So Victor Hall and Yusmeiro Petit joined forces to put us over the top in the latest chapter of our long struggle against the Washington Nationals…oh yeah, I forgot. Anyway, nice way to close out the exhibition season — I heard about half the game, and the D.C. fans sure sounded excited.

Time for some post-Florida moratoriums:

* Grumbling about Randolph's Rules of Order is suspended until Memorial Day. Those determined to violate this order must first intone “we battled” after five consecutive losses.
* Immediately after the completion of tonight's season opener,  any and all warm wishes for the Boston Red Sox not of the “enemy of my enemy” variety are verboten. They're enemies again; the bandwagon is returning to Boston for storage with those kooky duck boats.
* Now that they're family, grousing about Hernandez, Heredia, Aybar, Matthews and Koo is hereby declared suspended — until Pedro walks off the mound at some point tomorrow afternoon.
* No one is allowed to wear electric blue with black until next February. A small silver lining in the dark cloud of Cablevision shenanigans: Those horrors were invisible for two-thirds of my spring. (If the powers that be should like to make this moratorium a permanent ban, they have my enthusiastic support.)
* Howie Rose must never, ever again sing “Complicated” by Avril Lavigne over the air, even if doing so might prevent an act of nuclear terrorism. If you don't know what I'm talking about, trust me.

Speaking of WFAN, our next burning question is which Met should get the nickname of “American Chopper.” This year's first inescapable radio promo is Tone Loc shilling for some cable-TV show by announcing that “American Chopper's in the hoouuuuuuse.” As with previous exhortations (“I seen better hands onna snake!”), it's so bad it's good.

Off to Cincinnati. We're oh-and-oh.

When I turned thirty, my family threw me a wonderful surprise party. The coup de grace was the presentation unto the birthday boy of a small silver box with a Mets logo taped to the top. In it were fifteen pairs of tickets. Thirtieth birthday, thirty tickets.

Thirty tickets for the 1993 season.

The first game was awesome. It was Opening Day, the first one I ever went to. Everything about it was perfect. Itzhak Perlman played the national anthem. Dennis Byrd, the Jet who had been nearly paralyzed the previous season, was presented with a Mets jersey with his number (No. 90) and declared a Met For Life. The Colorado Rockies were making their debut; there was a stampede on programs by the collector-minded, but I got there early enough to buy one. Dwight Gooden threw a shutout. Bobby Bonilla made a sliding catch in right. The Mets were 1-0.

I went to the next game, too, having bought tickets for it ahead of my birthday. It had been my Christmas present to my co-workers. We shut down the office for the afternoon, sat in the sun, were handed commemorative pins marking this as the first Colorado series and watched Bret Saberhagen toy with Rockies hitters. The Mets were 2-0.

Then the fun stopped.

Picked by consensus to finish first, the 1993 Mets slid helplessly down a greasy tube of misery, taking their fans with them. Or what fans were left. Every time I dug into that silver box, I couldn't help but notice how there were progressively fewer and fewer people at those games. It was getting harder and harder to find anybody to go with me, and I don't think it was my breath. By June 27, with Anthony Young pitching just horrendously enough to lose a record-setting 24th consecutive decision, the Mets had fallen from 2-0 to 21-52.

I was there for that one, too.

1993 is the season from which the perception of the Mets has never quite recovered. After seven years of plenty, they stumbled in '91, but were given the benefit of the doubt, especially after their bold Hot Stove moves of signing Bonilla and Murray, trading for Saberhagen and bringing in Torborg to manage. That didn't work so well, but 1992 was seen as kind of a freakish, injury-plagued aberration. That October, Al Harazin went out and acquired Tony Fernandez, so surely 1993 would be the year the Mets got back to being the Mets as we knew them.

They did. The Mets as we knew them in 1962. The last lingering fume of excitement from 1986 had at last evaporated. All goodwill toward Mets was exhausted. It was official: We were no longer hot stuff.

First, it was news, the way a car wreck gets your attention. Torborg was fired. Harazin was gone. A.Y.'s losing streak and Bobby Bo's threats to Bob Klapisch and the general dissolution of civilization was a spectacle. Then spectacle became farce. And then most people stopped paying attention, save for the occasional bleach blast or fireworks explosion. It was a long, barren summer at Shea Stadium, where those of us who were favored with fifteen pairs of choice tickets had more legroom than we could've imagined.

Prior to '93, I'd never been to more than seven games in any one season. That year I attended sixteen, paving the way for the late '90s when going to Shea became more habit than event. The repeated visits to a mostly empty, totally depressing ballpark steeled my resolve and hardened my Mets identity. Where did you rats go? Sure the ship is sinking, but look! No lines at the concessions!

But it was painful. As Don Henley said, there's just so many summers and just so many springs, and both of those were wiped out before they started in 1993. There was a midweek afternoon game in St. Louis in May that I just plum forgot to listen to. That may not sound like much, but that sort of thing never happened to me. Never. But it was the kind of year when one's capacity to care shrunk in inverse proportion to the staggering number of losses and, worse, the immense sense of embarrassment.

It bottomed out when David Letterman returned to the airwaves. You'll recall he left NBC in late June and emerged on CBS with an earlier time slot, a brighter spotlight and a louder megaphone at the end of August. His easiest laugh that September, with everybody watching him, was the New York Mets. The joke went national and now transcended sports fans.

From Top Ten New York Mets Excuses, 9/23/93:

* All those empty seats are distracting.
* Play so much golf during season thought lowest score wins.
* Baseballs are harder to throw than explosives.

The Mets are still Dave's go-to punchline. They are permanently suspect as a going concern because of that year when they went 59-103 and looked worse than that. They've been to two post-seasons and a World Series since then, but when they got tangled up in '02 and '03, I am certain the hypernegative reaction associated with the losing was charged by a straggling toxic cloud that settled over Shea in 1993. Sort of like what Chernobyl left in its long-term wake.

This is the part where I tell you all that didn't matter, that I had my tickets and I loved going and that in spite of it all, it was the best time I ever had because I could be one with my team and say I was there when nobody else was.

But I'm not going to tell you that at all. I hated the 1993 Mets. I could barely tolerate showing up for their games, especially when I had to beg, badger and cajole friends, family, acquaintances, passersby and loiterers to join me to use those tickets. By the end, I'd just as soon go to a funeral. No, really. My Great Aunt Tillie passed away in the second-to-last week of the season. Services were being held for her at a Queens Boulevard funeral home on the morning of the Mets' final Sunday home game. Having given up on the prospect of companionship for my last pair of tickets, I decided I'd make this a doubleheader of my own. First, I'd pay my respects to Tillie. Then, a short drive to Shea, where they were inducting Tug McGraw into the Mets Hall of Fame. I could at least enjoy that alone.

One problem. President Clinton was in the midst of promoting his national health care plan (you know, the one that now covers every citizen of this great nation so nobody goes uninsured). Part of his PR swing took him to Fresh Meadows where he was going to wander into a diner and just happen to tell customers why they should support his initiative. I'd never quite known where Fresh Meadows was (I always thought it was just a more polite name for Flushing) but it's apparently near Shea. As a result, the police blocked every roadway anywhere near the stadium. The Grand Central was cordoned off. Roosevelt Avenue was a no-go. The game had already started. I took one more shot at it from the Van Wyck.

At last making my way up an entrance ramp (I could still get there by the fourth or fifth inning), traffic was halted again. Whizzing by went the presidential motorcade. I waved. When we were allowed to move, I, like the Mets, headed south and returned home, never presenting my last ticket for tearing. Having missed Tug's induction, I decided I wasn't going to see anything more interesting than Bill Clinton's limo that day.

Wouldn't you know they won without me?

The 1993 Mets were not great, none of them, certainly not that year when I trudged dutifully past the uninterested ticket-takers and surly ushers to sit in my assigned seat sixteen separate times because that was the gift I was given.

No foolin'.

To Tanana and his bottomless barrel of slop, Saunders with the whole in his bat, Jackson's old-lady issues and Terrel Hansen, the man who wasn't good enough to play for the worst Mets team of my sentient lifetime — and to all of your teammates: Maybe we're not even now, but after a dozen years of brooding, I feel a little better about having devoted so many hours of my thirty-first year on the planet to observing, let alone encouraging your foibles and your futility.

But just a little.

45 degrees with a 25 MPH wind — sounds like DC will be fun tomorrow.

I slept late, didn't realize the game was on the radio, and belatedly

turned it on to hear muttering about Felix Heredia and news that Matt

Ginter is gone, sent to Detroit in return for Steve Colyer, owner of a

6.75 ERA in addition to sundry dry goods. (His problem is — brace

yourself — that he can't throw strikes.) The end of the Matt Ginter

era proves, for the 44th year in a row, that figuring out rosters

before the last hours of spring training is pointless, since a

dog-and-cat trade always scrambles things. (Of course it's better than

watching the snow melt.)

So if I've got this right, which I probably don't because I came in

late, our bench and bullpen are set and almost completely overhauled.

The bats are Ramon Castro, Miguel Cairo, Chris Woodward, Marlon

Anderson and Eric Valent; the arms are Braden Looper, Mike DeJean,

Dae-sung Koo, Mike Matthews, Roberto Hernandez, Manny Aybar and

(barring injury or sanity) Felix Heredia. Four out of five bench guys

are newcomers, as are five of seven bullpen arms. (And if you remember

Mike DeJean vividly, you're a better man than me.)

I can't quibble with the bench: Cairo and Woodward in particular seem

like very valuable hands. But the bullpen shows Randolph (and maybe

Omar) did exactly what I feared would be done: fetishize experience

over potential by handing jobs to guys whose recent careers suggest

it's time for the golf course.

Heath Bell and Bartholome Fortunato should be on this team because

they're clearly ready to contribute to a major league baseball club

and  have futures measurable in something more than months. But

instead of learning by facing the top echelon of baseball, which is

what they have to do, they'll be doing what they've already done at

AAA. Troglodyte thinking, with a certain Bronxian gold-watch mentality:

Roberto Hernandez has earned the

right to watch balls go screaming into the gap, kid. Now go fetch me a

Gatorade if my eighth-place hitter hasn't done it already.

I know it's silly to get too worked up over this. As I've mused before,

middle relievers are like minefield clearers — you'll need a

whole new set before the job's halfway done. I'll be shocked if two

guys out of the trio of Hernandez, Aybar and Matthews are still here at

the break, and wouldn't be surprised to find them all gone by Memorial

Day. I just wish more of them were gone now.

On the other hand, at least we aren't employing Lenny Harris. Why don't

the Marlins just pile up some of those fertilizer bags at first? The

range factor would be the same.

Happier tidings before I hand this off: Bill Pulsipher made the Cardinals. Now there's a washed-up pitcher I could get behind.

Terrel Hansen lives!

I too had hoped for a return by John Olerud, to rid us of the bitter taste of his exile/departure for Seattle and his brief, appalling tenure in the raiment of the Beast. It's amazing how many big moments I remember being bound up with him. I was in L.A. during the Curt Schilling game, and kept watching the scoreboard, which is updated with reassuring regularity. (On the other hand, a fight between the Dodgers and Cardinals broke out, and they played “Bad Boys” — a far cry from Shea's fusty prudery during such things.) I couldn't believe it when the score changed to our favor, then immediately switched to “F.” Bonus points for the fact that the FAN made the finale of that one the climax of the pregame psyche-up for part of the year, and for the shot of a giddy Roger Cedeno drumming his heels on home plate.

Oh, that triple play. It used to be part of my capsule biography as a fan that I'd never seen one. No-hitter? Sure. (Nolan Ryan on the Game of the Week. Think it was '81. He was a tall drink of rainbow sherbet on the mound.) Cycles? Quite a few, including the one you mention, where Felipe Alou* left a young Vlad the Impaler in right despite the fact that his leg had fallen off a couple of innings earlier. But no triple play — the closest was that crazy play with Deion Sanders in the Braves/Jays World Series, which should have been one but was such a You Kids Ain't Goin' to the Tastee Freez screw-up that it might not have felt like it counted anyway. Emily and I were at Shea with our friend Megan, and I was rattling on about the thousands and thousands of games I'd seen on TV and the hundred-odd I'd seen live and no triple play, whereupon Olerud and the Mets turned one. I stared at the field in disbelief. Megan gave a small “Oh!” of surprise and then started to laugh.

But my favorite Olerud moment is one you'll remember too: Sept. 29, 1999. (After all, you were there.) To revel in past horrors, we'd lost seven straight — three to the Braves in Atlanta, three to the Phils, and now one more to the Braves at home. Maddux was on the mound, bidding for his 20th win, ready to rip our hearts out in his infuriatingly calm way. You and I and Emily (and 42,000 others) were too stunned and scared to even cheer acceptably — we kept emitting spastic sounds of defiance, then looking down at our laps and muttering. Brian Jordan (of course) made it 2-1 Braves in the third. Then, the fourth: Hamilton single. Cedeno single. Ordonez single. Leiter single. Henderson single. Alfonzo single. 4-2 us, but nothing had been hit hard, and as Olerud came to the plate we were still tense and muttering and flailing hands generally together and begging. WHAM! Grand slam, one of those that's so obviously gone that you're up and looking for strangers to embrace before the ball even clears the fence. We were still in trouble, but we believed again. Thank you, Oly.

As previously mentioned, Rusty Staub was my favorite player as a little boy, which came from hearing my mother cheer for him and thinking it was hella cool that a grown-up could have a name like Rusty. The lone wrong note of 1986 is that Rusty had hung 'em up — if only he'd had one more year and a place in the pile.

Eleven years before that, though, all I wanted from the world was a Rusty Staub glove. Unfortunately, nobody made a Rusty Staub glove, which may have been the usual conspiracy to ignore the Mets but was probably Rusty not being interested in an endorsement deal. (There were no Staub baseball cards in '72, '73 and '74.) I didn't find this out for years, but my parents bought some generic, signature-free glove, fished a Rusty Staub card out of one of my shoeboxes, and carefully burned a flawless likeness of the signature into the leather before presenting it to me the next day. I never noticed that my glove had a brown signature with a certain depth while other kids' gloves had a black, stamped signature — as with a lot of similar stories, my mother later said she'd lived in fear of me figuring out the truth from the first minute.

Odd postscript: Last year I was standing in a crowd near the starting line of the Tunnel to Towers road race, enduring the usual chin-wagging by semi-dignitaries (Chuck Schumer, Curtis Sliwa, various clergy) and waiting to run when the MC announced “and one of the all-time most-beloved Mets, Rusty Staub!” Wow, I thought, peering around my fellow runners, that's pretty cool. After the race, on the other side of the Battery Tunnel, I saw a big, redheaded man walking up West Street by his lonesome. I hesitated for a moment, then clambered across a median and caught up with him, inanely sticking out my hand before saying anything.

Rusty shook my hand warily; I regained my faculties and said, “Hey, Rusty, I just wanted to say you were my favorite player when I was a kid.”

“Thanks,” said Rusty, quite pleasantly. “That's very nice.” He also kept walking. On top of everything else, Rusty Staub is no fool.

My favorite Jerry Grote story (like so many others that made a deep impression, it's from Joy in Mudville): In July '69 Newsday writer Joe Gergen told some Chicago rag that the Mets had as much chance of winning the pennant as man had of landing on the moon. Grote didn't seem to get the joke: When Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder he was still fuming about Gergen and his smart mouth.

As a kid I liked the story because it wasn't immediately obvious why it was funny and I was proud of myself for getting it. Later, it seemed like mildly amusing evidence that Jerry Grote might not be suiting up for the Mensa Nine. But Grote seemed pretty damn smart in other Mets books, so I chalked it up to the fact that he hated sportswriters. Now, as I grow older and more susceptible to elegy and myth and all that, I like to think it means he was so focused on beating the Cubs, the rest of the NL, the umpires and anyone else in the Mets' way that he wasn't going to be distracted by a bunch of guys in white suits. NASA? Who's he play for? We've got the Reds on Thursday. I'm gonna get out of this slump and beat Jim Merritt like a rented mule.

Several years ago I was in the middle of some big rewrite at work when I saw on the wire that Mookie Wilson was going to be signing autographs and greeting fans at the Winter Garden. When? Right now — if I hurried, I could still catch him. So I did. Mookie was chatting with a couple of beaming business-looking guys; I waited my turn, shook his hand (he has enormous hands) and thanked him for getting me into college. He looked a bit taken aback, so I explained that in '86 I was a senior in high school, going through a rough time, drinking and doing other things way too much and generally walking the edge of getting caught and/or kicked out. The Mets were the only thing that made me happy; when they won the World Series I got my act together for a while, sent my college applications off in good order and made it through, when it could easily have gone the other way. (OK, I did get caught drinking. Let's move on.) So, I said, thanks for that.

Mookie kind of looked at me, and if memory serves he said that was a lot to put on a person, which may or may not be a gentle way of saying, “Christ, are you ever a disgusting preppie brat.” I went back to my office (I didn't get an autograph — I never saw the point of those) and my editor fixed his eye on me and asked where the hell I'd been.

“Mookie Wilson was in the Winter Garden,” I said.

“Really?” he said. He didn't blame me one bit. He'd been a Met fan too.

* Not Frank Robinson, as originally writ. I'm an idiot.

On Wright batting eighth: Yeah, it’s insidious and insulting and makes one suspicious that Randolph and Down were sent here as spies from the north — and don’t they know that David Wright, after 69 big-league games, established himself as The Future/The Blossoming Present? For Cameron? That’s a Howe motive if it’s true (still think Cammy’s not gonna last the year). Down’s quote about how Wright’s lucky he’s not on the bench should get him transferred back to Columbus or whatever rock he crawled out from under. Randolph (he’s been downgraded from first-name status for the duration of this crisis) said something somewhere to the effect that he’s not a lineup-juggler. Gosh, Skip, on what do you base that? I mean, where among your many stops as a manager have you established this iron grip on 1-through-8, day-in, day out? Listen, if it works, then hallelujah, we’re packing thunder every place ya look. When it doesn’t, watch how quickly Mr. Non-Juggler “tweaks” the order. To be fair to Randolph, he’s new at this and this group of eight players as a starting eight is an unknown quantity. (Bobby V, you’ll recall, was crazy enough to lead off with the likes of Brian Downing and Benny Agbayani.) I’m willing to cut Randolph just a bit of slack on this one because, quite frankly, the first batting order of the year is one of the most overrated things in the sport. The dynamic of these things changes faster than the price of parking at Shea. Finally, who knows? Why, the SPSP — Statistic Proving Somebody’s Point — is the last word on the subject! Fine, we’re screwed before even one guy has batted. My apologies to the figure filberts, if I may use a crochety pejorative. (This does not change my general support for getting worked up over every little thing that hasn’t gone wrong yet but might; what else is Spring Training for?)

On Galarraga retiring: After battering us as an Expo, a Cardinal, a Rockie, a Brave (if not a Pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king), I was looking forward to Andres blasting at least one into the visitors’ bullpen, preferably on Home Opening Day. He’d tip his cap, take a bow and skedaddle. The man is 87. He’s also hellishly hard not to root for when he’s not wearing a tomahawk across his chest. May a fine man find great health and a long life. Too bad about not getting to 400, but Al Kaline, forever “stuck” on 399, isn’t bad company. Neither is Ted Lepcio. I’ll always think of Andres Galarraga the way Murph described him: The Big and Gracious Cat.

At least somebody somewhere gave him a long look this spring. I can think of first basemen of more recent accomplishment who have gone wanting for as much as an invite. I can think of one anyway…

20. John Olerud: Catch the breeze and the winter chills in colors on the snowy linen land. On December 20, 1996, the Mets traded Robert Person to the Toronto Blue Jays for John Olerud, allegedly on the downside of his career, supposedly too fragile of psyche for New York. Look out on a summer’s day with eyes that know the darkness in my soul. In three seasons that didn’t last nearly long enough, Oly batted .315, including the eternally untoppable .354 of 1998. While almost every other Met froze down that pitiful stretch, John sizzled. Fourteen plate appearances, fourteen straight trips to first or beyond. Spent virtually all of the late ’90s on base. Caught everything everybody threw him or hit toward him. Started a triple play against the Giants in ’98 — got two assists and a putout. Entered the final week of 1997 with 88 RBIs and finished with 102. Hit for the cycle against Montreal earlier that September, a cycle that, like every other cycle, required a triple. It was the only triple he hit that entire season because John Olerud ran with two packs of freshly chewed Bazooka stuck to the bottom of each spike. Weathered faces lined in pain are soothed beneath the artist’s loving hand. His one Mets post-season went like this: .349; first homer by a lefty off of Randy Johnson in two years; deep fly that Tony Womack couldn’t catch; homer off Smoltz, then, when no hope was left in sight on that starry, starry night, the perfectly placed bouncer between Ozzie Guillen and Bret Boone to win Game Four; homer off Greg Maddux to start Game Five, providing the entirety of the Mets’ offense for fourteen innings. Colors changing hue, morning fields of amber grain. In a game that is all but forgotten because both the protagonists and the antagonist went on to do so many more interesting things, John Olerud lifted the 1999 Mets to perhaps the most thrilling May victory in franchise history, driving home the tying and winning runs off a stubborn, faltering, previously infallible Curt Schilling in the ninth at Shea. It was a sign of good things to come.

Swirling clouds in violet haze reflect in Vincent’s eyes of China blue. Unlike, say, Kevin McReynolds, Olerud’s quietude actually enhanced his personality. His muteness along with his omnipresent hard hat were shown off as signatures in those hilarious Nike Subway Series stickball commercials. The other players swore by him. Flaming fl’ors that brightly blaze. Cataloguing all the good baseball John Olerud committed in three short seasons should have been enough to earn him at least five more as a Met. They would not listen, they’re not  list’ning still, perhaps they never will. Instead, Steve Phillips turned his back on him. John didn’t go on the open market, though. He and his wife headed home for Seattle, where his parents and in-laws could regularly babysit the Oleruds’ infant son. I could’ve told you, Oly. This team was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

19. Rusty Staub: While M. Donald Grant is rightly pilloried for a trade he made in June 1977, he should’ve gotten the effigy treatment in December 1975 when he sent Rusty Staub and Bill Laxton to Detroit for Mickey Lolich and Billy Baldwin. Rusty had just gotten done being the Mets’ best player for four years, not nearly inoculation enough against his tendency to speak his mind and his impending status as a 10-and-5 man. Before Rusty could veto a trade, Grant vetoed Rusty. Never mind effigy — where was the rope it was needed? Rusty was a New York Met waiting to happen all those years in Houston and Montreal. Rusty was a sophisticate. He could barbecue the classiest ribs. He was opening a restaurant. He was a bon vivant. How many of those have we had? And how many guys were worth Ken Singleton, Tim Foli and Mike Jorgensen all at once, all while they were young? Who led the Mets into first in ’72 where they stayed until he took one off the hand from George Stone? Who was determined to outhit the Reds all by his redheaded self (three homers in the first four games) until he literally hit a wall saving Game Four in the eleventh inning? Who suffered a bum shoulder but batted .423 in the World Series anyway? Who was the first 100-RBI man the Mets ever had? It was Rusty’s second Met tour of duty, when he refined the pinch-hitting role as few others had (eight straight at one point to tie a Major League record) and became an icon for what would have to be termed his Rustyness: homering to join Cobb in the 40/19 club; switching back and forth between right and left in the eighteen-inning marathon against the Pirates to avoid having him try to make

any catch; catching Rick Rhoden’s looper down the RF line despite Davey’s best-laid plans; driving Keith and other Manhattan Mets to the park in the Rusty’s van; finishing up in a Mets uniform, too rare a phenomenon among the Greatest Mets. It was being Rusty circa 1981-85 that won him his own Day (remember the orange fright wigs?) and the sinecure behind the mike, but it was the Rusty of 1972 through 1975 who really earned it.

18. Jesse Orosco: In 1983, Jesse Orosco was probably the most awesome relief pitcher the Mets ever had. In eleven consecutive appearances between July 31 and August 21, he won six games and saved five. The first two wins came in both ends of a doubleheader. The first one was earned with four shutout innings of relief. In fact, this stretch encompassed 21-1/3 innings and Orosco didn’t give up a single earned run. Those wins weren’t vultured, those saves weren’t Eckersleyed — as an All-Star in his first year as closer, the lefty pitched more than one inning in seven of the eleven aforementioned appearances. Jesse Orosco could throw fastballs and sliders then. By the end of 1983, Orosco was 13-7 with 17 saves and an ERA of 1.47 over 87 innings, finishing third in the Cy Young balloting. If George Bamberger and Frank Howard deserve credit for anything as managers, it was the establishment of Jesse as a top-notch late-inning man. Jesse Orosco’s Mets legacy would be pretty strong based solely on 1983 and 1984. when he saved 31. It’s important to know that Jesse Orosco did something besides throw his glove in the air twice. Not that those weren’t extremely wonderful deals unto themselves.

17. Howard Johnson: As his best seasons came amid major disappointments for the team as a whole, one can debate whether Howard Johnson was a true impact player. The power-speed combo that made him a 30-30 man in ’87, ’89 and ’91 was all the more stunning because he preceded each of those years (which were all better for the Mets than the seasons that followed them) with relatively wan performances. Taken another way, Howard Johnson carried the Mets on his back in three years when nobody else was playing up to their full potential. HoJo exceeded everything that was expected of him on three separate occasions. For shock value, his 1987 was the most spectacularly surprising single season by any Met: 36 HRs, 32 SBs as an infielder and switch-hitter, both firsts, one RBI shy of a hundred. He could already turn on a fastball (especially Todd Worrell’s) like nobody’s business but now he was catching up to the slower stuff. Bettered his numbers two years later when he led the league in runs scored (104) and stole 41. And two years after that, he wore the NL homer and RBI crowns, with 38 and 117, respectively. He never completely nailed down the third base job — Davey’s mouth watered at the vision of all that offense at short and Buddy shoved him into the outfield toward the end — but he wound up playing more games than any Met at that mythical minefield and burial ground. His name figures prominently among all-time Met leaders: third in homers and ribbies, second in steals and total bases, all the more noteworthy considering he was never

the marquee player around here. More than a decade removed from his last Met at-bat, Howard Johnson’s success remains at least a little bit of surprise.

16. Tommie Agee: Who needed Bobby Bonds? Heck, who needed Wilie Mays in 1969 and 1970 when Tommie Agee was setting the world on fire from center field at Shea Stadium? Though his numbers for the two seasons (50 homers combined, 31 steals in ’70) were good the way Mets’ numbers were good, his real-time performance was world-class. Shaking off his miserable, headachy 1968, Tommie Agee became, in 1969, the leadoff guy and centerfielder the Mets had always craved. In August, he hit a homer off Juan Marichal in the fourteenth (yes, the fourteenth) to beat the Giants, 1-0. In September, he avenged Bill Hands’ first-inning headhunting with a two-run dinger in the third and a beautiful slide home under Randy Hundley’s tag in the sixth to accelerate the Cubs’ decline, 3-2. In October…well, after batting .357 in the NLCS, Tommie Agee owned an entire World Series game, the third one: Two deservedly legendary catches (the snow-cone and the dive) warded off five Orioles runs, and a leadoff Agee shot gave the Mets the immediate upper hand. Without Agee, it’s Orioles 5 Mets 4. A horrifying thought. With Agee, it was Mets 5 Orioles 0. Much better. Tommie rode ’69 into a Gold Glove season (only Met OF to win one) in ’70, by which time he was probably the most popular baseball player among elementary-school children in the Metropolitan Area. Sometimes, kids know best.

15: Cleon Jones: Between October 17, 1960 (National League awards expansion franchise to New York) and June 3, 1980 (Darryl Strawberry selected as first pick in amateur draft), the best all-around, everyday player signed and developed by the Mets was Cleon Jones. It is not clear anybody was ever second. Cleon was the Mets’ offense or certainly a significant chunk of it for a decade or so. He was huge (six HRs in the final ten games) in September ’73 and placed in the Top Ten in the league in ’68 and ’71. Cleon Jones’ entire Mets career wasn’t 1969. But if it were, nobody would’ve complained. His .340 was the team standard for nearly thirty years, placing him third in the National League. Nobody’d ever heard of it, but his OPS was a staggering (for then) .904. And despite the image of Gil escorting him to the dugout for not hustling, he led NL left fielders with a .991 fielding percentage. Of course as it is with all Great Mets, it was symbolism as much as accomplishment that defined Jones. Cleon’s shoes were polished generously before Game Five, which let the manager prove beyond the shadow of a smudge that he had been hit by a Dave McNally pitch, sending him to first base and positioning him to score the first Met run. Plus he caught Dave Johnson’s fly ball for the final out in the ninth, the lovely last image of that most Amazin’ season. What is generally overlooked is Cleon Jones started the rally that won the damn thing in the eighth, doubling to lead it off and scoring the winning run. See, there was a lot of pixie dust sprinkled over Shea in 1969, but Cleon Jones could actually play ball anytime.

14: Jerry Grote: Crank. Sourpuss. Ornery cuss. Beyond his station as the best defensive catcher of his time, beyond his nurturing of a fistful of some of the era’s greatest pitchers, beyond a bat that showed steady, solid improvement between the mid-’60s (when he was stolen for Tom Parsons) and the mid-’70s, there was what Jerry Grote was said to be like: not pleasant. Maybe the beat guys minded, but for the fans, he remained, in his way, endearing. He caught, he threw, he prevailed. We knew less about our heroes then and maybe that wasn’t so bad. Of course his longstanding bristle would explain why it was Sharon and not Jerry Grote who fronted those commercials for Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard. It must’ve been all he could do to look happy biting into a bologna sandwich after 22 takes.

13: Jerry Koosman: Nineteen wins as a rookie, seventeen as a sophomore and — after arm problems interrupted what could have been a borderline Hall of Fame career — 21 wins in 1976 underscored the likable Jerry Koosman’s undisputed place as the best lefthanded starter in team history. No responsible Mets fan would argue the designation. But his regular-season numbers, even his most impressive (his total of 140 wins is third among all Mets pitchers), weren’t what made him great. It was the post-season. Push came to shove? Kooz came to pitch. Jerry Koosman started six games in the 1969 and 1973 tournaments. The Mets won all six. He was 4-0, which was swell for him, but the 6-0 was awesome for everybody. Kooz is recalled accurately as the quintessential good guy, but he was bad news for the other team when it really, really counted.

12: John Franco: For the entire decade of the 1990s, John Franco registered 268 saves. All but perhaps five felt worthless. He’d pass milestone after milestone and the Mets would hold ceremonies in his honor, but it all came off as very hollow given the state of the team most of the time. By the end of 1999, once he was no longer closer, the main goal of the Mets’ playoff push seemed to be Get Johnny In. He’d been pitching since 1984 and missed the post-season every one of his first fifteen years. He was killer effective for the Reds in the ’80s, but they didn’t win anything until he left…for the Mets. That was when the Mets crumbled, despite all those Franco saves. On October 3, 1999, when Melvin Mora duckwalked across home plate with the run that guaranteed no worse than a one-game playoff for the National League Wild Card, just about every set of eyes turned toward John Franco as he led the charge from the dugout. For maybe a half-minute, the collective consciousness of Shea Stadium thought, “John Franco is finally going to get his chance.” DiamondVision found him and the crowd erupted for someone who had been, at best, a Rorschach Test for most Mets fans.