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Hello, Finazzle? I want my money back. I see the sign for your product behind home plate at Turner Field every game I watch from there and you've done nothing about cleaning the grout of the Mets' batting order let alone removing the scum that's infested almost every game we've ever played down there.

Hello?

Serves me right for depending on a product sold in every N.L. East town but ours.

You know what's particularly irksome about losing to the Braves in situations like this? I mean particularly? It's that the Mets never stop being beaten by the same fuckers who've been doing them in since 1997. Who beat us today? Andruw Jones and Chipper Jones. Sure, Francoeur played a predictably immense role (I predicted it yesterday and I am indeed agitated — and am still agitated about Julio Valera, Cesar Cedeño and Luis Aguayo from other Septembers) and of course John Thomson is still getting even with us for whatever prank Charlie Hough and Mike Bacsik played on him three years ago. But Andruw and Chipper? Same as it ever was. Time stands still and smokes 'em if it's got 'em where those two are concerned.

Andruw? OK, 45 homers, predictable enough (I can't wait 'til he tests positive). But Chipper? Chipper? Again? They just get done telling us how lame he's been all season and then he sees NEW YORK embroidered onto polyester and parties like it's 1999. They'll be waking this weasel up at the age of 78 and activating him on September 1, 2050 just so he can keep his consecutive-year streak of eating our hearts out intact.

Who's going against us Tuesday night? I mean besides us? Oh, that fresh young arm Smoltz. He's 107-3 lifetime versus the Mets. Should be fun.

Pennant fever. Get a shot for it.

As good a centerfielder as Andruw Jones is, the Mets once had a better one, even if he wasn't such hot stuff by the time he got to us. I give you 24 good reasons why the Mets should retire No. 24 for Willie Mays at Gotham Baseball.

What can you say? It was the Braves against a .500 team.

Trachsel was horrible early — how Andruw Jones didn't hit one of the several awful pitches he saw in the first inning to the moon is beyond me — then settled down and pitched quite well. Met For a Minute John Thomson was horrible early and then settled down. After that, well, pick 'em: If you're feeling superstitious, you can leave this one moaning that we played well but it's Turner Field, so the other guy broke on top. If you're feeling philosophical (like I am these days) you can say that we made the kind of mistakes teams that are still works in progress make, and those were enough to beat us. Two stuck in my craw:

1. Victor Diaz trying some ludicrous little pop-up slide in the seventh when the only chance he had was to try and steamroll Johnny Estrada. Not to be all bloody-minded, but the only play there was the football play. I don't blame Manny Acta for sending him, though — it demanded a perfect throw to get Victor, and Jeff Francoeur uncorked a perfect throw. A beyond-perfect throw. Uncle, Monsieur Francoeur — we've heard of you now.

2. In the ninth, Marlon Anderson works a 2-2 count against Kyle Farnsworth, who's just come into the game, and singles. So Jose Reyes, of course, POPS UP THE FIRST PITCH. It's too late in the season and Jose has come too far for him to keep making these stupid, overaggressive mental mistakes.

Funny aside from Gary and Howie: The Mets tried to get a call against Francoeur tagging up from second, and Angel Hernandez said no. Howie noted this, and Gary chimes in, “Either that or he wasn't watching.” God bless Gary and Howie.

It was the best of sixths. It was the…yeah, it was the best.

The short season that just passed — the 28 games encompassing August 5 through September 4 — ended with a record of 16-12 and a winning percentage of .571. That's the best Mets' mark compiled in such a period since we began paying homage to Newsday's pioneering sportswriter Joe Gergen with our adaptation of his Short Season Awards.

Let's compare that to the four sixths that preceded it.

First Sixth: 12-13 (.480)

Second Sixth: 16-13 (.551)

Third Sixth: 12-15 (.444)

Fourth Sixth: 14-13 (.519)

On a sheer numbers basis, you've gotta take the fifth. And momentum/delusion was also running highest during the span covering these 28 contests. So yes, we just lived through a golden era.

Because of the massive popularity of the Short Season Awards, I haven't been able to answer every question that's come in regarding them, but I will clarify one that's been asked quite often:

Why doesn't each sixth add up to 27 games — is it because you guys are still having math problems?

That's a great inquiry made by too many readers to thank individually. The answer is that the Short Season Award Committee (SSAC) didn't think it wise to break up eligibility periods in the middle of a given series. So for the fifth sixth, we waited until the weekend's Mets-Marlins set was complete to call it a sixth even though at 28 games, it was slightly longer.

Thanks for asking. It makes us feel good that there's such a high level of interest in this feature. I want to assure all of you that there will be a sixth sixth report issued before Faith and Fear wraps up the 2005 season as a whole. Rest easy, gang. The SSAC is on this.

Housekeeping out of the way, it's post time in the fifth.

Guns Of August

1. David Wright: MVP! MVP! Sit down Cliff, we're not talking to you.

2. Jae Seo: Say, we used to have a pitcher named Jae Seo. You're not related to him, are you? Couldn't be. You pitch nothing like that guy.

3. Ramon Castro: When he doesn't just stand there, he does something.

4. Jose Reyes: Watch him run. Hell, watch him walk.

5. Tom Glavine: We've Met at last.

Late-Summer Saggers

1. Miguel Cairo: An excellent bench player, thus the rub.

2. Marlon Anderson: He's no Lenny Harris and that's not a compliment.

3. Danny Graves: Eight-run lead, dude. Ya lost me when ya lost it.

4. Braden Looper: Someday we'll take note of the saves you do get. This is not that day.

5. Mike DeFelice: Get a batting average and we'll talk.

Best Things From The Worst Moment Of The Season

1. Mike Cameron and Carlos Beltran being alive

2. Carlos Beltran being shook up but staying conscious

3. Carlos Beltran returning to the lineup

4. Mike Cameron returning to Shea

5. Guys like these playing the way they do…but for god's sake, be more careful next time

These Things Were Good

1. Seo bests Maddux

2. Jacobs' unconscious debut

3. Wright's barehanded grab

4. The Diamondback staff (good for us to poop on!)

5. Steve Trachsel's two-hit cameo

These Things Were A Drag

1. Antonio Perez and Jayson Werth

2. Ryan Howard and Chase Utley

3. Jason Schmidt and Noah Lowry

4. Zach Duke and Dontrelle Willis

5. Shingo Takatsu and Miguel Cabrera

Five Stages of Wild Card Grief

1. Denial: “Are you kidding? We're gonna win the division!”

2. Anger: “Are you kidding? Can't Looper hold a lead?”

3. Bargaining: “Are you kidding? I'd gladly take two out of three.”

4. Depression: “Are you kidding? I can't watch another pitch.”

5. Acceptance: “Are you kidding? We're gonna win the Wild Card!”

Entourage Characters' Met Equivalents, More Or Less

1. Vince: David Wright

2. E: Roberto Hernandez

3. Johnny Drama: Doug Mientkiewicz

4. Turtle: Gerald Williams

5. Ari Gold: Pedro — who else?

Alternate Names For Marlins' Home Facility

1. The Continuously Exposed Sack

2. Hideous Mistake at Nowhere's Middle

3. Joe Robbie Pro Player Dolphins Stadium Park Stadium

4. Florida Turnpike Southbound Rest Stop Number Fourteen

5. Shea Sans Charm

Things Victor Diaz Will Never Be

1. A Gold Glove winner

2. A Gold Glove candidate

3. Allowed to look at a Gold Glove

4. Much of a rightfielder

5. Endorsed by Fred McGriff

Failsafe Predictions For The Rest Of The Way

1. Willie Randolph will make some people unhappy.

2. The St. Louis Cardinals will make some people unhappy.

3. The New York Mets will make some people unhappy.

4. Fran Healy will make everybody unhappy.

5. I will drop the names Julio Valera, Cesar Cedeño, Luis Aguayo and Jeff Francoeur into agitated conversation.

That's whom I was thinking about when Shingo after came in and gave the Marlins a bingo. (By jingo!) Him and Billy Taylor. Dial-up being dial-up, I'm not going to investigate, but I'm sure Taylor and McElroy might have made decent first impressions before being packed off after a single partial season.

Yes, a nice win today, followed down here in Vacation Paradise (which it totally was today — 80, just enough breeze to cool things off) via the WB and FAN, which was accessible with some mild gymnastics while walking about. Was particularly glad to see Clifford hit one to dead center (fuck the Marlins for every goddamn time one of their fielders has caught a drive from us in one of Soilmaster Stadium's 440' cul de sacs), Wright pour it on late and Seo show that whatever nuttiness is going on, he's not coming out of the rotation. And to see some tolerable production coming out of second base — all is not lost, Kaz, just do what you're capable of and don't get hurt, y'hear?

It's funny about the Braves. I don't have the same dread that usually manifests itself when we arrive in Turner Field with a season in the balance, and you've absolutely nailed why: Because it's extremely hard to claim that we even deserve to be in the running for something at this point. If the Braves knock us into 2006, it will hurt, but it won't be the shock that '98 or the '99 postseason or '01 were. Those were a lot better teams than this one; an end to '05 would just be finally coming back to earth, even if it were Schuerholz's Slaughterers offering the coup de grace.

Which isn't to say I don't like this team. I do — a lot, despite my grousing about Victor and Kaz and Kaz and Ice and Offerman and Looper and Koo and Graves. There's a difference between bad roster moves and bad guys, and of this year's Mets, Offerman and DeJean are the only ones who seem like they might be guys you wouldn't particularly want to root for. I like this team and I'll cheer madly for whatever wild-card hopes we have until math dictates otherwise (and we still might win — plenty of time left), but this ain't a great team, and no amount of devotion can hide that. It's a .500 team trying to make the leap to the next level, but the mismatches and the growing pains and the roster mismanagement and the injuries and the bad luck strongly suggest that's not going to happen. That's OK in a year in which .500 and respectability would have been accomplishment enough — mission most definitely accomplished even if nothing else happens. Do I want more than that? Of course. Will I be disappointed not to get more than that? Sure. Will I be surprised not to get more than that? Absolutely not.

The Redbirds were glowing with success as they lined up in the narrow runway between their locker room and the ball field. They were serene, confident and rich. They followed their drillmaster, Dr. Walter C. Eberhardt of St. Louis University, to the grass along the first base line. “Con-grat-u-lations on your last season,” Eberhardt sang out in a deep voice between exercises. “But that was last season, men, and this is another year. Now, on your backs, stretch out, stretch out, now bend to the waist, sit-ups, three, four.”

—The defending National League champion St. Louis Cardinals report to spring training, 1969, as recorded by Joe Durso in Amazing: The Miracle of the Mets.

Nice win Sunday. Now go get another one.

No kidding. Beating the Marlins after losing two to them is a fine thing. Picking up ground when the top three in the Wild Card race lost it is beautiful. But don't give it back. Not Monday.

The Mets are lucky. They're pretty good, but they're mostly lucky. They don't deserve to be under any kind of post-season consideration. After 136 games, can you tell me you've seen a team in Mets uniforms that you can picture playing beyond October 2? Unless the October opponent is the Diamondbacks, I don't think you can. I can't.

But they're here, so it's time to make the best of it, albeit in the worst possible place to try.

Atlanta. Turner Field. It's where Mets dreams have been dying for almost a decade. If it doesn't stop this week, we're gonna have to wear commemorative patches next season.

Like every sensible Mets fan, I've been dreading this trip. The relatively easy part is over and that didn't flow all that smooth. Now it's Atlanta, followed hard by St. Louis. At the moment when we can least afford to screw up, we are thrown against the league's two best teams, two teams whose tournament we want to wheedle our way into. The Redbirds are far and away the class of this circuit, but never mind them right now. It's the Braves who stare us in the face. It's the Braves who always stare us in the face. We're two losses out of a playoff spot but it's not hard to imagine us being five behind somebody by Wednesday night. No matter what happens when the other WC wannabes play each other, precedent suggests handling our own affairs will be a chore.

We have to win games in Atlanta. Plural. We shouldn't be in a position for it to matter. We've lost too many times in too numbskullish a fashion to be called contenders, but that's neither here nor there any longer. We are contenders. Our colleagues in four other cities have been thoughtful enough to be almost as mediocre as us, so let's take advantage of their largesse. Let's not do what we did against Philadelphia and Florida. Let's not lose games. Plural.

A New York Mets win should always be something to revel in, but the New York Mets have left us little in the way of that luxury. Nice win Sunday. Now go get another one.

While we must look forward, I can't let Saturday night pass without an attempt to put its stupefyingly defining moment into proper context.

Has anybody in the history of the New York Mets made a worse first impression than Shingo Takatsu? Given what was at stake, I'd have to say no. He is the Anti-Jacobs. To the extreme.

I've tried to think of a Met whose first Mets moment was as horrid and costly as Shingo's. I gravitated to pitchers. A position-player generally doesn't have that kind of negative impact at his fingertips. He might go 0-for-5 or make three errors but it's unlikely that he and he alone will kill the team. Pitchers are different. They've got the whole game in their hands.

Here are some Takatsuan performances that come to mind. Please send the children to their rooms. This isn't pretty.

• Tom Glavine: Before we loved him to death, The Manchurian Brave opened the 2003 season in Arctic conditions at Shea and did nothing to warm anybody's heart. His line on March 31: 8 hits, 4 walks, 5 earned runs 3-2/3 innings. His ERA was 12.27. The Mets lost 15-2. Things remained chilly for the pitcher and the team for a loooong time.

• John Thomson: He was Wild Card insurance or at least a theoretical boost to the rotation down the 2002 stretch. Thomson had the misfortune to make his Mets debut some 40 minutes after the season's most devastating loss, the August 3 first-game choke by Armando Benitez against Craig Counsell and the Diamondbacks at Shea. With the joint having all but cleared out for the nightcap, Thomson took to the hill and surrendered 7 hits and 3 walks for 7 runs (only 3 earned, but nobody was in the mood for technicalities) over 6 innings. The Mets lost and would lose without winning at home for the rest of the month. Thomson is the starting pitcher for the Braves tomorrow.

• Brett Hinchliffe: He turned an emergency start into a catastrophic one. Two innings on April 26, 2001 in Milwaukee yielded 9 hits and 8 earned runs. He left the game, the team and the bigs with a lifetime Met ERA of 36.00 and no parting gifts.

• Mike Hampton: Don't know if it was the schools, but something about Japan didn't agree with our newly anointed ace. Mike Hampton had the honor of throwing the first pitch in the first Major League game outside this continent on March 29, 2000, and he went with that theme. He threw many pitches outside. Hampton, traded to the Mets after a 22-4 season in Houston, walked 9 in 5 innings, allowing the Cubs 2 runs. Just two? He lured Chicago into four ground-ball double plays before leaving (the Mets lost 5-3). It took several starts for Hampton to settle in as a Met…and one year for him to decide he didn't want to.

• The Rutles: They were the Dirk, Barry, Stig and Nasty of the Mets bullpen. Our very own Prefab Four: Yorkis Perez, Toby Borland, Barry Manuel and Ricardo Jordan composed a group debut on April 1, 1997, coming on in “relief” in San Diego once Pete Harnisch began to lose it in the sixth. What Harnisch started, the lads finished, combining to surrender — and it really was a laying down of arms — 6 hits, 6 walks and 9 earned runs in a 12-5 loss. The Mets got better as 1997 progressed. These blokes had absolutely nothing to do with it.

• Alejandro Peña: The once-reliable Dodger set-up man made his Met debut at Shea on April 9, 1990, Opening Day. He faced Jay Bell. Bell doubled. He faced Andy Van Slyke. Van Slyke doubled. He faced Bobby Bonilla. Bonilla singled. He faced Barry Bonds. Bonds singled. He was removed. That he was ever invited back was astounding.

• John Candelaria: On September 11, 1987, Ron Darling went out for the year with torn ligaments in his thumb. At the tail end of a year when the adage that you can never have enough pitching resonated all too forcefully, the defending world champion Mets fished around for another hurler. On September 15, they dealt two minor leaguers to California for veteran lefty John Candelaria. On September 18, desperately groping at the first-place Cardinals, they started John in his prior place of business, Three Rivers Stadium. The Candy Man immediately went sour, facing 12 Pirates who pillaged him for a leadoff homer (John Cangelosi), a double, two triples…8 hits in all, leading to 5 earned runs in an inning-and-a-third. Candelaria's Met ERA teetered at 33.75. To be fair, there wasn't much good pitching in what turned out to be a 10-9 final in Pittsburgh's favor (hmmm…familiar score and pattern). John made two more starts for the Mets and won both. The Mets finished three behind St. Louis.

• Mac Scarce: The ostensible replacement for Tug McGraw made his first appearance as a Met in Pittsburgh on April 11, 1975. He came on to face Richie Hebner with the score knotted at three and runners on first and second. Hebner singled. The Pirates won. Scarce, swapped four days hence to Cincinnati for Tom “The Blade” Hall, never made another appearance as a Met. His first, last and only impression was one batter, one game-losing hit.

• Roger Craig: The first pitcher to pitch for the New York Mets, in St. Louis on April 11, 1962, was responsible for setting a rather atonal tone for the club's inaugural campaign. In the first inning of his team's existence, Roger Craig gave up 3 hits and a balk, resulting in 2 runs. After tossing a spotless second, Craig was touched up for four singles, a double and a stolen base, yielding 3 more Redbird runs in the third. Craig left after three frames with the lowest ERA in Mets history, 15.00. Of course it was the only ERA in team history.

There. Nine debuts to remember because to forget them would be to repeat them…though I guess we just did Saturday. In the words of Leonard Pinth-Garnell, stunningly bad. Exquisitely awful. Couldn't be worse! Yet no matter how many productions of Bad First Impressions I've looked at, none ranks quite so low as Shingo Takatsu's.

Most of the above came in April, the calendar early enough and the circumstances innocuous enough so as not to be fatal. The ones that didn't, those by Thomson and Candelaria, were at least wrought by experienced arms in situations where the managers in question could feel reasonably confident that terrible things wouldn't happen.

Shingo Takatsu was a reclamation-project callup coming in to take on budding superstar Miguel Cabrera with the bases loaded at a perilous juncture in a critical September showdown against a Wild Card rival when there was no track record to indicate that this might be a good idea.

This was worse than Candelaria.

This was worse than Hinchliffe.

This was even worse than the Rutles.

This was, to channel Mr. Pinth-Garnell once more, monumentally ill-advised.

And yet we get to play more meaningful games. Isn't baseball something?

You and your Unholy Books. Ever since I bore witness to them almost five years ago, I have rooted for them and for their contents to flourish. I keep up on who's a new Met first and foremost in order to confirm with you the status of the next entry within those heretofore sacred volumes.

Therefore, in the bottom of the seventh when Willie pulled Padilla (Met No. 766) and replaced him with Shingo Takatsu, I wasn't thinking “What The FUCK?” or “WILLIE! THIS GUY NOW?” or “here comes an American League reject who hasn't pitched since I don't know when to make his debut against one of the best hitters there is in the absolute most crucial situation in the absolute most important game of the year.”

I thought, “Oh good, No. 770. I wonder which card of Shingo Takatsu's Jace has.”

I'm apparently not enough of a Toppsmudic scholar to have correctly interpreted the purpose of The Unholy Books. I realize now they exist to record and reflect reality, not create it. Nobody's successfully created a Met out of thin air since George Weiss did so with Hobie Landrith.

Anyway, it didn't look any different or better at home than it did in your vacation paradise. YNH Stadium continues to disturb with its assortment of patio furniture in the bullpens and its men's room tiles scattered about various side walls and its 40,000 empty orange seats sweating and its yard markers calling attention to a pockmarked infield and its superstrength light bulbs borrowed from the climactic scene of White Nights shining in the eyes of converted second basemen who are hopelessly lost and generally befuddled in right field to begin with.

That said, it would've looked just fine if Victor Diaz could've held onto a fly ball, if Larry Poncino could've made a one-way-or-the-other call on the pitch that got away from Lo Duca while Castro dashed into contemplation mode and if I had never, ever found cause to be more than dimly aware of the man who would become the 770th player to enter a Major League game in a New York Mets uniform — somebody holding the fate of our hard-fought season in his funkyjunky right hand, somebody named Shingo Takatsu.

Having my consciousness raised where the massive talent of Miguel Cabrera is concerned is another phenomenon I could've put off for the foreseeable future.

To be fair, our newest pitcher stayed in and retired the next four batters, which perhaps provides the answer to the one question we all had to be asking in our heads: “Aside from that, Mrs. Takatsu, how did you enjoy the game?”

Shingo's statistically successful Mets debut (ERA: 0.00) combined with the Astros' loss — about time that Clemens voodoo doll kicked in — and the Nats' comeback win over the Phillies keeps us within dreaming distance. As I watched Washington triumph (bang zoom, indeed), I couldn't exactly decide if it was good or bad for us. Good in eyes-on-the-prize terms, but we're last in the N.L. East again. What the hey — I didn't like being mired amid all those teams anyway. If this Wild Card chase has reinforced anything, it's how much I absolutely despise the Marlins, the Phillies and the Shingo Takatsu of divisional opponents, the Nationals (I'd never heard of them either at this time last year). If this is our competition, I just as soon not belong to any pennant race that would have us as a member.

On the other hand, I still like and admire The Holy Books. I just wish they were entering Sunday a 769-card affair.

Now, an unfair comparison I've resisted making…until now:

FOSTER VS. BELTRAN

FIRST YEAR AS A MET

THROUGH 135 GAMES

FOSTER 1982: 13 HR 63 RBI .252 AVG

BELTRAN 2005: 14 HR 62 RBI .265 AVG

They have the WB. You can view the varieties of Soilmaster. I've got Internet access of a sort. I can writhe around on a couch going insane while we suck.

Tell me something good. Shingo Takatsu entering the rosters of The Holy Books in singularly wretched fashion doesn't count.

Before we skedaddle for Jersey, I'll leave you with a tale of baseball and New Orleans.

There aren't a ton of them — Rusty Staub is from there, but beyond that it hasn't been so long that the town even had a minor-league team. But I do have one, from the two summers when I lived down there. The second summer I fell in love with Emily. The first summer she wasn't around, and I fell in love with reporting and writing and storytelling and all the things that have somehow sustained me since then, thanks to some kind-hearted and tough (by proper turns) folks at the Times-Picayune who taught the world's greenest intern everything his little mind could hold.

Baseball took a back seat then — my summer-sublet shotgun at Esplanade and Chartres, on the edge of the Quarter, didn't have a TV, and in those days before the Internet, satellite radio and crazy bloggers New Orleans may as well have been Mars for Met-watching. The best I could do was scouring the long version of AP stories that moved over the wire at work. So my Met watching that summer was limited to Braves and Cubs games, on whatever TV I could find.

The most-reliable venue I could find was a bar in the Quarter ostensibly for Chicago expats. This wasn't really a tourist bar, though they'd take their money — its clientele was a little harder, and all knew each other in that borderline-unhealthy bar way. (New Orleans is singularly experimental and open-minded when it comes to bars of whatever theme.) But they'd always have the Cubs on, so for the two series we played against the Cubs in the summer of '89, I was there.

I was young and dumb back then, so my habit was to drink about a beer an inning, which means my memories of the early innings would be crystal-clear with the intensity of a fan getting the rare treat of seeing his team, and the later innings not so much. The regular bargoers accepted me or shrugged me off — until an odd incident that Retrosheet suggests must have come during the July 28-30 series at Wrigley.

At some point during the Mets-Cubs game one night, the bartender decided to switch on porn on another TV — and we're not talking sanitized hotel-room porn. (This was a bar that was always trying to attract more female customers. Never worked. Mystery to me.) So now I'm on about beer five. If I turn my head one way, the Mets are in a tense game with the hated Cubs on TV; if I turn my head the other way, hardcore porn.

Being a good fan, I of course keep watching the Mets.

Which seems fine until it's time for my next beer, at the inning. I look up at the bartender is staring at me from his station down at Porn Central. So are all the other customers. They're not particularly friendly stares. Uh-oh. What have I done now? Did I just get caught openly rooting for New York? Would anyone really care?

“We got a question,” says the bartender.

“OK,” I say, suddenly aware that I'm at least a couple of beers too late for an adroit navigation of bar-stool diplomacy.

“We noticed you keep looking at that –” and the bartender indicates the TV that's been showing the game — “and you don't seem interested in looking at this.” And he points to the heavy breathing and pneumatic goings-on. “And we're wondering why that is.”

Man, I think, I haven't been called gay for liking the Mets since about 1981. And I've never been the subject of a recreational beating because of it. That may be about to change. In fact, it likely is about to change if I say the wrong thing.

So I point to the set with the Mets game and say, “Well, I'm not sure what's going to happen here,” and then point to the porn TV and add, “but I've got a pretty good idea how this is going to turn out.”

Total silence. Then, broken — thank Christ — by all of the regulars laughing at once. They keep laughing. They buy me beer. From then on, I'm golden in that bar, even if I am a Met fan.

That was 16 years ago. It's numbing to think what's happening down there now. That bar probably isn't flooded — the Quarter's pretty much the highest ground in the city — but has it been looted? Has it burned? I hope not. I hope things are back to normal there and everywhere else down there as soon as possible. But “soon” doesn't seem to be in the cards. Maybe not even “possible”. Just heartbreaking.

Anyway, not to leave you a down note. Take care of our blue-and-orange lads. See you if the vagaries of vacation dial-up allow.

Poor Glavine. Poor us. That was baseball like it oughta be — two teams playing hard for big stakes, and one mistake cost us. Well, two mistakes — one of organization and one of execution. I felt for TEM. Watching him fumbling for that ball snapped me back to Keith Hernandez crawling in the mud in '88, a man trapped in a nightmare. Watching Looper I was a fan trapped in a nightmare, watching a closer who's only effective when guys are standing on one side of the plate.

Keeping one eye on the game at work, I wrote down scrawled notes on the back of a piece of paper. Some excerpts:

g butterfingered on dp, must pitch to utley. little flare by bell on 0-2 pitch, two runs. fuck! … reyes somehow out on high chopper to 3B bag. 3 pitches on 2 outs after glavine gassed. wtf, kaz? … coulda been leadoff single, score on double, double, 2-0 with beltran on 2nd, no out. instead it just sucks. … good inning by glav. 3-2 on vd — Ks. what was he looking for? great pitch on difelice … YES, TRIPLE! kaz RBI groundout. get run, kills a little mo. … goodness, victor. we got a call! TRAP! glavine? 3-2 on pratt? 124 pitches! YOW! 126 total. great performance by glavine. … reyes 3-1. wow. very close on 3-2. great pitch. he's learning. damn. no help from the sun. kaz will lead off. … FUCKING LOOPER! still, howard's gonna get a lot of those. we're toast. looper cannot get lefties! goddamn michael fucker. um, looper can't get lefties out. rollins! fuck! we cannot keep going w a closer who can't get lefties out. … c'mon kaz! we're ready to love you! 102 mph? really? he's missing. good eye, kaz. YES! KAZ! c'mon carlos, don't try to do too much. goddamn it! cliff. ugh. c'mon dw. oh boy. 0-2. great pitch! yes, yr out.

It's possible I doomed us by not having a big enough piece of paper — I was pretty much out of space as Wright came to the plate. Apologies.

Dunno what I could really add to my play-by-play. We didn't find the handle and we lost. Simple as that. Can we survive Florida, Atlanta and St. Louis? The stats would say no, the schedule would say no, the team's crazy quilt of Ws and Ls and highs and lows would say…who knows. I can't get the handle on that any more than TEM could. I suppose there's a reason they play 'em.