league saves leader and the lights-out closer for a World Series winner. That that team wouldn't be the Mets and that the Mets wouldn't be a World Series winner again any time soon was, like so many other things about baseball — and life, unknowable in what was then the present.
What could we know about those who had just been plopped into our midst in the late summer of 1986? In years when things aren't going so well, it is traditional for the baseball fan to look forward to September for the callups. Who do we have who's going to make tomorrow brighter than today? It was usually a mixed bag. In September 1980, for example, we were introduced to Mookie Wilson, Wally Backman and Hubie Brooks, all of whom became somebody. We also shook hands with Scott Holman. September '81 brought us Ron Gardenhire, a marginal infielder; Brian Giles, whose claim to fame is that he wasn't the other Brian Giles; Charlie Puleo, traded to bring back Tom Seaver; and Mike Howard, whose only noteworthy act as a Met was to drive in the winning run in Seaver's return.
Late-season callups aren't so much a box of chocolates in that you never know what you're going to get as they are a bag of M&M's. You go through them very fast and, before you know it, the bag is empty and you're not all that satisfied. You don't take another bite until Spring Training. Did you get an Ed Kranepool (up in September '62, around through September '79), an Ed Lynch (1980-1986) or just an Ed Bauta (17 relief appearances, 0-2 between August '63 and May '64)?
Kevin Mitchell, three years in advance of his Most Valuable Player season (no other '86 Met had that prestigious an award still in front of him), was the only rookie to make a sizable impact on the team. His first cup of coffee came in 1984. World/747 was with the team from Opening Day and stuck the entire season, something no other rookie could say. (He also led the team in nicknames.) In the course of the year, other youngsters with no or limited previous experience would dot the roster. Their short-and long-term contributions ranged from memorable to trivial.
In that day-after lineup on September 18, 1986, the one following the clinch, Stan Jefferson jumps out as the quintessential afterthought. He was considered fairly hot stuff, a centerfielder of the future, so to speak. That was going to be difficult on a team that had two pretty solid centerfielders of the present, Wilson and Dykstra. Mazzilli, a relatively storied centerfield of the past, was still hanging around, too. I had hoped somebody would snap a picture of the four of them together, our own Willie, Mickey & The Duke and Stanley Jefferson. I don't know that anybody did. Jefferson batted 24 times during his shot of Sanka. He would be gone for Kevin McReynolds in short order, play for five other teams and become an officer in the NYPD much later. Don't remember the scouting report on him then, but eventually it would be accurate to say he had a real gun.
Dave Magadan competed for a batting title in 1990 and played in the Majors until 2001, but it's not unreasonable to say he's most remembered for replacing Keith Hernandez brilliantly for one night and not altogether successfully thereafter.
Kevin Elster snuck under the August 31 deadline to make the postseason roster, purely as managerial insurance. Davey Johnson wanted to be able to pinch-hit for Rafael Santana, and if HoJo were otherwise engaged, he needed someone to sub at short. Elster was sold as a defensive whiz. Looked shaky in his spot duty, but if you're 22 and thrust onto the best team in baseball from Double-A, so might you. Was a Met through 1992 with a very good glove, but never really developed into the all-around player the Mets hoped for. Drove in 99 runs in 1996 after having driven in all of 90 in the six previous seasons combined.
John Gibbons, drafted in the same first round as Darryl Strawberry and Billy Beane, was supposed to be the great young catcher who caught the great young pitchers in 1984. Got hurt in a spring game (fractured left cheekbone) and never regained the starting job, losing it first to Mike Fitzgerald and permanently to Gary Carter. His first Met stint in '84 yielded an .065 average. His second in '86 resulted in .474. Was called up in '85 and '87 but saw no action. That résumé makes him uniquely qualified to tell younger players of the ups and downs of baseball. He's managing in Toronto, at least for another week or so.
Rick Anderson threw the most innings of any Met pitcher who didn't make the 1986 playoff roster, but he'll be in the postseason in 2006 as Ron Gardenhire's pitching coach, same as he's been three times in this decade in Minnesota. Nice career coda for someone known otherwise, if at all, as a fill-in and a throw-in, the latter for David Cone, accompanying Ed Hearn, the rookie backup catcher in '86, to Kansas City in perhaps the greatest pro-Met steal ever. Hearn, like Gibbons, got hurt (and more seriously ill later in life), but he was a pretty good backstop in his one year of championship reserve duty. He has a story to tell everybody. Hearn usurped the job of Barry Lyons in May. Lyons was up with the big club out of Spring Training, down for good on June 23, back in '87 through '90. He's presently persevering after Hurricane Katrina hit him hard in Mississippi last year.
Anderson went five in his September 18 start against the Cubs, followed to the hill by John Mitchell. It was Mitchell's third appearance following a stellar season in Tidewater when he was named the International League's Most Valuable Pitcher. Shipped to the Mets with Bobby Ojeda for apparent stiffs like Wes Gardner, LaSchelle Tarver and Calvin Schiraldi before '86, Mitchell's promise threatened to make him the Leroy Stanton of the Nolan Ryan deal. Didn't exactly work out that way, but Mitchell, though not to as positive an effect as perennial cameoist Terry Leach, threw some yeoman innings in the Great Starting Pitching Shortage of 1987, keeping the defending champs from completely cratering.
Randy Myers, who picked up for Anderson against the Cubs, was hyped more than any other '86 rookie. He had one inning at the end of 1985 and 10 appearances as a Tidewater shuttler in '86, but big things were expected. He was a hard-throwing lefty the likes of which the Mets hadn't had. It wouldn't be long before he made Jesse Orosco obsolete and Roger McDowell expendable. His place in 1986 lore was cemented in Jeff Pearlman's The Bad Guys Won as the object of Ed Lynch's ire. Lynch was with the Cubs when the Mets clinched against them, his six years here having expired in June via injury, overcrowding and trade.
“It was,” Lynch recalled, “like living with a family the whole year and getting thrown out of the house on Christmas Eve.”
The Mets celebrated their first division title in the home clubhouse. Lynch was in spritzing distance of the fun, but it was no longer his fun. It was presumably one thing to see the Oroscos and Wilsons and Backmans, guys he came through the bad years with, get their due, but…well, here's what he told Pearlman about one particular 1986 Met callup:
“There's Randy Myers, who had been with the team about a week, and he's got his arm around two gals, and he's got a bottle of champagne in each hand. I remember just looking at him and thinking, 'Where's a grenade when you need one?'”

Emily and I go out every Saturday night. Every so often, there's a Saturday night game. Every so often, we decide one of these Saturday night games is a must-see: It's Mets-Yankees, or it's a big game against the Braves, or it's an attempt at clinching. So we wind up in a bar or a pub together, parked in front of the TV.
Sometimes when this happens, we fall into conversation with some fellow Met fan. And the process is always entertaining. The first time Emily says something about the Mets or the game, she gets a polite nod or a brief look, and then the Met fan goes back to chatting with me. The second time she says something, it's much the same reaction. About the third or fourth time (depending on how smart the Met fan is), you can see the newcomer starting to recalibrate. Wow, she's talking about Endy Chavez. Hey, she knows Billy Wagner's been lights-out since the All-Star break. Gee, she knows about Duaner Sanchez and his injury.
And then things change — the fan, if not frightened off by his scrambled gender assumptions, stops treating my wife like a baseball afterthought and starts discussing all things Mets as fervently with her as with me, if not more so. It's happened often enough that now we practically wait for it from the moment some guy at the next table or the next barstool looks over and asks, “Met fans?”
I'm an insanely lucky man. I didn't rate a woman who would endure my mile-long list of faults. Somehow I wound up with one. I didn't deserve a woman who's smart and beautiful and ferocious. Somehow I married one. I certainly didn't deserve a woman who loves baseball and the Mets and knows what catcher's interference is. But somehow I got one. (If you're thinking my luck is Emily's utter lack of it, well, hush. Don't blow this for me.) One summer evening before Joshua was born, I suffered through some 7 train mishap and didn't arrive at Shea until about the third inning. Emily had broken out her full complement of baseball knowledge and was chatting amiably but a trifle coolly with a drunk guy in Jets regalia who was now clearly lovestruck.
“If only you didn't like the Giants,” he sighed, “you'd be perfect.”
No, Emily doesn't watch every pitch of every game — a three-year-old bolluxes up your schedule something fierce, and she takes the early shift, so the sixth inning is often the end for her. She doesn't pore over Hagerstown stats or moon over the enigmatic career of Rich Sauveur or wonder if there's a decent picture of Al Schmelz on the Net. But that kind of thing doesn't make you a fan, it makes you a lunatic — and one lunatic per marriage is enough.
All of this is preamble for tonight's game: Emily attended it with her dad, while I tried to convince Joshua to eat chicken fingers and apologized for repeatedly breaking the unwritten laws of how to color dinosaurs. After four innings, I had a wild hope blooming in my chest: Sure, I got to see the clincher, but she could see history. An end to the Curse of Nolan Ryan. The disbanding of that stupid club. Why not? Didn't David Cone flirt with a no-hitter after his aneurysm? Wouldn't that be a perfect chapter to add to the legend of Pedro Martinez?
Of course, it wasn't to be — the count stalled at 15 to go. (Nowhere near, but hey, we're Met fans.) Then Pedro lost a little something, got a little unlucky, and before you could blink it was 4-1. Not a bad outing by any means, though it was another Rorschach in how to view Pedro. I think Pedro is incredibly smart not only about the game but also about himself — he wasn't going to do something foolish out of pride or stubbornness in a meaningless late-September game, but when there's bunting on the stands and October in the air, the artist will look at the baseball in his hand and find a way. Maybe I'm right. Or maybe even Pedro can't outfox Father Time.
Still, it wasn't a meaningless late-September game for Emily.
Over the years my wife's had to put up with innumerable Met-related rages, a smaller but not insignificant number of bursts of overexuberance, impromptu lessons for our son in spectacularly foul profanity, black depressions, winter muttering, complaining that spring training's too long, complaining that spring training's too short, moaning that it's an off-day, moaning that it isn't a double-header, moaning about the All-Star break, hours spent on obsessive Internet searches, hours upon hours of blogging, hours spent on online and offline baseball-card hunts, half-assed conversation because the other husbandly ear is listening to a game on a headphone, and various and sundry other annoyances and offenses.
There have been rewards. She was there for the 10-run inning, for the wild pitch that allowed Game 163, for Pratt hitting it over the fence, for the Grand Slam Single, for Agbayani's homer, for the game of Bobby Jones's life, for Timo leaping into the air to make the pennant arrive earlier. But in recent years she's had too few chances to go to the park. Saturday-night games are rare, the Mets' schedule hasn't meshed well with Joshua's grandparent visits, and the price of being a Met fan instead of a Met lunatic is the lunatic goes to more games. Tonight was different. Nice evening. Pedro pitched. The only thing wrong was the score.
Sorry, sweetie — I wanted this one for you. Here's hoping the Mets and I can make it up to you in October.