This is the time of year when one of two things is happening to your baseball team: Those coming back from injuries aren't doing as well as they would like (or are off getting MRI #1), or everyone is throwing well, getting along, adapting to their new positions and getting ready to hit .300.

So far (and my goodness it's early) we're the latter kind of camp — the “happy ball clubs are all alike” camp, if you don't count music. Which is a lot better than the “every unhappy team is unhappy in its own way” camp, except for the fact that, well, it means nothing.

Felix Heredia? Throwing well! Braden Looper? Throwing well! Dae-Sung Koo? Thr… you get the idea. Kaz Matsui? Looking surprisingly comfortable over there at second! It would save everybody a lot of time and trouble if Atlanta just gave us the keys to the division.

Unfortunately, as we know, there's a reason you play 'em — and a reason you scrimmage 'em and stretch 'em and every other thing. But right now, it's all good, even if it means nada. As you noted, we've been more or less no-shows on the back pages. In February that's a good, good thing.

So what the heck. Let's enjoy the intangibles that never even achieve not-showing-up-in-the-box-score status. Pedro has adapted wonderfully to his status as the lead dog in the clubhouse — who's heard a whisper from Glavine this year? Carlos Beltran has taken Wright and Reyes under his wing, and might even be able to reach young Jose about doing all those pesky exercises. It goes against the Met fan pedigree, but I'm going to try to just enjoy it all as a vicarious dose of Florida sun.

Though here's a memo to Bartholome Fortunato: Don't knock down Cliff Floyd, even in fun. He tends to break.

The thing I really like about spring training, I decided, is that after months of seeing ballplayers as businessmen and bounty and celebrities and vessels for our unfulfilled, unreasonable dreams, we are now seeing them as ballplayers. Press conferences and personal appearances are secondary to what it is they actually do for a living, which is why we're interested in hearing from and seeing them to begin with. Every one of them has to work out in public view. They put on their baseball pants (presumably one leg at a time) and their tops — no suits anymore — and their caps and they don't smile for the cameras. They run out on the field and stretch and shuffle and sprint. They all do it, every one of them at every camp.

Now that's baseball like it oughta be.

When the Mets network fires up next year, I hope they show live infield drills. Live BP. Live “attaboy” and “get that glove down” and “all right ladies, once more!” Spring training without actual baseball activity was getting on my nerves, too. All through the honey-do season, I didn't feel terribly deprived because there was so much news surrounding the Mets and I was a little smug about how it overshadowed the so-called winter sports. Then, the first week after players started trickling in was endless. I'd seen enough faux-baseball. Let's get it started, indeed. Actual game action can't be too far behind.

But will the vets last 'til then? Channel 2 had the best coverage last night of the marathon session that Willie inflicted on his charges. It occurred to me I had never seen baseball players look physically drained the way I would if I ever got any exercise. Cameron in particular appeared ready to agree to play left out if someone would just toss him a bottle of Aquafina. He was shvitzing. So were Piazza and Floyd. What did they do here when Howe was in charge? Arrange tee times and make reservations for an early lunch at Hooters? (Probably.)

This business about Beltran taking the kids under his wing is absolutely adorable though I'd be more comfortable if they could vacuum-pack Reyes at the end of the day. He is fragile. He is delicate. Don't mess him up, Carlos.

Of course Wright wants to work out some more. Ernie Banks' attitude would disgust Diamond Dave. “Only two? But there's time to play two more!”

When I was 9, I came across a sports comic book. The hero played for a team called the Bluebirds or Blue Jays. (Toronto was five years from expansion.) It was a baseball team in summer and football team in fall, according to the house ads; this was October, so it was football. Anyway, the plot of this particular edition was all the vets on the team were grumbling that only the young guys got to play. So the coach acted on a great idea from the hero: Use only veterans in the first half. For a while, it worked and the team played well. But by the second half, the veterans were out of breath and were getting beaten. So the coach put all those other guys back in to join the youngish hero and the sidekick (the only non-vets who started) and the team won. The moral? I think it was that you were worthless if you were old. Perhaps the manager will come to the same conclusion monitoring Wright's and Cameron's divergent reactions to Randolph's Regimen.

If after all this huffing and puffing the Mets have any fight left in them for anybody but the skipper, then bring it on, my core philosophy of non-violence be damned. Used to be you could count on one good brawl a year the same way there was an annual pitcher's home run. For all the legitimate concern that somebody (likely Reyes) will get hurt, it makes me feel like more of a man to see my boys out there getting one or two shots in against some headhunting goon. What's the best we've had in the last few seasons? Zeile and Penny shouting obscenities followed by some milling and meandering? “Suck on this for Shinjo!” should've become a rallying cry.

In 1980, the Mets and Expos threw down at Shea during the nightcap of a July 4 doubleheader. Bill Gullickson, creep, dusted Mike Jorgensen who had taken one in the head to seriously deleterious effect earlier in his career. Montreal was in first place and the Mets — the “Magic Is Back” Mets — had crept to within 3-1/2 games of them after winning the opener. I was on my bike with my radio on when the fight broke out and I pedaled mightily to Shell Creek Park where Joel Lugo was working so I could deliver the news as if it had come straight from Lexington and Concord. All at once, the Mets were dead serious about contending and standing up for themselves. A few weeks later, the Mets were dead, but I couldn't know that at the time.

Did I see Kerry Robinson in No. 22? That was fast. I'm not in the cult of Leiter, but you'd think it would maybe go to Pat Mahomes if not into mothballs for just a bit. I remember how shocked I was to see the Mets issue 36 to Wayne Twitchell in 1979 when Kooz's locker wasn't even cold. Flushing does not believe in tears.

Jason Phillips put on 15 pounds in the offseason. I've been trying to come up with a joke about this since Saturday, but really, it couldn't hurt.

Here we are at the first stir-crazy point of spring training, the first afternoon that 1:30 rolls around and you think, “Can't they televise a split-squad game or something?” At least a week from now they actually will play a game. It'll even be an actual game, at least by spring training's low standards. It'll even be televised. It'll even be on ESPN.

Yeah, I know, it'll only be on ESPN because it's the Nationals' first-ever game, but I'm still thinking of it as a Met game. I'm glad we got to see the Expos' final game ever (forever known in the Hietpas household as Young Joe's debut), but I'll be a heckuva lot more glad to see that first Nats game, if only because I didn't have to wait four months to see a baseball game before that last Expos affair.

Trivia question: Who was the last player to play baseball in an Expos uniform? (Answer below)

One reason I'm happy to see Pedro on the mound is somewhat shameful: He will hit people with a baseball in situations that call for people to be hit with baseballs. This will be a welcome change — I'm still steamed about Bobby Jones' turning the other cheek after Steve Avery hit Jose Vizcaino, let alone Shawn Estes' missing the Antichrist (just aim for the middle “6,” for Chrissakes) or Glendon Rusch hitting Tino in the ass with a palmball after said Antichrist tried to decapitate Piazza. Try that with Pedro and yeah, he probably will blow your head off. And what's wrong with that? Good old-fashioned country hardball in my book, particularly now that the guy's wearing our uni. As Mike told the papers, he's an SOB out there on the mound. (Star-Ledger customers, who apparently are thought to be shrinking violets, read that he's a tough customer.)

In fact, I was at what I'm pretty sure was the last regular-season Met fight. (Apologies if you were too.) A Google search indicates it was May 11, 1996: Pete Harnisch felt Scott Servais's attitude would be improved by punching him, leading to 18 minutes of mayhem with the crowd chanting “Let's Go Mets!” and John Franco getting ejected on John Franco Day, which is pretty priceless. As befits Shea's silly prudery, there was no mention of the ejections, leaving us all to resort to radios to figure out why our closer wasn't coming into a razor-tight game. Pretty good game — Rico Brogna won it with a homer in the 9th — and somehow the Republic continued to stand.

(Piazza's freakout at Guillermo Mota doesn't count, because it was spring training and he didn't catch him. No onus attaches to new favorite Heath Bell for peaceability, however: He was ordered not to retaliate by Lights Up the Room, and looked unhappy about it.)

Postscript to John Franco Day: Our friend Chris was there, and in the early innings he was explaining how a staggeringly high percentage of the games he attended featured on-field fights. (He's a Boston fan who goes to Yankee Stadium, so there should be an asterisk.) When Harnisch punched Servais, Emily and I looked at him and he shrugged and said, “I'm the Human Fight,” a nickname he retains to this day.

Random news gleanings: Philip Humber is the winner of spring's First Rave That Means Nothing — he is (brace yourself) Throwing the Ball Really Well. Oh good.

Answer to trivia question: Brad Wilkerson went on MLB's tour of Japan as an Expo last fall. There's a doomy short story in there somewhere. 

It won't matter come April or July or, fingers crossed impossibly tight, October, but have you noticed that we've been aced out of the back page every day of spring training thus far? I thought we had the sexy stories: Pedro reporting, Carlos alighting, Cameron fuming, Mike marrying, Willie laying down the law, Jeff Keppinger taking a wrong turn out on there on I-95. Instead, the youknowwhos have trumped us daily with their physical inflation and hissyfit melodramas. Today Barry Bonds overshadows all. You'd think a zillion dollars would buy us just a little more attention.

Here's what I'm talking about when I say baseball coverage goes right down the memory hole. Vaccaro writes in the Post that “Met fans have rewarded Wilpon by snapping up season tickets in record numbers, filling the air with more Met buzz than anyone's heard since the '80s.”

Is Mike Vaccaro thirteen years old? Does he remember 1992? (God, I've got to stop bringing up that blighted year.) Never mind what actually happened after spring. In spring, the Mets were all anybody talked about. Couldn't get us off the back page even when it would have been nice to have vacated it. Come to think of it, weren't we a playoff team five and six years ago? A defending league champion four years ago? I hope when all is said and done that there was more buzz in 2005 than there's ever been because the Mets achieved so much, but this idea that nobody's said nothin' since at least 1989 is inaccurate and absurd.

But I'm a literalist.

I'm ready to express sympathy for the rightfielder. Yeah, Cameron should be a team man and trot out to his new position and holler “hey batter” and run kangaroo court and give guys hotfeet and not exude sulky tendencies over losing centerfield to Beltran, but the more I think about it, the more I can't completely blame him.

Shoot, the guy came here with a rep as the big-time centerfielder and if he wasn't golden in 2004, he was an exponential upgrade. They threw a press conference for him. He led the team in HRs. He was the only Met to play 140 games (Zeile and Valent were next in games played ­– when part-timers appear more than all but one regular, you begin to understand where it all went wrong). He succeeded Franco as Santa Claus at the Christmas party. And he gave the Mets a theme song, OutKast's “The Way You Move,” which filtered from the clubhouse to the PA as a fleeting but emotional anthem for the mid-season brush with first. When the Mets won the Saturday Shea Subway Series game 10-9, they blasted it and I hummed it for the next 24 hours.

So then what happens? The Mets get a new centerfielder. Put aside the obvious improvement Beltran brings to the lineup. Carlos hasn't won a gold glove; Cameron has won two. Mike probably has that information tattooed on his upper right bicep. He's likely remembering some catch he made when he was a White Sock against Kansas City and how in the top of the next inning Beltran didn't make a similar play. “I'm better than him,” he's thinking over and over and over. He's got those plays tattooed on his brain.

Plus, nobody called Mike to tell him this was happening. Nobody took him into consideration at all. Then he comes to camp to be told that all that great clubhouse leadership he provided with the music, even the jaunty angle at which he wears his cap is verboten. If Mike Cameron is human, he's going to be an unhappy camper. Literally.

Again, he should shut up, soak his wrist in the whirlpool and shag flies in right, but I can see where he's coming from.

Say this, too, for Cameron: He came here for money, of course, but he also came here when the Mets were the Mets that they've been, and they were no bargain. A reluctant Beltran had to be coaxed by Scott Boras, according to Adam Rubin yesterday: “Carlos, this is not the Mets. This is the 'new' Mets.” Boras loves new money.

Pedro will blow your head off for Mike Piazza. That's touching. I'd like to believe such a statement indicates a player has seen the light, that he knows he's been wasting his time with all the other teams he's been with and now has reached his true purpose in life, being a Met and defending the honor of other Mets. But Pedro will blow your head off on behalf of whoever pays him. They do the same thing on The Sopranos.

Ah, Fonzie. You and I are never going to agree on this, and that's OK — if we wanted bloodless analysis everyone could agree with at a glance, we'd be actuaries. To me, it's pretty clear that Fonzie's bad back killed his career, or at least maimed it — his power numbers have dipped into the decidedly ordinary, he walks less, he never could run and his range has become tiny at third. It's only a bit of an exaggeration to say he's become Dave Magadan. Of course, I still mourn Bill Pulsipher, who never even had two weeks of good numbers, so obviously I'm an idiot.

And I still miss the hell out of Fonzie, stats notwithstanding — if I close my eyes I can see that little twirl of the bat knob he liked to do, and he sure isn't doing it in orange and black. I loved that little bat flip around the hand — I loved how it was evidence that for Edgardo, having a bat in his hands was perfectly natural, perhaps more natural than not having one, and his hands knew that bat so well that they could make the frickin' thing levitate. Here's hoping when his contract expires he comes back as our Miguel Cairo and we celebrate with a public tarring and feathering of Steve Phillips. (“God, Jeff, that was YOU strapped Lecter-style to the hand truck? We've, uh, made a terrible error. Don't know how that happened. Oh, here's the hand truck with Skill Set. Guess we'll have to do this again.”)

OK, that's taking it too far. Hmm. Maybe it isn't.

I liked Dave Magadan too, of course — if he had only been faster than, say, an air-conditioning unit being wheeled around by Teamsters ready for their hourly break, he would have hit .360. (And if Olerud had been faster than the above, we still would have cheaped out and let him go to Seattle.) Though I was always somewhat spooked by Magadan's resemblance to late-80s Bruce Springsteen. Danny Heep looked strangely like Billy Squier, while I'm exhausting the subject.

Tidbits from my pre-work scan of the papers: The reporters can't agree on who's the last man in camp. Leaving aside the visa-problems guys, it's either Gerald Williams or Jeff Keppinger. If I were either of those guys, I'd have made sure I was in camp by now, but what do I know. Please, please, please, let this be the end of the Gerald Williams era. There is no more perfect example of how ridiculously unimaginative a baseball front office can be than the fact that we let Gerald Williams play the outfield for us in the second half of last year.

Mike Cameron's nickname is “Midnight,” which is insanely cool. Jon Heyman, having frightened himself by expressing admiration for David Wright, thinks Mike Cameron is a phony and/or a criminal. We don't have a captain right now, which is as it should be — honestly, the fact that our captain was a lefty specialist was pretty pathetic. (“And Steve Kline is leading his Orioles onto the field!”) I feel bad about making fun of Heath Bell (though that'll pass) after reading about him rollerblading in the driveway with his daughter. I now have a nonlaundry reason to root for him, which is nice.

Oh, and it has to be said: Willie Randolph may lead us to the promised land, in which case I'll eat these pixels, but he's behaving like a typical Bronx mullah. No loud music in the clubhouse? OFFS. It's getting a little Torborg in here….

Man, today would have been such a good day for a spring-training game.

Gray, frozen, a yawning afternoon to fill up finding something to do

besides the things I should have been doing but knew I wouldn't do. A

great afternoon, in other words, for exulting over the sight of, say,

Victor Diaz catching a pop-up or the sound of Omar Minaya being

noncommittal about moves to be made before Opening Day. Shucks. Soon

enough in the grand scheme of things, but not soon enough today, not by

a long shot.

More David Wright hagiographies today. I really hope nothing bad

happens to Wright — it still kills me to see Edgardo Alfonzo in

another uniform, even though with cold-eyed hindsight that's one of

Steve Phillips' moves that's hard to criticize. Even Jon Heyman seems

to have fallen in love with Wright — apparently there is

at least one person on this Earth whom Heyman doesn't suspect is

secretly a phony or a criminal. Though Heyman should work on his drug

slang — “blow, weed or a bong” indeed. No. 3 in that list is kinda

pointless without No. 2, Jon.

This Mike Cameron trade “guarantee” bugs me. I'd normally be suspicious

of anything in the Post (though Mike Vaccaro has been quite good this

spring), but this sure feels like the usual Mets “no bad PR” move.

Cameron strikes out way too much, but he does have real power, and

that's not the kind of glove you send elsewhere unless it's for a good

reason. Joe McEwing made a great comment last year about how in '03

there'd be runners on first and third and one out early and the next

guy would hit a ball up the gap, and in '03 it would go to the wall but

in '04 Cameron would catch it (OK, most of the time), and what a

difference there was

between being down 2-0 early with still just one out and having there

be no

score and two out. Obvious, maybe, but it did remind me how many games

in '03 became dismal before the hour mark. I actively loathed that '03

Mets team — for all of last year's disappointments, at least I was

glad to see them.

Anyway, who'd be coming back? If Cameron goes to Seattle, there's Raul

Ibanez, who got moved to first base last season and Randy Winn, who's a

crummy outfielder. I certainly don't get the sense Cameron (or Cliff

Floyd, for that matter) is a problem inside the clubhouse. So for God's sake, why?

Ah, Bill Pulsipher. If I remember correctly that first day of our

watching games together, Pulse's first pitch went to the backstop (we

exchanged a Bull Durhamesque glance) and when he got to the dugout for

the first time as an honest-to-goodness big leaguer it was 3-0. “That's

an ugly crooked number,” you said, and I nodded, and it got uglier.

I still miss Pulse. I'd put him in middle relief in a heartbeat. Which is just reason #45,382 that I'm a fan instead of a GM.

I did see “Bad Lieutenant,” but admit I kind of zoned through the

baseball parts while waiting impatiently for more perversion. I'm a bad

person.

Not a lot to say about our boys this morning — David Wright is today's

obligatory mass profile (nice kid, drinks milk, works hard), with the

occasional side trip to see how Matt Ginter's shave went. (Randolph

says Ginter now looks cute. Really.) Chris Woodward's wife of five

years has supposedly never seen him without facial hair, so if she's in

St. Lucie, yesterday probably cemented her opinion of Willie Randolph

one way or the other.

Shave Day vaguely reminds me of a season in the late 80s or early 90s

in which the team pulled one of those “We're not shaving till we lose”

rallies. (Whatever year it was, it didn't work.) I seem to remember

Jeff Musselman sheepishly admitting that he couldn't grow a beard

anyway, and David Cone losing a fight with his significant other and

being forced to shave his off for a wedding. And that was largely

before the era of bleach-blond tips and other wretched things players

now do to their hair. (Exhibit A: Bronson Arroyo's fantastically

ridiculous cornrows.) I've always assumed they do their blond tips

themselves with a Clairol kit, pulling little locks of each other's

hair through the holes in the plastic cap and wearing plastic gloves.

Strangely enough, this always gets left out of the team highlight

video. (Obligatory reference to Piazza's ash-blond makeover in Chicago,

which of course sparked Todd Zeile's immortal quote that “this is the

kind of loss that makes you go right to the hair salon.” I miss Zeile.

Miss his quotes, I mean.)

I wonder how Don Bosch's

obligatory mass profiles went. You'll remember Bosch was supposed to be

the next Willie Mays, but the player who showed up in camp in '67 was

short, had gray hair at 24 and ulcers. Wes Westrum's reaction: “My God,

they sent me a midget.”

Bosch hit .157 for us in half a season's worth of at-bats. 

(There's an obvious question here, isn't there?) Yet we somehow we

turned him into Don Cardwell. Good trick. Blond tips could only have

helped him.