David Wright is going to hit eighth, and after some false starts, I've found a reason to be mad about it.

At first I figured stats would make an effective weapon, so I went out and did some furious Googling for the latest sabermetrical thinking on optimal batting orders. It's an interesting subject, though frustrating if you're in a revolutionary mood. As best I can determine, the definitive recent take on this is by James Click of Baseball Prospectus. That article is behind the subscription wall, but it's excerpted and discussed here, on Baseball Musings.

The gist of it (and I'm undoubtedly missing the subtleties) is that players should bat in descending order of on-base average. But this look at the problem, by Roger Moore, finds that the advantages of the optimal lineup are pretty small — 0.4 game per season. The conventional batting order isn't dumb at all, Moore says: It's “close enough to optimal that it took far more games than have been played in the history of MLB to show that the descending OBA order was statistically significantly better.”

Mark D. Pankin goes into a bit more detail on what's wanted from each position in the order; the math was tough sledding for me, but I liked his discussion of the biggest managerial blunder: putting a guy who can steal bases but has a low OBA in the leadoff spot. Unfortunately for us, that description fits a certain Mets shortstop perfectly: One might call this error the Reyes Fallacy. And, in fact, MetsGeek's Michael Oliver suggests we'd do better with Reyes hitting 7th. (He has Wright hitting 2nd.)

Still, the Reyes Fallacy doesn't necessarily dictate Wright's place in the order. TRF aside, the difference between a conventional-wisdom order and an optimized one is small. And Randolph's lineup begins with three switch hitters (Reyes, Matsui, Beltran) before alternating right- and left-handed hitters (Piazza, Floyd, Cameron, Mientiewicz, Wright) the rest of the way, which is certainly nicely balanced and should be tough on enemy relief corps.

So I was still trying to be outraged, but lacking a good reason. My next move was to think, “Well, this is going to cost Wright plate appearances, and any fool can see you'd rather have more PAs from Wright than from Cameron or Mientiewicz.” And it will cost him PAs — but the cost is somewhere between 20 and 35 PAs, which isn't enough to get worked up about. (I'm basing that on thinking Wright should hit 6th — batting him 2nd would give him an extra 60 PAs or so, which is a different story.)

Returning to Newsday's account, I re-read what Rick Down had to say about the move. And finally I found my reason to be ticked.

Here are Down's comments:

“The fact that he's in the lineup, hitting eighth is still better than being on the bench.”

Wha? It's also better than being sent to Norfolk, released, or shot, which would also be stupid things to do with David Wright.

“…if it's not him, who is it?”

How about the right-handed hitter who had a lower OBA last year and, unlike Wright, has never shown the ability to draw walks? How about Mike Cameron?

“It's a nice luxury to have to be able to say that our No. 8 hitter has the abilities that David Wright has.”

It's also a nice circular argument to make. You could put Ted Williams in the 8th slot and have a heckuva No. 8 hitter, but that wouldn't make it a good idea.

“Experience-wise, too. It will be his first full season…”

Ah. Here's the outrage.

I mean, is this a baseball team or a frat initiation? Wright is straight outta Boys' Life — it's not like he's a bad seed who needs to be put in his place. If this is about Mike Cameron's psyche, as the Daily News suggested, I don't want to hear it — Mike Cameron is a fabulously well-paid adult, and Wright shouldn't be punished for being a team guy. And Randolph and Down's Yankee teams won because they worked counts, wore out pitchers and played solid situational baseball — not because Jeter and Rivera were fetching Gatorade for veterans. If they aren't clear on this point, I've overestimated them.

David Wright has never shown that he's anything less than Gallant in blue and orange. So why is he getting Goofus'd? 

Greatest Mets Twenty through Eleven, coming very soon, were ten good reasons to root for the Mets. But since you went deep Monday, I thought I’d reach back for the first ten reasons I became who I became.

1) Peanuts was the most popular thing going. Circa 1968, my sister, eleven then, had a bunch of Peanuts books which I, five then, began reading. Charlie Brown was always playing baseball. Peanuts was a normal thing to like, ergo baseball must have been a normal thing to like.

2) As a child, I sensed I was on the outside looking in. If baseball was as normal and popular as it seemed to be as portrayed through the pen and ink of Charles Schultz, then I wanted to get it on it.

3) Susan — it became Suzan in the Seventies — also had a respectable collection of 1967 and 1968 baseball cards. I inherited them pretty quickly given that she had absolutely no interest in baseball. I asked her many years later, hey, what were you doing with all those cards? She was, for one of the few times in her life, going along with the crowd. The other girls bought them because they were, for their purposes, pictures of boys. I distinctly recall one of the cards was a 1967 Joe Torre. Hardly a Shermanesque (Bobby) pin-up, but Susan briefly burned for the Atlanta catcher. All of her ’68s were low numbers, meaning she must’ve given up on conforming before sixth grade was out, or simply opted to devote her spare change to Archie Comics.

(Aside: The ’67 Torre was lost in 1974 in the one and only “if you don’t clean up your room, I’m throwing out your baseball cards” threat my mother ever made good on. Not all my cards went, but there were arbitrary victims, including that Torre. When I let on that I was still carrying a grudge about it as an adult, she swore to me that she allowed them to linger in the basement for a week or two, assuming I’d have the good sense to sneak them back upstairs. I never did that because I assumed I’d just get in bigger trouble. When I went to my first card show in a generation in December 1999, I asked a dealer to see a ’67 Torre. It was maybe four bucks. But now that Joe Torre was Joe Torre, I felt I had to explain to the man that this had nothing to do with his current job or exalted status. Of course the dealer couldn’t have cared less, but I couldn’t bring myself to contribute to Torre’s beatification, so I passed.)

4) Susan had a few Mets cards to which I gravitated more than I did any of her others, including Bob Clemente and Carl Yastrzemski. I demonstrated my fealty to Ed Kranepool by drawing a mustache and beard on him while he knelt in the on-deck circle. This was New York and what little I did know about sports included that you root for the team from where you’re from. (There were a couple of ’67 Yankees in there — Ruben Amaro, Tom Tresh — but they could’ve been from Pittsburgh for all I cared.)

5) My first memories of the Mets as a baseball team and not just a word comes from somewhere in the summer of ’69 when the talk of the Sands Beach Club and Day Camp in Lido centered on the moon landing and the Mets. My father would bring home the Post, then a responsible afternoon paper. The back page featured a running cartoon depicting the adventures of a mean ol’ bear and a lovable duckling duking it out for something called First Place. Every night I would check to see if the duckling was giving it to the bear. As summer progressed, it would be the Cubs’ bear ducking the Mets.

6) In September, I started following the standings in Newsday very closely. As a six-year-old, I was considered the family math prodigy, so the W, L, Pct. and GB columns mesmerized me. New York’s Pct. and Chicago’s GB both grew bigger at the same time. Having just begun first grade with a pencil box that featured a map of the United States, however, I was confused on the matter of Washington being in the American League East since Seattle was in Washington and Washington was way out west, which is where Seattle was in the American League. By 1972, the respective placements of the Senators and the Pilots would be moot.

7) The first specific game I can recall was September 24, 1969, the Mets playing the Cardinals with a chance to win the Eastern Division. It was Susan’s friend Iris who relayed word over the phone that Donn Clendenon had just hit his second homer of the night to put us up 6-0. Neither television was available to me; Susan watched Chad Everett and Medical Center Wednesday nights on the portable Sony while my parents just had to see Kraft Music Hall in their bedroom. It was Iris and the radio for me. While I grasped the significance of this victory for the Miracle Mets as the papers insisted on calling them for some reason, I was mystified as to why, after a summer of chasing and passing the Cubs, we had to beat the Cardinals to win the division. Later, after learning that St. Louis had won the pennant in 1968, I puzzled it out: First you had to outlast the team in front of you, then you had to defeat the team that had won the year before. In 1970, I made up a song about it, which even if you buy me more beers than I’ve drunk in the eleven years we’ve known each other, there’s no chance in hell you’ll ever hear.

8) Watching Game One of the playoffs against the Braves on the first Saturday in October, I had a revelation that I breathlessly reported to my parents. I can tell the game is in Atlanta, see, because when the Braves do something good, the people there cheer. They don’t do that for the Mets. I was told I had nailed it.

9) A week later, my sister and I were in the car with my father, heading to the recently opened Times Square Stores (TSS) in Oceanside. My dad put the first game of the World Series on the radio, and the first Baltimore batter, Don Buford, hit a home run off of Tom Seaver. I was instantly distressed but he told me don’t worry, the Mets can still come back. They didn’t that day but it was nice to know they could.

10) The following Thursday, my father took off from work to bring me to an eye doctor in Brooklyn. My family hadn’t lived in Brooklyn since before I was born but all our doctors were still there. I fidgeted and fussed over having eye drops poured into me. I clenched my eyes tight until I was told that if I didn’t cooperate, I wouldn’t be allowed to watch the World Series that afternoon. I opened wide and took my drops like a Met (after all, somebody did me the favor of making this appointment on this particular school day, so this was no time to pull a tantrum). I was indeed dropped off at home in time for the game. My main impression of the action was Ron Swoboda hit a home run. He didn’t. He doubled to drive in a run and later scored himself. I hadn’t yet delineated between home runs and runs — they were all home runs to me. Regardless, the Mets went on to win and become world champions. Dad, who had emerged from Penn Station just as the final out was made and reported there were celebrations everywhere, brought home the Post that night to confirm it. They ran one final duckling cartoon, except now the duckling was a glorious swan. The next morning, Scott Gerber’s mother gave us and another kid from down the block, Jeffrey Kohn, a ride to school. I asked them if they knew that the Mets had won the World Series. Yes, they did. The Mets had won the World Series. I knew it was special. I knew it wouldn’t happen every year. I knew I’d be back for more. And I never, ever left.

A week to go, good lord. At least there's some bits of news: Scott Strickland, Scott Stewart, Orber Moreno, Jae Seo and Jeff Keppinger took that long walk. Supposedly that has us down to 37 guys.

David Wright hit eighth. That seems insane to me: Beyond the fact that Wright can flat-out rake, to use the currently fashionable cliche, his minor-league numbers show he knows how to take a walk. I know he's a rookie, which would argue against putting him in the 3, 4 or 5 hole for now for fear of putting too much on him too early and bruising some veteran egos, but can we really give up that many David Wright at-bats? In my batting order he'd be hitting sixth. Of course, I have a mental block about who's a lefty and who's a righty, so my batting order is worth a bucket of warm spit.

There's a great new blog called Metsgeek.com which kicked off with, among other things, an interview with Bob Klapisch that supplies plenty of dirt without being irresponsible about it. As might be expected, it's hard on the Wilpons, the medical staff, Aaron Heilman and Jae Seo, among others. Actually he was easier on Seo than I figured he'd be: Vern Ruhle couldn't reach him either. If you refuse to listen to two pitching coaches in a row and keep carping to the papers, the problem probably isn't the pitching coaches. Here's betting a trade this week gives Mr. Seo a new address.

Sticking with the news front, Jeremy Heit, one of the Metsgeek guys, did our boys' Five Questions over at Hardball Times. Good stuff — lots of the newfangled stats I love and imperfectly understand, but not so many that old dinosaurs like me can't follow along.

Some good quotes today, too. Both, oddly, are concerned with speed:

“Velocity can win stuffed animals at the circus.”

So saith Dr. Peterson about the fact that Ishii didn't hit 90 in his first pitching session.

“I think adrenalin-wise it would have created a little more velocity rather than being on Field 14 with two crows in the stands and one umpire.”

That's from the departed Mr. Strickland, whose velocity wasn't where it should be but who also didn't get much work in spring-training games.

Of course Todd Zeile was a great quote too.

Re the boys in the 20s, your request for snarky Wayne Garrett quotes brought me back to my first year of being a fan, which was 1976. I had said the Mets were my favorite team for a couple of years before that, and Rusty Staub was my favorite player, but in truth that mostly had to do with one of my earliest memories, which was my mom jumping up and down cheering, “Yay, Rusty!” To employ a little pop psych, I think my four- or five-year-old self was so taken aback by this display that I had to know why she was doing this and who this Rusty was, and reflexively took team and Rusty to heart so my mother jumping up and down yelling would be a good thing and not a scary thing. Fandom wells from strange springs.

Anyway, in '76 I turned seven and became a real fan. My entry into Metdom was twofold: baseball cards and the tale of '69, probably absorbed through George Vecsey's Joy in Mudville. This made the baseball cards odd, though: I treasured all the remaining '69 Mets, regardless of team (what was Tug doing wearing maroon?) and adored the players left on the actual Mets, but I couldn't help noticing that nothing particularly miraculous happened on the field. Koosman and Seaver would pitch, Garrett would play third, Buddy was at short and Kranepool was on the bench, but they'd win and lose in various combinations and finish third. Hey, I was seven: Show me a miracle, and I'd think it was great — and then want to know where the next one was. 

So all those players were icons to me — I'd watch them play baseball, but mostly I treated them like guys who'd walked on the moon: They'd done something marvelous and it meant a lot to me, but watching them doing workaday things was disorienting and a bit disappointing. The first player I ever rooted for the way I root for players now was Lee Mazzilli. After all, he came up after I did.

Given my weakness for brawling, of course I loved Ray Knight. That game against the Reds should be replayed weekly on the new Mets channel: The moment where Ray's eyes go square right before he slugs Eric Davis is priceless. And his putting both hands on his head right before he vanishes into the crowd of Mets around home plate to end Game Six always makes me cry. (In a quiet manly way, of course.)

Putting aside the recent unpleasantness, the thing that always struck me about Al Leiter was how friggin' smart he was. There was some locker-room interview in which Piazza had said “centrifugal” (or maybe it was “centripetal”) and Leiter laughed and said Piazza was always using fancy words but had used this one wrong, and launched into an explanation of how centrifugal or centripetal was what he'd meant, and how it related to pitching. It was the kind of thing geeky writers like us wish jocks would say, but he really said it. (Ken Burns got Bill Lee to do this too.)

Given my weakness for boozing, of course I loved Lenny Dykstra. Crashing cars, spitting chaw, high-stakes gambling, doing 'roids when it was flaky instead of criminal, boozing it up in Paris, you name it. A couple of years ago Emily and I watched a Behind the Music about Iggy Pop. At the end, she was horrified by what a wreck Iggy Pop had made of his life. I was horrified by the realization that it was too late for me to be Iggy Pop. Lenny was my baseball Iggy.

David Cone was another player I loved for being all too human. One of the best pitchers in baseball, and still capable of letting runners wheel around the bases because he'd blown a fuse and was giving both barrels to the ump. It's the kind of thing I'd have screwed up too.

Ah, Robin Ventura. It ended poorly, what with the Yankee uniform and all, but I'll always have the memory of sitting in the top of the upper deck for the Grand Slam Single game. We were behind the DiamondVision, which blocked out most of the announcements, so there'd just be various booms, and up there it was Bob and Gary (transmitted via dozens of nearby pocket radios) providing the narration. Which was nice. Afterwards I walked down the steps and every couple of feet had to stop and just scream into the rain and the darkness.

Wally Backman stepped on my foot as we were both leaving Al Lang Field when I was 16 or 17. I was amazed that he was my size. He was in full uniform, so he spiked me, and it hurt. He didn't say sorry or anything — just hopped on the bus. That was OK, though. He was Wally Backman. He could step on my foot anytime he liked.

By the way, Mientkiewicz has cats. But not cats like you have cats. This is a strange story. 

Hope you had a happy Elster Sunday and that your boy got to every egg within his limited range.

Cripes, the real thing is a week away and panic is simmering in this

corner of Metsopotamia. Pedro's lower back. DeJean's right calf.

Cameron's nodding, if that, familiarity with his new position.

Zambrano's refusal to make the Kazmir trade palatable. Diaz's apparent

ticket to Norfolk. Reyes' excellent health (which has to be a set-up).

Our utter lack of a bullpen beyond Braden. How did April 4 get so close

with so much unknown?

These are the desperate hours. It occurs to me that the seventh, the

eighth, maybe the sixth innings — one-third of our lives — will be

trusted to people we barely know. Who is Dae-Sung Koo anyway? He's

looked fairly abysmal and

he doesn't know why he's here. Earlier in spring training, it was

reported that the Yankees had been interested in signing him. When

asked why he chose the Mets, he replied, “I'm not sure why my agent did

that.” Assuming nothing was lost in translation, we've got a

responsibility-ducker who can't pitch. It's Viola all over again.

Why do I keep hearing Chilly Willy, a.k.a. Manny Aybar, has no chance

to make the team? Sunday afternoon I wrapped myself in a blanket and

listened to him pitch two shutout innings. Ditto for your pal Heath

Bell who should have bladed his way onto the staff by now. He's no

lock. Nobody's a lock, except for Felix Horrendous and DeJean, whose

calf-baked career wasn't much before his injuries, save for like three

appearances last summer.

Is this what we're setting up with? Brrrrr…

Save Victor Diaz! Somebody's gotta bat right-handed off the bench and

hit one out. I'm of two minds on Galarraga, despite his recent pretend

power surge: 1) He's old and 2) He's decrepit. Not as a human being,

just as a ballplayer. I look in the mirror; I recognize old and

decrepit when I see it.

Why no bandwagon for Luis Garcia who looked/sounded good Sunday? A year

ago Karim Garcia was the starting right fielder and Danny Garcia was

our secret weapon. It was muchas Garcias. Now? Sic transit Garcia.

Glints of sun: John Pachot seemed particularly studly behind the plate

Friday night — move over, Hietpas. And the closer of future past,

Royce Ring, actually appeared on TV, pitching well if wearing No. 91

without a name. I guess the future will have to wait.

As you can see, I'm coping a lot better with the past lately than I am

with this particular present. C'mon man, make some snarky comment about

how Wayne Garrett wasn't a Great Met because he didn't charge Lynn

McGlothen one night in 1976. That I can wrap my head around. The New

Mets? They still elude me.

What on earth do you have against Bruce Chen of all lapsed Mets? He's like three teams from being Todd Zeile.

I first read about Rotisserie Baseball in Inside Sports circa 1981. It sounded delightful for the first couple of pages until it was explained that you could have guys on “your” team who might face Mets who weren't. That's the moment I decided Roto/Fantasy wasn't for me. (I know there are all-AL leagues, but that would require validating the existence of the junior circuit.)

Let's Go D'Etres, everybody except Kazmir. I can't stand the idea that he's going to be lighting up the American League while Zambrano goes on the DL after throwing 16 consecutive balls in his first start, which will give every know-nothing writer and analyst yet another touchstone with which to bash us. That's what they live for, you know.

For today only, I will offer up my own ten-man fantasy team, the Soaring Twenties. We're not gonna overpower anybody, but we will dirty our uniforms, flap our gums and set your feet on fire. We're also gonna play a lot of third.

30. Ray Knight: The morning after the Mets won the 1986 World Series, New York radio was wall to wall with Mets talk. On WABC, sports guy Steve Malzberg got a big laugh by suggesting that if you ask Ray Knight what time it is, he'll tell you how to make a watch. The night before, after Knight hit the seventh-inning home run that put the Mets ahead once and for all and accepted the MVP, it was a three-sheets Keith Hernandez who wouldn't shut up, telling an interviewer, “people call me the leader of this team. Ray Knight's the leader of this team.” Malzberg and Mex were both right. Ray talked a lot which helped set the tone for a Mets team that knew it was good and wasn't shy about letting you in on it. Ray backed up his talk, as Eric Davis and Tom Niedenfuer could tell you. His whole season was about fight, starting with his spunky comeback from the .218 disaster of '85, running through his shockingly successful April (six home runs), his honor-defending fisticuffs of summer and that glorious moment he jumped full-force on home plate with the winning run of World Series Game Six. Said his excitement got the best of him and he twisted his back by jumping for joy. Of course he did — even Ray Knight's body language spoke volumes.

29. Wayne Garrett: The Mets went to and won a World Series with Wayne Garrett playing most of their games at third base. He drove in the decisive runs in the final game of the '69 NLCS. Then the team he helped as a rookie couldn't wait to demote him. Joe Foy came. Bob Aspromonte came. Jim Fregosi came. Three years in a row, the Mets got themselves a third base messiah. Wayne Garrett hung around while all three imploded. By 1973, there was nobody but Wayne to play third. And he did, at the highest level of his career. During the stretch of all stretches, September '73, Wayne Garrett was at least the second-best reason to Believe in the Mets. From September 4 through the October 1 clinching, Wayne hit safely in 19 of 23 games, including the last nine in a row. He batted. 333, hit six homers, drove in seventeen runs and scored twenty. In the World Series, he hit two more homers. Wayne Garrett not only brought the Mets within one game of ultimate victory, he secured himself another year as third baseman. Natch, the Mets went out after that and got themselves an old Joe Torre to take it away from him. Garrett continued to persevere, though, winning back his job before '75 was done, eventually putting in 709 games at the position, about a million more than any Met third baseman before him. He was finally ousted from the hot corner by Roy Staiger. Yes, that Roy Staiger.

28. Al Leiter: Al Leiter was the face of the Mets. He was their arched brows, their wide eyes, their open mouth, their aching cheek bones. He was the expressive one. Al Leiter did not hide his emotions on the mound. While there, he invented new ones. He could pitch some, too, particularly when it counted — with one notable exception. Between 1998 and 2001, he had what could be considered 38 “money starts”: September, October plus all games against the Braves and the Yankees. In those pressure situations, Al's ERA was 3.07. Subtract the inexcusable 0 IP, 5 ER in Game Six of the '99 NLCS, and it drops to 2.89. Al was never more facial and never more wonderful than in the ninth inning of the final game of the 2000 World Series, when his pitch count reached 142. It may have been a few pitches too many, the last one accounting for a universal grimace, but oh that face.

27. Dave Kingman: For the longest time, the Mets were an acoustic act. Then they bought Dave Kingman from the Giants in 1975 and all at once they were plugged into a massive power source. The sound was electric. In Kingman I, he was a revelation. Said he didn't worry about home runs but he hit them in numbers and to distances that no Met had ever reached. A franchise that never featured a slugger now cultivated one. “Dave Kingman” became synonymous with home run hitter, albeit the one-dimensional kind, as a Met. The first glimpse we had of him as our own was in a spring training game televised back to New York. Mets vs. Yanks from Fort Lauderdale. Catfish Hunter pitching. Kingman walloping one into the Everglades. Mickey Mantle swearing he never hit anything nearly as far. Don't call me Kong, Dave asked, so Sky King became his nickname. Pleasant. Did commercials for United Airlines bragging on their legroom. Never found a position to call his own and struck out a lot but broke Frank Thomas' team record for dingers in '75. Broke his own record in '76. Elected to the All-Star Team. Threatened Hack Wilson's 56 until he decided to try to catch a ball in left and tore up his thumb. The next year he wanted to be paid like a star and he was gone. Kingman II was a warier affair. Brought back in the spring of '81 for Steve Henderson, he had honed his reputation as a proto-Bonds, a Carlton without portfolio, someone who didn't really care for the media. He handed out pens inscribed with his initials, D.A.K., and handed them to reporters. Told them to write nice things with them. The Mets put up signs in the Shea parking lot warning that this was a KINGMAN FALLOUT ZONE, management not responsible for windshields broken by flying baseballs. Still could hit 'em. They soared. Among the league leaders in '81. Led the NL in '82 with 37 HRs, but batted .204. Grew surlier and surlier. After being replaced by Keith Hernandez, finished '83 on a 5-for-43 skid, no HRs after July 2. Mets ate his salary and released him. Dave Kingman left town a jerk. His work here? Majestic.

26. Roger McDowell: The flake act seemed kind of forced — more a practical joker than a poignant Tugger. Roger McDowell's personality on the mound was dead serious. Nothing wrong with the masks and the upside-down uniforms and the hotfoots (hotfeet?), but it was the sinker that was the real crowd-pleaser. As Orosco waxed and waned in '85 and '86, McDowell pitched steadily. Roger's sense of whimsy stayed undercover for the duration of NLCS Game Six. He entered in the ninth, scored tied at three. He left after thirteen, score tied at three. Roger McDowell threw five shutout innings of baseball inside the Astrodome pressure cooker, giving up just a single hit. After the pennant was won, few celebrated as heartily. It was the sensible thing to do.

25. Lenny Dykstra: Where did Lenny Dykstra come from? He says he's from Garden Grove, California, but that's likely his cover. One theory has it that Lenny was a Midget Met, the pre-PC youth program the team ran in the '60s and '70s. Lenny got separated from his group and missed the bus home. He decided he liked baseball so much that he set up camp inside the bowels of Shea Stadium, a building that doesn't lack for bowels. Secretly subsisting on Harry M. Stevens fare and teaching himself reading and math with old press guides, Lenny watched every game from the old Jets locker room. He learned his lessons well. Soon, using the traveling secretary's credit card number that he'd overheard so often, he began booking himself on road trips. Thus, Lenny was available to take over for Mookie Wilson when the incumbent centerfielder got hurt early in '85. Davey Johnson didn't ask many questions when the runtish kid wearing No. 4 appeared in his office in Riverfront Stadium, spitting tobacco and demanding, “put me in coach, I'm ready to play.” He needed a player and Lenny was there. In his second Major League at-bat, Lenny hit a home run off Mario Soto. After the game, the writers wanted to know who he was. Davey didn't know but wouldn't let on. Stalling for an answer, he nervously thumbed through the visiting manager's desk and stuck a finger on something sharp. “Nails!” he yelled. The reporters took that to be the rookie's nickname, so they wrote about Nails, that new sparkplug in center. One thing led to another and  Lenny Dykstra grew up quickly as a Met, running, stealing, cursing, tripling, homering, winning, carrying the team on his diminutive back against Houston and Boston all the way to a world championship. That's just one theory, though.

24. David Cone: John Schuerholz, certified genius for how he built the Braves, was once an idiot. As GM of the Royals, he traded David Cone for Ed Hearn. He even threw in Chris Jelic for good measure. Ed Hearn was a swell guy. David Cone won 75 games between 1988 and 1992. He went 20-3 in '88. Struck out nineteen on the last day of '91 with the threat of arrest hanging over his head. Led the league in strikeouts that year. Made up for the transgression of dissing the Dodgers in a ghosted NLCS column by shutting them down in his next start. Threw from all kinds of interesting angles. Said all kinds of interesting things. The Mets getting David Cone was a case of Grand Theft Pitcher.

23. Felix Millan: There is a sense among Mets fans that any time their team acquires a highly regarded veteran, he will disintegrate upon arrival. Felix Millan was a three-time All-Star for the Atlanta Braves before joining the Mets in 1973 and replacing Ken Boswell as starting second baseman. In his first year, he played 153 games and batted .290. Whereas all Mets second basemen made 79 double plays in '72, Felix alone turned 99 in '73. Instead of finishing third, the Mets won their division. In the playoffs against the Reds, he batted .316. Two years later, Felix, forever choking up, set what would be a longstanding club record by collecting 191 hits. He played in all 162 games, the only Met to ever play every time the Mets took the field. Bottom line: Five very solid, very impactful seasons, including one in which he made, perhaps, the difference in the before-and-after fortunes of the Mets.

22. Robin Ventura: Mike Piazza is generally credited as the player who turned the Mets around. No mean addition, Piazza joined a team that had previously won 88 games. With him on board, they won…88 games. You want somebody who transformed a team, look to Mike's buddy Robin Ventura in 1999. After signing as a free agent, the Mets installed Robin at third, shifting Edgardo Alfonzo to second, a spectacular upgrade over Carlos Baerga. The lineup no longer hinged on the likes of Brian McRae because Robin could be penciled into the 5-hole daily. The defense was better — the infield made play after play and set record after record — as Ventura earned a Gold Glove. The offense was phenomenal, with almost everybody hitting around or above .300. Robin himself, playing in all but two games, put up MVP numbers: .301, 32 HRs, 120 RBIs. Following the distressing 88-win season of 1998 (five losses at the end, no Wild Card), the '99 Mets of Robin Ventura won 97, made the playoffs then made them amazing. Ventura slipped instantly and easily into the role of team leader, taking heat off a reticent Piazza. His implementation of Mojo Risin' created, somehow, the perfect theme for a pennant run. And then there was the matter of the most unique single in the annals of baseball history, the one that sailed through the raindrops and cleared the centerfield fence in the fifteenth inning with the bases loaded. From every angle that can be measured and a few that defy quantification, Robin Ventura's 1999 was the best season any Met ever had.

21. Wally Backman: A thorough examination of the anatomy of the 1986 Mets will find Wally Backman was the team's most vital organ. Heart? Spine? Guts? Cojones? Filth-covered epidermis? Wally was all of it.

The tragedy of Bonds is he didn't need the cream or the clear. He was

no Jason Giambi — a perfectly nice doubles hitter with a good eye

before he swole himself up into a slugger — but an organic,

all-natural Hall of Famer. Pending further evidence, I don't believe

Bonds was on the juice in the early 1990s, when he was putting up

awesome years. But whatever drove him to be able to do that on the

ballfield also drove him, if his mistress's allegations are true, to

the syringe. (Or the cream, or the clear, or whatever.) The Hall of

Fame that eluded his father wasn't enough; he had to propel himself

into the stratosphere with Mays and Ruth and Aaron. You can see an echo

of this in the allegations of Bonds laundering $80,000 in autograph

money. Why on earth? What's $80,000 to Bonds? (Or to Martha Stewart,

for that matter.) Maybe it's simply that the kind of drive that makes

you a Hall of Famer (or a self-made mogul) can't be modulated or

switched on and off — being that good means you go for the kill every

time, even when it isn't in your interests.

I booed Bonds when he'd come to the plate at Shea, but that was because

A) he was trying to beat us; and B) I couldn't abide the

spectacle-seeking know-nothings who were cheering for him in our

park, hoping for another event to add to the string of them adorning

their pointless, frivolous lives. More than anything else, I was booing

them. As far as I can recall,

I've never disliked Bonds. Heck, I was always conscious of seeing one

more game about which I could one day tell Joshua's children, “Sure, I

saw Barry Bonds play.”

To my amazement, I've let myself get sucked back into fantasy baseball

after 14 years on the wagon — a friend of mine invited me to play in a

league full of diehard baseball fans who sounded like entertaining

company, and I couldn't resist.

This is not exactly the fantasy baseball of the late 1980s, when as

commissioner I used to spend hours of valuable New Orleans boozing time

transcribing stats from USA Today

by hand, then slip them into the newspaper's outgoing mail. In this new

millennium, my draft preparations consisted of manipulating a Java

applet displaying Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball's ranked list of every player

in the majors, with the ability to look up stats, break down players by

position, automatically set up draft queues, launch the space shuttle,

and who knows what else. Amazing. Yes, I sound like an old man.

So my first move was to exclude hated Yankees, particularly hated

former Yankees, and Met apostates from my roster of potential draftees.

A-Rod, the top-ranked player in all of fantasy baseball, was the first

one chucked on the forbidden list, quickly followed by his little

friend Jeter. Adios, Posada

and Rivera. Back in your Montoursville bunker, Mussina. Away with you,

Bernie Williams — and by the way, you suck at guitar. The Antichrist

got tossed, of course. So did Kenny Lofton. Then it was time for former

Mets — no game today, Armando, Jeff Kent and Bruce Chen. Finally I

threw Franco and Leiter on the pile out of spite. (True confession: I

exiled Jae Seo in a fit of pique. Omar will soon do the same.)

This is, of course, a great way to lose. So be it — I will lose with honor.

Did I draft Mets, you ask? Of course I did. I took Wright fairly early,

grabbed Glavine in the middle rounds (while thinking to myself, “Gee, I

don't even like Tom Glavine”), and added Floyd and Mientkiewicz to fill

out the roster late. Other notable players on the '05 edition of the

Jaison D'Etres: Jim Thome, Luis Castillo, Miguel Cabrera, Nick Swisher,

B.J. Upton, Grady Sizemore, Rich Harden, John Lieber, Danny Haren, and

Scott Kazmir. We'll see how this goes, and I promise few if any updates

from the world of fake baseball.

Happily, I wound up with no Yankees. Though I admit I was thought

Giambi might be a bargain and was lying in wait for him in the middle

rounds. (He got away, which means I did too.)

Turk Wendell forgive me.

With XM Radio, you can listen to every home team broadcast of every game this year including a bunch from spring training. Wednesday night, with the Mets and Cards on the FAN from Jupiter, I checked XM and they were carrying the St. Louis broadcast about a minute delayed.

So first I heard Gary Cohen enthusiastically call a sweet play that David Wright made at third. While that was completed, Mike Shannon of KMOX was droning on about what a great crowd we’re gonna get here at Roger Dean Stadium tonight. Then when the Wright play happened, he gave it its props, adding, “few are paying attention to David Wright but he’s gonna be good”.

What planet is Mike Shannon living on? Oh right, St. Louis.

I bought USA Today Sports Weekly last week because at least in the New York edition they put Wright (future Greatest Met 1 through 4) on the cover. In a spread featuring the “award winners of tomorrow,” he was picked as the 2006 Silver Slugger. Great! Next to him was “Scott Kazmir: 2007 AL Cy Young Award winner”. D’oh!

Not sure how apocryphal it was, but do you remember how in the wake of that awesome 11-9, 12-inning win over the Giants last August (decided on a fly ball lost in the sun) it was reported that Barry Bonds acknowledged Diamond Dave? He landed on third after a triple (having gotten on base six times, not homering and not being intentionally walked; it was seriously Howe’s finest hour of managing) and after young David told him “you’re as good as advertised,” Bonds replied, “keep swinging it”.

If David Wright can make Barry Bonds seem human, he can do anything. Except maybe cook for himself, according to Thursday’s News.

Regarding that opposing player, as long as I’ve brought him up in a Mets context, Barry Bonds is so easy to root against. I sat deep in left field for the final game of the Mets-Giants division series in 2000, the Bobby Jones one-hitter. There was one guy (a rabid beer drinker on a very cold day) who could not stop taunting him. We were too far from the field for Barry to possibly hear us, but the guy wouldn’t shut up. I cringed out of fear of awaking the sleeping Giant but after a while it was infectious. We were all chanting horrible things about Bonds (the guy who started it was off buying beer during his last at-bat and caught loads of grief for it).

Yet to be honest, except for when he’s playing against us, I find it hard to root against Barry Bonds. On the field, he’s the best player I’ve ever seen. There’s nobody close. I love watching him hit. I love watching him take. When he could still move, I loved watching him play left field. In a human-being contest, I’d prefer Henry Aaron maintain the home-run record forever, but I was looking forward to Bonds chasing and passing him because I like watching history get made and I like great players getting the attention they deserve.

Count me among the enablers who turned a blind eye to substance-enhanced performance when it was blossoming in the late ’90s. I just figured players worked out a lot more than they used to. I wouldn’t consider myself a home-run whore, especially coming from a pitching-and-defense tradition (and intensely abhorring the front-runners who showed up at Shea in Cardinal or Cub jerseys). I never felt any particular affection for McGwire or Sosa. But I admired their accomplishments. My friend Chuck would tell you that I never notice anything physical about anybody but watching McGwire give a press conference in 1998, I heard myself say “will ya look at the guns on that guy?” He must really lift, I guessed. Bonds and Sheffield talked about their off-season workout regimen. Gosh, I figured, it must be working.

It’s difficult to pretend that whatever we’ve seen over the past decade didn’t occur. I know I watched guys hit 73 and 70 and 66 home runs in a season. I sat at a Mets game late in the ’98 campaign when the DiamondVision announced McGwire had just hit his 64th of the season. My god, I thought, 64 home runs and we’re alive to see it. He must take lots of swings in the cage below the stands or something.

If and when Bonds comes back, the baseball tastemakers in the media will tut-tut him until he hits his first home run. Seeing as how the Giants always manage to have him in San Francisco when he reaches a milestone, he’ll hit No. 715 at Phone Company Park and he’ll be cheered and it will be treated as an achievement. By the time he gets to 756, depending on whatever other revelations come to the fore, the line will be “sure, he did this or that and he’s like this or that but boy, you’ve got to admire the accomplishment”. And since it will also probably take place in San Francisco, the visuals will be Bonds-friendly, he’ll be tearful and say wonderful things about his family and for a few minutes most people will forget about the steroids, et al.

Once he retires, he’ll be remembered less than fondly and less all the time. Baseball is really good about its oral history. The 1919 Reds are still listed as world champions but everybody save for the smallest child knows the story. If Bonds hits 756+ home runs, he hit them. He swung, he connected, he trotted around the bases. Those who choose to pretend he didn’t, that’s their business. I know what I saw.

Well, I'm in midseason form — somehow I thought the season started

next week. Along with the time change. This extended winter is

destroying my brain.

Quick question: When you hear “partially herniated disk,” do you think,

“Well, that's no big deal”? Me neither. Not with Trachsel on the shelf.

Not with the ghost of Edgardo Alfonzo hovering over both of us. Some

good news on Matsui would be most welcome.

On to the 30's.

I admit to branding Bobby Jones

a cancer once he replaced Jose Vizcaino as my scapegoat for Everything

That Was Wrong With the Mets. He was so … average. Except for the

famous Steve Avery/Jose V. game, in which he was … Estesian. And, of

course, for the clincher against the Giants, in which he was …

Koufaxian? Johnsonian? Fellerite? Whatever he was, no one's timing has

ever been so good. You'd think a one-hitter to clinch a postseason

series would make even the most jaded New York fan regret saying all

those bad things, and I did regret them … until about next June. For

which I'm not as ashamed as I probably should be. I guess it's that in

my eyes, most of the time he was neither Estesian or Koufaxian, but

right exactly between them, embodying the quietly soul-killing

mediocrity one sometimes fears is the natural state of existence. By

the way, that thing with the other Bobby Jones on the roster at the

same time was just ridiculous. Once per franchise was enough, thanks.

(Memo to Pedro A. Martinez: Stay retired.)

On the other hand, I loved Todd Hundley

for so much less. All that piss and vinegar, sometimes even channeled

into the game of baseball. I loved that he was Randy's kid in the wrong

uniform as far as Chicagoans were concerned. I loved that he was blunt

to a fault, in the fine old Backman tradition, that he snuck cigarettes

like Mex, that he stayed out too late like the whole '86 squad. It

wasn't quite so cool that the other side of midnight ate up a lot of

his potential, in the not-so-fine old Elster tradition, but that's a

risk one runs liking that kind of player. And in this age of chemical

suspicion, I don't like to revisit my astonishment that the twiglike

Double-A catcher who announced himself with his shockingly unlikely

double off Dibble in '90 soon transformed into a hulking backstop.

Regardless, Hot Rod stayed Hot Rod — I saw him in Candlestick near the

end, looking bewildered and unhappy out in left field, but still egging

on the frat boys in the bleachers by cupping his hand to his ear as

they gave him the business. And when the Dodgers wound up going into

the stands at Wrigley, I immediately looked for him, confident he'd

been in the scrum throwing hands, as Lenny Harris liked to say. And

indeed he was.

I was standing next to you for Rey Ordonez's famous debut, and what sticks with me is the sound.

Remember that? It was this sort of rolling murmur that went on and on,

rising and falling, of a sort that I'd never heard 50,000-odd people

make. That's because 50,000-odd people don't generally turn to their

neighbors and quietly ask, “Did he really just do that?” Later, we'd discover

he couldn't hit at all, had a habit of collecting wives, was on a

first-name basis but not a last-name basis with his trainers, and was

too self-centered to even feign interest in his own highlight video.

But that's mostly forgotten. The memory of that sound remains.

Every team needs a Lee Mazzilli.

He was the capstone of the '86 team, the piece that made you happy in a

way anyone with a heart would be happy, because when he came back it meant that it wasn't too late for Lee Mazzilli after all

— his faith had been rewarded, his struggles would get to mean

something. “You gotta excuse me, I've been smiling for two months now,”

he told some reporter or other before the World Series, and so had we

all. When he was shipped out again, this time to Toronto, I wasn't

surprised he was done almost immediately. I liked to think he'd left

everything he had with us.

About Armando Benitez, all I

can say is this: One day in December 2001 I'd tracked in something or

other and found myself vaccuuming an annoyingly large portion of our

downstairs hall. No one else was home, and my various chores had led

me into the kind of meditative state in which you aren't 100% aware of

your own thoughts anymore. Except suddenly I realized I was fuming. Goddamn Armando, I realized I was subvocalizing repeatedly. Goddamn Armando.

And I wasn't thinking about Brian Jordan; I was thinking about Paul

O'Neill and his fatal at-bat, which had transpired 14 months ago. And had been thinking

about it, in increasing agitation, for a good 20 or 30 minutes. Goddamn Armando.

When I was an intern in New Orleans, Ron Swoboda

was a sportscaster for a local TV station. He'd occasionally come down

to Molly's at the Market, the Decatur Street hangout for journalistas,

and the woman I'd started dating knew him and spoke of him with amused

familiarity. All of this terrified me, because I seemed to be the only

one who understood that this was no local sportscaster — this was Ron

Swoboda. Ron Swoboda who made The Catch. The woman I'd started dating

didn't know anything about The Catch, which shocked and appalled me at

the time, and, come to think of it, still does. I never did meet

Swoboda that summer, for which I'm grateful, because I would have made

an idiot of myself even by the low standards of my usual behavior. I

don't know when he left broadcasting, but now he's the only

Met old-timer who looks cool on those fantasy-camp TV spots. He says

his pitch and tilts his head at the camera a little bit and kind of

smirks. If I'd made The Catch, I'd be on my 36th year of kind of

smirking and looking cool, too.

Game Four, 1988 NLCS: Nobody’s finest hour. Game 4, 2000 NLDS: Somebody’s finest hour. There are a lot of somebodies here who at one time or another appeared to be nobodies. But we knew better.

40. Bobby Jones: Underrated competitor until he got noticed (12-3 start in ’97, consecutive All-Star K’s of Griffey and McGwire), overpaid schlub thereafter, the Bobby Jones we wished he would be resurfaced in the second half of 2000, the first patient to respond to the Norfolk Miracle Cure. Asserting himself as an honest-to-goodness money pitcher, Bobby Jones was named starter for the fourth game of the division series. It wasn’t a given that he’d get the ball. Leading off the visitors’ fifth, Jeff Kent doubled just over Ventura’s glove. He advanced to third on Ellis Burks’ fly ball to right. Two unintentional intentional walks bracketed a second flyout. Three men on, two men out. The pitcher’s spot arrived. Trailing 2-0, Dusty Baker stuck with Mark Gardner, who popped to second. Inning over. Facing the kind of adversity which had eviscerated him regularly since the second half of 1997, Bobby Jones bore down and got out of a bases-loaded jam. From the first through the fourth and from the sixth through the ninth, right up to the series-clinching out, Bobby Jones allowed no Giant to reach; he was perfect. In the fifth, when he wasn’t, he was even better.

39. Jon Matlack: Mystery guest, please sign in. OK, let’s get started. Is your middle name Trumpbour? Yes. Were you the second Met to win Rookie of the Year? Yes. Were you named to the National League All-Star team twice? Yes. Did you get the win in one of those games? Yes. In your first five full seasons, did your record 75 victories? Yes. Was that the most any Met not named Seaver or Gooden ever totaled in his first five seasons? Yes. Was your ERA for those five years a mere 2.84? Yes. With the Mets trying to win a division in a five-team scramble on what was supposed to be the final day of the regular season, did you strike out nine Cubs in eight innings? Yes. Did you wind up losing that game 1-0 on a run scratched out in the eighth? Yes. Was this kind of run-support typical of what you received while you were a Met? Yes. Was the only game you pitched in a playoff series a two-hit shutout against one of the greatest-hitting teams of all time? Yes. Were those two hits collected by Andy Kosco? Yes. Not Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez or Johnny Bench, but Andy Kosco? Yes. Did you start three games in the ensuing World Series against another historically great team? Yes. Did you yield no earned runs in 14 innings over those first two starts? Yes. Did you pitch two more shutout innings in Game Seven before running out of gas in the third? Yes. Would have you avoided that situation had Yogi Berra pitched George Stone in Game Six, thereby saving Seaver for Game Seven? Yes. But you took the ball? Yes. And did you come that far in 1973 despite Marty Perez of the Braves whacking a liner off your head and fracturing your skull? Yes. Yet were you back pitching eleven days later? Yes. On June 29, 1974, did you pitch a one-hitter against the Cardinals at Shea Stadium? Yes. Was it the first win ever witnessed in person by at least one eleven-year-old Mets fan? Yes. Shouldn’t you be mentioned more often as one of the best pitchers the Mets ever had? You tell me.

38. Todd Hundley: In the summer that Todd Hundley chased his two cherished milestones, the all-time catcher’s single-season home run record and the all-time Mets’ single-season home run record, he was running second to Sammy Sosa for the NL lead. Before a Mets-Cubs game, Fran Healy rounded up the two of them and challenged them to stage their own home run derby during batting practice the next time the teams played. Hundley couldn’t wait to do it. Sosa shrugged his agreement. The authorities stepped in and put an end to it, but Todd Hundley was so brimming with confidence in 1996 that he was willing to do anything that would allow him to show off his new toy…his power. He had never hit more than 16 homers in any one season, but now he was closing in on 40 to top all Mets, 41 to be king of the catchers (tortured explanations abounded of how Johnny Bench hit 45 one year but was moonlighting at other positions just enough so they didn’t count here). Slugging his way relentlessly to No. 38 on August 21, Todd had 34 games remaining. Obviously he’d blow by those records and put newer, greater marks out of the reach of future Mets, future catchers and future Mets catchers — not that Hundley figured to be relinquishing backstop anytime soon. But like Joe Hardy or maybe Dorothy, the closer he got to his goal, the further from it he seemed. His power stroke disappeared and he almost reverted to the player who nearly lost his starting job to Kelly Stinnett two years earlier. It took him ten more games to swat No. 39 and tie Darryl Strawberry. Another five games got him to 40, breaking Straw’s back and knotting Roy Campanella. Finally, on September 14, in the 148th game of the season, Todd took Greg McMichael deep at Shea. No. 41 at last. Todd Hundley was no longer just Randy Hundley’s son or the player Dallas Green said couldn’t hit, couldn’t catch, couldn’t throw and couldn’t call a game. He was The Man. A year later he was hurt. A year after that he was a failed leftfielder and completely superfluous on what had been

his team. Mike Piazza took over as catcher and pre-empted any reason to miss his predecessor. Eventually, Javy Lopez hit 43 home runs as a catcher. But check the Mets’ record book. On at least one line, Todd Hundley remains The Man.

37. Rick Reed: John Pappas paid his way to St. Petersburg in 1962 and asked the Mets for a tryout. He told them he’d heard they needed pitchers. Pappas had been throwing under the 59th Street Bridge all winter and said he was ready to help the new team in town. Egged on by reporters, the Mets gave in to the stranger’s request. Suffice it to say John Pappas wasn’t good enough to pitch for the 1962 Mets, which says all you need to know about John Pappas’ ability and self-perception. The point is the Mets gave him a chance. That’s all anybody can ask for in baseball, it’s what everybody ideally should get. Thirty-five years later, the Mets gave a chance to another pitcher whose backstory made him, relatively speaking, almost as much of a long-shot as John Pappas. Rick Reed was 32 years old entering 1997. Across parts of eight seasons, he yo-yoed between the Majors and the minors for four different teams, never pitching in more than 19 games. Worse, he carried a scarlet S for scab after participating in the Reds’ replacement camp of ’95. Dire family circumstances drove him there, he said, but nobody wanted to listen. He spent all of 1996 as a Norfolk Tide, which wound up not so bad because his manager was Bobby Valentine, soon to assume the Met helm. And in Valentine’s first spring training, Bobby gave Rick a chance. Rick, in turn, gave the Mets a chance to win almost every time he took the mound for the next five seasons. Reed had impeccable control. They called him the mini-Maddux for a reason. He would be an All-Star in ’98 and ’01, but it was ’97 that defined Reeder as a Met: 31 starts, 208-1/3 innings, 28 starts of at least 6 innings, 16 wins, 2.89 ERA, 31 walks…from somebody nobody expected to find pitching for anybody. There was this one game on a Monday night against Atlanta and Smoltz, following an extra-inning slugfest versus the Pirates the day before. Valentine had used everybody out of the pen on Sunday. Monday, Reeder had to give his team innings. He gave them nine. The Mets won 3-2, establishing themselves once and for all as contenders. Later on, Rick Reed would give the ’99 Mets a chance to stay alive to make the playoffs. Against the Pirates in Game 161, he pitched a shutout, striking out 12. They made the playoffs. Rick Reed would give them a chance to clinch a Wild Card in 2000. He went eight. They clinched. Rick Reed would give the Mets chances to win the five post-season games he started. They won four of them, including their only victory in the 2000 World Series. John Pappas notwithstanding, it pays to give a guy a chance.

36. Rey Ordoñez: On Opening Day 1996, Howie Rose, broadcasting his first game on SportsChannel, got to describe a sequence no announcer could have possibly seen before: “Lankford gets one down the left field line. Clayton rounds second. Lankford’s going into second AND CLAYTON’S gonna try to score! ORDOÑEZ THROWING FROM HIS KNEES…AND THEY GOT HIM! There is your first look at what Rey Ordoñez is capable of doing. He was on his knees, Fran.” Down on one knee, up the third base line, receiving the relay from Gilkey, then turning and crouching and dropping to both knees to throw. To watch it is to see a play in which every other Met in the picture between third and home is rendered irrelevant once Ordoñez releases. Jose Vizcaino, the second baseman (shifted from short to make room for Rey), ducks. Rico Brogna, the first baseman, lets it fly, declining to cut it off; “it’s perfect,” he thinks. Hundley, who makes the tag, calls the throw “as good as it could be.” Clayton is indeed out. He sought the seventh St. Louis run of the day. All he got for his hustle was Ron Gant, the stranded on-deck batter, offering condolences. Royce Clayton, if he’s known for anything, will be noted as the Texas Ranger struck out by old Jim Morris, The Rookie, in the movie starring Dennis Quaid. All due respect, it was this rookie, Rey Ordoñez, who made the more cinematic debut, fired the more flamboyant throw, displayed the more amazing motion. And this was only his first game. But with that throw from his knees, Rey Ordoñez, not yet a Gold Glove winner or a defensive record setter or the star of his own highlight video (Rey O!) — wearing No. 0 of all numerals — became in an instant the greatest fielding shortstop ever. “I’d rather not compare anyone to Ozzie, he’s the best,” Gilkey said of his ex-teammate after the game. “But Rey is coming.” He was right. A little bit of Rey spoiled you forever. Mortal shortstops were a monumental comedown, and every shortstop was a mortal compared to Rey Ordoñez.

35. Lee Mazzilli: In the spring of 1979, the Sunday Daily News magazine declared on its cover that “If this team has a future, its name is MAZZILLI”. This may have been a slight overreaction to a glance at the league leaders as they stood after the games of April 18. Mazzilli, NY led all National Leaguers in batting with a .462 average. Could he keep it up? Well, no, but on a roster larded with disgruntled Hebners, itinerant Hasslers and preposterous Sergio Ferrer types, a future was hard to come by. 1979 would make Lee Mazzilli into the MAZZ of back page headlines. Mazz (not Maz) went to the All-Star Game. Mazz bested Ron Guidry with a bases-loaded walk. Mazz batted .303. Mazz got his own pin-up poster — think Tony Manero with a slightly less embarrassing pose. As for the Mets, the fruition of their future lay seven years hence. In August 1986, Lee Mazzilli, since traded and despondent from almost five years in the baseball wilderness, was called home to fill in, not star, on a Mets club headed to the post-season with him or without him. Once there, they played better with him than they would have without him. As a pinch-hitter, Lee started the rallies that tied Game Six and Game Seven of the World Series. He was the final piece of the championship puzzle, thus when this team reached its future, its last name was Mazzilli.

34. Armando Benitez: The good was 104 regular-season saves between July 1999 and September 2001 when the Mets were almost always playing must games. The good was taking to the closer role fairly seamlessly when Franco’s finger (the middle one, appropriately) went awry. The good was setting team records in ’00 and ’01, with 41 and 43 saves, respectively. The good was an uncommonly intimidating presence unlike anything the Mets had ever had in the late innings. The good was the way he established himself as a bulletproof setup man in ’99, defining the newly configured Mets bullpen — Cook, Wendell, Benitez, Franco — into a fantastically effective weapon early on, showing hitters a panoply of different looks, speeds and styles. The good was keeping the door slammed on the Pirates that all-important final Sunday of 1999 and closing out the Braves in Game Four and keeping them at bay in Game Five and saving Game Three of the 2000 World Series. There was some substantial good with the bad. On the other hand, the bad has paid for more therapists’ summer homes than all off Woody Allen’s neuroses combined.

33. Ron Darling: Of all the what-ifs that haunt Mets fans, there’s one whose implications are as tantalizing as the talent that the player at the center of the question never displayed quite enough of. What if Ron Darling doesn’t tear the ligaments in his thumb while trying to field a Vince Coleman bunt at Shea on September 11, 1987? What if that doesn’t finish him for the season? At the time, the top of the sixth, the Mets led the Cardinals 4-1. Darling had a no-hitter going. Two months earlier, the Mets were in fourth place, trailing St. Louis by 10-1/2 games. Now they were in second, 1-1/2 back. The no-hitter would have been dandy, but a healthy Darling finishing out the Cardinals and trimming the deficit to a half-game would’ve been, for all practical purposes, more important. One can only imagine the Mets, led by a lights-out Ron Darling (and not scrambling with the likes of John Candelaria), storming past their blood rivals and taking the division, the pennant and a second consecutive World Series, and the ’80s Mets being acknowledged as a dynasty instead of a disappointment. Like the Mets, Darling had scuffled for too long in ’87, spinning his wheels at 2-6, making the Goodenless void of the first two months yawn that much wider. But between July 7 and September 5, he went 10-2, remaining the only starter to not lose time to injury or drugs. He was, at last, fitting into the ace role it was assumed he could fill as needed. It wasn’t like he hadn’t thrived as the No. 2 or 3 pitcher on the staff at any given moment since coming up at the end of ’83. Twice an all-star, he won 43 games in his first three full seasons. The Mets won 26 of his 34 starts in 1986 and he pitched gems in a Game One loss and a Game Four win against the Red Sox. Yet despite compiling 99 regular-season victories as a Met, fourth most ever, Darling had his problems in the extraordinarily big games. He dug a 0-4 hole in Game Three against the Astros, saved only by Darryl and Lenny. He didn’t settle down in Game Seven versus Boston until it was almost too late. Two years later, in another Seven, he didn’t show up at all versus Hershiser, getting knocked out in the second. What became known as the Terry Pendleton game might have changed all that. Sadly, it never got to be the Ron Darling game.

32. Ron Swoboda: Casey was right. The Youth of America was on its way. There was no greater line of demarcation between what had been and what was at hand than the promotion of raw, righty slugger Ron Swoboda, all of 20, to start the 1965 season. It was the difference between importing veteran lovable characters to guffaw at and cultivating our own guys, even if they were unintentionally laughable for a while. If you’re going to watch a ballplayer stumble around helplessly, the least he can do is give you hope that he’s something to build on. Rocky Swoboda fit the mold of the old absurd Met. Attacked fly balls like they were grenades, necessitating the insertion of late-inning defensive replacements on his behalf. Celebrated on a banner as STRONGER THAN DIRT. Had a Chinese grandfather (which was considered colorful in those unenlightened days). But he could hit: Fifteen homers in the first half of his rookie year. Old-timers still talk about the three-run pinch job he blasted off the Giants’ Bill Henry in the bottom of the ninth in August ’66. It capped a comeback that had been started against one of the Mets’ most unforgiving oppressors, Juan Marichal. At 22, Swoboda was a folk hero if not a particularly well-rounded baseball player. The Mets grew unimpressed by the former while seeking more of the latter. In 1969, Ron Swoboda played less than he had in any of his previous four seasons. He says he resented Gil Hodges for it. But Hodges, who had it all over dirt in the strength department, knew how to pick spots for his players. Swoboda platooned with Shamsky in right field. In the Series, the Orioles threw lefties in four of five games, so Ron started four times. He hit .400 and drove in the winning run of Game Five. And the day before, in the ninth inning of Game Four, he was not replaced for defense, even with Seaver clinging to a 1-0 lead, even when the O’s put runners on first and third with one out, even as Brooks Robinson came to bat. Robinson lined a sure double, maybe a triple to right. Swoboda dove, lunged and stuck out his glove. When the ball got by him, it would probably go for an inside-the-parker. Except Ron Swoboda, all of 25, made the greatest catch in World Series history. Casey was right. The Youth of America had arrived.

31. Sid Fernandez: Nobody had better stuff than El Sid. That was a given. He won 98 games in ten Met seasons, yet usually left you wanting more because his stuff didn’t always translate into success. Except during Game Seven when he relieved Ron Darling in top of the fourth, the Mets down 3-0. Sid had his stuff that night. With a man on and two out, he walked Boggs then retired Barrett. In the fifth, three up and three down, two strikeouts. In the sixth, three up and three down, two more strikeouts. Sid Fernandez pitching 2-1/3 hitless innings in any given start was a commonplace occurrence. Doing it at the juncture at which he did it in Game Seven — methodically squashing the Red Sox’ momentum and holding the fort until the bottom of the sixth when the Mets would at last nick Bruce Hurst and tie the game at three — that’s the stuff that dreams are made of.

Some scouring over at Retrosheet

makes me think my flawed brain cells were trying to combine the 6th

inning with this horrible sequence, our last gasp in that dismal game:

METS 12TH: Leary replaced Stubbs (pitching); Sasser singled to

right; Darling ran for Sasser; Mazzilli batted for McDowell; Mazzilli

singled to center [Darling to second]; Jefferies flied to left; Orosco

replaced Leary (pitching); Hernandez walked [Darling to third, Mazzilli to second]; Strawberry popped to second; Hershiser replaced Orosco (pitching); McReynolds popped to center; 0 R, 2 H, 0 E, 3 LOB. Dodgers 5, Mets 4.

To which they may as well have added, Team goes in toilet for nearly a decade.

I'm glad I can't remember my 19-year-old self leaping up and down after J.O. walked Mex. I must have been very excited.