The year was 2000. I was 37.

Or was I?

I was in the fourth year of a stretch when I lived and breathed Mets baseball more than during any other period in my life. Wasn’t I supposed to get that out of the way when I was a child? Sure sounds childish. But in 2000, I wasn’t 7. I was 37. Yet it was all happening now.

Stephanie and I were taking a walk through East Rockaway one Sunday afternoon, long after the post-game edition of Mets Extra had wrapped, when I noticed, lying on the ground, a used Shea Stadium parking stub. “Wow,” I said, “that’s weird. I was just thinking about the Mets and there’s a thing from Shea.”

“What’s so weird about it?” she asked. “You’re always thinking about the Mets.”

If I had put any thought into it thirty years earlier, this would have been the adulthood I envisioned for myself: a grown-up who went to as many baseball games as he liked practically anywhere he liked. I never gave the future much thought, but this was definitely the one I would’ve angled for.

We were living in the future, right? It was the Year 2000, Y2K. Actually, it wasn’t any different from the 1900s, at least not the last few of them. Since 1997, the Bobby Valentine Mets had become my cause, my concern, my reason for being. Even more, I mean. If I had to rate the intensity of my baseball-commitment on a scale from 5 to 10 (let’s face it, it was never going to dip into low single-digits), these were the 9-10 years. The needle never saw 8.

Coming into 2000, I was stuck on 10. That was 1999’s doing. Don’t get me started on 1999 or we’ll never see much of the new millennium. Suffice it to say that the season when the Mets were merrily sailing toward the post-season until they crashed into a rock called the Atlanta Braves in late September and then almost drowned, only to pull themselves to safety, then triumph (over Pittsburgh, over Cincinnati, over Arizona) only to be swallowed up by a shark (Atlanta again) had a profound effect on me. 1999 turned out to be the greatest season I ever lived through, its final thirty days the most epic month I could ever imagine.

The seven-game losing streak that nearly sunk us…the unlikely resurrection…the wild pitch…the one-game playoff…beating Randy Johnson…Pratt…going down 0-3 to Atlanta…then Olerud…and 15 innings…and Ventura with the grand slam that was a single…and Game Six, the game I still haven’t switched off, the one we fell behind 0-5 and 3-7, led 8-7 and 9-8 and lost 9-10. That was the epitome of Mets fandom. Nothing could follow it.

But 2000 did. It had to. It was on the schedule.

It started early. Way too early. In late March. At five in the freaking morning, two games against the Cubs from Japan. The Mets lost the first one. They weren’t ready. Neither was I, I thought. There’s no way this season will be as good as the last one. Where, for example, did John Olerud go? John Olerud had been, since 1997, the clutchest and most graceful of Mets. He made me forget all about Rico Brogna, something I didn’t think was possible. Oly was quiet, wore a hard hat, had soft hands and carried a loud stick. John Olerud made the infield The Greatest Ever. He completed us.

But the Mets let him go prior to 2000. Steve Phillips, the GM, made no effort to re-sign him. There went 90-some RBIs and a hundred walks a year. There went class and dignity and that left-right-left-right balance that made the ’99 lineup a thing of beauty.

Here, instead, came Todd Zeile.

Todd Zeile? The third baseman? The third baseman who played for like eight other teams? And he’s going to play first for us? We’re replacing John Olerud with that?

I already missed the 20th century. Fuck Steve Phillips. Thanks for ruining a good thing.

On the mound that first morning in Tokyo was Mike Hampton. OK, that was a better deal. Hampton was one of those New Age baseball acquisitions that became possible because of money. The Astros didn’t want to spend much to keep him as a free agent and the Mets were willing to part with two young contributors from 1999 (Octavio Dotel and Roger Cedeño) to take that risk. It was essentially the same way we got Piazza and that paid off. Hampton was a serious lefty, 22-4 the year before. Trading for him just before Christmas took a touch of the hurt off losing Olerud in early December. We’d have a lesser first baseman but an absolute ace.

Mike Hampton looked uncomfortable on the Tokyo Dome mound that March morning. Walked nine in five innings as the Mets fell to 0-1. Hampton would come around as a Met but he’d never look particularly at ease.

That would describe my approach to the Mets for much of 2000. It wasn’t 1999 and I never quite got over that. Oh, ’00 had its moments, starting with the second game that was won by Beh-NEE! Agbayani on an eleventh-inning grand slam before work (silliest question I heard when I came in toward noon: “Did you watch the Mets this morning?”). After rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, the Mets went on a nine-game winning streak in mid-April and appeared to be on their way to doing something.

Within a few weeks of Japanese Opening Day, the newly featured players — Derek Bell, Glendon Rusch, Super Joe McEwing, Hampton, Zeile even — showed themselves to be capable sorts. Edgardo Alfonzo, my favorite since 1997, was having a year comparable to the one before. Mike was hitting like he was when he was a Dodger. The pitchers behind Hampton — endlessly talkative Al Leiter and strategically tightlipped Rick Reed — were dependable. Bobby Jones, injured for the important part of ’99, was dreadful, but the pen was still above-average. Misunderstood flamethrower Armando Benitez, reluctant set-up man John Franco and the top middlemen in the business, Turk Wendell and Dennis Cook, separated us from the batch of mediocrities that had come to populate the National League in recent years. It wasn’t a bad team.

But their timing was terrible. They were following 1999 when the Mets came with one game and change of reaching the World Series. Then we had almost beaten the Braves and almost got to take on the Yankees. What was left to accomplish except beat the Braves and actually take on the Yankees? Thus, 2000 was spent mostly on edge, fearing and loathing those two obstacles to the ultimate bliss that I sensed was just around the corner.

The Braves and the Yankees — indomitable and insufferable. I forget who was which. We were the third-best team in baseball, yet there were significant chasms that couldn’t have felt much worse because we were sharing a division with our tormentor and a market and psychic space with our torturers. The Braves and the Yankees. They hovered relentlessly over our heads and were always one pitch away from ruining everything.

The Met-Brave dynamic was simple enough to understand. They were always in first place and we were always trying to get there. We had gotten to the point where we could play some marvelously close and competitive games with them but we never won nearly enough of them. Oh, a few here and there. Mostly here. A Mets-Braves game at Shea Stadium was a matchup. A Braves-Mets game at Turner Field was a beatdown.

It could be argued that our 1999 run to glory would have gotten at least one step further had we not had to play six September and October games in Atlanta. We lost all six, including three NLCS contests. The last one, the searing Game Six, slipped through our fingers in the eleventh inning when a rented stranger named Kenny Rogers walked Andruw Jones with the bases loaded to score Gerald Williams and hand the Braves the pennant. It was the greatest game I ever saw amid the greatest series I ever suffered through, rejoiced in and suffered through again at the end of a season that became the flagship of all my seasons. But we lost. Seconds after it ended, NBC flashed a graphic on the screen promoting its next game. There were three logos: the 1999 World Series’, the Braves’ and the Yankees’. They would be together. We would be left out.

First I let out a wrenched-gut moan. Then I dropped to the living room floor, curled up tight, bawled over what I just saw, picked myself up, brushed myself off and bailed on the Fall Classic. If I had to spend more than a moment pondering the Braves versus the Yankees for the championship of the world, I swear I’d disintegrate.

There was talk among Mets fans who could bear to countenance the subject over who to support in that World Series. We had just been victimized by the Atlanta Braves. Larry “Chipper” Jones earned all-time villainy at Shea for hitting home runs and urging us to go home and put on our Yankee stuff (this was before we rallied the final weekend of the season). John Rocker was honing a WWF persona and was fast coming up on Jones’ right as Public Enemy Number One with his unkind comments over our team and ourselves (this was before he mentioned his views on New York’s diverse population to Sports Illustrated). Bobby Cox was an unsympathetic figure and his pitching coach appeared to be working through some unspoken Tourette’s tick, rocking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth…Leo Mazzone rocked harder than Judas Priest in their prime. Bloodless gamers Maddux and Smoltz and Glavine received whatever signals Mazzone sent them and regularly threw eight innings of four-hit ball against us. Unassuming chipmunks like Keith Lockhart and talented studs like Brian Jordan and perennial second-stringers like Eddie Perez and just-passing-through journeymen like Walt Weiss shared a bond, that of destroying the Mets at the worst possible moment. That is who the Atlanta Braves were in 1999.

Barring a gigantic sinkhole that would swallow both teams in one bite and taking into account my shellshocked obliviousness to the affair, I was rooting for those Braves in that World Series.

Why?

Because they were playing the New York Yankees.

As much as I loathed, detested and despised the Atlanta Braves with every fiber of my being, I out-and-out hated the New York Yankees. The Braves had already wrecked our season. The Yankees were constantly wrecking our lives.

Go Braves.

And of course, they didn’t. No, the Mets had taken too much out of them in those six NLCS games. I didn’t do more than glance at the World Series, but by the results, neither did the Braves. They were gone in four. The Yankees were champions again, second straight, three of the last four.

They were dynastic.

Their fans were bombastic.

Not a few of them were plastic.

And our composite rage against them? Practically spastic.

This wasn’t what I signed up for in 1969. This was a Mets town. I was a Mets fan. And so it would be forever, forever something I hadn’t pondered much when I was six. Over the years, the Mets would decline, the Yankees would rise but that was just a hiccup. By 1984, this was a Mets town again. Even when we started falling flat in the early ’90s, the other local team wasn’t doing any better.

But then came 1996, or Nineteen Ninety Bleeping Six. It was the New York baseball equivalent of Chernobyl. It contaminated the air and the water and the cows who gave the milk that you dare not drink. 1996 poisoned the atmosphere, unleashing a toxic pinstriped cloud that had yet to dissipate by the turn of the century. The Yankees — up to and including the vile, overbearing bully George Steinbrenner for crying out loud — were hailed by an army of media bootlickers whose marching orders were to continually pump up the self-esteem of every miscreant Yankee fan on the planet. It wasn’t enough that the Yankees played baseball well. It was required by law (the mayor of New York City certainly would’ve signed such a bill) that the Yankees be adored and beloved for everything they accomplished. As such, all baseball fans within the sound of John Sterling’s voice, which echoed with inaccurate home run calls and gobs of self-promotion, were presumed Yankees fans.

If you were a Mets fan, you had to go to the Department of Sports Allegiance and apply for an exemption.

The champion Yankees were ubiquitous, circa 2000. They were everywhere. They were in commercials. They were on billboards. They were in the gossip pages. They were even on our schedule. Our schedule? Yes, somebody engineered the clever concept of making us play the Yankees several times per season. Thus, the overflow of Yankees fans who couldn’t make it into The Stadium to take their tongues to The Monuments crowded into gorgeous (by comparison) Shea Stadium to block our view of our team.

I hated those Yankees. I hated Derek Jeter for usurping the attention that should’ve been paid to our superior fielding shortstop Rey Ordoñez. Sure Rey couldn’t hit and was a shifty character (he had more wives than homers most years), but he was a gem in the field. He was positively balletic. Yet his one gift from Above, his God Glove defense, was washed away in a tsunami of Jeter publicity. Who’s Derek dating? Where’s Derek eating? What’s Derek wearing? That he scored a few runs and won a few rings — which is what it’s all about, baby! — was beside the point.

Derek Jeter was a sneering weasel who mouthed platitudes that taken as a whole were mistaken for evidence of character. I hated the way he stepped back in the box and raised his right hand as if to say, all right, now I may be pitched to. God forbid when a strike, even strike one, was called. He’d give the umpire this look of, “WHA’? DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM?” The sense of modern Yankee entitlement was personified by Jeter. Or weaselfied. Sneer went the weasel. But the weasel won.

I hated his manager almost as much. I once liked Joe Torre. His was the first baseball card, from 1967, that I could remember holding. He later played for and managed the Mets. I stood up for him against those who said he was washed up at one job and not ready for the other. I even followed him, in a manner of speaking, to Atlanta when he became their skipper. In college in Florida, deprived of the Mets, all I had was Braves Radio. They became (ugh) my second-favorite team while he was there. Years later, he wound up managing the Yankees, confounding all expectations and winning that first, butt-ugly World Series in 1996. By then, he was Good Old Joe. His brother needed (and received) a heart transplant. He sister was a nun. The Torres deserved a World Series, darn it. His Yankees deserved it — they had waited 18 seasons to win one.

When the Yankees beat the Braves the first time, I could hear yelps of satisfaction from outside our window in East Rockaway, Long Island — nominally Met territory. I cursed and muttered and cursed some more. Stephanie, a good New Yorker at heart, knew they weren’t my team, but gave me just a bit of a look that said, “Can’t you be happy for them?” I gave her more of a look that said, “Absolutely not. You’ll see.”

What good New Yorker would dare deprive swell guys like Joe and his pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre and his third base coach Willie Randolph and his bench coach Don Zimmer and his reformed veteran leaders David Cone and Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden a ring…baby?

Holy cripes. Every one of those 1996 Yankee was a Met at one time or another, some more Met than others. Coney? Darryl? Doc? You’re a Yankee, Doc? You would do this to us? You would pitch for them? You would pitch a no-hitter for them after never pitching one for us? You would do that to us after being my and my mother’s favorite player? Even after we stuck with you through the first drug suspension?

Not only did I hate the Yankees for being Yankees. I hated the Yankees for being ex-Mets. They took our heroes and then they took our city. By 2000, I was still with the same beverage magazine that I joined for just a short while in 1989. (It had been bought by a bigger publisher in 1995 and was then swallowed hole by a gargantuan one in 1999. The company got bigger. I felt smaller.) In the years immediately preceding 2000, I was surrounded at work by Yankees fans every day. It didn’t matter that their knowledge of the game, let alone their team, had some obvious holes in it. Never mind that with few exceptions I didn’t hear a lot about life before 1996 from them. They were, as I said, ubiquitous.

I hated their fans more than I disliked any individual player or manager or owner. Kenneth Lay didn’t have such a sense of entitlement. Their championships had longer GOOD UNTIL dates than anybody else’s. Some other team won last year? They were old news this year. The Yankees win last year? They’re the champs, baby! They fancied themselves, as well, the fun police of baseball. Beat them 9-8 when your final pinch-hitter singled in the winning runs against their allegedly impenetrable closer? “Who’s got the rings? You’re in second place. You haven’t won anything. Yankees BABY!” They knew no humility and less shame. Why any of us bothered to enmesh ourselves in any cult but theirs was beyond them.

Stephanie saw it. She understood not long after ’96 what I meant by “you’ll see.” She saw how the team her husband bled for got ignored in the city they played in and how she herself had to take grief for modeling that team’s regalia. It wasn’t Braves fans invading New York who were making our lives unmerry. It was Yankees fans and their amen corner. Stephanie didn’t listen to WFAN but she saw every suck-up local anchorman and anchorwoman spout the pinstriped party line. She took a job in lower Manhattan in 1999 and had to put up with wave upon wave of obnoxious Yankee reveler descending on City Hall for yet another parade of arrogance. She didn’t like the Yankees either. Mostly she felt bad that both of us had to put up with their fans.

So we had the Braves on the field and the Yankees lurking in the foreground every time we tried to get a little something for ourselves in 2000. We — the few, the proud, the Mets fans — could enjoy baseball but not without those twin specters just waiting to have our way with us. I don’t think any other team’s fans had two bullies kicking sand in their faces. Getting to October became paramount because we had to assert ourselves against of both of them the way we hadn’t or didn’t get the chance to in 1999. I almost didn’t want to bother with the 2000 regular season.

But that would’ve been a mistake. A baseball season, even the feyest among them, is too good to wish away. I didn’t get up at five in the morning in March to not watch my team and I wasn’t planning on going to bed until late October.

Screw the Braves!

Screw the Yankees!

Let’s Go Mets!

I was living the life of my childhood fantasies. I made it to 25 games (19-6) at Shea Stadium in 2000. During all of the 1970s, I only got to go to 11. There was nobody to stop me and were plenty to encourage and accompany me. Just the year before, Major League Baseball went milestone-happy and took votes on an All-Century Team. It made me think of who I would choose if I were putting together a lineup of my own for any given afternoon or evening in Flushing.

1B: Joe — Funny story about Joe. On the Thursday in 1990 that I got a call at work from my father telling me that I should come home immediately, that my mother was taking the turn for the worse, Joe got fired from the beverage magazine. Actually, there’s nothing funny about that at all for either one of us, except a few weeks later, I called Joe to see how he was doing. From that, we became friends for the next decade, based almost entirely on a mutual and generational fondness for the Mets. Joe’s the one who keeps score and tells me about it. If Pete Rose could calculate his batting average on his way to first base, Joe could tell you how many of his hits had come while he was scoring Pete Rose at-bats (if Pete Rose had been a Met). So Joe belongs at first. He zones in on the task at hand like nobody I’ve ever known. One Sunday he verbally and vocally undressed Takashi Kashiwada and Cory Lidle because they were turning a 10-0 romp into a 10-1 thrashing. I was satisfied with a nine-run victory but he wasn’t. Joe wanted to score a shutout and Joe only rooted at one speed…Joe’s.

2B: Richie — In terms of instant impact and subsequent elevation, Richie was my Gregg Jefferies. I had barely met him via AOL when I decided there was practically nobody I was better off knowing or going to games with. Almost every dramatic moment that broke out in 1999 happened on our watch: the comeback against Wells and Toronto; Matt Franco vs. Mariano Rivera ; Game 162 when Melvin Mora scored on Brad Clontz’s wild pitch to extend the season. A week earlier, he and I, along with his son traveled to Philadelphia to view the Mets’ freefall in progress. When Rickey Henderson grounded into the last outs, I never felt lower…until I got a look at Richie. I practically had to peel him off the Veterans Stadium concrete. A week after that, once Mora duckwalked across home plate, he grabbed me, hugged me and whispered “they didn’t choke” into my previously disbelieving ears. I’d never particularly wanted a big brother before then. Now I had one.

SS: Laurie — Like Richie, Laurie provides strength up the middle. Nothing gets by her. The only person I ever knew who could root with a straight face for the Mets and the Braves when there wasn’t an inch of common ground between the two. But Laurie had her own code of ethics, not giving up on players and teams until she absolutely had to. I called her a promiscuous fan. She threw the Braves overboard at last in the ’99 playoffs. By then, she had introduced me to the only Major League baseball player I ever got to know, even a little, as well as his wife. That was entrée into another world whose sights I won’t ever forget. One night late in the ’98 season, I got to join this player’s “entourage,” lingering among Met family and friends outside the clubhouse while our boy got himself showered and dressed. I don’t feel comfortable dropping the guy’s name because I was just a hanger-on in all of this, but let’s just say he was a player for whom it would be hard to find a replacement.

3B: Chuck — The Mets were always converting somebody who played something else to third base, so I’m giving the job to my best friend, somebody who knew just enough Mets to engage me in hours-long conversations about them. The first game I ever went with him to was ended when Dave Magadan hit a eleventh-inning home run against the Pirates. Chuck, who had about a thousand percent less emotional capital invested in the outcome than me, was the only one among the two of us to shout, “FUCK YOU PIRATES! FUCK YOU!” Later, he admitted he had no idea where that came from, but we could never discuss the Pirates after that without calling them by their full name.

LF: Joel — He was this team’s first pick, way back in eighth grade. We once waited out a field trip by playing Met Hangman. His clues involved the roof Shea was never going to get and the thumb whose ligaments Dave Kingman tore diving in the general direction of a fly ball. That was in left, so Joel’s in left. To compound matters, he moved toward the Left Coast in 1993, coming thisclose to raising his son a Diamondbacks fan before fate sent him from Phoenix to Northern California. Not New York, but far from conversion temptation.

CF: Jace — The first of many non-axe murderers to enter my life via a technology I didn’t understand, Jason quickly moved beyond the virtual realm after we started e-mailing in 1994. By 2000, we were each other’s go-to game companions. He even brought his own late-innings substitute, wife Emily, to Shea to make for the most enjoyable centerfield platoon since Mark Carreon and Daryl Boston. (Wait, that didn’t come out right.) Jason was a brilliant writer, a devastating observer, a hilarious storyteller and, best of all, as fucked up as any Mets fan I knew. That did come out right; I can offer no higher praise. His mission was to collect every baseball card that any Met had ever appeared on, or perhaps a baseball card for every Met who had every played. It was hard to follow and it was way harder to actually do, seeing as how there have been plenty of Mets who didn’t earn traditional cardboard. One night in September 2000, I slipped him three 1975 Tidewater Tides. I doubt the actual Jay Kleven, Randy Sterling and Brock Pemberton ever made their significant others as happy as their images intoxicated Jace.

RF: Rob — I always liked the way Lindsey Nelson would give the lineups, ending with “and around in right, Rusty Staub”. Rob is around in right because he’s almost always around being right. From the time we found ourselves working together in 1992, he made only sense, left behind only good ideas. Rob could channel Bill James without the standard dose of making you feel like an idiot for not having known what he was telling you in advance. As one whose mantra is that old chestnut about never looking as good as you do when you win and never looking as bad as you do when you lose, Rob was a calming influence during those jumpy Bobby V years when there were actually days when I had to get away from the Mets. I needed a distraction from what was supposed to be my diversion. That’s what rooting for the Mets was like then.

There were others I counted myself fortunate to know, but this was my starting lineup, the people I’d go to war or games with if I needed to pencil in names.

No, I haven’t forgotten the battery. I get to pitch. It’s my conceit, I’m the pitcher. And that means I get a personal catcher. That job goes to my wife. Nobody else could handle my stuff nearly as well.

I loved bringing Stephanie to Mets games. She liked being brought. Every now and then. More then than now. Keep her out of the sun. And the cold. And extra innings. Yeah, I may be exaggerating her fondness for going to Mets games but she was always up for a newish experience. In 2000, somebody she worked with got us into a Diamond View Suite. That she could deal with. Better yet, she didn’t at all mind our midsummer sojourns to medium-sized Midwestern cities whose sole attraction was their baseball team. Outsiders assumed she kicked and screamed when I mapped out our itinerary but it wasn’t like that. Ballparks, she believed, were kind of like museums and any museum was worth going to once.

I liked my museums on a daily basis and never came closer to achieving that ideal than I did as July turned into August in 2000. I went to a game against the Cardinals on Saturday with Joe. The Mets won (newly acquired Mike Bordick — Ordoñez was out for the year and Mora, sadly, wasn’t cutting it at short — homered to lead off my hundredth win). I went the next day with Jason and Emily. The Mets won (announcing their Ten Greatest Moments and bringing back everybody from Willie Mays to Rafael Santana). Two nights later, I went with folks from work and saw the Mets beat the Reds. The next afternoon, I was joined by an out-of-town friend. The Mets beat the Reds again. I went to four Mets games in five days and the Mets won each game. Could it get any better?

It could. The day after all that, Stephanie and I flew to Cleveland. America’s North Coast. Home of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. But mostly Jacobs Field. Friday night, thanks to an Ohio-bred co-worker’s season-ticketed parents, we were treated to really great seats at the Jake. The Indians won a back-and-forth affair against the Angels when Jim Thome homered in the bottom of the ninth. The crowd went nuts, but not as much as I did when Roberto Alomar banged a foul bunt off the press box window and it bounced to Stephanie’s feet. My wife scooped up a foul ball. We had invited along a Cleveland couple I knew. The husband shook his head. He’d been going to Tribe games all his life and had never sniffed a foul.

We flew home to New York and the following Thursday Stephanie accompanied me to fulfill a lifelong dream. We took the D train to 155th Street and stood on the site of the Polo Grounds, her snapping pictures of me looking solemn in front of a plaque, and me soaking up as much of Bobby Thomson’s aura as was available.

For two weeks, my existence was explicitly about baseball and almost only baseball. My wife was my enabler and my partner. My friends were perfect company when she opted to stay home in the air conditioning. We even bought a jar of B&G Pickles because, for that one season, B&G Pickles were the official pickles of the New York Mets. This was high summer, 2000. Life didn’t get any better.

Due to the length of our season, the story of 2000 is presented in three parts. Part II follows in a separate post.

Due to the length of our season, the story of 2000 is presented in three parts. Part I appeared in a previous post.

Life would get no better if the Braves and Yankees continued to lurk. Lurk they did and down they could bring us. At the end of June and the beginning of July we got a taste of just what might lie in store for us come October if we got that far…which, all fun aside, was the whole point of 2000. My pastime was business too serious to completely enjoy.

As soon as tickets went on sale, Jason and I zeroed in on the first Braves series which started June 29. It wasn’t only the first rematch of the ’99 NLCS but marked the return of John Rocker to New York. He had superceded Chipper as most bastardly Brave in town. The Mets built a canopy to protect the Atlanta bullpen. Security was everywhere. And I was nowhere in sight. My ticket went by the wayside as I was stranded in Toronto on business. A thunderstorm KO’d my flight and Air Canada didn’t see fit to charter me a new one. The Braves beat the Mets and I slept fitfully if at all, forced onto a 7 AM plane the next morning.

I made it to Shea for the second showdown but I could’ve stayed in bed. Or Canada. Hampton didn’t have it (we’d been warned he didn’t do well versus the Braves) and the Mets trailed 8-1. I thought about going home and burying my face in a pillow. But I stayed for the bottom of the eighth, stayed awake and was rewarded with:

Four Met hits.

Four Met walks.

Three Brave pitchers.

Five Met runs.

One paper cup I chewed on for luck.

Not a word of encouragement between me and Jason even if most of the other 52,831 on hand were going bananas. It just seemed like bad form to display excitement.

A two-run single from Fonzie to tie the game.

One pitch from Terry Mulholland to Mike Piazza. Why just one pitch? Because that’s all The Man would let him have.

In the most electric swing of his brilliant Met tenure, Mike showed Mulholland no mercy. He smashed the ball on a line only as high as it needed to be and far as it could possibly go. If the left field auxiliary scoreboard didn’t get in the way, that distance would be immeasurable. What could be reckoned was Mike had just capped the second 10-run inning in Mets history, and as fast as one could chew through a paper cup, the Mets led (and beat) the Braves 11-8. There was hope for us against them yet.

The Yankee end of the equation was a different story. We’d already seen them twice in 2000 up at (genuflection alert!) The Stadium. On a Friday night, Mike hit a grand slam off the great Roger Clemens who was very human when he faced Piazza. On Saturday, Rob and I ventured into enemy territory to see if we could make it two in a row. We couldn’t. Bobby Jones, who was already five minutes from Norfolk, was battered and bruised and bullied by the Yankees. They could do no wrong and their fans were fucking magicians. Seriously. As the game got worse and worse, one of their loudmouths shouted to callup left fielder Jason Tyner, “TIME FOR YOU TO MAKE AN ERROR, TYNER!” And Jason Tyner made an error. Rob and I suddenly remembered a pressing issue back on Long Island and got the hell out of Dodge.

The third game was rained out, which led to one of the brighter ideas of 2000, the day-night, two-ballpark doubleheader right after the Friday night Shea game (which we lost to some cretin named Orlando Hernandez). Yankees at Mets as scheduled on a Saturday afternoon, Mets at Yankees to make up the postponement on the same Saturday night. What fun! I put on an old Subway Series t-shirt, bought some bagels and tuna and made a day of it.

I learned never to look forward to anything involving the Yankees again after that Saturday. It didn’t matter where the two teams played. Everywhere I looked there was embarrassment. The Shea game couldn’t have started worse. Chuck Knoblauch, the Yankees’ knucklehead second baseman (he threw balls into the stands, though not on purpose) got himself thrown out at second in the top of the first. I cheered. But wait! Lee Mazzilli, an old Met matinee idol and now a Yankee coach (they continue to hire our lame and our halting) told the first base ump, a minor league fill-in named Robb Cook, to call Knoblauch safe on account of Zeile interfering with the runner. That’s not intended to be a cute statement. Mazzilli (Mazz when he was ours) literally shouted “OBSTRUCTION!” at Cook and Cook obeyed. Later on, the two players ran into each other again except this time Zeile was on offense. Guess who didn’t get the call.

Parachuted into the middle of this rivalry was Dwight Gooden. He’d wandered around baseball through the spring, released first by Houston then Tampa Bay, his hometown team. If you can’t pitch for the Devil Rays, then who? Why, the world champion Yankees. Again, Steinbrenner gave an old Met another chance and for the first time since 1994, Doctor K pitched at Shea Stadium. Rusty, out of practice, blisteringly high for all I know, Dwight Gooden outpitched the recently recalled Bobby Jones. Through umpires and apparitions and the usual bullshit, the Yankees won the first game. It was one of the most awful baseball experiences I ever absorbed through a television screen.

Yet it was merely a warmup. For after this exercise in futility, both teams piled on buses (I was sure Giuliani was giving only his Yankees a police escort) and headed to (genuflection alert!) The Stadium for the nightcap. Sending the Mets into the Bronx that night was like a judge ordering the guys who were viciously attacked back to Howard Beach to finish their pizza.

Roger Clemens started for them. He nearly finished our season. His nemesis Mike Piazza faced him in the top of the second. Clemens figured if you can’t beat him, bean him. Down went Piazza. He was…

Dazed? Dead? Damaged?

It looked terrible. Apparently the great Roger Clemens was subhuman when he had to face a tremendous hitter and, by all indications, a superior human being.

Mike lived. The enmity flourished. The Mets lost, of course. Both games were Yankees 4 Mets 2. I could have sworn they were 40-2. It was that bad. Everything went right for those SOBs that Saturday. Even our “retaliation” — Glendon Rusch tickling Tino Martinez’s rear end with a breaking ball — was pacifism in action. The Mets’ “revenge” the next night, when Hampton and Benitez shut them out on seven hits, just underscored the day-late, dollar-short, Us vs. Them nature of things. The only moment that made me happy was when Steve Phillips told Jorge Posada and Mike Stanton that they couldn’t use the Shea weight room before the Sunday game. Take that, you, uh…oh never mind.

Fortunately, Bud Selig didn’t mandate we play the Skanks (yes, that’s what it came down to — childish twists on their name) more than six times a year. The Mets, as one of baseball’s three best teams, recovered and played well through August. Mike got over getting Rogered and went on another tear. It lasted until he made the cover of Sports Illustrated. Fonzie continued to do everything brilliantly. Zeile didn’t make me stop longing for Johnny O (who was succeeding in Seattle), but I’d gotten used to him.

I even found myself defending John Franco. That I didn’t see coming. I was your average Mets fan where Franco was concerned. I dismissed his saves and dwelled on his failures. Just as Zeile couldn’t live up to Olerud, I never shook the image of weightlifting, camo-clad, fireballing Randy Myers, the closer we traded to Cincinnati for Franco 10 years earlier, as a young, flamethrowing Met. Never mind that Myers bounced all over the place through the ’90s and was now retired. He was my idea of a fireman. Franco nibbled and noodged and left himself open to all manner of blooper, bleeder and bleeping, as in OH BLEEP, BLEEPING FRANCO!

But John Franco in all his New Yorkness and his orange Sanitation Department t-shirts he wore in his dad’s memory and his perseverance, spanning the last days of Davey Johnson to these days of Bobby V, grew on us. He was no longer the closer, so it was Armando we couldn’t stand. Franco was a reasonably reliable setup man. That was something we could get behind. After a win against the Astros in late August, Jace and I shared the 7 platform with the U.S. Open crowd. One of the tennis set asked us how the Mets did. They won, I said. Oh, he answered, that must mean John Franco didn’t pitch. I nearly restrung his racket for such ignorant intemperance toward our Johnny.

The Mets got to September in first place. That lasted about 18 hours or until they began what had become their annual autumnal collapse. The Mets cost themselves a playoff berth in 1998 with a five-game losing streak the last week of September (the week I swore I’d never watch baseball again). They came perilously close to doing the same with seven strategically placed losses late in the month (barely rescuing and righting themselves and cutting off my second consecutive “that’s it, I’m done with this” pledge in mid-dive). Natch, the Mets marched into St. Louis at the beginning of September 2000 and the Cardinals crapped all over them with three walkoff wins.

There were a few more displays of ineptitude those first two weeks as the Braves — beep beep! — ran and hid again, but we had mustered enough competence and built enough of a cushion to withstand another visit to the abyss. Atlanta came to Shea to clinch its ninth consecutive division title. Jason, Emily and I left before the final out but were back the next evening to anticlimactically nail down the Wild Card. My spirits were lifted when a man banging a cowbell with a drumstick wandered through the upper deck and brought us all a little lift. He had a mustache and a custom-made black Mets jersey. His name? COW-BELL MAN. His number? 10. I looked closely. It wasn’t the otherwise disabled Rey Ordoñez. This was somebody else altogether. COW-BELL MAN. He shows up and we win the Wild Card. He must know his stuff. When I passed him on the way out, I told him “what you’re doing is great!” He smiled and nodded. He agreed that what he was doing was great.

I had spoken to COW-BELL MAN. I couldn’t say that before 2000, but now I could.

The Mets were playing in their second consecutive post-season, another unprecedented event. First up, the San Francisco Giants. If we could get by them and their 97-win goodness, we could brace ourselves for Atlanta once again. We won 94. The Braves won 95 and were to face St. Louis and their 96 wins. The Mets were only the Wild Card but I didn’t see anybody as particularly better than anybody else. I just assumed the Braves would be waiting for us in the NLCS.

After that, if there was to be an after-that, maybe things wouldn’t be so bad. The Yankees had stumbled severely down the stretch and finished with a record 6-1/2 games worse than us. Yes, we were better than them for the first time since 1991 even with them beating us four out of six in June and July. It was only because the American League East was composed of spineless supplicants that the Yanks/Skanks were granted a bye into the post-season.

There was hope yet. But first there were the Giants and they were an extra large pain in the ass. Mike Hampton, who didn’t much like pitching in Japan or Atlanta also looked bad earlier in the year when he worked in San Francisco. Maybe the only place where he pitched like an ace was the Astrodome and they didn’t play baseball there anymore. I took a vacation day for Game One, good timing in that I also came down with a cold, a stuffed-head affair only compounded by Hampton’s inability to retire Ellis Burks when it mattered. The Mets got stomped on by the Giants 5-1 and looked lost at suddenly not so beautiful Pac Bell Park. Our rightfielder, the slumping Derek Bell, couldn’t handle the Giants’ new field at all, slipping on the grass, spraining his ankle and absenting himself from the Mets for the rest of the post-season. He was replaced in the cauldron of October by swift yet callow rookie Timo Perez.

How lucky could a loss be? D-Bell stopped hitting in May. Timo came up in September and looked like the leadoff hitter that the Mets had been craving since Rickey Henderson played himself out of town (Jason Tyner, you may be surprised to learn, didn’t last). Timo pulled the Mets from their September doldrums with an inside-the-park job at the Vet and he figured to give the Mets a spark. The outfield that would compete to advance deep in the playoffs was going to be, from left to right, Benny Agbayani, Jay Payton and Timoniel Perez. If I had stopped to think about it, I might have taken a few more Tylenol Colds and turned my set off right there.

Al Leiter (16-8) pitched a beauty in Game Two. Fonzie homered. We were up 4-1 in the ninth, ready to fly east with the NLDS knotted at two. All Armando Benitez needed to do was secure three outs.

Yeah, that’s all.

J.T. Snow hit a three-run job that barely cleared the right field wall at Pac Bell. Barely didn’t matter. The Mets and Giants were tied and if I’d had a plug nickel, I wouldn’t have wasted it on the chances that the Mets were going to come home with a win or a prayer of facing the Braves in the next round. But for reasons I’ll never understand, Darryl Hamilton, who’d been injured most of the year, doubled off of Felix Rodriguez. And Payton, in the coda portion of his three-season rookie year, singled him in. The Mets led 5-4. In the bottom of the tenth, fearsome Barry Bonds had a chance to reverse fortune against John Franco. But Franco got the borderest of borderline calls (I guess we could get a few when the Yankees weren’t on the field). It was strike three and a Met win.

The series returned to New York and we were every bit as alive as San Francisco was. For the second consecutive October, I had tickets to the first two post-season games to be played at Shea. This was something I dreamed of going back to childhood, when I began to comprehend that regular people could actually go to playoff and World Series games, that they weren’t reserved for celebrities (not even those starring in new Fox sitcoms). I didn’t have tickets in ’69 or ’73 or ’86 or ’88. 1999 was my first year with that honor. I was there for Todd Pratt’s LDS-winner off Matt Mantei. It wasn’t just an unimaginable moment of bliss in and of itself, but I was there. Do you hear me? I was there! And I was here again. My cold was dragging on but I felt great.

We all — Jason, Emily (it was their dime I was on for this one), their friend Danielle, Laurie and I — felt fantastic before a pitch was thrown in Game Three. The out-of-town scoreboard was the reason. The Cardinals had just finished off the Braves in three straight. The road to the World Series would wind through St. Louis, not Atlanta. 56,269 right arms, safe from karmic consequence, mock-chopped in celebration. There was one dissenter. Laurie refused to join in. Alas, she hadn’t completely wrung all the Braveliking out of her system.

The Giants scored two in the fourth off of Rick Reed. The Mets stayed silent until the sixth when Timo (already better than Bell) brought home Bordick. In the eighth, Fonzie doubled against Robb Nen, scoring Lenny Harris. We were tied at two and we would remain tied at two for what seemed like hours. The game started a little after four on a Saturday afternoon when it was light and seasonably cool. Now it was dark and cold, matching the state of my sinuses this Saturday night. I knew enough to bring gloves. They fought off frostbite and helped me clap louder.

The ninth and tenth and eleventh and twelfth all passed without a score change. The Giants hadn’t tallied since the fourth; our pen was brilliant. By the bottom of the thirteenth, the Giants had run through all their relievers whom I’d heard of. They were down to Aaron Fultz. He faced Benny Agbayani. And Benny set all of our clocks back to March, back to Tokyo time. From the upper deck on the third-base side, we could see his fly ball had wings. It disappeared over the fence and the next sound you heard was barking.

Who let the dogs out?

Who? Who? Who?

Who let the dogs out?

Don’t get me wrong. I was happy. I was ecstatic. I was warm (or perhaps fevered) all over. We now led this best-of-five 2 games to 1. We could win tomorrow. Germ-dissemination be damned, I’m grabbing everybody I know in this row and picking them up with the superhuman strength I gain from Met playoff walkoff home runs.

But Who Let The Dogs Out?. I was more of an L.A. Woman man, myself, remembering how Mis-Ter MO-JO RIS-in’! played underneath every big moment in ’99. The Baha Men were all right, I supposed, but the Cardinals and the Mariners claimed them, too. Was this really our fight song? Our battle cry? Our good-luck charm? Who Let The Dogs Out? What did that even mean?

The only artist less likely than the Baha Men to win me over that weekend was Bobby Jones. When John McGraw managed the Giants (the New York Giants, thank you very much), he referred to his longevity as something akin to the centerfield flagpole. He, like it, had always been there. In that spirit, Bobby Jones was our wallpaper. He came up in 1993 with a touch of fanfare but then faded into the background almost immediately. The most interesting thing about him was he was from Fresno, California, hometown of George Thomas Seaver. That was the only trait Robert Joseph Jones shared with our greatest pitcher. Bobby was OK. He had an All-Star first half in ’97 but just as we came to count on him, he tumbled into mediocrity. 2000 was his worst year of all, so bad that he was sent down to the Tides to get himself fixed.

It worked. Jones was perhaps the Mets’ steadiest pitcher in the second half, starting with the surprise complete game he threw against the Cardinals on Ten Greatest Moments day. That may not have made the list but what we were about to see could have.

I attained tickets for Game Four the old-fashioned way. I called TicketMaster and got through. They weren’t great — last row of the mezzanine in fair territory in left, but they were at Shea. It was colder on Sunday than it was on Saturday but I was prepared. Old down coat over Mets jacket over hooded sweater over, somewhere down there, a Mets t-shirt. Gloves plus wool cap. Even a scarf. And longjohns. It was almost enough, too. This was Jet weather, the wind whipping off Flushing bay, making field-goal kicking a nightmare should it come to that.

Two of my guests were Richie and his son. I hadn’t seen nearly enough of Richie to suit me this year. My other ticket was given to Joe. It felt strange at first because my friendship with Joe had endured outside my various intersecting orbits. I almost had the feeling he preferred it that way. Joe’s scorebook talk was an acquired taste. I’d been listening to it for a decade and I wasn’t used to it. But Joe, this is Rich and Rich Junior; Rich and Rich Junior, this is Joe. They shook hands and Joe filled in his scorebook. Business as usual.

Except that this was Game Four of the playoffs and it was freezing and I still had a cold and every time I blew my nose (which was often), feathers would fly out of my old down coat. There was a Forrest Gump quality to it. You go to a Mets playoff game, you never know what you’re gonna get.

You might, for example, get the first no-hitter in Mets history. Ventura homered immediately to grab us a 2-0 lead and Bobby Jones did the rest. He retired the Giants in order in the first and the second and the third and the fourth. Jeff Kent, nearly everybody’s least-loved ex-Met (and the eventual league MVP), doubled inches over Robin’s glove in the fifth to shatter the no-hit dream but what followed was, if you can believe it, even better. Jones worked around Kent, two flyouts, two unintentional intentional walks and Dusty Baker’s bizarre decision to let pitcher Mark Gardner bat for himself and he wriggled out of the inning with no runs scored. Never mind the baserunners — this was perfection! The old Bobby Jones would have dug a hole. Jones 2.0 had all the bugs removed.

Inspired, the Mets scored two more to take a 4-0 lead. The rest was Jones, back to routine perfection. No Giant runner reached base in the sixth or the seventh or the eighth. Chants of Bah-BEE! And Bah-Bee JONES! went up. Both sounded stilted and I knew why. 1) Shea Stadium had never seen fit to cheer Bobby Jones with any great affection before; and 2) Who knows how to cheer wallpaper anyway?

Our section kept itself warm following the lead of one particular fan, a great supporter of the Anheuser-Busch Companies. The guy drank and yelled at Barry Bonds, theoretically with earshot of his barbs, all of which were, in essence, YOU SUCK BARRY! First, I was annoyed. We’re at a potential clinching game, we’re being treated to the pitching performance of a lifetime and you’re taunting one of the greatest hitters any of us have ever seen? Hey pal, tempt fate much? Have another beer. But as Barry never broke out, it got kind of funny and hard to resist. When Bonds came up for his penultimate turn, we were all doing some variation of YOU SUCK BARRY! All of us except our role model. He was up getting more beer. When he came back, row upon row reminded him that he missed the fun.

Well, not all of it. Bobby was on the mound when the ninth started. Marvin Benard grounded out. Bill Mueller did the same. The final batter was You Suck Barry Bonds. He lined out to Jay Payton.

The New York Mets were winners of the 2000 National League Division Series, three games to one.

I grabbed Richie and did a hug, clean and jerk. I turned to Joe. He inked an 8 for Bonds’ at-bat and then clapped. Joe was Joe to the end, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. We embraced for the only time I can remember.

Who Let The Dogs Out? blasted from the Mets trumped-up loudspeakers. It was a great song. The Mets were great. Bobby Jones was great. Winning this series was great. The only thing that wasn’t so hot was what I overheard as I peeled off my layers on the train ride home. The Yankees, playing a do-or-die game in Oakland, scored six runs in the first. They’d win their series that night. I thought we might be rid of them and the Braves in one cathartic swoop. Guess not.

The Mets Express, such as it was, rolled into St. Louis. Mike Hampton found a mound to his liking and flattened the Cardinals in the first game. Game Two was close but we pulled that out, too. Mike Piazza, a notorious October underachiever, was smacking Redbird hurlers all about Busch. Fox had miked third base coach John Stearns who was heard to say “The Monster’s Out of the Cage!” Mike had never really had a nickname. “Mike” said it all. But to the Cardinals, he was a monster. And we were two games from the World Series.

Don’t know how they managed it, but some combination of Jason, Emily and Danielle had secured six tickets for each National League Championship Series game at Shea. Once again, I’d get to go to every one of them. I paid for my share and invited Laurie and, because it was starting in daylight and it wasn’t at all chilly, Stephanie to Game Three. Reeder pitched and, in a rare clutch situation, didn’t have it. The Cardinals flew away with it but the oddest thing was it didn’t feel desperate. It was a lovely fall afternoon in the upper deck and I was with most of my favorite people in the world. Stephanie wore the 2000 PLAYOFFS hoodie I spent a pretty penny on and drew jealous looks from the rest of our crowd. If that was our worst problem, we were in luck.

Sunday night was more like it baseballwise. Emily’s father joined the crew while I brought Andrea from the beverage magazine, one of the Mets-sympathizers who never gave into our office’s Yankee hegemony. We were in the upper deck again.

Really, we almost weren’t. I was convinced the upper deck would soon, like the Cardinals, be history. In the bottom of the first, Timo doubled off Darryl Kile. Then Fonzie doubled. Robin doubled. Mike doubled. Zeile, the piker, grounded out. But Benny doubled. Add it up and the Mets had scored four runs.

For every double, every fan, including Emily’s dad but save for me and Andrea, jumped up and then down. Up and then down. The upper deck itself jumped up, then down. Up and then down. As much as I supposed my life had been mere prelude to a great Met championship, I didn’t think it would literally work out that way, that the Mets would take a 3-1 lead on the Cardinals while I and 20,000 others fell to field level and the mezzanine became the new upper deck.

To my surprise and delight, 1960s municipal architecture was stronger than I had figured. The ballpark stayed in one piece. The Cardinal staff was left in fragments. Even with Timo running wild and Fonzie hitting and Zeile joining in the double barrage and the Monster homering and Glendon Rusch picking up for a diminished-from-perfection Bobby Jones, Shake Stadium withstood its own frenzy.

Up! Down! Up! Down! DiamondVision wasn’t directing this. This was self-taught behavior. Jump! Jump! This is either a Van Halen reunion or a mass suicide pact. Whatever. The Mets won 10-6. There were 55,665 survivors.

As Andrea and I waited for the 7 to take us back to Woodside and then Long Island, who should be on the same platform but COW-BELL MAN? This time he was carrying a birdcage. Guess what was inside it? A stuffed cardinal. He had it rigged so he could make it bob up and down while his associate (even COW-BELL MAN had an entourage now) hit the play button on a boom box.

Who let the dogs out?

Who? Who? Who?

Who let the dogs out?

Every time I’d hear Who Let The Dogs Out? for the rest of my days, no matter how derisive the context (it was usually played as part of some sort of Worst Sports Song ever countdown), I would get goosebumps. Or dogbumps.

The finale almost felt like a formality. How had the Mets gone from edge-of-the-seat to sit-back-and-relax inside a week? These weren’t the same Cardinals who whacked us in early September. Maybe they simply couldn’t equal the majesty of the Big Met Machine.

Game Five had us in the mezzanine. I’d arranged to meet Rob outside Gate E an hour ahead of the first pitch, but we missed each other from a range of 20 feet and barely made it in for the start. That was the only gaffe of what became the single most magical night I’ve ever experienced at Shea Stadium.

Mike Hampton pitched flawlessly.

Timo and Fonzie fueled a three-run first.

Todd Zeile drove in three himself.

And the National League pennant was counted down to, out after out after out.

Matters seemed so settled that I could really notice where I was. To my left was Jason, the Mets fan I met online as if through some jock-obsessed dating service. To my right was Rob, who had worked a desk over from me for a couple of years a long time ago. I met them both when New York’s bout of Mets fever was in remission. That means that no matter how I found them, they were pure of heart. Like me, they never stopped rooting for the Mets. Rob, my friend since 1992, and Jason, my friend since 1994, were the two people with whom I hunkered down most intently during the victory drought of the early and mid-’90s. Maybe I would’ve been pals with each of them if we had met when the Mets were on the upswing, but meeting them when they weren’t made my friendship with each, on this pinnacle night, that much more meaningful.

When Rick Wilkins (an almost-forgotten face from one of our growing pains years) lofted a fly ball to Timo Perez in center to crown the New York Mets champions of the oldest established professional baseball league, I turned left and hugged Jason. Then I turned right and hugged Rob. It was the moment I had waited 14 years for and I was between exactly the two people I would’ve wanted had I ever thought about it.

The Mets win the pennant! The Mets win the pennant!

That’s who let the dogs out.

Gosh, we’d even surpassed my beloved 1999. Long live the new century.

They gave Hampton the MVP of the NLCS. Sure, he pitched 16 shutout innings, but it could’ve gone to Alfonzo (8 hits), Perez (8 runs) or Zeile (8 RBI). But this Mike was a good choice. When they showed the presentation on DiamondVision, a cheer went up. It would be the last time Mike Hampton would be cheered when he pitched at Shea Stadium, but we couldn’t have known that then.

Normally I would take the subway to Woodside or, depending on the vagaries of the LIRR, Penn Station to get home. But Rob had his car, so I parted ways with Jason, Emily and Danielle, my constant companions across two Octobers, and went with him. Rob had parked in the lot across Roosevelt Avenue and given the milling of the sellout crowd, we had to take a long walk to get there. We said almost nothing to each other. Rob was usually quiet. I was just mesmerized by what I was watching.

Did you see ever Avalon? In the opening scene, the old man through whose eyes the story is told is flashing back on arriving in America on the Fourth of July in 1914. In his mind, children are running through the streets of Baltimore waving sparklers. And it’s silent. That’s what the outside of Shea Stadium and Roosevelt Avenue reminded me of on Monday night, October 16, 2000. There was noise to be sure. There was honking and yelling, but it all felt like it was taking place in dreamy slow-motion. People waved instantly bought t-shirts and climbed up on light poles and were just happy. Neither Rob nor I had to say a word. The night said it all to us. The Mets had won the pennant.

Due to the length of our season, the story of 2000 is presented in three parts. The exciting conclusion follows in a separate post.

Due to the length of our season, the story of 2000 is presented in three parts. This is the exciting conclusion. Parts I and II appeared in previous posts.

In 1904, John McGraw, a baseball visionary if ever one lived, refused to play the World Series. There was no rule saying he had to and he dismissed the American League as a bunch of bushers. A year later, the ultimate championship round was codified and had to be contested.

Too bad. When I woke up on Tuesday morning (called in sick…or joyful; can’t remember anymore), I was overcome with a revelation. We were the champions. We were the only champions. The A.L. still didn’t have a winner. So if we could stop baseball altogether — an earthquake, a wildcat strike, a well-placed bribe — we would remain the only champion of 2000. We would be No. 1.

That wasn’t going to happen, but it was a lovely thought. I paced around the house humming “We are the NationalLeagueChampions, my friend…” For 24 hours, that was all we had to be.

Everything began to fall apart that Tuesday night when the Yankees beat Seattle for the American League flag. Damn it, I was rooting for the Mariners. They had Oly. They had Alex Rodriguez who was said to be coming our way in the off-season. And, best of all, they weren’t the Yankees.

I wasn’t so much afraid of the Yankees. I just wanted them over and done with. They’d hung around far too long and we deserved the stage to ourselves. But mine was the minority opinion in New York. The Mets and the Yankees meeting in October was off-the-charts orgasmic to the media. This was a real Subway Series, 1950s style. This hadn’t happened since there were Dodgers in Brooklyn and Giants in Harlem. It seemed like it would never happen.

In that spirit, I’d like to gloss over it as much as possible.

Practically every Met who did good things against San Francisco and St. Louis did not-so-good things against the Yankees. The most glaring example was our recent catalyst Timo Perez. Without Derek Bell’s Pac Bell injury, we might not have succeeded at all because Timo turned things around. He did that again in the first game of the World Series but not the way we wanted him to. In the top of the sixth with no score, Timo was on first when Todd Zeile, having ingratiated himself at last to my goodwill, lifted a long fly ball that was going…going…

Timo could see that it was a home run. He began to trot, even waving his finger like an umpire to signal it was over the left field wall. The guy was called up in September and in October he’s doing shtick. But I didn’t see that until the replay. What I did see as it unfolded in unforgiving real time was that Zeile’s ball hit the top of the left field wall at Yankee Stadium and unlike Jeffrey Maier, whoever sat nearest to it backed off. David Justice caught it on a bounce. The next image I recall was of Derek Jeter grabbing the relay and throwing home. It was at that exact juncture that I divined:

1) OH SHIT! TIMO DIDN’T RUN! IF HE HAD, THERE’D BE NO RELAY!

2) We’re screwed. We’re gonna lose the World Series to the Yankees.

…gone.

Yeah, I watched every pitch of every inning of every game the rest of the way and I took every bit of it as serious as death and refused to give in until the very last out was made in Game Five, but when I saw that Timo Perez, a guy nobody’d heard of two months earlier, was going to have a play made on him by Derek Jeter, the most overexposed baseball player in the universe, I knew that was it.

Perez was out at the plate. And for what it’s worth, Zeile had gone into a trot, too.

Game One was lost then and there but it officially took 12 innings. The winning hit was delivered not by Jeter or Bernie Williams or Jorge Posada or Paul O’Neill or Tino Martinez or any of the throbbing headaches who had pained baseball so much since 1996. It came from Jose Vizcaino, the Mets’ shortstop before Rey Ordoñez. Of course it did.

Game Two was lost early and often, mostly when Roger Clemens pitched against Mike Piazza in the most eagerly anticipated encore since Ali-Frazier II. There was a broken bat and an unprecedented flinging of that bat and a lot of huffing and puffing, but when you get right down to it, the Yankees scuffed up NLCS MVP Mike Hampton and built a 6-0 lead and Clemens cruised and after he left, the Mets scored five runs in the ninth but no more. When it was over, I lay prostrate on the living room floor, pounded the carpet with my fists and literally let out the longest, most agonized scream of my life. It was Game Two so I acted like I was two.

We won Game Three at Shea. I didn’t go. I didn’t go to any World Series game. What little satisfaction that was to be derived from actual World Series play was from Armando retiring Justice for the last out. I screamed again but this time out of vengeance. TAKE THAT YOU MOTHERFUCKERS! It was good to get a win, but if I was enjoying this, it was hard for anybody within the sound of my voice to tell.

Game Four was lost on the very first pitch, one Jeter drove over the wall at Shea, where there was discernible cheering because Yankee fans were sitting where I should’ve been. Bobby Jones pitched his last game for the Mets. It had been a long time since San Francisco. Mike hit a home run but when another one would’ve done us some good, Torre brought in the otherwise decrepit ex-Met — didn’t the Yankees scavenge castoffs from any other organization? — David Cone to get him out.

Game Five was so awful that all I clearly remember was Al Leiter’s heart and soul practically dropping out of his insides right there on the mound in the top of the ninth when Luis Sojo tapped the weakest of grounders into the outfield to drive in not one but two runs because his catcher, Piazza, couldn’t block the plate. (Whaddaya know? One pitch did ruin everything.) The same Piazza seemed to hit the game-tying homer in the bottom of that same inning, but it, like our season, died in center. It was a simple enough fly ball that even tin-gloved Bernie Williams could corral it.

I turned off the TV. It was over. The World Series for which we had waited almost a decade-and-a-half was over in five games. It didn’t go well. The Yankees beat the Mets at Shea Stadium. I’m surprised the sun ever came up again.

Giuliani had proposed some kind of joint celebration at City Hall to pat us on the head, but the Mets declined to take part. I don’t know that they ever got as much as a certificate of good conduct. The Yankees received their annual municipal worship session. Stephanie’s job had moved to within a few blocks of the World Trade Center, still close enough to City Hall to know how unpleasant the neighborhood would be under the celebratory circumstances. Having learned from experience, she stayed home from work on parade day.

I went to the office the morning after the Series ended. I had to. A year earlier, after Kenny Rogers walked Andruw Jones and ended that month of months, I called in sick. I was told that everybody expected it and nobody held it against me. This time, it was Luis Sojo infecting me. If I was going to be one of the company’s signature Mets fans, I had to be there to take whatever was to be dished out by the ubiquitous front-runners who called themselves diehard Yankees fans. The worst part was finding the fax machines covered with crude “dead puppy” drawings, dissing us and our Baha Men.

Generally, I kept a low profile and indulged in several rounds of melancholy e-mail to and from the other true believers with whom I had kept the faith throughout October. Hey guys, I wrote, chin up. Leiter threw 142 mostly beautiful pitches. Zeile basically called Jeter an insincere automaton and for that we should love him. And we still have the pennant.

Which, by the way, Atlanta didn’t. So there was that to hang our collective hat on. And as much as the World Series didn’t pan out, there was something to be said for having been a part of it. No, not because we were privileged to step on the same hallowed grass at (genuflection alert!) The Stadium, but because, except for the results, it was sort of, kind of fun.

The post-season was laced with High Holy Nights, so having a Mets World Series in our home felt like both a blessing and a tremendous responsibility. I placed a WFAN Let’s Go Mets! sign in the living room window to let our neighbors know exactly where we stood, and we planted ourselves on the couch for this once-every-fourteen years epiphany. Bernie and Casey, our steadfast cats, took turns wearing a new orange Mets cap I bought in one of my many merchandise frenzies; they took turns squirming out from under it as well. Stephanie, who had jabbed her right index finger silly trying to get through to TicketMaster, admitted she was perversely kind of glad I hadn’t gotten World Series tickets. She wasn’t going to join me at any stadium for games that were late and cold but she was happy we could watch them on TV together. Hell, she even picked up my superstitious vibe.

“Why won’t you reassure me that everything’s going to be all right?” I asked after fretting about winding up on the wrong side of the Subway Series tracks.

“Because I’m afraid if I say they’ll win, they won’t.”

As helpful as it would have been to have had one of us remain sane, Stephanie’s once-and-for-all absorption into the Metsopotamian culture was even better than finding out she knew who Tom Seaver was back in 1987.

Despite my team being disrespected in my and its own city, it was OK to take it all so seriously in 2000. We were dispensated for our obsession. “Subway Series” was easily understood by the crowd that probably thought baseball was stupid. Well we thought they were stupid. And we didn’t care what they thought all that much to begin with. That was the beauty of building a virtual fort with my crew. There is some comfort to be had in tribal societies.

My family was benignly supportive of my mania, supportive as they could be considering they didn’t really get it. Suzan’s husband thoughtfully cautioned me “not to take it too hard” before Game One (prescient dude). But the friends I depended on to hear me out on why Steve Phillips was killing us or why Todd Zeile was a misguided notion or why Fonzie was the coolest, were, in the realm of the Mets, more like a family than my own family during the baseball-intensive period that climaxed in 2000. My Mets-above-all zeitgeist had been in effect since 1997, when Bobby Valentine first truly insinuated himself into my well-being. He and his charges gave me reason after reason to worry about them. My angst on their behalf was well-honed by October 2000 but it was also extremely genuine. I cared because I couldn’t not care.

With me every step of the way, even more than Mike and Robin and Al and Rick were the Mets fan friends I had made and kept. With baseball serving as our common denominator I realized I knew little else about these people — their politics, their music, their favorite TV shows, all of which are subjects I carry strong opinions about. I didn’t know much if anything about their jobs, their parents, their children, their backgrounds, their hopes, their dreams, their aspirations.

All I knew is they, like me, wanted the Mets to win. I didn’t need to know a whole lot more. As the years went forward, I did get better acquainted with most of them and I was never sorry I did.

What’s that they say about baseball being a kid’s game? I respectfully disagree. I played ball when I was 7 or 8. I wasn’t any good at it, but I played. But I also watched. That’s what I wanted to do. When I was in college, I tried intramural softball once and when a ball flew over my head in left field as I broke in to catch it, I called it a career (though my glove got borrowed regularly for the next four years). What I did do in college when none of my various roommates was around was stand in front of the mirror and — good lord, I can’t believe I’m telling you this — practice cheering the last out of the next World Series the Mets won.

All I ever really wanted to do was be a Mets fan. And that I got good at. I was never better than during the wistful winters, the restless springs, the high Bobby V summers and the chill autumn nights of 1999 and 2000. That was when I could be who I was meant to be and be with whom I was meant to be — my wife, my cats and my fellow Mets fans. My friends. Maybe it helped to be not so young. I was old enough to enjoy it, understand it and savor it without self-consciousness in all its unlikelihood.

In the years when the 1-to-10 needle stuck at 10, baseball and all with whom I shared it meant so much to me — so much more than I could’ve imagined when I was a kid watching by myself. I’m told I remember everything, but above and beyond any that preceded or succeeded them, these were days I’ll remember.

The year was 2000, 5 years ago.

I was 37.

Flashback Friday is a weekly tour through the years, every half-decade on the half-decade, wherein a younger Mets fan develops into the Mets fan he is today. Previous stops: 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985 (Part I), 1985 (The Exciting Conclusion), 1990 (Part I), 1990 (The Exciting Conclusion), 1995 (Part I) and 1995 (The Exciting Conclusion). Next and last stop: 2005.