So Jack McKeon played the game under protest because the lighting changed when Carlos Delgado walked to the plate against the mighty Tim Hamulack. Awww. I rooted the game under protest when Willie let Braden Looper out of the bullpen. I withdrew my protest a bit later; Jack may as well do the same.

The award for Gallant But Doomed Gesture goes to for Ted Robinson for trying to plead Looper's case before an incensed fan base. Paraphrasing: “I don't like to tell the fans what to do, but that was a groundball to the opposite field that found a hole. OK, he did walk Lo Duca, but that was a groundball. …And Looper hangs a pitch to Lenny Harris, and the Marlins have tied it. [BOOOOOOO!] And that one's harder to dismiss.” Uh-huh, Ted. Tell us which part of the inning we weren't supposed to boo again?

As for Shingo, well, either he's tipping that fastball or hitters have got used to it or it's not enough of a weapon to make the rest of the arsenal work. The experiment isn't yet into Danny Graves territory, which is to say the baseball equivalent of persisting in cold-fusion research — but the data aren't exactly promising. After watching Shingo's fastball get pounded all over September, perhaps this white boy can get away with pointing out that funk doesn't work without a backbeat.

But all this agita was the appetizer to an unexpected delicacy: The unlikely reappearance of Miguel Cairo. For one night (or at least for two plays on one night) Cairo was everything we'd hoped to have this year. There he was in the ninth, first and third with one out and Juan Encarnacion looking to return to his usual program of stabbing us through the heart, and Cairo played his grounder perfectly, running across the diamond to cut off Jeff Conine's route to the plate, driving him back toward third to be tagged out. No wasted throws, no Delgado replacing Conine at third, just an absolute textbook rundown. And then of course he finished the Marlins by driving in Reyes from second. One night doesn't redeem a terrible season — that was Cairo's 16th RBI — but we'll take it.

A less-partisan blog might consider it more accurate to say that the last two nights haven't been Met wins so much as Marlin gag jobs. We've heard of those less-partisan blogs — you want Fair and Finicky in Flushing down the hall. Round these parts, we're whispering “walkoff, walkoff” again as we fall asleep with another smile on our faces.

I spent Tuesday evening with some tremendous New York National League baseball fans. But I wasn't at Shea. Wasn't even watching the Mets. I had to pick up our game in transit and in fragments from the eighth inning on.

This was a night for New York Giants baseball and the quarterly (more or less) meeting of the New York Giants Historical Society, which actually has dissolved of late into the Giants Fan Club. We seem to be a breakaway republic from the original organization. It's not official. Nothing about this is official. It's just a bunch of guys who were New York Giants fans getting together in a Chinese restaurant in Riverdale to talk Giants baseball, the good old days and whatever comes to mind.

I'll admit to feeling like a bit of a camp follower in this group, having missed the entire existence of the New York Giants the first time around. That's why I have to attend these meetings, to get the only taste I'll ever get of what it was like to burrow into Coogan's Bluff, to descend the Brush Staircase, to sneak into the Polo Grounds when the ticket-takers weren't looking. That's something our organizer used to do 65 or so years ago. I'm guessing the statute of limitations has run out on that particular crime.

As I've hinted, indicated and implied along the way, I'm a time-displaced Giants fan. I fell in love with the idea of the New York Giants when I was a kid and everything I've read about the life they led from 1883 through 1957 only makes me root for them in memoriam more. Not the San Francisco Giants. They're just some team that plays the Mets.

Unfortunately, most of my Tuesday night cohorts have stuck with that organization from 3,000 miles away. I can see why, I suppose. They grew up in the '30s and '40s and '50s as Giants fans. Nobody warned them that someday their team would relocate. What were they going to do, become Mets fans?

Yeah, that would be what they should've done, what lots of Giants fans did, but there's something to be said for holding out and holding on, keeping the torch burning (in case Horace Stoneham should show his face at one of our meetings) back east. Guys who maintain a connection to the San Francisco Giants are more likely to want to get together to relive the New York Giants, and that works for me.

Let me not make these fellas sound sad-sackish. They're not. They know the score. They know what's going on. They're in 2005 even if they will forever regret what happened in 1958, the year the New York Giants and their Brooklyn counterparts set up shop elsewhere. As we passed around various articles and souvenirs for mutual inspection, somebody recommended a book that chronicles the Giants' first year on the West Coast.

“I'd like to get that book,” somebody else said. “And use it to heat my house.”

While I could think of a worse future for the likes of us than gathering around a distant table and rehashing with 70% accuracy what it was like back at the turn of the millennium…

“Remember the time Valentine wore a fake mustache and glasses in the playoffs? And that game where the two outfielders played cards with the bases loaded in center? Wasn't that the game with the single that went for a grand slam? Piazza hit that. He won the series. Because Pratt couldn't play. Or was that the year Tony Perez got thrown out at home by Todd Zeile because he didn't hustle?”

…I hope it never comes to that and only that. I hope our team doesn't disappear out from under us and give us nothing more than a Chinese restaurant in Riverdale three or four times a year. It's bad enough that the tenured members of the Giants Fan Club have to live in such a world. I'm merely a visitor there. I'd hate to be a permanent resident.

Ain't it always this way? Garbage Time is upon us, and so we're playing some stone-cold thrillers.

But still…take THAT, Marlins! Take that for every time we got our hearts torn out by cat-faced killer Juan Encarnacion, or by some absurd Juan Pierre bounder, or even by Ryan McGuire. Take that for Carlos Delgado and his look-at-me agent. (“WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME ABOUT BEING THREE GAMES BACK IN THE WILD CARD! CAN YOU NOT HEAR I AM AT THE JOE COCKER CONCERT! HE IS SPASMING HIS WAY THROUGH 'FEELIN' ALRIGHT' AND YOU ARE INTERRUPTING ME!”) Take that for Armando Benitez's one flawless season — and for Antonio Alfonseca while we're at it. Take that for Miguel Cabrera driving the air out of our season's lungs when we were already gasping and clawing at our throats. Take that for the bags of Soilmaster and for your incompetent grounds crew and for Jeffrey Loria and for employing Jeff Torborg.

Take that!

This was a marvelous game through and through, from Carlos Beltran's trio of terrific catches (shame on the clueless for booing him in the 12th — he came back from 0-2 to 3-2 and got under a pitch, which ain't no sin in my book) to Cliff Floyd gunning down Jeff Conine, to Willie keeping Braden Looper the hell away from the game, to Roberto Hernandez standing tall and Aaron Heilman standing taller, and so all the way down the line until Mike Jacobs sent us home happy.

And it was a fun game too — the Marlins are battered and almost pulled one out despite playing with a supremely mismatched set of players. I mean, goodness: Luis Castillo can't run, Alex Gonzalez can't throw, Paul LoDuca looks like he can't walk (though as Kris Benson found out, he can trot) and Josh Wilson looks like he can't shave. A couple of weeks ago Mike Mordecai was managing the Jamestown Jammers, for Pete's sake. (Hey, the Marlins can have Miguel Cairo if they ask nice.) Extra-inning games have their own odd rhythm: You're sure they're going to go on forever, then can't quite believe it when they collapse into one outcome or the other. But that rhythm is odder in September, with the whole 40-man roster joining the band — by the time the 11th or 12th comes around, it's improvisational baseball, and you never know who's going to get the solo.

Three at-bats were particularly fun. I love at-bats where you can challenge the person next to you — your seatmate, significant other, child, friend, random work pal, whoever you got watching from the stands or the sofa — to think along with the batter or pitcher. You wait until a fateful pitch needs to be delivered, then throw out the innocent question: So whatcha gonna throw/look for here? and wait for the lip to get bit. Here were my three:

1. Floyd in the 7th: Burnett came back from 2-0 with two absolutely deadly curve balls, leaving Cliff looking at 2-2. So, a third straight curve or the heater? Whatcha gonna throw here, A.J.? Cliff was guessing fastball, got it, and banged it off the fence to tie the game.

2. Cabrera in the 12th. Heilman had great stuff tonight — lots of slithery movement, good location, not afraid of contact. But he got lucky to get to 0-2 on Cabrera, particularly with an 0-1 fastball that was too fat and too straight. So…whatcha gonna throw here, Aaron? The obvious call was a changeup off the outside corner, and that's what Cabrera was looking for. Nuh-uh — fastball, on the corner. G'night, Miguel!

3. Jacobs in the 12th. Moehler fell a bit too in love with that inside corner, particularly after Jacobs was overeager on the 2-0 pitch and swung at an inside pitch he could do nothing with. Which made Laz Diaz's gift strike on the next pitch (the ball was clearly and obviously inside) a blessing in disguise. 2-2 — whatcha gonna look for here, Jake? He figured Moehler would try to put the ball in that spot again, and that's indeed what Moehler tried — only this time the ball was a bit higher. Bang! Ballgame.

There's a reason football starts with an “f”. So do all the other sports as far as I'm concerned.

Don't get me wrong. I like football. In November, where it belongs. Get it the fuck out of September. October, too. Even if the Mets aren't in the post-season, baseball deserves October, not so much for the playoffs and the World Series but so we can spend a month mourning and reflecting on what he have just witnessed.

But no, it starts ramming itself down our throats in late July and by September, it's jumped offsides and into the valuable media space that should by rights be maintained 24/7/365 by baseball (24/7/366 in leap years). You can't even whistle it for encroachment.

Honestly, who but those who make their living in it (players, coaches, inveterate gamblers) spend the football offseason staring out the window waiting for autumn? “Oh boy, fall is coming! And winter, too! Soon it will be cold and rainy and maybe icy! Imagine the accidents! And the football!”

No, it's horrible. The only good thing about September is that baseball is still being played, occasionally meaningfully. It was meaningful Monday night in Chicago where the White Sox were choking away their massive lead to the Tribe and in St. Petersburg of all places where the Red Sox were not playing like idiots, damn it, and in Pittsburgh where Roger Clemens' ERA floated up to 1.89, a safe distance from Doc's post-Gibby low of 1.53 (we don't have much but we have that) and in the fucking Bronx where the fucking Orioles were their usual worthless pieces of…ah, you know the rest. Fuck them, too.

I hate fall previews. I hate anything that glorifies September and everything after. I don't care which dinosaur has a new CD coming out or what fucking movie Gwyneth Paltrow is in. I like TV a lot, but I can do without being told that it's the new fall season. There's nothing new about September, a dreadful, dreadful month.

Why the dread? I haven't had to go back to school in more than 20 years, so it can't be that. I prefer warmth over cold but I'm glad to be mostly rid of the humidity, so it's not the weather. No, it's gotta be what happens to baseball in September.

It dwindles and practically disappears. In its stead we get football out the yin and the yang and then those other worthless sports. You know why they have football, basketball, hockey, golf, tennis (which they have the nerve to play at our subway stop), kayaking and the Tour de France, don'tcha?

It's to make us think we don't need baseball. That's all they're there for, to make us look bad and feel stupid. Well fuck the lot of them. I remember six years ago leaving Shea after a drab Mets loss to the Phillies on a Saturday afternoon. I had some time to kill in Woodside, so I wandered down Roosevelt Avenue and came upon an Irish bar. You know what they had written on their outdoor chalkboard to lure you in? A schedule of soccer matches.

Fuck soccer. How on earth can another sport be ballyhooed in the very borough where the Mets lost a game that very day? How can life be allowed to go on so casually?

There is no direct Mets correlation to loyalties in other sports. I like the Jets and the Giants. I know people who like the Mets but can't stand one or both of those teams. Call me in November, and we'll have a nice chat about football. Call me in December and you could easily mistake me for somebody who gives a flying wedge about who makes the NFL playoffs and such. But leave me and my game the fuck alone in September when there's so little left of it to begin with.

Play ball!

On a gentler note, I was thinking how strange it is when our favorite Mets are remembered as something else altogether. The result of that thinking is at Gotham Baseball.

Granted, all the horses that matter are in front of us, but still. We had an off-day today; the next time we have one, it'll last for six months.

Tonight I watched football. High drama given New Orleans' situation and the celebrity appeals for help for the Katrina refugees and the weird pageantry of the Saints' supposed “home” game, and at least the prospect of high drama on the field, what with Aaron Brooks and Deuce McAllister and Joe Horn doing their damnedest to write a nice little story in enemy territory.

Back in my New Orleans summers and following I became briefly infatuated with the Saints (if you know nothing about football you can fool yourself into thinking John Fourcade will lead you to the promised land), so I watched until a few minutes into the fourth quarter, when it became clear that the tide had turned for good. And then I quit. Because, hey, it was just football. I'd only managed to give it about half my attention anyway, and I'd have flipped over to watch a meaningless Met game in a second. A nanosecond. A half-nanosecond. Even if Miguel Cairo and Jose Offerman were in the starting lineup, we got crushed early, and Ice Williams pinch-hit so Willie could bring Kaz Ishii into the game. A quarter-nanosecond.

Man, it's getting dark at like 6:30 and there were a couple of trees shedding leaves today and we've got 13 left to play. How can that be? It was only like a minute ago that Carlos Beltran was taking David Wright and Jose Reyes to the gym after workouts in St. Lucie. Wasn't it? It wasn't? You're sure?

Time to cling, kids; winter's coming. Sure wish there was a game on. Gonna be saying that a lot awful soon.

The thing that never shows up in the boxscore or even The Log (10-7 on the season, likely clinching a winning record for the year; woo-hoo!) is how easily irritated I get at a Mets game. It has nothing to do with the outcome, which on Sunday was dandy, but rather the actions of those in my immediate sensory sphere.

My companion and I arrived in our seats by 12:20 for the 1:10 start because we didn't want to be Nos. 25,001 and 25,002 when Willie Randolph Bobblehead Dolls were only going to the first 25,000 (we needn't have worried). That gave me 50 minutes before first pitch to get riled up by my most peevish peeve: people who can't find their seats.

I'm sure there was a time I made the wrong turn, wandered into the wrong section, sat in the wrong row and had to be redirected. I know that when I visit a foreign ballpark, it takes me a moment or more to get my bearings. But as a fan who has entered those pearly Shea gates 300 or so times, I feel I can find virtually any seat blindfolded. Our 2001 Tuesday/Friday plan made me a master, learning by rote repetition and needing something else to think about besides Todd Zeile. When we were going to games twice a week (at least), I began to notice how clueless the plurality of daytrippers were. For every time I've been asked or, more likely, felt compelled to interpret a section, row and seat for some bewildered soul holding a ticket whose only hint of destination was the clearly marked section, row and seat printed right there in readable, bold, black ink, I could be an usher there.

No, I take that back. To be an usher there, I'd have to make myself scarce when needed to perform my duties. Then I'd have to expect a tip.

Sunday was Kiwanis Day at Shea Stadium. It was also Scout Day (the Cub and Brownie kind; Gary LaRocque was nowhere in sight). And Tropicana Batboy/Batgirl Day. And Crohn's & Colitis Awareness Day. And Sterling Awards Day. I forgot that when you show up real early for a weekend afternoon game, you are subject to a stream of ceremonies that, no matter how worthy the honoree or admirable the cause or influential the sponsor, is not why you came.

Anyway, it was Kiwanis Day. The Kiwanis have supported the Mets for “more than a decade,” which I found amusing in that the Mets have been around for 44 seasons and the first Kiwanis Club was organized in 1915. The Kiwanis do fine things and I invite one and all to learn more about their mission of service. What I found out Sunday before the game was I would be sitting one row in front of several rows of Hicksville Kiwanis members. I figured that out when various local chapters were being recognized on the field and a cheer went up behind me for Hicksville. (It's my reporter's training.)

Somewhere between the end of the Kiwanis plaques being handed out and, oh, the third inning, dozens of Hicksville Kiwanis and guests made their way up the steps of Mezzanine Section 21 to find Rows K, L and M. It was a chore for most of them. I grant you Shea Stadium has its mysteries (like the elevator that Does Not Stop On This Floor), but each section is reasonably designated these days. They even upgraded it a couple of years ago. There are two entrances to each section and sometimes somebody with Seat 24 will come in where Seat 1 is, but it's navigable. The newly stuck Row-letter appliqués have already peeled off in some places, but if you discern Row C and Row E, you can bet the one in between is Row D.

Look, it's just not that hard, people. Find your seats. Need a role model? Look no further than some of your favorite Mets: Doug Mientkiewicz, Kaz Matsui and Miguel Cairo.

Blessedly, each of them found a place to sit on Sunday. On the bench. No offense to any of them. We never really got a full dose of Minky, Kaz has been hitting and Cairo was never supposed to be more than one of Rando's Commandoes. But as the season has gone to seed, there has been less and less reason to see any of those gentlemen do anything more than sit and offer encouraging words of wisdom to their younger, more athletic, less stale teammates.

Miracle of miracles, the home team's lineup was freshened by a delightful breeze of hope floating in from Flushing Bay. Didja notice something strange about the infield Sunday?

It didn't creak.

Left to right, David Wright, Jose Reyes, Anderson Hernandez and Mike Jacobs all started. Each of them was born in the 1980s (surely a Mets first). Two of them we're happily familiar with, the other two — both 2005 Sterling Award winners — we're suddenly meeting in real time. I don't know whether Jacobs or Hernandez is the future and I doubt we'll divine their fate and ultimate functionality right away. We've seen Jakey get in and out of and back into the buggy already. Which end of the horse will he look like when it's all over? Hernandez was awfully slick with the glove but didn't do anything with the bat. Is he all that in the field and might he be a little more than he appeared to be at the plate? Let's get a taste of an answer. In mid- to late September, with a pennant race gone and two weeks remaining, the last thing Actualhead Willie needs to do is affix their butts to pine.

That Glavine kid was pretty good, too. I wish we'd had him from the time he signed his contract instead of just the last couple of months. He threw 118 pitches and only got stronger (the same could be said for my constitution when the bullpen gate didn't swing open between the eighth and the ninth). While Tommy (Tommy?) toyed with a lineup laced with a classic mix of old and new Braves poison (they even trotted out Brian Jordan to remind us that a lovely September Sunday afternoon at Shea is never but a Mets closer removed from utter ugliness), his 118 pitches were complemented by four in a row from 2002 Wild Card bolsterer John Thomson in the bottom of the sixth:

1) Ball four to Reyes

2) Double by Diaz

3) Double by Beltran

4) Homer by Floyd

Four pitches, four runs, a 4-1 lead, a 4-1 win. It's a special day, indeed, when the Mets find their way over the Braves more easily than their fans find their seats.

If we hadn't imploded at the end of August, yesterday's game would have been agonizing: Trachsel in the first inning, chasing that tricky third out like it was the end of the hallway in Poltergeist; a crap call by the ump turning a two-run single for Piazza into another Andruw Jones put-out; back-to-back homers by the Mikes giving us some desperate hope; Shingo and Zambrano quickly reminding us the hope was desperate; and our seventh-inning rally of course coming to naught despite having the heart of the order coming up.

If we'd been in a pennant race, bitterest gall. Since we're not, just another crap day at the office during garbage time. (By the way, Furcal and Andruw weren't even trying. It's some cold comfort to me that they won't be trying in the playoffs either, guaranteeing another disappointing October for the middling percentage of Fannypack Nation that bothers getting playoff tickets.)

Incidentally, it's a shame no one's writing one of those Inside the Mets accounts of this season, because I for one would love to know what's going on between Omar, Willie and the coaches and ownership. It's like Kremlinology in Flushing: Today's article of faith is tomorrow's discarded idea, obvious moves aren't made or even discussed, and the whole decision-making process is utterly mysterious.

One thing I have finally figured out is that Willie likes keeping things close to the vest with the press or outright misleading them, refusing to discuss his real motives for moves (or their lack), even when those motives make sense or are at least defensible. Couple of examples off the top of my head:

* Reyes as a leadoff hitter. I think there was a method to Willie's madness here. He finally said sometime this summer that (I'm paraphrasing) he'd been working on teaching Reyes to swing at better pitches instead of trying to remake him as a player who walks a lot, for fear of leaving him baffled at the plate. Which, after seeing Reyes' dramatically better at-bats in the second half, does make a certain amount of sense to me. (And, I'll say through gritted teeth, is in line with something Joe Morgan said about not wanting to take away Reyes's aggressiveness.) The implicit point was Willie wanted to develop him as a leadoff hitter and not further down in the lineup, with better pitch selection paving the way for working counts — from hitting strikes to hitting the right strikes, if you will. The thing of it is that the explanation only came late in the summer and then almost by accident; before that Willie offered platitudes and brush-offs where the subject was concerned. I think he was trying to protect Reyes from the media, in effect keeping them distracted by looking at OBP when Willie was trying to teach Reyes something else.

* I think something similar was going on with that stuff about Wright hitting eighth and paying his dues. That mostly didn't happen; what I think Willie was doing was offering the media a distraction in an effort to take the pressure off Wright. With Wright seemingly consigned to the No. 8 hole and being asked to pay his dues, most anything he did to build on his rookie season would look like a positive; if he'd always been ticketed for the middle of the lineup, the scrutiny would have been more intense and the pressure correspondingly greater. As it turned out, Wright didn't need coddling, but Willie didn't know that in March. What's interesting to me was Willie effectively put all the scrutiny on his own move instead of on the player; of course he never let on that that was what he was doing, so we had to figure it out.

Not that there aren't moves for which I can't come up with even a theoretical explanation:

* Trachsel/Zambrano. I have no idea what the original plan was, how it changed, or what anybody was trying to accomplish at any point.

* The bullpen. Who's in what role? And who's gonna be in that role next week? Spin that wheel! Graves and Koo are here; they're gone; they're back; Koo's gone, Graves will get the chance to audition despite having utterly flunked a rather extended audition already, yet it's been a couple of days since that was said, and no Graves in sight. Juan Padilla's finally getting to pitch, but nobody seems to acknowledge Heath Bell's on the roster, and Royce Ring can't even get that far. Looper's gonna be the closer for the rest of the year. No, maybe he won't be. But Heilman definitely won't close. No, maybe he will. Around and around we go. Wheeeeee!

* The bench. Offerman's still here despite being a surly boor who can't run the bases. Ice Williams is still here despite demonstrating that he now can neither hit nor serve as a defensive replacement. Eric Valent can do both, but he's playing golf somewhere. Anderson Hernandez is coming up if the brass can figure out which Class of 1990 prospect we could bear to release. No, he's not coming up. Oh wait, yes he is. But now that he's here, the stupendously useless Miguel Cairo is playing anyway. Does Omar think he's still in Montreal and not allowed to make roster moves?

I'm beyond being frustrated by it, because it no longer much matters — this season's lost, and I've never really thought garbage time was much good for figuring out players like Heath Bell or Anderson Hernandez anyway. I'd just like to know a little more about what was going on behind the scenes, because I sure as heck can't figure it out.