Dana Brand’s Mets Fan Blog

So did they suddenly decide that they wanted it, having not really wanted it before?

Did new-found guts strike out those fifteen batters and get those nineteen hits?

Guts and stuff that they hadn’t had the day before? 

Is that how baseball works?

I do believe they have confidence now.  And I am hoping so hard that they’ll win it. 

[Since irony is not always easy to pick up on blogs, I just want to say that I think that the answer to each of my four questions is “no.”]

So I was at that ballgame last night (Thursday, 9/27).  From the very beginning, you could tell that people were ill-at-ease.  They were hopeful, but afraid.  You could tell this when you heard the relief in the sound from the crowd’s throat, when the first pitch Pedro threw was a strike.  You heard the nervous fear when the second Cardinal at-bat was a single.  And then you knew what you were up against when you heard the fatalistic groan after Castillo’s error.  Pedro looked good to me.  I thought things would be all right when I saw that 72 mph curveball, that slow, sneaky strikeout pitch.  I felt as if the Cards would not score many runs.  We would be okay, wouldn’t we? 

Nobody thought we would be.  We were like the Mets, I think.  Deer in the headlights.  I saw the Mets come up and I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to get a few hits in a row.  I felt as if I had looked into the future and nothing was in it.  At least not in the short term.  I would stay for the whole ballgame of course, and I would cheer and chant “Lets Go Mets!” and glower at the loud less-than-10% who booed.  Those guys are loud, let me tell you.  There aren’t many of them but they make a lot of noise.  I think the part of their brain that has been removed has been replaced with extra lung tissue. 

What really gave me the sense of deep sadness was the fact that, perhaps for the first time ever, I took no pleasure in the festive goofiness of the stadium.  I found it distracting.  At one point, for the first time ever, Mr. Met popped into the crowd right next to where my daughter Sonia and I were sitting.  Sonia whooped and ran after him shouting, “Dad, take a picture!  Take a picture!”  I took this beautiful picture of my beautiful daughter and my favorite Hall-of-Famer.  But for the very first time in my life, Mr. Met could do nothing to cheer me up. 

I didn’t want to have fun.  Yet all around me people continued to have fun.  The young couple in front of us made me feel as if I was sitting behind the Kiss Cam.  Boy did they have a lot of beer, and pretzels, and hot dogs, and ice cream, as if being able to eat all this food and kiss in the bright lights was a kind of foreplay.  They made me wonder, in my sourness, if they should think of setting up little booths in the concourse of the new stadium.  I think the Romans had things like that.  Oh, was I miserable.  I saw people leaving before the end of the game, with no emotions on their faces, not numb, just indifferent. 

The ironies of the season flashed before me as I sat there waiting for the runs that never came.  We were good and the Yankees were bad.  And then that all changed.  We were a .500 team since what now seemed like an impossibly distant Memorial Day.  There was a moment of pride and spunk as Pedro obviously insisted that he wanted to pitch to Albert Pujols.  We cheered Pedro.  He had come through for us.  But it wasn’t enough.  He left and we were alone with our thoughts.  Oh why, pray tell, would we want to stand up and sing “Take me Out to the Ballgame?”   Why did I have to hear Lou Monte singing “Lazy Mary?”  When would I hear it again? 

After we made a lot of noise through a feeble ninth inning, it ended.  The 0-3-1 that had been on the board for so long stayed there and froze.  It stuck.  It was humiliating.  We were tied for first.  The lead was gone.  And here we were in this mocking semblance of a familiar reality, in our beloved stadium where the lights were still bright and kids were still cute.  But nothing was the same.

Most of the crowd on the ramps were anguished.  I was with them.  Some were indignant.  Screw them.  The season was down to three games. 

It’s funny to think that in four days, we will know what happened.  I remember reading about Washington at Valley Forge in a book I had when I was a kid.  I remember wanting to go back in time to tell the Continental Army that even though things looked as bad as they could possibly be, they would actually win and they would create our wonderful country.  I want to tell the Mets something like that right now.  But it will be four days before I can imagine doing that.  Right now, I just see them in the snow, with their crutches and bandages and grey, blank faces, just like the pictures in my book about Valley Forge. 

I was at the game last night, (Wednesday, 9/26, Nats over Mets 9-6), with fellow blogger Greg Prince of Faith and Fear in Flushing.  It was really terrific to meet Greg, whose blog sets the standard for literate, knowledgeable Mets blogging.  We got to go on the Citi Field tour, an experience I will write about when I am not in such a horrible mood.

You’re in the same mood.  But you may or may not be thinking what I am thinking.  Look, the game was a genuinely lousy experience.  I’m not going to deny it.  But do you know what’s even worse?  What’s worse is having to listen to people’s mouths.  Not everybody’s mouth.  I’m talking about the brain-dead 10% at most.  That’s all it is.  Next time you go to a game at Shea and somebody like Billy Wagner gives up a couple of runs and is taken out look around you and see what proportion of people are booing him.  It’s never any more than 10%.  It’s even less.  But you hear them loud and clear.  I’ve said it before about booing.  I’ll boo genuine jerks.  But I won’t boo struggling ballplayers.  And I certainly won’t boo excellent ballplayers having a slump or a bad outing.  Booing never helps.  Booing often hurts.  If the Mets lose a playoff spot by a game or two, you can blame the team if you like.  I’m blaming the loud minority of morons in the stands.

One of the losers who dared to open his mouth on our sacred ramps observed that “This team sucks!”  If this team sucks, how would you have liked to have rooted for the 28 teams in the league that haven’t won as many games as we have?  Go down the lineup.  Okay Jose Reyes has had a mysteriously unsatisfying second half but taking everything into account would you say that Jose Reyes sucks?  Does Luis Castillo suck?  Does David Wright suck?  (I’m surprised he wasn’t booed when he popped up and when he hit into a double play, but I think I heard some of the boo-ers thinking about it).  Does Carlos Beltran suck (you know for a guy who’s hit 32 home runs and 109 runs batted in, he’s heard a lot of boos this season, so maybe he does)?  Does Moises Alou suck?  Does Carlos Delgado (the answer is no in case any of you are thinking that you want to jump on this one)?  Do any of our other outfielders actually suck?  Does LoDuca suck?  Sure he hasn’t had a year like last year, but that was by far his best year ever.  Who has a complaint about a scrappy catcher who hits .280 with some power?  Does our bench suck?  Does Pedro or El Duque?  Glavine is giving us the same year he gave us last year.  Ollie has had a terrific comeback year.  Maine has slumped in the second half but has, overall, given us an excellent second season in the majors.  Wagner has had a spectacular year.  Heilman and Feliciano have done decent jobs, just as they did last year.  So who sucks?  Well our middle relief this year is nowhere near as good as it was last year.  That’s the crux of it and it’s perfectly obvious.  Yes, some of our starters are slumping or incapacitated as we get to the end but that happened last year too.  The only really significant difference I can find between this year’s team and last year’s is that this year’s middle relief do not measure up to last year’s Mota, Bradford, Oliver, Sanchez, and Hernandez. 

There’s the reason, right there.  That explains it, that accounts for the seven games difference.  That’s all you need to explain it.  Oh yeah, and the other difference is that the Phillies and Braves are better than they were last year, which creates a race.  And this year we’re used to the Mets being good so it’s not a novelty.  So when the mediocre middle relief cannot hold a lead built for a tired starter who implodes (as they did many times last year), we feel anguish, because it counts and it hurts, and nothing causes a fan to lose faith more than repeatedly blowing leads.  It gives you a sense of total insecurity.

As I’ve said before, I think the “they just don’t want it enough” theory is bullshit.  They want it.  They fight.  They do what they can to come back.  They don’t suck.  They are an excellent team, probably the best in a relatively weak league, and they have one particular glaring flaw.  And that flaw is difficult to correct, because if someone really shines as a middle reliever, there is a logical temptation to turn them into a starter or a closer. 

As Donald Rumsfeld observed (bear with me, this is the first time I’ve ever quoted him approvingly), you go to war with the army you have.  I like these guys.  Maybe you don’t, but if you don’t, please try to examine the reasons you don’t.  Please don’t just go with your impressions that they lack this or that intangible manifestation of “guts” or “spirit” or “heart.”  I submit that you don’t really know that.  Nothing they’ve said would actually suggest that.  Willie Randolph is not going to be able to change his personality just so you won’t say that. 
 

I’m going tonight.  I’m going to cheer them on.  And nothing short of them waving white flags would get me to boo them. 
 

The Community of Bloggers.  From L to R: Zoe Rice of PickMeUpSomeMets, Mike Steffanos of Mike’s Mets,Stefi Kaplan of YouCan’tScriptBaseball, Dana (me), Kathy Foronjy of MathematicallyAlive, Taryn Cooper of MySummerFamily, Caryn (MetsGrrl), Steve Keane of The Ed Kranepool Society

Schmoozing.  On the right, with his chin in his hand, is Mike Silva, of NY Baseball Talk on Blog Talk Radio, soon to be the host of Gotham Baseball Live on Gotham Baseball Magazine.

More of the same.  That’s Kathy Foronjy to the left of me.  The film she and Joe Coburn just made about the culture of Mets Fans, Mathematically Alive, premiers next week at the Coney Island film festival.

If anyone had told me, on my 50th birthday, that I would be celebrating my 53rd birthday with a book launch party in the East Village for a book I had written about being a fan of the New York Mets … I would have thought that they were crazy.  But it actually happened on Sunday and I had such a wonderful time. 

The turnout of fellow bloggers was particularly moving to me.  I felt like a kid in a cartoon whose imaginary friends have come to life.  Sure I knew that people I knew from the Internet really existed, but you’re never really sure, you know what I mean?   For all I knew, these people were inside the worn laptop with the F8 key missing on which I had written my book, and on which I compose my blog and my website.  It seemed that way, until yesterday. 

Everybody was so nice and so supportive.  Everybody made me feel as if I had done something worth doing.  Everybody made me feel as if we were all in this together, trying to build an alternate world of blogs, podcasts, and films about the Mets; an alternate world in which the hopes and dreams of millions and the joys and sorrows of fandom, are treated with respect.  The Mets do not exist simply to soak up fake and irritating condescension from Mike and the Mad Dog.  They are part of a family that includes the fine, generous, imaginative people I met at my party.  

I’ll go so far as to say that the most amazing thing about the New York Mets is not the inconsistent baseball franchise by that name.  It is the millions of people who continue to root for them, through years of frustration and disappointment, even though they are geographically entitled to root for the most successful of all baseball franchises.  We are stubborn.  We are millions.  We have been dangling on a precipice for over a week.  Who knows how we’ll remember this strange, awful, but maybe promising moment in Mets history?  We’ll find out soon enough.  All I know is that I will never forget my 53rd birthday.  Thank you to everyone who was there, and to everyone who was there in spirit.  

If you want to read more about the party and see more pictures, please check out these other sites and accounts:

“Mets Fans Gather for ‘Mets Fan’” on PickMeUpSomeMets.com

“Sunday in New York” on Mike’s Mets

“WARNING:  DO NOT OPERATE HEAVY MACHINERY, MOTOR VEHICLE OR WATCH METS BASEBALL WHILE USING THIS MEDICATION” on The Ed Kranepool Society

“Another Easy Win” on You Can’t Script Baseball

“Dana Brand, Eddie Kranepool (Society) … and Something Else … What Am I Forgetting?” on My Summer Family

“Around the Blogosphere” on Hotfoot

“Paperback Writer” on MetsGrrl

And if you’d like to read about the book, read samples of it, reviews of it, find out about appearances, or get ordering information and even find out how to get personalized signed copies at no extra cost, please visit my website by clicking here:

Gertrude Stein wrote, several times as a matter of fact, that we are what we repeat. Look around you. This is true. Each of us is composed of the things we say and do over and over and over.

We can see why this might work with individual people. We can see why this might work with nations and cultures, who tell themselves the same stories through generation, who pass on a set of beliefs. It’s a mystery to me, however, why this also sometimes works with baseball teams.

The Red Sox kept doing the same thing for over a century. They finally broke the pattern in 2004, but it looks now as if they are trying to slip back into it. The Mets right now are doing something they’ve done many times before. Why is this happening? The Mets, for the most part, did not grow up as Mets fans, unlike most of their fans. How much do they even know about the team’s history? What could be inside of them that would cause them to repeat this ancient, primordial, obsessive pattern? I don’t know and you don’t know. But we all know that we have been here before.

No matter how good they are in any individual year, the Mets never stride into the room, take what is theirs, and exit in triumph. What happens instead is something like what happened in 1969, when the Mets charged almost to the very top, after years of humiliation, by mid-July, and then collapsed completely to play like a last place team for a month, falling 9 and a half games behind the Cubs by mid-August. That time, they revived and won the pennant by 8 games and went on to win the World Series. In 1972, they got off to their best start ever and looked as if they would repeat 1969. Then they collapsed. But they never revived. 1973 was a crappy last-place season all the way to the final month. The Mets were back to where they had been in the ’60s. But then they won the pennant. In 1984, the Mets roared back to life and led for most of the season, but then they lost it. In 1985, the Mets had one of their best seasons ever, winning 98 games, but because of some heartbreaking games in September, they came in second. 1986 was the best Mets team ever. But the Mets got Mike Scott into their head and almost didn’t make it to the Series. Then when they got to the Series, they got spooked by a dramatically inferior Red Sox team and almost lost the Series in 6. The best Mets team won a World Championship, but not before coming as close as they could to losing it twice. The 1988 Mets were probably the second best Mets team ever. They dominated the National League all season. But after one ill-advised article by David Cone, and two unexpected late inning homers by the Dodgers, and they went home before getting to the Series, which they would not see again for 12 long years. Remember having a Mets miracle comeback season in 1997, but not making the playoffs because we couldn’t win just one of the last six games we played? Remember almost the exact same thing happening in 1998? Remember their solid lead in the Wild Card in 1999 and how they lost that lead by losing seven in a row, in a year in which they would win 97 overall? Remember how heroically they came back? Remember winning the one-game playoff? Remember beating Arizona on Todd Pratt’s homer? Remember digging our second grave of the season by dropping three to Atlanta? Remember how we almost came back? But didn’t. Until next year when we did win the pennant, with a grand triumphant team that still couldn’t win the division, but could win the Wild Card and the playoffs with ease? Remember what happened in the Subway Series you had dreamed of all your life? Remember what a Yankee team that had won only 87 games did to our sterling squad that had won 94? Remember the great, exciting comeback season in 2005, and then sinking back into the herd by losing 11 out of 14 on a roadtrip in September? Remember 2006, the most evenly triumphant season since 1986? Remember rolling over the Dodgers. And then do you remember whatever it was that happened in that series against the Cardinals?

Why am I telling you all this? I’m telling you because this is what you are. This is what they repeat. This is what you repeat. This is what you are. Sorry. Always, they dig their graves. Always they lie down in it and get comfortable. Sometimes they climb out of the grave and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they are beaten even though they climb out. And sometimes, twice to be exact, in 45 years, they win it all.

Live with it. Live it. You have no choice. You don’t love them for it. You love them in spite of it. But you love them. That stays the same. And if you don’t, go away. We want to be alone with our team.

What do you want me to say?

What do you have to say?

Just scroll back through my archives and find any of the posts I wrote after they suddenly started playing badly after they were playing well.

And then in a few days when they start playing well, you can scroll back and find one of the posts I wrote after they started playing well after they had played badly.

I’ve run out of metaphors.  Do you want me to say that they are like a car that runs smoothly and then sputters and almost breaks down an then starts running well again?  Do you want me to say that they go in and out of the Bizarro world?  Do you want me to compare them to the Allies in WWII?  To a book whose pages turn?  I’m not going to do it, folks.  I’ve already done it.  I’m not going to do it again.

Sit there.  Watch the TV.  Listen to the radio.  Schlep out to Shea.  Whatever is going to happen is going to happen.  I’ve got no control.  I’ve got plenty of faith.  I’ve got as much confidence as it makes sense to have.  Not a lot.  Not a little.  We’re all here together.  And we will live through whatever happens in the next six weeks.  Our circulatory, digestive, and nervous systems are not going to enjoy themselves.  But we will, right?  Why else would we be paying attention?  This is fun, right?  This is meaningful to us, right?  Right.  Whatever.
 

If you’re a reader of this blog, there’s room for you at the

BOOK LAUNCH PARTY FOR METS FAN

Where:  Mo Pitkin’s, 34 Avenue A between 2nd and 3rd Streets (East Village)

When:  Sunday, September 23, between 4 pm and 7 pm

There will be food and drink and lots of Mets fans and Mets bloggers and Mets authors and documentary filmakers and campaigners to save the apple, etc.  This will be a true blue-and-orange event.

I’ve built some extra room into the estimate, so there’s room for you if you’d like to come.  Just e-mail me at danaabrand@cs.com. 

P.S. Don’t get your hopes up, he has to be in Florida.

I went to the ballgame last Sunday.  What a wonderful way to spend an afternoon!  I wanted to see Pedro pitch.  I wanted to welcome him back, and so since we still have, for a season and a month, a nice big stadium that welcomes anyone who is interested, even if on the spur of the moment, I went online and bought one ticket for me and one for my daughter Sonia.  We drove down and entered the big stadium as soon as they opened it, two and a half hours before game time, on a slow, hot, and lazy Sunday morning.

First, we went down to the Mets dugout to see batting practice, but there was no batting practice because yesterday was a night game.  A few people stood around, so close to the sacred earth, even though there were no Mets in sight.  We could see Howie up in the WFAN booth, looking over some papers, stats?  splits? Or who knows what before the game.  Then we saw Ron and Gary and Keith, relaxed and looking out over the blue and orange seats from their perch in the press level.  In the meantime, we heard an organ concert, just like Jane Jarvis used to give us back in the days before Diamond Vision.  Where else can you spend a Sunday morning listening to an organ playing the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday?” or the Four Seasons’ “Oh, What a Night?”  followed by “Talking Baseball?”   Nowhere else, I think.  Nowhere but in this little American space on the edge of the American metropolis, in a big, old, historic stadium near the airports and the marshes.

Finally some Mets started running back and forth out by the bullpen in right field.  But they weren’t the regulars and they weren’t today’s pitcher.  We were hot so we went and got chocolate ice cream in plastic baseball helmets.  Then we went up to where we could look out over the Mets.  Then we got our hot dog and knish lunch and just as we finished it and had our picture taken by one of those people who walk around the stadiums taking pictures for you to then buy on the web, Pedro appeared in right field. 

There he was, back after a year, drawing everybody’s attention from some girls in red banging drums for Taiwan Heritage day.  We all looked at the broad, friendly, and familiar outline of number 45, gone for a year.  We thought we had lost him forever, but he comes back to us on the wave of win streaks that have followed the humiliation in Philadelphia and that have turned our eyes once again to the postseason.  Pedro is back.  We are ready to be happy.  We are calm and pleased unequivocally with the Mets, for the first time in three and a half months. 

As he sort of runs back and forth a little (it’s hot, he should conserve his energy) and chats with Rich Peterson, the girls in red dance and wave red scarves as tall, brooding, swaying god and monster puppets look on.  Out in right, everyone sees Pedro doing his loosening up under the gaze of the Home Run Apple who, you suddenly notice, has just been given a new coat of paint.  The paint is lighter, brighter.  I don’t like it.  Apples aren’t that color.  When it finally sinks into the hat for the game to start, it looks for all the world like The Home Run Tomato. 

We cheer and stand for Pedro when the lineup is announced.  We do the same when the Mets take the field.  There he is, and we watch as he stymies the Astros hitters with 69 mph curve balls, 81 mph sliders, 78 mph changeups, 80 mph cutters, and wham, 87 mph fastballs.  They get some hits.  But they don’t score runs.  And in one almost historic inning in which a passed ball allows a runner to reach first, we almost see Pedro tie the all-time record of four strikeouts in one inning.  Lots of pop-ups.  Lots of ground-outs.  Lots of pitches, but he seems always ahead in the count.  Carlos Beltran and Moises Alou give us some runs, nothing gaudy, no more than we need.  Pedro is 2 for 2, with a double and an infield single, to the delight of the happy fans.  Magical Mets Pedro is back, the Pedro who pitched so miraculously in 2005 and the first half of 2006.  Not lightning perfection Red Sox Pedro.  Mysterious slow pitch Pedro.  They can’t hit him any more than they could hit the other one.  When his five shutout innings are up, we demand a curtain call and he gives it to us.  All is right with the world.

We sit down to watch the relief pitchers, on a short fuse for Guillermo Mota.  But Mota doesn’t give Pedro’s ballgame back to them.  Feliciano, Wagner, and Heilman pitch beautifully to close it down.  The ending is happy.  We are even rewarded with the distraction of Julia Stiles sitting down two rows in front of us, right after Pedro leaves, in a blue Mets hat, with a friend, like a perfectly normal person in a sea of normal people. 

Normal Mets fans are very happy now.  We should coast to the clinching that will put an exclamation point on our current enthusiasm.  We will start to forget the summer doldrums.  And we will go into the postseason, this time with a starting pitching staff that is not crumbling and tearing.  On this hot and perfect September afternoon, I dream of the bracing cool nights of October.

I heard Joe Benigno say on a radio ad that he had single-handedly motivated the Mets (by dissing them roundly in an opening monologue).  I heard Howie Rose say, near the end of Wednesday’s 7-0 loss to Cincinnati, that the Mets had seemed lackluster all day.  Why wouldn’t the Mets have wanted, for their own reasons, to win the NL East title?  Why would they have needed Joe Benigno to motivate them?  Why wouldn’t the Mets have wanted to win on Wednesday as much as they wanted to win on Tuesday?

You know, at the end of Philadelphia’s four-game sweep of the Mets, I came to the frightening conclusion that the Phillies really wanted the division title and it might be impossible to deny it to them.  Then I speculated on my blog that the epic 11-10 game (and not Joe Benigno) had finally lit the fires under the Mets.  I marveled at the weekend evidence that maybe Philly didn’t really want it.  I marveled, during the weekend series in Atlanta, at how little the Braves seemed to want something that was plausibly within their grasp. 

Why would Philly want it so badly during the Series with the Mets, and then lose their desire over the weekend?  Why wouldn’t the proud Braves want to regain their title? Why wouldn’t Philadelphia, on the verge of virtual elimination, want Wednesday’s game against Atlanta really badly?  Now that Atlanta had virtually eliminated themselves, why would they want Wednesday’s game so much that they’d stage a titanic comeback?  Why wouldn’t they have wanted to come back against the Mets over the weekend?  Why could they manage only one measly run per game?
 
Why, I can’t help but ask, do we talk so much about “wanting?”  Surely the degree to which the Mets, the Phillies, and the Braves want the NL East title doesn’t vary THAT MUCH from day to day.  Why would it?  How could it? 

Well, you may say, the 2007 team, good as it is, has had a motivation problem all year.  Okay.  Name me a team that didn’t or doesn’t have a motivation problem.  The 1986 Mets, you say.  Okay, why couldn’t the 1986 Mets, with all their scrap and guts and nails, beat Mike Scott in the playoffs against Houston?  Didn’t they want to?  The 1986 Mets came, as you may remember, THIS CLOSE to losing to Boston in 6.  What if they had lost that series?  Would you have said that they didn’t want it?  How could you have said that?  Well, you say, the Mets beat the Red Sox in 7, didn’t that show that they wanted it?  Maybe, or maybe that simply showed that Stanley was tired and Schiraldi was inexperienced.  I have to be honest.  I think that the amount that the Mets wanted to win the 1986 World Series would have been the same if they had lost it in 6 as it was when they won it in 7.

I honestly think that the Mets wanted to win Wednesday’s game against Cincinnati.  But I think that John Maine didn’t have it and I think that the Mets hitters simply couldn’t figure out that Cincy pitcher who was living out of a trailer in the minor leagues last week.

When a player or a team is trying really hard to break out of a slump and can’t do it, we say that they are pressing, that they need to relax.  But if they relax when they’re doing badly, we say that they don’t want it.  I think that if we’re honest with ourselves, we can see that none of this makes any sense.

I do think that motivation is important in baseball, as it is in everything in life.  But I think that we rely too much on the idea of a lack of motivation to explain disappointing performance and I think that we rely too much on the idea of motivation to explain good performance.  This is why I think it is wrong to boo people who are trying.

It’s not that motivation is irrelevant.  It’s just that there are too many other factors involved.  When an enormously talented pitcher gets into the right groove, no amount of motivation is going to make it possible for you to hit him.  When a batter gets so keyed in that you can’t get him out, motivation is not going to make it possible for you to get him out.  Somebody could say that motivation accounts for what Atlanta did to Philly on Wednesday, but to me it had all the marks of a Philly bullpen meltdown.  If motivation could do what we imply it can do, players would get out of slumps by desiring to.  Everybody would win the pennant when they really really wanted to.  It doesn’t work like that.  The universe does not bend so easily to human will.

I’m declaring a moratorium on speculating about how much the Mets want anything.  I think they want to win the World Series.  And I think that all the other teams that make it to the playoffs will too.  And I think that the Series will be won by the team that somehow manages to win the most games, and not necessarily by the team that wants it the most.  It will be won by the team that manages to grab onto and hold onto the slippery beast that will try to slither away.  It will take desire to do this, but it will take a whole hell of a lot more than desire. 

What will it take?  We don’t know and the Mets don’t know.  And it is because no one knows that baseball is so interesting.  None of our explanations work.  And this is why baseball is so beautiful, wonderful, and mysterious.

By sweeping us in a dramatic four-game series in Philadelphia, the Phillies served notice that the 2007 season would end with a real pennant race.

I guess they changed their minds. 

It’s hard to believe that that was only Thursday.  What is it today, Monday?  It’s only four days later and we’ve got a 5-game lead with 25 to play. 

We’ve won four in a row, after losing those four in a row.  We look invincible after having looked, well, vincible. 

The pattern continues.  Players streak and then they slump.  All is forgotten.  Then they streak again.  All is forgiven.  How, exactly, does one develop the steadiness, patience, and calm necessary to enjoy this particular team?

And here’s something else.  Like the ghost of old hopes and expectations, Pedro returns.  He came to us, remember, in our darkest hour, at the end of the 2004 season.  He was to have been our Moses.  He was to lead us out of the darkness, through the desert, to the Promised Land.  In 2005, he gave us a spectacular season and showed us that it was possible, once again, for the Mets to win and contend.  He gave us the first marvelous half of the 2006, showing us that we could not only contend, we could actually win the division, after a decade and a half of the Braves’ dominance. 

Then he drew back and faded, just as Moses was not destined to enter the Promised Land with his people.

I have to be honest.  I never thought that he would come back.  I was glad that Pedro had come to the Mets, because he did deliver us from bondage.  But once he faded last September, I thought that he was never coming back.

He is back.  And from what I think I saw today, he is actually back, with the masterful control that allowed him to still pitch like a Hall-of-Famer even after he had lost his velocity. 

I guess the Moses analogy doesn’t work any more.  That’s okay with me.  I realize that I am really enjoying this season, now that I am beginning to have a clearer sense of how it could turn out.  I’m ready to enter the Promised Land.  With Pedro.  He makes me calmer, makes me more confident.  I realize that history illustrates that once you get to the Promised Land, everything from that point forward is a crap shoot. 

But we’re on our way.  And for all of the season’s ups and downs, it is going to feel very good to clinch this year.  Remember how many losses and stumbles were washed away in the champagne last year?  No you don’t, that’s the point of the champagne celebration. 

Now if I can only figure out which game it’s going to be.

All season long, we’ve been comparing the 2007 Mets to the 2006 Mets, to the disadvantage of the former.

The few Mets fans who remember that the 2006 Mets were not as good as the 1986 Mets may also remember that the Achilles heel of the 2006 Mets was a starting pitching staff that collapsed and almost disappeared in the second half of the season.  You see, when we started a rookie who’d only been with us half a year in the first game of the NLCS, and when we started a pitcher in the seventh game of the NLCS whose E.R.A. would have been the worst on the 1962 Mets, we weren’t just trying to show off how good our offense was. 

The reason the 2006 Mets made it to the playoffs was that it had such a terrific offense and relief staff that it could survive the collapse of the starting pitching.  The reason the 2007 Mets will make it to the playoffs is that the starting pitching is so good that it makes up for a decline in the quality of our offense and our relief pitching.  This is what this weekend’s series has proven.  The 2007 and 2006 Mets may look like roughly the same baseball team.  But they’re not.  The 2007 team is actually a mirror image of the 2006 team.  Everything is reversed.  We are in the Bizarro world. 

You remember the Bizarro world from Superman comics, don’t you?  It was a world that looked like the real world but in which everything was reversed.  Even if you’ve never read Superman comics, you may know about the Bizarro world from the many references to it on Seinfeld.  As I have written elsewhere (in the chapter in Mets Fan entitled “The Mets and Seinfeld”) Jerry Seinfeld is the representative Mets fan.  He showed the world the way the minds of Mets fans work.  And one thing he often showed them is that the Mets have a tendency to spend a lot of time in the Bizarro world.

What happens in the Bizarro world?  Well, you sweep the Braves at Turner’s Field for one thing.  You know that the Mets never win at Turner’s Field.  Well, when they’re in the Bizarro world, they sweep a whole three-game series.  Another thing that happens in the Bizarro world is that even though everybody else in the league thinks that the Philadelphia Phillies relief staff is pitching batting practice, the Mets can’t hit them!  Everybody hits Philadelphia, but when we’re in the Bizarro world, we don’t!

Here’s another sign that we’re in the Bizarro world.  Which game will be remembered as the turning point of the season, the game in which the 2007 New York Mets discovered who they were, and realized where they were going?  It was Thursday’s game:  a spectacular, marathon, epic, super-exciting 11-10 LOSS!

If I make it to the end of this season with my sanity intact, it will be a miracle.