…baseball is a masterpiece of tension, with the storyline unrevealed until the final seconds. Some nights you spend guessing who'll be the hero. Which batter will end it in extra innings with a blast into the darkness or a clean single up the middle? Which pitcher will coax a final pitch past a final batter? Which manager will emerge from the chess match with bragging rights?

Other nights, you find something the hell else to do with whatever you can salvage of your evening. Because in January when you're moaning that you'd watch any baseball game, you don't mean games like this.

When the Nationals spat the bit in gruesome fashion, Emily and Joshua and I were wandering Coney Island. I had Howie and Tom in one ear, the cacophony of Astro-Land in the other. And while that meant I couldn't see Frank Robinson, I could certainly imagine what he must look like. I assume it was something like this.

Frank Robinson is up there with Larry Bowa and Dallas Green in my personal pantheon of Managers Without Poker Faces. The beauty of this pantheon? It's that each of those three men gets catastrophically angry in his own unique way. (Willie, on the other hand, is a graduate of Headmaster Torre's Great Stone Face Academy. Kyle Farnsworth could give up a grand slam to a blindfolded relief pitcher who was holding the bat upside down and it's possible Torre might blink.)

Larry Bowa: Primordial rage, with the tics and head twists giving way to square eyes, purple face and bulging neck. The limits of mere human form couldn't contain Bowa's fury — properly capturing it would demand a master cartoonist, a Tex Avery or a Chuck Jones. Man, I miss watching Bowa in the Phillies dugout, particularly with Keith Hernandez gleefully narrating. Those nights were like performance art.

Dallas Green: His trademark was combining rage with astonishment at whatever numbnuts thing the Mets were doing. His signature face was the mouth hanging open while the rest of the body was absolutely still. Like he knew as well as everybody that he was going to lose it in spectacular fashion (with the shotgun mikes picking up every word), but the explosion was delayed while he processed how mindbogglingly awful whatever had just happened truly was.

Frank Robinson: Frank incensed is a dish served very, very cold. When things go bad, for a while he exudes ice and a certain lofty disgust, as if he's thinking, “I've got a half-century in this game, 586 home runs, nearly 3,000 hits and have dealt with more bullshit than any man should have endure, and you are going to subject me to this?” If you'd been kind enough to hand poor Ryan Zimmerman a shovel when he crossed the white lines after brainlocking on the number of outs, I'm sure Zimmerman would have gratefully used it to tunnel his way out of RFK rather than go anywhere near Frank.

As long as it doesn't come excessively at our expense, I'd be happy to see Frank Robinson get some payback for having to endure the cynical dismantling of the Expos, their shameful forced march into nomadism and their relocation without money. (Now that they have a new owner and a new park on the way, money would certainly help.) Watching the Nats, you're reminded that hey, this is what bad teams do — not all the time, but often enough to be out of it by late July. Tony Armas was rolling along impressively and then boom! A throwing error, a bobble and a wild throw erase a lead, and then a horrid mental mistake keeps them down. If you're a Nats fan, you can moan that a couple of bad breaks doomed them, but that misses the point — bad teams take the field having buried landmines for themselves, step on them more often than not, and good teams ensure they don't crawl away. (We know — we've been those bad teams more years than I care to remember.)

Anyway, Michael Tucker officially regained the use of his given name as we were leisurely oscillating far above the city on the Wonder Wheel, and Delgado bailed out Billy Wagner as Joshua was feeding his newfound rollercoaster addiction. Then it was off to Keyspan to see the Cyclones do very little against the horrendously named Batavia Muckdogs. Afterwards, Joshua did a fine job of running the bases despite being tired to the point of hallucination, with me trotting behind him reminding myself not to stop and gaze in rapture at the Real Professional Baseball Field I was on. At home plate Joshua (who'd been forbidden multiple times from sliding) even got in a low-five with Sandy the Seagull, an exchange Emily wanted broken down with a Zapruder film level of detail. Our assessment: It was a lame, perfunctory low-five. No, Sandy the Seagull is not off the family shit list 13 months after his infuriating brush-off of our kid.

(Yeah, I know it might not even be the same person in the smelly mascot suit. Don't come around here with your logic.)

Michael Tucker, on the other hand, is most definitely in the clear.

In the past ten games, dating back to the finale in Miami on August 3, the five Mets starting pitchers have thrown 63 innings and given up 21 earned runs. That's an ERA of exactly 3.00.

That's not bad. That's not bad at all.

I guess we can now officially slide our floating anxiety anvil from above the rotation to above the corner outfielders because the starting pitching has quietly but definitely come around.

Each pitcher has taken two starts since August 3. These are the results.

Pedro Martinez: 13-1/3 IP, 3 ER

Orlando Hernandez: 13 IP, 6 ER

Tom Glavine: 13 IP, 5 ER

John Maine: 11-2/3 IP, 4 ER

Steve Trachsel: 12-1/3 IP, 3 ER

Not eye-poppin', Doc '85 numbers, but not eye-gougin', '06 Lima lines either. Every start in the last ten has given the Mets a genuine chance to win. The three club losses in this span are attributable at least in part to the other guy (Dontrelle Willis, Billy Traber) pitching just a little better twice and our pen pitching a damn sight worse than the other team's once.

We haven't been hitting a whole lot, which is of some nagging concern, but remember that we were getting antsy because our offense was making up for our pitching so often early in the year. Well, guess what — the reverse works sometimes, too. In Steve Trachsel's turns, it works to ridiculous extremes.

After being fed a mountain of runs start in and start out, he marched parched through the D.C. desert today. I'm not kidding about the parched — he wasn't allowed to haul his beloved case of vino with him on the team plane…a rather unjockly carry-on item that is presumably yet another reason we all love Steve Trachsel as we do. But he didn't let down. The Nationals may be a wine cellar-dweller, but do you feel gently buzzed or horribly hung over when the opposing lineup features the likes of Soriano, Johnson and Zimmerman? Stevie Shoelaces is certainly capable of pouring runs by the bottle for anyone, but he didn't for the second start in a row. He kept the Mets in the game long enough to allow the Nationals to take themselves out of it. And they did.

Good starting pitching today and the last ten days. Good, not great. Maybe we'll get enough great to make up for whatever bad is bound to come. But more than at any point this year, even when Alay Soler had me goin', I'm confident about whoever takes the mound on any given date.

As for the outfield corners, tie yourself up in knots at your own discretion. I'm not worried there either. I know it's quickly become de rigueur to fret the cast of Milledge, Chavez, Tucker and Ledee and the TBD availability of Floyd. I also know that there is a strain of Mets fans (otherwise known as “the majority”) that isn't happy unless they believe there's a segment of the big picture that's dangerously out of focus. The pen is falling! The mound is falling! Left field is falling!

Poppycock! Or pish-posh! Take your pick, they're both delicious.

Yes, it would be sweet to turn back the clock two weeks and whisper in Duaner Sanchez's ear, “you're sleepy…you're very sleepy…you don't want to go find Dominican food at two in the morning.” Then we'd still have Xavier Nady and Xavier Nady would be competent if not spectacular (in itself a crime in some Mets minds during his truncated tenure) and we'd have to stay up nights worrying about Delgado's slump and, perhaps, searching for our own Dominican food given that we're staying up that late. As is, Nady's not here, man. The guys who are, or maybe the guys who will be, will do the job because on the 2006 Mets, somebody usually does.

Can I prove that statement? Not exactly. Speculation is inadmissible as evidence if I remember my L.A. Law, but I can present for the court, your honor, today's Exhibit A, Michael Tucker.

Admit it, Mets fans. You've still got some of that 2004 in you even though we have now won exactly as many games in 2006 as we did during the entirety of two years ago. Maybe you are also unknowingly trudging around the darker portions of 2005, to say nothing of all of 2003 — and any number of the many unsuccessful seasons you've lived through — in your souls. It's OK, I do, too. Those years are hard to shake, but for your own good, at least try to shove them to way in the back, back where you keep your vaguely simmering dismay over George Bamberger or Wes Westrum.

When the Mets brought up Tucker, I don't know how many snarky references to Gerald Ice Williams I read and heard. “Oh no, Tucker! He's Williams! Why do they always do this to us? It sucks to be a Mets fan!” Or words to that effect.

Have you seen Michael Tucker since he came up? He's not Gerald Ice Williams. I don't remember Gerald Ice Williams throwing out a runner like Tucker did Thursday. He might have, but it doesn't stand out, know what I mean? I didn't see Gerald Ice Williams pile on some insurance runs as Tucker did that same day. And I sure as hell know when Gerald Ice Williams was double-switched into games the way Michael Tucker was at RFK Sunday, Gerald Ice Williams didn't wallop the tiebreaking and decisive homer late.

I know it's more fun, on some perverse level, to wallow in woe-is-Mets rooting; there nothing like claiming “I'm a long-suffering Mets fan!” for defeat cred. But that time has passed. If Michael Tucker were a 2003, 2004, even 2005 Met, it likely would have been dispiriting. Michael Tucker as a 2006 Met is at worst an experiment that won't come to fruition and at best a revelation. So far, it's the latter. This is what happens on good teams. It's the difference between depending on Michael Tucker and taking a flyer on Michael Tucker. On the 2006 Mets, Michael Tucker sits way down the depth chart. You get something out of him as you have twice in four games, then life is good. You don't? You find somebody else.

Who? I dunno, but he's out there and Omar knows where to find him. Put another way, who made more brilliant, game-saving plays at second today: you or Jose Valentin?

As for Michael Tucker's lousy, illegal slide into the person of Mike Piazza at Turner Field on July 5, 1998, that was more than eight years ago. He's on our side now. That pardons most crimes. If we were able to forgive Jay Payton for being stupid in Atlanta, we can dislodge the Scarlet A from Michael Tucker's cap if he's going to function effectively with an NY up there. Should he barrel home the same way as a Met that he once did as a Brave, we'll call him exceedingly competitive and exchange high-fives.

Shoot, if Angel Hernandez could catch day games after night games and get a hit or two in the process for us, he'd be dispensated so fast it would make Frank Robinson's head spin. And his doesn't appear to be a particularly spinnable head.

Friday night, the whole division gained ground on the Mets. Saturday night, the Mets snatched that ground right back from under them. With a New York win over Washington and losses by Philadelphia, Florida and Atlanta, the Mets' magic number was reduced to increasingly inevitable.

John Maine's pet gopher, out to lunch since his doubleheader start against the Marlins more than a month ago, came back to nibble on him a bit. I wish it hadn't. And I wish we could have scored a couple more TDs from the red zone…I mean runners from third (damn football). But those are not problems.

Problems are Iraq when it refuses to receive the memo that things are getting better all the time; Israel and Lebanon in the heat of a ceasefire; anybody who was just getting comfortable with the notion of flying again; anybody whose car runs on petrol.

There are problems in this world. As has become custom during baseball season, I focus on the limited-perspective quandaries I'm under the illusion of having some control over, like begging Delgado to hit to left or urging Willie to bring in Bradford already yet. My impact on these situations is every bit as negligible as anything I could do about peace in the Middle East, but it sure is more fun worrying about the Mets.

Alas, every now and then I force myself at twenty minutes before or after the hour to turn to WINS instead of WFAN and I am reminded that our 14-game lead isn't saving a single life or foiling a single terrorist plot or dropping the price of gas nine-tenths of a single cent. Then it's back down the dial to the FAN to join Joe Benigno in stressing about who our third starter will be in the NLDS.

Am I disturbingly shallow in my information-gathering priorities or par for the course? If history is any guide, I'm merely one of a long line of Mets fans for whom the back page trumps the front page as often as the severity of bad news will allow.

The following passage is from Jerry Mitchell's The Amazing Mets, a seminal team history first published in 1964. It pretty much explains that when the world teeters on the edge of extinction, we are the one group that can be counted on to keep its concerns on an even keel.

It was the morning of October 23, 1962. President John F. Kennedy had the night before declared an embargo on Cuba, taking a step which could have meant the beginning of thermonuclear war. There was a sense of crisis all over the United States and all over the world.

After replying to the fan, Allen forwarded the postcard to the Mets with the observation, “With the world on the verge of ruin, I thought you might be interested in what the Mets' fans are worried about.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved. And the Mets improved to 6-12 on Thursdays in 1963.

We're 10-5 on that day this year…in case you were wondering.

I was.

This has been the summer that Joshua has slowly but surely become attuned to the doings of the New York Mets.

It started with the simple things: wanting to see Mr. Met, or watch the apple come up after a home run. (Explaining the apple's absence during a road game was a challenge.) From there we got into the rules, which aren't so easy to break down into chunks for someone who's just learning and is easily distracted. Three strikes and you're out, three outs and the other team gets to hit, the team with more runs is winning, the teams take turns hitting nine times, if they have the same number of runs they take a turn each again and see if someone has more runs. That's a lot to keep track of right there. Now throw in all the complications: For example, that foul balls are strikes but not if there's two strikes, unless the batter is bunting. (What's bunting?)

A single pitch can start dominos of questions falling, and sometimes you discover you've plunged into the depths of the rulebook without taking care of the basics. (What's a foul ball?) It's hard to explain why a ball that took one bounce before going into the enemy shortstop's glove is bad when a moment before a ball that took one bounce before going into the enemy left fielder's glove was good. And let's not get into force plays vs. tag plays. (Or the fact that last night I realized to my horror that I'd spent three baseball-mad decades missing a crucial part of what makes runs earned or unearned.)

Confronted with all this, Joshua's most-common question remains, “Was that good?” But he's getting it: He knows which number on the TV screen is balls and which is strikes, understands three outs and keeps track of them, gets that the lit-up bases correspond to actual runners, is beginning to understand singles and doubles and triples, and even has a rudimentary grasp of the strike zone. (Which makes him more advanced than Rey Ordonez ever was.) Not bad for someone who won't be four until after the season.

And he's learning his Mets. He knows Jose Reyes (probably his favorite player) and David Wright and will tell you proudly that Jose is No. 7 and David is No. 5. He neat as you please dropped Paul Lo Duca's name into casual Met conversation the other day. He thinks it's funny that there are two Carloses and two Joses. He has heard the hushed talk of this legendary man known only as Pedro. (Starting pitchers are the hardest, since they disappear from view for days at a time.) For the other Mets, he uses the Choo Choo method: “Get a hit, Number 23!”

He's even a more-reasonable fan than I am: When word came that Michael Tucker had become a Met, I made no secret of my unhappiness and freely expressed my loathing for our newest player. (I refrained from using the generally accepted variant of his name, however. Now that he's on our roster, Tucker gets the probationary use of his actual name. Besides, I'm not a completely horrible parent.) Anyway, confronted with a parent excoriating Michael Tucker, Joshua looked stern and had this to say: “Daddy, is he a Met? I'm sorry, Daddy, but you have to be happy about him.”

Blasted rational child.

Having two baseball-mad parents has certainly helped him find his way. Joshua knows game time comes around the same he's called to the table for dinner. (And he'll be able to sit where he can see the game.) He knows we'll turn the volume up at bathtime, angle the TV so we can see it from beside the tub and tell him what's happening. He expects we'll turn on the radio in his room so we can keep track of things during the bedtime ritual of books and juice. And being a cunning creature, he's figuring out that if he takes an avid-enough interest in the proceedings, he can con his father into delaying bedtime to explain some arcane rule or wait out a half-inning. When he's particularly lucky, something will happen that warrants a quick dash next door to Mommy and Daddy's bedroom to see the instant replay. The last such event was Piazza's second home run, and Joshua quickly saw a new angle to exploit. But he has a little to learn about what's TV-worthy: A few minutes after Piazza's dinger, he tried to invoke TV privileges for a replay of a long foul ball by Jose Reyes. Nice try, kid.

But the moment Emily and I knew there was no turning back? It was Thursday, around dinner time. The string of lights on the brick wall in the yard had lit up, meaning the game should be starting. (The lights are on a timer set for 7:10. Like you're surprised.) But for some reason, his parents weren't turning on the TV.

“I want to watch the baseball,” Joshua said matter-of-factly, with admirable patience. He knows parents are stupid creatures and sometimes need a little help.

“There's no game tonight, kiddo,” I said.

“They played during the day,” Emily added.

“And they won!” I chipped in.

“But I want to watch the baseball,” Joshua tried again, looking less patient.

“There isn't any baseball tonight,” I said — and my son promptly dissolved into tears.

I explained that the Mets had to play in Washington the next night, so they played during the day. They needed to get on an airplane and get to the new city and get some sleep. More tears. I looked hopefully for an encore of the day's game on SNY. No such luck. Emily assured Joshua there'd be another game tomorrow. Nothing doing — the kid had dissolved into a river of misery. Tomorrow night was not going to cut it — he wanted the Mets, not excuses.

Emily and I couldn't really look at each other, because you don't want to ever actually explain to your child that on some level you're happy he's crying. We soothed him as best we could, but we couldn't have been prouder. The kid's got the family bug. No turning back now — he's one of us.

Still, this presents a problem: If he was this sad about a day game, how on earth do I explain the offseason?

We usually trot out this reminder early in the season when we're still adjusting our ballological clocks to the idea that we won't go 162-0, but the bromide is true anytime: You're gonna win a third of your games, you're gonna lose a third of your games and what you do in the other third determines your year.

Stick Friday night's mellow misfire in the pile of 54 about which you can't do spit. Not that it should have been impossible to overcome a 2-1 deficit to the last-place Nationals, but look at the variables working against us.

• Lefties with stuff need not apply. Billy Traber followed in the tradition of soft southpaws everywhere, baffling and beguiling Met bats while leaving every pane of glass at RFK undisturbed. Don't let him be traded where he can hurt us — and god forbid a potential playoff foe gets ahold of Zane Smith. We'll be doomed. Redeeming feature: Lastings Milledge timed a slopball and singled. There's hope for this kid yet.

• Heck hath no fury like a Met prospect scorned. I knew Billy Traber was a familiar name. When I heard the story from Howie — he was a top draft pick selected by Steve Phillips for whom Steve Phillips was already making excuses and placing blame before trading him for Roberto Alomar — I figured the fix was in. Bonus points on this count for Alex Escobar's mini-revival. He was in that trade and he probably wanted a piece of us. What, you thought I was only as good as Robbie Stinking Alomar?

• Bang zoom, they were due. Cripes, we hadn't played in Washington since Jefferson was president and we hadn't lost in Washington, it seemed, since the Adams administration. It had been merely eight straight over them there, but you can't swat Nats every night.

• I'm sorry, Mr. Glavine, but the offense is reserved for Mr. Trachsel. For Stevie Shoelaces, the Mets may very well have found a way to score eight runs and win 8-7. For Tom Tentative, not so much, but the important thing was he got sharper and sharper in defeat, especially in the sixth, his final frame, the one he had to talk Willie into (Willie doesn't get talked into much, I'm guessing). Lately we've witnessed a return to health by Pedro, a rounding into form by Duque and now a second straight start in which Glavine is kind of getting it together. I'd love to get you past 287, big fella, but just keep overcoming into October. Good advice for us all.

• The Homestead Grays have always been more legendary. The New York Mets are now 2-2 dressed as New York Cubans, winning at home over the Chatham All-Stars (a.k.a. Toronto Blue Jays) in 2001 and in Kansas City against the Monarchs in 2004, losing last year to the Crawfords in Pittsburgh and last night in D.C. Result aside, nifty throwback threads…or as Julio Franco put it, “hey, these fit just like I remember.”

The magic number is stuck at 36 over the Phillies, who won an endless game in Cincinnati. It went 14 and pitchers were pinch-hitting on both sides, raising a question: Do managers run through their benches quicker than they used to? How is it Davey and Bobby managed marathons and still seemed to have a Rusty Staub or Matt Franco available at the last possible moment? Or are benches just so much thinner because bullpens are so much more bulging? But I digress. The Phillies won, as did the Braves, the Marlins and of course the Nats. We lost. Everybody picked up ground on us.

Tough to say that with a straight face.

I know it happened last Tuesday post-Sanchez, but I'd bet (not that I bet on anything but the ponies, which is perfectly legal) there haven't been three nights all season when everybody in the division gained a game on the first-place Mets. That's why what could have been an irritating-as-hell 2-1 loss in August was so easily shoved onto the 54-L pile. Not that I haven't known for quite some time that nobody's gonna get us, but after having just won five in a row and increasing the games-ahead to 14 and the games-above to 25, this may have been the first one-run loss in 2006 that I really and truly greeted with “so what?”

Lest you think I was slacking, I also knew very well that if we had won, we'd be 26 over for the first time since ending 2000 that way and we'd be in sight of 30 over, a perch we've reached in only five Met campaigns ('69, '85, '86, '88, '99). Also, once we get to 15 up, we can think about 16 up, which would be the largest margin the Mets have ever floated above the field in any year that wasn't 1986.

Assuming nobody taxied back to the team hotel or limoed up to Atlantic City for some action, these are the problems with which a Mets fan can joyfully deal.

If we're up like 11-3 and he can't hurt us, I wouldn't mind seeing Marlon Anderson hit one out this weekend in Washington.

Only kidding.

Those dispensations are rare. I liked Marlon a whole bunch when he was here, but I liked a lot of Mets a whole bunch when they were here. Yet you can count on perhaps one finger those who are permitted to re-enter Shea Stadium hit two home runs off of Pedro Martinez in the same game and then take a bow for it…though I don't think Mike Piazza technically has to ask our permission for anything. He has a lifetime pass to do what he wants to us.*

*Void in the seventh inning or later; may require additional verification in close contests; not valid in postseason; trade to National League East or intracity rival cancels offer; check local blogs for further conditions and restrictions.

Anyway, Mike Piazza has left us again. As has Mike Cameron.

Hey, remember him?

I know ya do. I know we all do. His situation this week reminded me of the crack a teammate made about Ron Cey after Steve Garvey — who departed the Dodgers in the same offseason — took out a full-page ad in the L.A. Times to thank all his fans. “Ron,” said the teammate, “is taking out an ad in the weekly shopper to thank his fan.”

If Cameron wanted to be the center of attention in Queens this year, he should have gotten himself traded to the Rockies or the Cardinals and returned later this month. He would have bathed in a singular spotlight. As was, he got a warm greeting, but after what happened 364 days ago, he deserved a genuine homecoming salute.

Eerie we were playing San Diego on this Thursday afternoon just like last year. Eerier still that I was taking the same train ride into Grand Central from essentially the same meeting for exactly the same project that I was in Westchester for at exactly this time last year. The difference is that this year what I heard as I listened to the game via the exact same radio on the southbound Metro-North was that Cameron, like Piazza, was on the bench for Bruce Bochy; not hurt, just not playing. What I heard last year, of course, was the call of the gruesome collision between Cameron and Beltran in the Petco outfield. A lot less pain this year for Mets outfielders. A lot less angst for Mets fans, too.

Mike Cameron's Met career ended that afternoon but it was also sanctified. Before that you could argue his value as a power hitter — 30 HRs the year before — versus all the strikeouts, his natural flash in center versus his reluctant brilliance in right. But everybody always said nice things about him even before we all said the same thing: God, I hope he recovers.

He has. He's the centerfielder for the Padres now. He's playing ball which, if you think back 364 days, is as amazing and miraculous as anything Piazza did at Shea in the past 72 hours. (Carlos Beltran, who probably never let on to the severity of his own case of smashmouth from August 11, 2005, has also come all the way back and then some.)

Cameron's Met credentials are sound for posterity and I wouldn't have minded him maybe ripping into one as long as we were theoretically looking the other way and letting certain Padres jump the turnstile. You know, if we were up by a lot or something.

This Mike went 1-for-6 with a couple of walks. No curtain calls. Just hearing his name announced as being in the game most nights is probably reward enough.

Nice having such stellar reps of our Mike alumni association drop by for a spell. Surely they've stayed classy in San Diego. But given that our team just finished sweeping their team, I'm quite content making due with everybody we've got, even our latest Michael, previously written off as damaged goods. Watching the Mets outman the Padres at every turn reminded me that a team is more than one or two swell fellas with whom you're on a first-name basis.

So. Eighth inning. Two on. One out. Aaron Heilman on the hill. Here comes Mike Piazza, 800 feet of home runs hastily appended to his resume, only this time we're not talking about some cosmetic solo shot. He's the go-ahead run. Gary Cohen comments on the strange mix of wild cheers and sudden boos filling Shea, sagely noting something about the process by which a revered former player becomes the enemy.

No, not really. I wasn't in the park, but I think I know what those fans were doing. They weren't booing Piazza — it may be Nostalgia Week at Shea, but nobody's nostalgic for nearly running a Hall of Famer out of town in the summer of '98. They were booing their fellow fans who were still cheering — playing out, in 49,000+ instances of voting with hands or lungs, the family feud that gripped us earlier today. The same one that gripped any other Met blog and countless Met households and was fought around umpteen watercoolers today.

How can you be cheering for a guy who's trying to beat us? If he hits one we're down 5-4 and Pedro doesn't get a win! And man, there's a lot of baseball left to play — this team hasn't won a damn thing yet! What are you, nuts? Don't you have any brains?

What? How can you not be cheering for the best position player we ever had? Day game tomorrow — this could be the last time you ever see him! And we're so far ahead in the standings it's not even funny! What are you, nuts? Don't you have a soul?

I was thinking that was the perfect moment to freeze, but it's not. That came one pitch and a few seconds later. The ball's left the bat in an awful hurry, gone rocketing by far over the heads of the Joses, Carlos B. is moving onto the warning track, eyes on the sky, tracking its trajectory. Gonna be close.

And…STOP.

So. Where do you want that ball to land?

Maybe you're saying, screaming, pleading that it needs to find Carlos's glove — for Pedro's W, for the team's march to October, for the sake of finding a role for Heilman, for the simple reason that the guy in the wrong uni hit it. That's OK. I'm on your side. Lots of other smart folks and diehard Met fans are too.

Maybe you're hollering, whooping or cheering for it to bank off the camera tower, for Gary to yell that it's outta here — one of Mike's final bits of tape in a storied career, a nice bit of closure, another unforgettable night at Shea, the happiest L you'll ever take. (And hey, we could still win it.) That's OK. I'm not on your side, but lots of other smart folks and diehard Met fans are.

Or maybe you have absolutely no idea what you want to happen. And you know what? That's OK too.

It landed in Carlos's glove. We won. Twenty-four games over .500. Heilman got the job done. So did Wagner. (Neither was a model of execution, but this year I've taken a lesson from my co-blogger: There's no column in the standings for style points.) Endy gave us more evidence he can play. We got to see another how'd-he-do-that work of art by Pedro. Got to cheer for Mike, or at least smile. Saw a visiting player get a curtain call, of all things.

Not a bad night, even if it did come with a scenario that couldn't have been more perfectly designed for an intra-Met-family squabble. Heck, that's OK too. It's not abortion or Iraq or whether or not to tip on tax or any of the terrible searing quarrels that bring out the long knives. Just a baseball argument among adherents of the same faith, and an academic one at that.

Besides, we should be so lucky. Tomorrow we might have to cheer for Michael Tucker.