Now we’re cooking with evil gas.

The first three (or 2.2) circles of hell were a little lukey to my touch but now you’ve got us some distasteful, disgraceful souls truly worthy of our sincere and everlasting condemnation. There are no Greatest Mets here, not by a long run, not by a short run, not by a runner left on base or one too many allowed at a crucial juncture.

Their misdeeds mostly speak for themselves, but if I may testify against a couple…

LOLICH: Something aside from deStaubinization always bugged me about Mickey Lolich as a Met, even if he did make for a fine Answer No. 8 earlier this month. It wasn’t a Hellish infraction, but it’s what I most remember about him with us. Back in the day, each Channel 9 telecast opened with a filmed montage of various Mets in action. They did that in 1975 and they did that in 1976. The two versions were nearly identical save for one alteration. In the spot in which Rusty was swinging in ’75, was Lolich going into his windup in April ’76…on videotape. It was never updated and its cheapness and cheesiness ruined the whole presentation for me. If the Mets couldn’t be bothered to fit the Mick into their intro package, it’s no wonder he never seemed to belong. Don’t know if that slots him into the fourth circle of Met Hell, but let’s just say nothing about his presence or performance or posthaste departure suggests he reserved himself a spot in Met Heaven.

If December 1975 had been December 2005, taking a flyer on an experienced lefthander in a change-of-league situation would seem like a perfectly reasonable risk. That’s definitely the sort of thing that happens in the free agent era. But M. Donald Grant, the permanent chairman of the board of Met Hell, so feared and disdained the bull rush of modern times that he made as Eff You a trade as he could. It’s not so much that he swapped the first Met to drive in more than a hundred runs in a season (two months after this feat was accomplished) for a 35-year-old (when that was old), out-of-shape (unless the shape in question was blob), shopworn pitcher whose last indisputably good season was 1972. Yes, Rusty Staub was on top of his game and Mickey Lolich was in free fall and the Mets still could claim a propensity to produce pitchers of their own (all right, so Hank Webb never blossomed, but we couldn’t have known that then), but that’s only part of why this deal was so deleterious.

It wasn’t so much a matter of trading Staub and Laxton for Lolich and Baldwin that was brutal. It was the putting in a waiver claim on discredited old methods in exchange for an era to be named later.

Rusty Staub, in the bigs since 1963, was on the verge of becoming a 10-and-5 man. 1976 would have been his fifth season as a Met and he could’ve vetoed any trade thereafter. Weeks before the reserve clause blew up, players had already earned that right. And Grant hated any right the players earned. He was still checking the basic agreement to see if he really had to dispense meal money and pick up the tab for dry cleaning of uniforms. Rusty Staub represented a threat to the crumbling old order, so Rusty Staub was disappeared. That’ll teach him to have a mind of his own. That’ll teach ’em all. Grant applied that lesson with even harsher repercussions a year-and-half later when he traded Tom Seaver when Seaver was laboring under the true impression that star players now had leverage. Everywhere but at Shea, Franchise. (Which reminds me: Upon hearing Jack Lang referring to Tom Terrific by his alternate nickname, M. Donald is said to have lashed out, “Mrs. Payson and I are the franchise!”)

Jesus Christ, the Mets traded Tom Seaver. I still can’t believe it.

To be fair, it was pointed out by “schuey” at Baseball Think Factory yesterday that Rusty was ostensibly moved to clear room for Mike Vail, the August-September 1975 phenom who hit in 23 straight games as a left fielder. In 162 at-bats, he hit .302 with 3 home runs and 17 runs batted in. Space had to be provided for Vail, Met superstar of the foreseeable future, he who would be not denied. With Kingman rotating back to left from his infield audition in late ’75 (get yourself a ’76 yearbook and marvel at the Mets celebrating Sky King’s “versatility” with photos of him not necessarily collapsing into an embarrassing heap at first and third) and Unser in center, the juggernaut Met outfield wasn’t going to give way easily. That’s why the Mets had to ship Staub and his 105 ribbies to Detroit. Mike Vail was so happy to be handed a starting baseball job that he tried his hand at basketball that winter, damaging his right Achilles tendon in the process of screwing around on the court. Vail didn’t make his 1976 debut until June 17. He batted .217 in 143 at-bats; no homers, nine ribbies. So much for the Mets and planning. Rusty, by the way, averaged 106 RBIs over the next three seasons for the Tigers, staying on the exact pace he had set with the Mets in ’75.

That’s not Lolich’s fault, but when you get this deep into Met Hell, nuance is not required.

SANCHEZ: I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I imagine that if the Mets ever acquired Derek Jeter, I’d plain and simple throw up. I’m almost certain it will never happen, but if the Mets signed John Rocker, I’d boycott Shea until he was released. I know it will never happen, but Roger Clemens in Mets garb would guarantee that you wouldn’t see me in mine for a very long time. Rey Sanchez’s brief tenure as a New York Met stuck me in the same moral corner. I hated the Mets while Rey Sanchez was the starting shortstop. I hated being a Mets fan. I hated Rey Sanchez with a fiery passion seldom summoned for a theretofore innocuous middle infielder. He wasn’t the equivalent of Jeter or Rocker or Clemens on the Met radar before 2003, yet the moment he arrived, he represented a bundle as obnoxious as any two of those three stalwarts of Satan (let’s not kid ourselves: Met Opponent Hell is a far more gruesome place than Met Hell, but let’s stay on track).

I’d reckon that a goodly number of our readers have already forgotten Rey Sanchez if they even noticed him in the first place. Be careful, short-term memorians. Those who ignore Rey Sanchez are condemned to repeat him.

Everything you already said about him is dossier enough to bring him down to the Fourth Circle. What makes me froth that much more is Rey Sanchez was indisputable proof that the Mets were being operated fraudulently in 2003. We’ve already been over Rey Ordoñez, his miscreant nature and his glittery glove. By the end of ’02, even I couldn’t argue to keep Rey-Rey around. Concurrently, word was getting around that Jose Reyes was en route. If Ordoñez was out and Reyes was not quite in, we’d need a shortstop to fill in for a stretch. Why not Sanchez?

Because Rey Sanchez was a useless Major League shortstop by 2003 and Steve Phillips (if Grant has an assistant Down Below, it’s Press Conference Boy) knew it. But Phillips perpetrated the falsehood that Rey Sanchez is a fine shortstop. A wonderful shortstop. He’ll get to everything. Really, he’s better than Ordoñez. Phillips, in the best tradition of more than one presidential administration, told The Big Lie over and over again in the spring of 2003 and the Met media, like its cousins in the political sector, mindlessly went with it. Yeah, Rey Sanchez is a great get for the Mets. Rey Sanchez is a professional. Rey Sanchez is an upgrade over that malcontent Ordoñez. The Mets may have problems, but they’re covered at short.

IT WAS A FRAUD!

A decent shortstop for a team with numerous shortcomings? Noo, it’s not Sanchez.

Sanchez was a rotten shortstop and, as you laid out, a despicable human being. But it was his role as the subject of The Big Lie that pissed me off to extremes, specifically the way the Mets were allowed to pretend that they could plug in a weak link at the most important defensive position and refer to him as a “third-out” shortstop and act as if all their problems were not only solved but obliterated. The fingerpointing and the haircutting, to say nothing of the .207 batting average and the non-existent range, exposed him until he could no longer be covered up. But it was so freaking obvious ahead of time that Rey Sanchez was a desperation signing who had no business starting for a Major League team or even the 2003 Mets. And it was barely reported.

A year later, Sanchez was gone but Ricky Gutierrez was accorded the same mindless benefit of the doubt as the starting second baseman. Gutierrez was a placeholder while Reyes, criminally moved off short to make room for (I think I’m going to cry) Kaz Matsui, rehabbed, but he was treated as a perfectly viable option. Gutierrez didn’t dismay anybody by his off-field actions or on-field demeanor but he was not a “third-out” second baseman. Ricky Gutierrez was a benign Sanchez. Yet he was allowed to roam the Met infield as a starter for a solid month under the guise of adequacy. As with Sanchez, it was crystal clear that Gutierrez was not middling-caliber but also with Sanchez, the Mets were given a pass as in “they’ll be fine at second with this guy.” They weren’t. Ricky’s .175 adventure at the plate and unremarkable work with the glove were history by mid-May.

It’s not quite in the same realm, but we were fed a third consecutive set of talking points regarding Doug Mientkiewicz in 2005 as if a) we were way better off with Minky’s glove than we were Delgado’s bat and b) y’know, with Doug at first and Matsui at second, this could challenge the ’99 Mets in terms of infield defense (excuse me while I stand out in the rain sans umbrella).

Back to Sanchez. There were lots of reasons to dislike the 2003 Mets, one of whom I have a hunch will pop up later in this uplifting tour of hell (and pop up with two outs and the bases loaded, at that) but this guy right here topped my own lengthy list. He was the surest sign, the 666 if you will, that, at long last, everything I loved about the Mets in the heart of the Valentine era — including Valentine — was long gone.

ZIMMER: Creep. Cretin. Crud.

Enough said? I suppose, but let’s not lose sight of his Mets connection. 1962, 52 at-bats, 4 hits, .077 average, lowlighted by a team record 0-for-34 that wasn’t surpassed, as it were, until Ordoñez went 0-for-36 in 1997. That’s not the crime (not on the ’62 Mets it’s not). It’s that Don Zimmer’s affiliation with one of the most legendary teams of them all gives the crud cred that he doesn’t deserve.

Dopey manager? Sure. Poison bench coach? Uh-huh. Unhinged from reality? Ask Pedro. Yet none of that would be our worry per se if he didn’t have the 1962 Mets on his CV. Because he does, Zimmer gets to be lovable. How could anyone dislike a 1962 Met, particularly anyone who didn’t have to sit through 120 losses? That gilt by association makes him seem the sweetheart. It also gave him the overused title of the guy who’s been around the block so many times that he’s the Forrest Gump of baseball.

Everybody’s the Forrest Gump of baseball. Anybody who’s worn a fistful of uniforms and been on hand for a couple of memorable moments is Forrest Gump. Reggie Sanders is Forrest Gump. Jeff Huson is Forrest Gump. Craig Counsell is Forrest Gump. Seriously, I Googled “the Forrest Gump of baseball” and all those examples appeared. So did Zimmer.

Like Forrest ran through one baby boomer touchstone after another, Zimmer was a part of the ’55 Dodgers, the ’78 Red Sox, the ’89 Cubs, the ’95 Rockies, the ’96 Skanks, the ’04 Devil Rays. He’s been in the game a long time so it would figure he and history might collide once or twice, which is fine. But it’s his being a ’62 Met that launches him into the Gumposphere. “Why this guy played for Casey Stengel!” He didn’t last the season — ohfer snapped, he was traded three days hence to Cincy — but he was a Met long enough to bat .077. Isn’t that adorable?

This pinstriped porcupine accused Mike Piazza of not being a “man” (not everybody likes getting hit in the head, Donny). He made an annual event out of his “that’s it, I’m quitting!” threatdowns as if he just discovered that the owner of the organization that employed him was a lunatic. He set back the cause of 72-year-olds everywhere in the 2003 ALCS by physically assaulting a Hall of Fame pitcher. Yet at the end of the day, he was good ol’ Zim, the beloved gerbil who was a ’62 Met, so how bad could he be?

Hell, we shouldn’t have to take any responsibility for Don Zimmer.

They’re the team from Heck and who knows where the heck they’re going next? Meet your Florida/Las Vegas/Wherever Marlins at Gotham Baseball.

On to the fourth circle of Met Hell, reserved for minor Mets who committed major sins. If there's a bias toward recent Mets here, it's because minor Mets with major sins tend to get forgotten after a few years. Thank goodness.

Mickey Lolich: Rusty Staub was coming off a 105-RBI season in 1975, but M. Donald Grant packed him off to Detroit, and got back hefty lefty Mickey Lolich, fresh off losing 18 games. Lolich pitched to a decent 3.22 ERA, but only won eight games, fought with Met coaches over running (I'm going to take a wild guess and say he was against it) and made little secret of the fact that he hated New York. As with Mike Hampton, that's OK — Gotham's not for everybody. What wasn't OK was Lolich sitting out 1977 running a doughnut shop in Detroit to escape his contract, then coming back in '78 with the Padres. My 1977 Topps Lolich card still says RETIRED across it in a child's scrawl that fairly oozes bitterness 28 years later. Rusty Staub was my first favorite player, and while it's important for any young baseball fan to learn his favorite player can get traded, that's not the same as learning one's favorite player can get traded for a bloated, cheating weasel.

Tony Tarasco: Ah, 2002. The summer of drugs at Shea Stadium. Tarasco and Mark Corey got caught smoking pot blocks from the park, with Corey having either an anxiety attack (lame) or a seizure (scary) after toking up. That was neither the beginning nor the end of it — the photo of Grant Roberts with a bong had already been published, Newsday was quick to brand the whole organization as a den of potheads, and Bobby Valentine helped engineer his downfall with an idiotic imitation of a stoned batter at a press conference. If not a bad guy, Tarasco is clearly a disaster magnet: As an Oriole he got a ball snatched from him by Jeffrey Maier, and as a Yankee he came to the plate to the Lox's “Tommy Theme,” a song featuring about 67,000 motherfuckers. Oops. Corey got dumped on the Rockies, but Tarasco lingered for the rest of the year for some unfathomable reason. My favorite part of the 2002 pot imbroglio? It was the news that the druggie Mets were smuggling their pot into the clubhouse in jars of peanut butter. Given the collective tonnage of that fat, unmotivated, terrible team, couldn't Steve Phillips have saved trouble on multiple fronts by simply banning peanut butter?

Jim Leyritz: No, he was never actually a Met. But it was close enough that I still shiver about it — in some parallel Met universe, I had to go round up Jim Leyritz cards for The Holy Books and hear far too much about his heroics in the '96 World Series and look at Jim Leyritz and think of Jim Leyritz, and just knowing such horrors were possible makes me want to hide under the bed. (At least word of his invitation to St. Lucie provoked my wife's all-time-funniest reaction to an awful thing done by the Mets.) Jim Leyritz, March Met though he was, earns his spot here as a lucky charm to ward off horrible spring-training visits in the future. No arthritic, kneeless Chipper in 2014. No Jorge Posada as an aged backup catcher. No last go-round for an enormous Armando Benitez who can't hit 88 anymore. Back! Back! You see this, evildoers? It's the sign of Jimmy the King! Look upon it and begone!

Jose Offerman: A surly waste of a roster spot who cursed at the press when asked about his lousy defense — at least Gerald Williams is universally praised as a nice guy. Committed one of the more inexplicably stupid plays in recent baseball memory on September 13th, when he somehow managed to break back to first on a single to center and got forced at second. (The batter, of course, was the perennially luckless Kaz Matsui.) Let's go to the archives and dig up the revised rule Greg came up with to celebrate Jose's achievement: A runner occupying first base is entitled to second base when the batter hits the ball safely into centerfield unless the runner's head is occupying 50.1% or more of the inner portion of his own ass.

Rey Sanchez: The Robin to Roberto Alomar's Batman of Suck. The funny thing, except that it's not funny at all, is Sanchez was brought in for 2003 because he was such a great clubhouse presence. He was a clubhouse presence, all right: At the end of April Mike Stanton came into the clubhouse while the Mets were getting pounded by the Cardinals and found Sanchez present getting a haircut. Adding insult to injury, the story was broken by the loathsome Michael Kay; Art Howe promised the issue would be dealt with (just as soon as he came out from under his desk), and Sanchez lied about the whole thing. Even more incredibly, it wasn't the worst thing he'd done that month: On April 12th he was late covering second on a comebacker to Jae Seo and showed his leadership by blaming the rookie. Oh, and Rey Sanchez drives a Bentley. That's really all you need to know about modern baseball: Crappy utility infielders drive Bentleys. Here's hoping Rey's toodling down some country road and his neighbor lends him some Grey Poupon dosed with Ex-Lax.

Karim Garcia: Anger-management problems, anybody? In Game 3 of the 2003 ALCS Karim jumped the outfield wall at Fenway Park to assist Jeff Nelson in beating up a Fenway groundskeeper. (Because groundskeepers are wily — it takes more than just a bullpen full of professional athletes to battle one to a standstill.) The Mets decided someone with Karim's fire would be a fine addition to the roster; while in St. Lucie Karim and Shane Spencer distinguished themselves by getting into an altercation with a delivery boy for Big Apple Pizza after Garcia decided the parking lot was a fine place for a piss. Oh, and their wives were there. Classy! (Speaking of Garcia, his pal Shane should really stay out of St. Lucie: He was sent there on injury rehab after cutting his foot on broken glass in a bar, then got caught going 98 MPH one night after “six or seven” beers. Shane escapes this list because he did beat the Yankees with a two-run double and a 40-foot dribbler.) Words of wisdom from Pedro Martinez: “Who's Karim Garcia? I have no respect for Karim Garcia. I have no respect for that guy.”

Mike DeJean: Arriving when the Mets tired of Karim Garcia, DeJean salvaged his 2004 by being serviceable for the Mets after a wretched year in Baltimore. It turned out to be fool's gold: DeJean was horrendous in 2005, and showed his true colors at the end of the May, when he lobbied the official scorer in Miami to give David Wright an error on a Juan Pierre hit. Perhaps he knows Rey Sanchez?

Don Zimmer: Enough said.

Next up: The fifth circle of Met Hell, home of Mets we don't exactly hate but sure dislike.

Properly, we're at the third circle of Met Hell. But the more I think about it, this should really be the second. It's reserved for those whose Met tenure was damaged above all else by poor exits, which now doesn't seem quite as bad as having a perniciously lousy reputation. (Sorry. But hey — you take a journey through the netherworld and see if you're not a bit discombobulated.)

George Foster: Foster was a key cog in the Big Red Machine who hit 50 home runs when 50 home runs meant something, a feared slugger whose calling cards were his black bats and dagger sideburns. Met fans rejoiced when he arrived in February 1982 — but that soon curdled into discontent. Foster hit .247 with 13 HRs and 70 RBIs in '82, decidedly ordinary numbers that made him a target of boobirds forever after. He did show flashes of his old self, helping lead the Mets into contention in the ressurection summer of 1984, but his bat had clearly gone slow, and his cautious-to-a-fault play in the outfield enraged fans. In July 1986 Foster was benched in favor of the combination of Kevin Mitchell and Mookie Wilson (a platoon created to accommodate the arrival of Lenny Dykstra), then benched himself during the epic July 22 fight with the Reds, remaining in the dugout during the wild brawl sparked by Ray Knight cold-cocking Eric Davis. That lost the clubhouse; he then lost the front office by grousing to the Westchester News that his benching was racially motivated. The Mets released him on August 7. Foster had never been a fan favorite, but he made a dreadful mistake; had he not played a highly questionable race card, it's likely he'd be remembered now as a guy who got old at the wrong time, unfortunate but hardly a hanging sin. Instead, he's remembered above all else for his toxic exit. That's not fair, but Foster has nobody to blame but himself.

Mike Hampton: Look, New York isn't for everybody. New Yorkers can accept this — heck, it's a parlor game for lots of us to fantasize about living somewhere else, somewhere you can drive a car 10 miles in less than 45 minutes and not have to spend every waking hour wired for combat. If you've been here long enough to see the place and wind up saying, “It's just not for me,” we'll understand. We may think you're a rube, but we'll understand. Just don't be a phony — we don't like that. Mike Hampton could have been beloved in New York. A little lefty who pitched like a football player (and even wore a football helmet one day in the dugout), his 2000 season was a nice comeback story: He lost his first three decisions and scuffled along until a long walk in San Francisco and a heart-to-heart chat with none other than Tom Seaver shook him out of his doldrums. And how: He wound up with 15 wins and blitzed the Cardinals twice in the NLCS. And he could field, and he could hit — Hampton was legitimately dangerous with a bat in his hands. A bulldog pitcher who could crack home runs and had been put back on the straight-and-narrow by The Franchise? Sounded like a match made in Heaven — and we threw a celestial amount of money at Hampton after the 2000 season in an effort to get him to stay. But he didn't. For one thing, the Rockies offered him an obscene eight-year, $121 million deal. That was OK — we're New Yorkers, and making money isn't exactly something we decry. For another thing, Hampton and his wife just hadn't liked New York City. That was OK too. What wasn't OK was that Hampton kept coming up with reasons Colorado was better — it had great schools, it had better weather, it was closer to home, it had fantastic feng shui, those big round Os sounded better rolling off the tongue, it was a rectangular state, it had a younger mountain range, blah blah blah. That was not OK, not at all. Tell us you didn't like New York and got handed enough dollar bills to make a pile of George Washingtons that would reach the moon, but don't turn into a real-estate agent for fricking Mork-and-Mindy Land. As it turned out, Hampton discovered good schools and ruler-straight borders weren't much of a comfort when pitching in a stadium that lacked a key ingredient for sinkers to bite, namely air. After two horrid years in Colorado, he wound up as an Atlanta Brave through some spectacularly complicated transaction involving the Florida Marlins and several Swiss banks, and after undergoing Tommy John surgery he'll next pitch in 2007 — which, insanely, will only be the second-to-last year of that ludicrous contract. On the other hand, his departure netted us a draft pick, which we used on a fella named David Wright. If only all rude exits ended so well.

Next up: The fourth circle of Hell, home of minor Mets who committed major offenses.

Re: To Met Hell with them, Part Two. You're still not bringing me down.

EVERETT: That grand slam you mentioned? It's at the core of my No. 19 Greatest Baseball Experience ever. Can't vouch for his child-rearing skills, but man, that two-out grand slam which knotted the game at 6 in the bottom of the ninth when the Mets were hanging onto Wild Card hopes by their thumbnails was one of the best moments of my life. Nineteenth-best, actually.

MURRAY: Drove in 193 runs over two seasons (making him the 83rd Greatest Met of the First Forty Years) without really emitting a hint of interest in his surroundings. His care-quotient shot through the roof when his contract was about to expire. Then it was like, oh, you want to interview me? What time is convenient for you? A perfect if quiet complement to Bonilla.

MACHADO: Man, I loved this guy for a month. I was sure he would be our closer someday. Why does he stick in my mind? Because the first pitch he ever threw was high and tight to Tom Pagnozzi. Who knew he'd get even more dangerous?

SAMUEL: Confession — I wasn't aghast at this trade when it happened. Yes, it was wrong that Lenny Dykstra was no longer a Met, but Samuel had been a demon his first four seasons in the league. But the Mets, in their clever, time-tested fashion, scooped him up five minutes past his last effective week in the Majors. I don’t dislike him for that. No, I dislike him because at the end of that 1989 season, Davey Johnson, groping for news he could use in 1990, penciled him in at second for one game. One stinking game. Juan, who hadn't played his original position all year, refused to go in. Thought it wasn't fair to move him from the outfield back to the infield. Was afraid he'd embarrass himself. Well screw you, too, I thought.

KENT: This guy pisses me off way more in retrospect than he did in real time. When the '95 Mets clubhouse was itself a cheery day care center, all young and giddy with late-season success, I kept reading derisive snorts from the beat writers that morose Kent didn't fit in. (Long after he was gone, Fran Healy made a vague reference to Jeff “not wanting to play any of their reindeer games,” but he never explained what he meant; it was the only time I wished Fran had said a little more.) It had taken him all year to get it going at the plate and now that he was finally hitting, his personality didn't match the daily braintrust's expectations. The criticism struck me as piling on. As his post-Met career revealed, it was right on, though he kept hitting and his teams generally did well with him contributing, no matter what a snot he is universally acknowledged to be. I still can't get over the his being halted at customs en route to Montreal for carrying a handgun. Oh yeah, I forgot I had it with me, was his alibi. Who forgets they're carrying a weapon onto a plane? And, better question, why does a baseball player require a firearm for a road trip? Man, he must've been really unpopular in the clubhouse.

Cam-a-lam-a-ding-gone.

Only a shock in that it happened in November and yielded a single X-Man, the Mike Cameron Era's end coincides with that of the Braden Looper Epoch and, unless somebody plum forgets to detach themselves from him, the Kaz Matsui Millennium.

And, just like that, there goes the 2004 rebuilding project, crumbled to bits not two calendar years after it was undertaken.

On one hand, who cares? That was one of the worst off-seasons in Mets history, I've just decided, in that we signed those three guys and brought in as our rightfielder the two-headed momser Sharim Spencia, lowballing Vladimir Whatshisname in the process. Granted, we shot straight from 66 to 71 wins in the year that followed, but what annoys me now is that a front office that collected five very ordinary players pretended it was operating according to a plan.

Quick, anybody remember the plan?

The Mets have a ton of holes to fill, and they'll attempt to do so via the free agent and non-tender market, while staying far, far away of any commitment deemed “long” (Fred Wilpon said that would be four years; five years is “very long”).

The Mets aim to tailor their team to the spacious reaches of Shea Stadium, where power hitters are more of a complement than the rule — expect to see a young, exciting team created around speed, defense and pitching (think 1986). Sure, that's what every team wants to create, but the Mets really, really intend to do it this time.

Or so they say.

—NJ.com's Always Amazin', October 29, 2003

That coherent organizational philosophy — based on the sudden realization that Shea is 396 in the alleys — is what brought us Cameron and Matsui (for the speed and the defense) along with Looper (the pitching) plus Spencer and Garcia (no long commitments). It was gussied up by the marketing department as Catch The Energy.

It was unplugged by the end of 2004. The Mets never do anything that takes. Instead, every winter sees them overreact to perceptions that they don't do enough even though it's been a long time since they haven't done plenty. Sure, they often don't do it well, but they always keep busy. When was the last off-season, for example, that the Mets didn't sign themselves a fairly glittery free agent?

It was the winter of 1997-98, coming off their surprising dalliance with contention and even there, there's an asterisk to be applied because they were able to avail themselves of the Huizenga fire sale and pick up Leiter and Cook on the cheap (unless you consider giving up young A.J. Burnett as shortsighted). When they didn't immediately improve on their pace of '97 in the early part of '98, they went out and traded three kids for Mike Piazza to compensate for Todd Hundley's lengthy absence (Spehr, Castillo, Wilkins, Tatum not adding up to a hair in Mike's mustache) and, more significantly, to shut up everybody who said the Mets never made big moves.

Since then, the Mets have executed splashy transactions, or at least costly ones, every winter, either via free agency or trading for contracts somebody else could no longer afford.

1999: Ventura, Henderson, Bonilla

2000: Hampton, Bell, Zeile

2001: Appier, Trachsel

2002: Alomar, Vaughn, Cedeño, Burnitz, Weathers

2003: Glavine, Floyd, Stanton

2004: Cameron, Matsui, Looper

2005: Martinez, Beltran

We could sit here and deconstruct which moves necessitated other moves and how the Mets seemed to dig themselves deeper and deeper personnel holes down the line, but the point is the Mets do act. They're afraid to not do something whether it makes long-term sense or not. Ownership's rabbit ears are stuck on the criticism that they don't take the big dare the way the other New York team does.

Was Let's Get Athletic a valid stance? We'll never know. The Mets Dropped The Energy the minute they tired of Jim Duquette playing smallball and brought back Omar Minaya. I don't know what Minaya's plan is, and that's fine. I have an inherent trust that he will do something right this offseason, but that doesn't mean it will add up to worth a damn because eventually he'll do something wrong and the Mets will fall all over themselves to correct it and, inevitably, make it worse.

The Mets' nominal starting lineup in 2005 included two shortstops and two centerfielders. Now after essentially throwing away almost $30 mil the last two years on the guys who became the ill-fitting second baseman and the reluctant (nearly tragically so) rightfielder, they're scrambling again. Xavier Nady? He may be the answer, but probably only to some alphabetically themed trivia question. Think about that $14.5 mil annually tossed at Cameron and Matsui. Think that couldn't have been spent more wisely? Think that plus whatever they were offering Vlad could've outbid the Angels? Think they knew that Carlos Beltran (no long commitments?) might very well be available after 2004 so maybe they could've kept their wallet in their pants before splurging on Cameron, a guy whose presence here always seemed a bit of a mystery?

Mike C. did some nice things as a Met. We saw him hit a walkoff homer against the Tigers the night Mike P. drove home in the Ambiguously Gay Chevy. He hit 30 dingers in 2004 which still reads like a typo. His catch last June in the game when the sprinklers turned on and Cameron stuck his glove out and came up with an out, was stupendous. And that abysmal business in San Diego, of all places, in August elevated him to richly deserved baseball sainthood in our eyes. For all the talk that he wanted out and couldn't deal with right, he gave us his all wherever they stuck him.

But Mike Cameron was a Met because the plan of the week demanded he be hired. The plan of the subsequent week demanded he be traded.

Now what? There's 40 miles of bad road up ahead if you're a Mets fan. Deleting Cameron and Ishii and Heredia (Question No. 22 lives!) Graves and Mientkiewicz and Piazza is the easy part. If you don't believe Xavier Nady is a foundation element to the 2006 Mets, and I don't, we're looking at at least four everyday positions that remain definitively unfilled to say nothing of the hypothetical position of closer. That's all right in November, but what's gonna happen?

Catcher scares me the most because this is something the Mets haven't had to worry about for more than a couple of minutes in the past 15 years. Hundley grew into a temporarily fearsome slugger and moments after he shriveled, Piazza replaced him without missing a beat. Now what? Something inadequate, I hunch.

The frightening part is what a comedown from the Piazza of our dreams Bengie Molina (my guess) or Ramon Hernandez (my god, another player tantalizing us based on one good season) or the Japanese guy (my bad — his name is Kenji Jojima) will be. Don't know anything more than I've read about Jojima, but I've watched more than a bit of Molina. He's not an automatic out and he sure can play his position if he's not hurt (which he's been recently, of course), but man is he slow. So? All catchers are slow, right? Ramon Castro is slow, but he's not as torpid as Bengie Molina and, besides, we're still rubbing our eyes over how clutch Ramon was. Point is we're used to Piazza compensating for he inadequacies with his mighty axe. Mike wasn't much with the defense, but who really noticed? He was Mike. None of these fellows is Mike. (Nor is Mike at the present time, just to be clear.)

As you've no doubt figured out, not having Mike, not having even the 2005 Mike, is going to destabilize everything because for the first time since the early '90s, we can't necessarily count on the catching position to produce meaningful power. Hundley and Piazza were the exception, not the rule, at their position. As long as they were driving in runs, we could slide by with dead-ball corner outfielders and infielders. We could get by with the Timos and the Phillipses and their ilk. We had RBIs from an unlikely source so we could overlook how few were emanating from where they were “supposed” originate. Free ride's over, fellas. First base and right field are now officially offense issues.

Then there's the closer. Sign Billy Wagner? Well, it wouldn't be folly, I suppose, but we'll overpay and he'll deteriorate. He'll blow a save or two in April and he'll hate himself and we'll be blogging our asses off over how Mets fans are not helping him by booing him so vociferously so soon. It's a worst-case scenario, but you can't say it doesn't have touches of precedent to it.

Too bad we can't get a Bobby Jenks to close for us. You know, some guy with an arm and a bushel of ability that needs to be harnessed by a smart pitching coach. Oh wait, we can. Anybody can. That was the beauty of the White Sox closer. He threw hard and somebody figured how to make that work. Whatever Chicago was spending on, it wasn't on a name reliever. They didn't need to.

Nor do the Mets. Did I not just see Aaron Heilman improve over the course of the year coming out of the pen? Did I not see Juan Padilla get just about everybody out? Did I not see Roberto Hernandez stubbornly refuse to grow old? Out of those three guys you couldn't reliably weave a couple of innings when needed?

When needed. This is a matter beyond the scope of the Mets, and it's not by any means new, but this closer mentality is the biggest crock since Le Peep discontinued its Bottomless Pit of Onion Soup promotion.

Roberto Hernandez might not act his age, but I will and say dagnabit, in my day, you pitched to win the game. Meaning? Meaning you sent Pedro Martinez and Tom Glavine and every other starter out there to go as far as he could. When a reliever was needed, you brought in your best reliever and let him go as far as he could. If he were up to the task, he'd finish the game. It worked a lot. It worked when the man who got the call was Tug McGraw or Jesse Orosco or Roger McDowell. It worked from the seventh inning to the ninth as necessary.

Nowadays? It's a frigging bureaucracy. It's the Department of Ninth Innings. Nobody's eyes are on the prize anymore. Teams like the Astros, with routinely brilliant closers, short-circuit themselves with their philosophy of “Get it to Lidge.” The minute Lidge doesn't get it done (versus Pujols, versus Podsednik), they are so screwed. There is no court of last resort when your big-time closer fails. Eight innings of great work down the drain. The philosophy that's worked so well for so few (Eckersley, Hoffman, Gagne, Rivera) has sabotaged everybody else, including us. Then there's the White Sox with their mixing and matching and coming up with a scrap heap special. Which ones are the White Sox? The ones with the rings, baby.

But they have a great pitching coach in Don Cooper. We apparently don't have anybody special in that role. Oh wait, we do, or so we were told in that magical winter of '03-'04. We're also being told that Heilman, after finally maturing, is being shopped because he doesn't abide by Rick Peterson's rules of order. What in the name of Rube Walker is going on around here?

I thought the same thing when I saw the MVP balloting. Congrats to our boys David, Cliff and Jose for attracting support, however scant, in the 44th consecutive installment balloting that didn't yield a Met on top. But where oh where was Pedro Martinez? C'mon BBWAA members, what's up wit' dat? Who on the Mets was more valuable in every sense of the word than Pedro Martinez? Who redefined the franchise with every start he'd take, every strike he'd make? Who stopped losing streaks time and again? Who, if not for a boy named Loop, would've at least scraped 20 wins? Who set the stage for the Mets contending as long as they did, who carried the staff through dry spells and who shook off the late-season sag and right the Mets back to respectability?

Where MVP-deciding is concerned, once you stray outside the Albert/Andruw stratosphere, who was more valuable to his team's season than Pedro Martinez? Bad job, writers. Pedro was The Man and The Man deserved a vote.

Speaking of The Men, happy 41st birthday to Dwight Eugene Gooden, born November 16, 1964, and happy 61st birthday to George Thomas Seaver, born November 17, 1944, each unmatched as The Man in his respective time (time that didn't last nearly long enough for one of them, but that's another sad story). It's always tickled me that they entered this world almost exactly twenty years apart. There's gotta be a kid born 11/15/84 a couple years away, no?

Oh Hell, I almost forgot to have a good look around your First Circle. Before I go do whatever else it is I do when I'm not doing this…

STRAWBERRY: There is a gigantic blind spot blocking my ability to notice his severe drawbacks as a human being. It's 252 home runs wide.

ORDOÑEZ: He was Stephanie's favorite Met back when it meant something for her to have a favorite Met. That my wife cared more for him than he cared for his own wife is immaterial. Greatest Infield Ever, bud. Fonzie, Robin, Oly and Rey. I know him by the company he kept. With the glove of a lifetime, he could be as truculent as he wanted to be. And after absorbing years of abuse over his dumb bat (like we hadn't already figured out he couldn't hit), if all he could spit out in his second language was “stupid” to characterize the fans' reaction to him, then so be it. Stupidity was running rampant in these parts by the end of 2002.

HENDERSON: There's a reason dairy products come with an expiration date. As delicious as fresh milk or cottage cheese can be, keep it around too long, you know it's gonna go sour.

McREYNOLDS: One good season. Then one very good season. Then three years of dispiriting deterioration, none of which he helped with his hello, I must be going demeanor. The 48th Greatest Met of the First Forty Years struck me as a lump and a load. Burn, baby, burn.

(Before we proceed into the second circle of Met Hell, a word about a special brand of offseason Hell for baseball fans: evaluating a trade without getting to see the principals play ball. My 30-second take on Mike Cameron for Xavier Nady is that it's impossible to size up offseason trades and signings one by one. You have to wait until you're breaking camp in March, because all those offseason moves fit into the kind of plan you can't assemble during the regular season, when each day brings a win or a loss and a changed situation while you're scrambling for more pieces. Nady, if he stays, strikes me as a good complement to Mike Jacobs in a first-base platoon, which would eliminate one problem from this winter's lengthy list and free up some money to address the others. I'm also not sure what the trade's detractors thought we could get for Mike Cameron, a prince of a guy but a flawed hitter playing out of position and trying to recover from a devastating injury. For much more than 30 seconds' worth, check out Metsblog.com and MetsGeek.com. I think I reloaded those two sites approximately 15,000 times this afternoon.)

Those of you still left, well, let's move on to the exercise at hand. Dante's second circle of Hell was reserved for those overcome by lust, and while things are different in Met Hell, bad reputations are a factor here as well. For this is the domain of those less-than-beloved Mets beset chiefly by image problems. Their very souls seemed steeped in rancor and churlishness, and they marched to the fingers-in-the-ears beat of their own sneering drummer. So what are they doing out here on the margins? Well, for all their bad reputations, they never did anything too awful while they wore our uniform. We might have heard, thought or suspected they were jerks, and so regarded them with a certain wariness, but most of their jerkiness came before or after the Days of Orange and Blue.

Carl Everett — Doesn't believe in dinosaurs. Or, apparently, the authority of managers — he wound up as a Met after the Marlins suspended him for insubordination. Doesn't believe in the need to stay in the batter's box, the point of contention in the scary tantrum he threw on July 15, 2000 in Fenway Park while the Mets looked on in amazement. (Or perhaps Mike Piazza asked an innocent question about whether the most-famous sauropod should be properly called Apatosaurus or Brontosaurus.) Still, what did Everett do while wearing Mets colors? He got himself banned from winter ball after going Artest on a fan in Venezuela, but let's not pretend we care about that. Dallas Green didn't trust him, but it was Dallas' philosophy to never trust anybody under 30. What we're left with is the strange 1997 incident in which workers at the Met day-care center (a concept I found amazing to begin with) found bruises on his kids, which led to family court. My impression (which could be wrong) from the day-care mess was that Everett and his wife were believers in a level of corporeal punishment that's no longer generally accepted, but not abusive parents. It didn't matter: Carl was shipped to Houston for John Hudek, about whom I now remember absolutely nothing. I do remember a fair amount about Everett, particularly some amazing home runs, none more amazing than his '97 grand slam off Ugie Urbina in the bottom of the ninth for a 6-6 tie in a game we'd eventually win. Do I remember that Everett was also kind of psycho? Sure. But not for us.

Eddie Murray — A shy and strange man, deeply suspicious of fame and people, with those people employed by the media drawing the deepest suspicion of all. But an amazingly smart player and by all accounts a terrific teammate. I wish he hadn't left town as the same odd cipher he was when he arrived. But beyond that, who gives a shit that he was mean to Tim McCarver?

Julio Machado — It's among the more bland transactions in baseball history: On April 1, 1992 the Milwaukee Brewers placed Machado on the restricted list. Why? Well, he'd been accused of shooting a woman following a traffic accident in Venezuela. Now, it stands to reason that if someone who was once a Met goes to prison for murder, they get some place in Met Hell. Still, to be terribly shallow about it, it was practically in another hemisphere, and, well, he was a Brewer at the time. Extenuating circumstances? Not in the real world, God knows. But in Met Hell, it earns him a somewhat-awkward exile out here.

Juan Samuel — It's painful to even remember. This was the period where having two centerfielders (Mookie and Lenny) was somehow a problem, so the solution was to get rid of both and import a second baseman to play the position, an experiment that was such a flaming disaster that the Mets insisted on repeating it with the likes of Keith Miller and Howard Johnson, until finally we were all so shell-shocked that we wanted to cheer when some hapless Met broke back on a drive to center without falling down. That original player in the wrong position, of course, was Samuel, who floundered through half a miserable season before getting shipped off for the malingering Mike Marshall and the wretched Alejandro Pena, two more players to make the ulcers reignite. What's easy to forget is that while everybody hated the Dykstra and McDowell for Samuel trade from the get-go, most everybody also thought Samuel — a year removed from a 100-RBI campaign — was a pretty amazing player. He wasn't; in fact, in Carlos Baergaesque fashion he hung around for years afterwards and was never more than so-so again. But while I'll always remember him with a dull fury, I'm not sure how much of the whole disaster was his fault.

Jeff Kent — Another guy whose Met career was bookended by groan-inducing trades: Kent came to New York as an unknown in the exile of David Cone, then netted us Baerga in return. He certainly showed that he was wound too tight while in New York, with the most-famous incident coming at the beginning of his Met career, when he refused to go through the usual rookie hazing of being forced to wear a ridiculous outfit and seemed ready to fight the whole clubhouse over it. Kent's always seemed socially maladroit, and I never particularly liked him, but being out of step with the careening disaster that was the Mets of the early 1990s could be seen as a badge of honor. Hell, I was seething a lot of the time, and I didn't have to see the carnage from mere feet away the way Kent did. Certainly I remember he always played hard — too hard, if anything. And wouldn't you like to have found a place in our batting order for the 256 homers and 1,000+ RBIs he's racked up since leaving town? Me too.

Next stop: The third circle of Met Hell, home of two representative unfortunates who destroyed all prior goodwill with poor departures.

Welcome to Met Hell, which you'll find owes a certain something to depictions of the real thing. Now, here's the good news: Compared to that real thing, the Hell that holds a lot more than baseball players, Met Hell isn't really that bad a place. Oh sure, as we descend you'll find some malcontents and miscreants, and there are some truly bad characters we'll encounter late in our tour. But not so many of them, thank goodness. Compared with some other clubs, we've gotten off pretty easy.

The first circle of Met Hell is Limbo. Dante defined it as the place for virtuous pagans and the unbaptized — they weren't really punished, but they didn't get to hobnob with God, either. So it is with Met Limbo — it's reserved for Mets we bear no particular grudge and may even have a certain fondness for, particularly since they were part of some very good campaigns. But there's a creepiness at the core of these guys that makes us reluctant to truly embrace them, whatever grand deeds they might have been a part of.

Rey Ordonez — OK, he redefined shortstop in our eyes, and his debut was incredible. We were both there, Opening Day in the rain, and the throw he made to nail Royce Clayton at the plate (I can hear Gary Cohen yelping “FROM HIS KNEES!” as I type) produced a sound I'd never heard in a stadium before: the sound of 18,000+ people turning to the 18,000+ next to them and murmuring, “Did he really just do that?” An amazed burble, stadium-sized. Ah, but that wasn't all of Rey. It became clear all too soon that the O Rey wore on the back of his shirt was for “obnoxious.” He sulked. He pouted. He pretended he couldn't speak English until the very end of his Met career, in which he used his sudden command of the language to seal his fate by announcing we were all stupid. (Um, no. Hypercritical, yes. Vindictive, sure. Bitter, absolutely. But not stupid.) He couldn't even remain interested in the entirety of his own highlight video — if the Mets didn't edit out the scene of a bored Rey-O starting to wander away from Cookie Rojas, just imagine what they left on the cutting-room floor. The Mets could never turn his escape from Cuba into a stirring tale because there was the small matter that he left a wife behind who hardly ever got discussed because Rey found himself a new wife with unseemly haste. And the hitting? Ugh. Rey Ordonez may have been the stupidest hitter who ever lived. He bunted at the wrong time. He had not even the vaguest command of the strike zone. His determination to hit home runs made him a black hole in the lineup for weeks at a time. He was utterly and completely uncoachable, utterly and completely self-centered, and thoroughly unlikeable. Oh, but that stadium-sized murmur….

Rickey Henderson — There's an asterisk on this one, because we knew perfectly well what we were getting. But we sure got it. Rickey's 1999 was fairly amazing — he hit .315 and stole 37 bases at the tender age of 40 and (even more amazingly) managed to make Roger Cedeno a productive baseball player. But it all turned sour in the playoffs, and you could pinpoint the moment: Game 4 of the Arizona series, when Bobby Valentine pulled him for defense. Rickey's replacement (Melvin Mora) immediately proved Bobby right by gunning down Jay Bell at home, but Rickey whined nonetheless. Then he played cards with Bobby Bonilla while the rest of the team was fighting to the death against the Braves. In spring training the next year he started bitching about a raise, complained about the trip to Japan, then dogged his way through the next five weeks. Finally, the end: He jogged to first on an apparent home run against the Marlins, wound up with a single when it didn't go out, was booed mercilessly and properly by the fans and criticized by Valentine. His response? He threatened a New York Post reporter and said he'd do the same thing next time. There was no next time. “After considering everything that happened last night and this morning, something had to be done,” said Steve Phillips, adding that “no matter how talent you have, if you continue to create problems and situations, you wear out your welcome. We got to the point where we had to compromise our ideals and what we expect from our players too often.” Just for making me agree with Steve Phillips, he's on the list.

Kevin McReynolds — An absolute killer of a season in 1988, when he and Darryl complemented each other so perfectly that they stole each other's MVP votes and delivered the prize to Kirk Fucking Gibson. Tremendous power, wily baserunner, terrific arm from the outfield. But he played baseball with the kind of passion normally shown by DMV clerks. His wife didn't help: Her infamous call to WFAN defending K-Mac's laser-quick departures from Shea because, as she explained, her man wanted to beat the traffic is probably in some manual for team wives on what not to do. Of course K-Mac didn't always wait for the end of the game — in late 1989 he and Darryl got caught in the Wrigley Field clubhouse changing into their street clothes, which would have been fine except the game wasn't over and they had to hustle back during a desperate ninth-inning rally. Kevin McReynolds never did anything truly wrong, and he didn't owe fans any more than what he gave them on the field, which for a while was beyond reproach. But he's living proof that for baseball to be any fun, those of us watching must at least be able to imagine that the guy down on the field doing things we could only dream of doing gives a shit that he's doing them.

Darryl Strawberry — What? Darryl? Our Ted Williams? The Straw That Stirs the Drink? Why is he on this list? C'mon Jace, he's not a bad guy, just a weak guy. A tragic figure. Well, OK, sure. But c'mon now. Didn't you get sick of Darryl Strawberry? Of his constant illnesses, including sick days that coincided with the recording of “Chocolate Strawberry,” possibly the worst hip-hop song in history? Of the domestic violence? Of the fight on team-photo day? (Though the resulting photo is a classic, with Darryl and Keith Hernandez in a fury and Davey Johnson looking like he's just aged about a decade.) Of his stint in Smithers, which just happened to be timed to delay more potential domestic-violence charges? Of his equally phony stint as a Jesus freak? Of the endless sulking and whining and talking shit? Of the ridiculous book he, um, wrote? Didn't you get sick of it all more times than you care to remember? In Game 7 of the '86 series, Darryl hit a home run in the 8th to make it 7-5 Mets, and afterwards you can see Ray Knight intercept him before the dugout, telling him something urgent. He's telling him to be a man and shake Davey Johnson's hand. Moments after helping secure the Mets' second World Series title, Darryl Strawberry needed to be told to be a man. OK, fine, I agree. Darryl isn't a bad guy. Hell, he's a tragic figure. Would you still think so if he'd hit 15 homers a year?

Next stop: The circle of Met Hell reserved for those of unseemly reputation, and a weighing of their sins or lack thereof while clad in blue and orange.

At any given moment, the Mets roster is 12-20% occupied by guys I can't stand and guys I don't want. I don't know if I hate them though.

As much fun as some make it, I don't want to hate on the Mets. They're the Mets. I live through them. To hate a Met is to hate a little bit of myself. Not that I'm incapable of that.

We know too much about our Mets. We see them and hear about them and read about them not just as bright and shiny baseball players but as occasionally ugly human beings. I don't remember hating any Mets when I was a kid but I don't remember knowing all that much about them except that they were good guys. At worst I wished one or two into the cornfield. Or at least into Wrigley Field. A trade or a release was occasionally in order, but nothing violent.

Pawn Dave Marshall off on some unsuspecting sucker. Dave Marshall…I didn't hate him but he was the first Met I didn't want around. I refuse to look up his stats to discover if my distaste was based on anything more than a random determination that Dave Marshall should never play. Maybe Dave Marshall got all his hits before I came back from the fridge, but I don't recall him getting any while I was a witness.

So I'm avoiding his numbers and I'm sure as hell not going to click on Ultimate Mets' Fan Memories section. It's one of the greatest things on the Web yet it also kills me because I'll look up some player I recall as a .208 lifetime hitter who made six errors in every eight chances and find out that some contemporary of mine remembers this player as someone who visited him or his brother in the hospital and restored unto him the power of movement and perhaps positive thinking. And then the guy signed autographs for every kid in the neighborhood and rescued a dozen cats on his way back to Shea where that very night he went 4-for-5 off Phil Niekro.

That's lovely. But I don't wanna know. I don't wanna know that Sergio Ferrer, who was a mascot of futility to me and Joel Lugo, has gone on to bishophood somewhere. I don't wanna know that Phil Mankowski, the worst third baseman in Mets history (and that's some pretty bad third-basin') fights fires and slays ignorance. I don't wanna know that my existence-bane Brent Gaff jump-started some poor family's Chrysler Newport in the parking lot after a 9-1 loss and then took the entire Village of Coram out for pancakes, thus salvaging Coram Night for one and all.

It's bad enough knowing that a lot of the players I loved sucked as people. Knowing the players I disliked as players are standup gents is about as disappointing. I already feel silly enough in general.

You know who I didn't like? Ray Knight. Well, I liked Ray Knight just fine, but I couldn't stand that he was playing in 1985. I wanted him disappeared, certainly benched. Ray Knight was the first Met I booed, but I didn't boo the man. I booed the decision to play the man. I booed the results of his attempts to play. But I did not have it in for Ray Knight.

And a year later, when other teams had to fight with Ray Knight to party, I developed severe amnesia. Me, I loved Ray Knight as he was winning the 1986 World Series MVP and homering in Game 7 and scoring the Mookie run in Game 6 and such.

It just doesn't pay to hate Mets no matter how many Mets force the issue. Alas, very few take the boo by the horns like Ray Knight did and turn a Metropolis in their favor.

Wear a Mets uniform and I am contractually bound to like you. I ask but a few more adherences from you to ensure my loyalty.

Don't say stupid things to the press and I will like you.

Don't stare into space while in the field and I will like you.

Don't shirk your responsibility for playing badly and I will like you.

Don't break the law and I will like you…or break the law but strike guys out when you get off for good behavior and I will like you.

Make sense. Play hard. Succeed sometimes. Stand up. I will love you.

Amazing how many guys can't get with the program. No wonder we're descending into this subject and right on into the Met Circles of Hell. I'm afraid to find out how many of our heroes are hanging out there waiting for us.

The designated hitter rule is rather hellish in its own right, but I don't see holding the rule against a guy who rules at DH. A case is made for why pitchers should bat and why David Ortiz is most valuable at Gotham Baseball.

The old baseball joke about rooting for laundry means that donning the orange and blue (in its various migrating shades, to say nothing of white and black) absolves players of their former misdeeds against us. Hit Piazza in the wrist at Fenway and get in a war of words with him? We love Pedro now. Dismantle our hopes year after year after year with that aloof look on his face while 29,000 or so do the chop in Atlanta? We love Tom Glavine now. Or rather we like him. Or rather we've grown to accept him.

By the same token, take off that uni and you're the enemy. Pleasant memories didn't make any of us transfer our loyalties when Steve Bieser was dancing down the line against David Cone. Lee Mazzilli's tenure as poster boy didn't temper our distemper any when he started freelance-umpiring from the first-base line. When Charlie O'Brien was punching John Cangelosi in the back of the head, it was obvious he was the devil. I still mourn Edgardo Alfonzo's departure and root for him to do well, but not when he's in the box against us.

And yet there are those guys who are laundry-proof, those souls who can't be redeemed by sticking a Met hat on their heads. Some we can't get used to seeing in our uniform and never grow to trust. Others we start off liking well enough before their baser qualities become apparent. Some are arriving mercenaries we've already formed an opinion of. Others are homegrown children we quickly want to disavow.

So who are our least-favorite Mets? We'll get to that in a bit, but first some attempts at ground rules.

Not just anybody is eligible, regardless of how many boos rained down on them at Shea or whether or not we find ourselves wandering around years later still fuming over some play they didn't make or some pitch they did. However infuriating it is to watch, simple incompetence (Paul Gibson, Mike Maddux, Roger Cedeno, Rich Rodriguez, Danny Graves) won't get you on the list. Being frustrating (Jay Payton, Kaz Matsui, Victor Zambrano) won't get you there either. If you were good elsewhere but terrible for us, that's not black mark enough: Mel Rojas and Carlos Baerga aren't on the list. Family members we're quarreling with at the moment but will eventually welcome back to the fold are exempt — relax, John Franco and Al Leiter. Being a bad seed somewhere else won't get you enshrined if you didn't do anything particularly objectionable for us: Garry Templeton and Mike A. Marshall are in the clear.

No, it takes more than incompetence or not living up to your potential or saying the occasional stupid thing or becoming a Yankee or just being a lunkhead. There's got to be something worse, something that still makes the blood boil, something that made Met fans dread the smirking approach of the Yankee fans in their offices or on their blocks during that player's tenure. Mental or physical incompetence that stemmed from not being prepared. Being a quitter, a lousy teammate, spectacularly obnoxious to fans or the media, a bad citizen, a traitor.

In other words, it's not nearly enough to be a bad baseball player or an OK baseball player who had a horrible minute or month or year — there are plenty of such players, and the vast majority of them were trying as hard as they could. To make the list of our Least Favorite Mets, you have to have done worse than that. You have to have made us suspect you're actually a bad person.