Metsie! Metsie!

Ah, the completely anachronistic joys of getting to watch Vin Scully announce a Mets-Dodgers gam on TV, which is a treat MLB.com allows you only when the Mets visit Dodger Stadium. Vin is going on 80 years old now, and his vocal cords demonstrate virtually no signs of abuse — clean, pristine, with near-factory sheen. Maybe he sounds a little more aged now than when my parents listened to him growing up in the 1950s in Brooklyn, but probably not much more. Apparently he only does home games and a few select games in the Western Division these days, and Charley Steiner and Rick Monday second-banana him on days he doesn’t announce. But is there any doubt there’s nothing in the world like him and never will be again?

The Dodgers these days put him out there all by himself, no doofus ex-player spouting inane “color” like, “Russell Martin, you’ll notice he carries a BAT, and he HAS to carry that BAT, because you know what? Without that BAT, he has nothing to hit the BALL with!” You get the feeling Vin would rather be rolled around in Coke syrup and fed to mosquitoes than have to be subjected to the kind of stupid nonstop chatter the other 29 teams apparently think fans can’t live without. Somehow, Dodgers fans survive without it, thanks. They simulcast him on both the TV and radio feeds, so you get the same Vin goodness on both channels.

Yes, that’s right — he announces the game exactly the same for television as he would for radio, letting you hear the crowd noise, leaving space in your brain to actually anticipate the next happening instead of caulking every possible sonic space with blah, blah, blah. He makes the game about the game, not about how clever and cute he is, although I remain impressed with his ability to pronounce “Napoleon Lajoie,” not to mention his ability to work the likes of Lajoie (lah-zhu-WAH), who played a century ago and never donned a Dodgers uni, into modern game context — and I don’t even mind his silly puns (”Jose is in a Mesa of trouble,” “Butch Huskey certainly lives up to his name,” etc.), which put the hambone-extremitied likes of Chris Berman to shame.

That’s not going to go on much longer, I can tell you that; as soon as Vin steps away from the mic for good, voluntarily or not, you will have witnessed the breed officially breathing its last. Even the Dodgers, I’m sure, won’t be able to resist the lure of turning every broadcast into a frigging circus, assuming every viewer has ADD (hey, I have ADD, but even I can bleeping well remember that I’m watching a game without having to be whacked over the head with it every five seconds) and having a whole team out there to yack it up accordingly. Yeah, I enjoy hearing Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez reminiscing about the old days on Mets broadcasts, but I wish even they would shut up sometimes and just let me watch, just let me take it in. The Dodgers let Vin do it because he’s Vin, and Dodgers fans dig what’s left of the Tradition Thing. Get it while you can.

Speaking of getting it while you can, last night was one of those nights wherein 1) the Mets were poised to score a ridiculous amount of runs for once, and 2) they were going to need every blasted one of them, because Mets starter Tom Glavine had zip-a-dee-doodah. They staked him to a 6-0 lead off the equally pathetic-for-the-night Derek Lowe in the very first inning, and he was leading 9-4 starting the top of the third when he became totally unglued. First He Who Must Never Be Pitched To, Jeff Kent, hit yet another contra-Mets dong starting off the inning (how many does he have now against us, about 200?). Then Glavine proceeded to load the bases without recording an out in such a way that you knew, just knew, that holding a four-run lead was going to be hopelessly beyond him, so in came Aaron Sele for the garbage win. Sele got out of the bases-juiced jam with only one cheap run scoring, gave up only a single unearned run in three innings of work, and if garbage can be earned, then by ABC gum, he earned it.

The Mets actually got off easy in the bullpen department compared to their opponents, though. The Mets used only two other pitchers besides Glavine and Sele — Aaron Heilman and Guillermo Mota — whereas the Dodgers blew their way through four relievers (including two innings by Sunday’s scheduled starter, Mark Hendrickson) after similarly having exhausted their pen the two prior games against the Phillies.

In contrast to the three games the Mets played against the Padres at the Litter Box (c’mon, haven’t you thought of calling Petco Park that?) where other than the middle game they looked half dead, like they’d rather be getting their toenails surgically removed than have to face San Diego in the playoffs, against the Dodgers (whose record is .001 inferior to the Padres’) the Mets looked open for business. Everyone who hadn’t been hitting lately — Carlos Beltran, Shawn Green, Jose Reyes — hit. The Dodgers ran themselves out of big innings — Nomar Garciaparra, of all people, made the third out in that third inning trying to tag up and go to third on a sac fly, and came within a whisker of having it done to him a second time on James Loney’s single in the eighth.

Oh, and Marlon Anderson is back, having been placed on the scrap heap by the Dodgers and scooped up by the Mets. He played left field last night and went 2 for 5 with a couple of RBI. I always did like Marlon. I hope I like him tonight, too. At least they’re giving me a reason to watch, other than Vin. Who, BTW, I especially like because he wouldn’t get the joke in the title of this post in a million years.

I have to imagine there’s a lot of trichotillomania going on amongst baseball fans in the cities of Atlanta and Philadelphia right about now.

I mean, here are the Mets, who started this swoony June 4.5 games in front of the Braves and not much more in front of the Phillies, and have been standing around on a street corner all month more or less screaming, “Please! Someone relieve us of the terrible burden of being in first place! Anybody! Doesn’t anybody else want to be on top for a while? Our hands are hurting!” And nobody wants it.

The most the Mets have been able to give away is a total of three games, and now sit 1.5 games in front of Atlanta and two full games in front of Philadelphia. It’s like that song “The Cat Came Back.” They’ve tried and they’ve tried to give that lead away, alternately refusing to score or prevent runs in ways we couldn’t have dreamed possible even a month ago. But even winning just 4 games all month against 14 losses and being outscored 100-60, they still remain on top, although in the potentially awful position of not even qualifying for a wild-card berth if they do fall out of first place.

All this made me think of that ridiculous The Secret book and video (no, I’m not linking it, it’s already had enough hype, thanks) that made the media rounds not long ago, the one that says Success Is All In Our Heads. If you want to be thin, rich, beautiful, healthy, and always a winner, you need only clap hard enough and believe — what you’ve been given by fate or genetics means virtually zilch. Which made me wonder, of course: What if all sports teams ingested this? Would anybody ever lose?

This all seems perfectly silly on its face. It would appear to be better for one’s sanity, it seems to me, not to believe you have 100% control of everything that happens to you, to understand that other people exist besides you and they have needs and energies of their own, that nobody can do everything or be everything to everyone, and that life tends to go in cycles and has a certain randomness. Because, as intoxicating as believing in your own omnipotence might be, eventually you will run into evidence that contradicts it. Some will run into it sooner rather than later. But run into it, they will.

There is not a huge difference in the talent level of the Boston Red Sox and that of the Texas Rangers — even the “lousiest” player on the “worst” team is still a major league player, with physical gifts you or I or even most minor leaguers can never dream of. This is why no teams go 162-0 or 0-162, or even close to that. The talent level is only marginally higher on the “best” teams. People know this. This is why you hear so many theories of “team chemistry” and “wanting it badly enough.” Even David Wright fell into that trap, stating on the eve of Game 7 of last year’s NLCS that the winner of that game “would be about heart and who wants it more.”

I wonder now how The David felt about his own woeful performance in that NLCS and the Mets losing that fateful Game 7, and whether he would make that statement again. Did he suddenly stop “wanting it” somewhere between his apartment and the locker room? Hard to imagine. If anything, wanting it too much might have thrown The David’s game. That’s what’s called “getting tight.” But isn’t it possible that even with the perfect attitude, they still might have lost, just because…somebody has to?

Even now, I see Mets fans saying, “The team doesn’t care anymore.” Look, I understand the frustration, but sorry, that is nutsycuckoo. How could they stop caring over the course of less than three weeks? Yeah, maybe their play has been a little lacking in the energy department, but that’s what happens when you lose 14 out of 18, you start dragging your butts around a little more. You would too, believe me.

What do I think the difference is between this year’s team and last year’s? Simple. The middle relief isn’t as good.

Since I don’t have cable and get most of my Mets coverage through MLB.com, the Sunday night games on ESPN when the Mets are on present a special challenge to this out-of-town Metsie. MLB.com blacks out the video, but allows access to each team’s radio broadcasts. So I had to ask myself if I was in the mood to trundle out to a sports bar so I could see last night’s Mets-Yankees contest, knowing that the place I usually go will have the video but not the audio. Would I rather hear the game or see it, especially given that I’d have to pay extra (in bar food tabs) for the latter?

In the end, I decided to listen. For less than one inning. As soon as Paul Lo Duca got hit on the elbow in the first inning, I had a baaaad feeling. (I found out later he left the game with a nasty bruise in the fourth.) Then, when A-Rod hit the two-run homer in the bottom of the first, I knew it was over. Yeah, I gave up that quickly. Just turned the damn thing off. And I was right to. I am rooting for a team that is not merely losing a bunch of games, but is violating the very cosmos by remaining in first place.

Jason has a post today on Faith and Fear in Flushing which illustrates this point quite vividly. Jason, who kindly watched and listened to the entire broadcast on ESPN so I wouldn’t have to (how thoughtful of him!), gives us chapter and verse here about how Jon Miller and Joe Morgan (who are, y’know, supposed to be objective journalists and all, smirk) made the entire broadcast a Pinstriped Panegyric:

Watching tonight’s game, you’d never guess who was in first place and who’d only just closed within double digits. You’d have no idea which team played an all-or-nothing game to go to the World Series and which was sent packing in the first round of the playoffs. If it wasn’t Jeter’s radiance it was Clemens’ heroic journey back to the bank or Ron Guidry’s ancient glory days. Those guys in the other dugout? Um, there was Jose Reyes, discussed mostly as Jeter’s foil. And a couple of mentions of David Wright. El Duque got a retrospective of sorts — of his days as a Yankee.

Eeef. That’s certainly in line with the kind of media coverage that both the Mets and Yankees have had all year, isn’t it? We get the message, over and over again, that America — hell, that God, with a big G and everything — just doesn’t like the Mets. How dare they be better than America’s Team? How dare they? It just can’t happen. We’ll just tell the Mets they’re nothing over and over and over again, and tell the Yankees how great they’re supposed to be over and over and over again, until both teams believe it, and each goes back to its rightful place in the world — the Yankees dominating, the Mets being everyone’s chew toy. Good work, boys, you did your job. Except that there are about, oh, eight million Mets fans who have an itsy bitsy prahblum with that.

Now, if I’d been living in New York, I’d probably have sucked up every Metsochistic bit of that broadcast, because I’d probably be surrounded with commiserating friends and coworkers who’d reassure me that this was a temporary blip, that the team was still loaded with talent, was still in first place by 1.5 games, that they couldn’t go on playing .100 ball forever and scoring two runs or less per game forever. It’s true. You can’t suck that badly all season if you try.

But here, all I can think is, “No Alou, no Endy, no Pedro, no Duaner, Delgado is old, Beltran is way overrated, we’re faaaaahcked.” Hell, I’d even take obnoxious Yankmee-fan coworkers at this point. They’d help me strengthen my pro-Mets case.

And no, I couldn’t make the Yankees flowers either. One look at that navy yarn and it was puketime. I just. could. not. do. it.

I understand frontrunning in theory, really I do. But in practice, how do you make the leap? How do you just not care about the guys you used to care about anymore, to the point where you actually enjoy seeing them get beat? When you can’t switch and you can’t stick around, what’s left? Let’s go…baseball?

It’s so bad that:

- I’ve been reading I Blame The Patriarchy instead of the Mets postgame summaries this week because it’s cheering by comparison.

- I went to Seattle for three days, didn’t go near a computer once, and actually dreaded “having” to look at one when I came back.

- The Mets were playing three games in L.A. with the Dodgers, 7 PM PDT starts, Monday through Wednesday, which meant I could have watched every second of every game if I’d wanted to unlike my East Coast counterparts. And not only did I not watch, I didn’t even check the final, because I didn’t feel like losing three hours of sleep to the inevitable horror of the box score.

- I started unraveling all my blue and orange crocheted flowers. Sheehowdy, somebody has to do something. Mere animal sacrifices ain’t gonna cut it here.

OK. Now, I’ve said before that I’ve suffered through losing Mets teams before. If I was watching in 1979 and 1980 — and 2002 and 2003 — you know I have to have a stronger stomach for losing than your average frontrunning yobbo. But there’s something truly creepy going on in Metville, something I haven’t ever seen before. Something that looks like voodoo hoodoo. They started out flying to Miami, and once they crossed the Gulf of Mexico, someone hijacked the plane to the Bermuda Triangle. Someone who didn’t even have pockets, let alone a suspicious-looking carry-on. They have truly seemed to have forgotten how to do everything. Which is far more painful for me to watch than a team which didn’t look very good in the first place.

Yeah, there have been injuries. But they have almost everybody back now. At least their bodies are there. But we are watching Invasion of the Mets Snatchers. I want my team back.

So now the Yankees have won 9 in a row, bless their little cockroach hearts, and the Mets figure to be both petit-fours and toothpicks for the Yankees this weekend when they get sucked into the Bronx for their three-game ritual killing.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, then. I will dig up navy and white yarn and start crocheting flowers in Yankees colors. I will wear navy and white clothing to work tomorrow. (I draw the line at buying Yankees gear, though — I just can’t.) I will watch the games and force myself to boo every time a Met gets a hit or strikes someone out. I will make popcorn and throw it at the screen every time they show Willie Randoph’s face. I will salaam at the sight of Roger Clemens — yikes! I didn’t really say that! Roger Clemens is evil!evil!evil! Ptooey! Ahem. How about if I salaam at the sight of Suzyn Waldman instead? At least she never gave anyone a concussion, just a headache. Plus she’s a breast cancer survivor, so she deserves a bow just for that. OK, much better.

Now, let’s see if I can actually be a Yankees fan with a straight face. And without hurling. I’ll let y’all know how it went.

I am so sorry. My fingers should be bound together with Krazy Glue for what I wrote the other day.

First and foremost I should apologize to Endy Chavez and his hamstring, both of which I doomed to go down in flames by saying what a good thing it was that we had him around as a backup. Now he’s out four to six weeks.

Never again, jamais, jamais, jamais. From now on, only Chicken Little posts for me. We’re screwed! We’re screwed! We’ll never win a pennant again! My Entire Team Sucks!!! Really, baseball fairies, I meeeean it. Heck, after the last four games, it’s apparent we’ll never again see another Mets victory. It is actually mathematically possible, if unprecedented, to lose the last 106 games in a row, and this team will find a way.

Shawn Green made an appearance last night in the announcer booth and informed hope-starved Mets fans that he intends to play on Sunday when he comes off the DL. Dream on. He will wrench his neck sneezing after a nose-hair pluck and never return.

Damion Easley, whom I also waxed enthusiastic about in the aforementioned Endycurse post, is day to day with a sore right knee. Prolly he’ll take up breakdancing in the next few days and really screw it up, ay?

And Moises Alou? Bob Alou. Alou Paratha. Mashed potatah. He will do the alligatah and render himrself and his going-on-41-year-old quads completely unable to walk, the pathetic urine-stained gimp.

Pedro Martinez’s fate is obvious, he will put on his Yoda mask the wrong way the day after he returns from rehab and asphyxiate himself. It’s the Mets’ way.

The Mets’ bullpen, of course, will continue to be the total brushfire it’s been all week, and will have an ERA over the last four months of the season of 326.4. Again, totally unprecedented, but we’re All About Teh Miracles here. (Miracles can work in reverse if they’re unprecedented enough, nu?)

And this is not just guesswork. I borrowed Kevin Kernan’s crystal ball and found out for sure. There’s a reason those New York Post guys still draw six-figure paychecks, they really do know everything, even when it hasn’t happened yet. If he says we won’t see a Mets championship this year, there’s no reason to keep tuning in. I mean, why waste four perfectly good months hoping for something that is so not taking place?

Catastrophizing is fun and funny! I’ll bet even Willie Randolph does it, at least when no one is looking.

All you Mets fans who have been busy sticking pins into the hands of Chipper Jones voodoo dolls all these years, your ship has finally come in.

During tonight’s broadcast of what would be an icky 4-2 loss in 11 innings to the Phillies, Gary Cohen informed us that the now-35-year-old Laaaareeee would be unable to haunt Mets fans with his Brave presence for a good long time, as he is planning to have casts placed on both of his hands after smashing up both wrists simultaneously on a collision with the Pirates’ Jose Bautista on May 11. Thus sprach Larry:

“Taking off my socks hurts,” Jones said. “Everything bugs you. If I bend my hand all the way back or down, I feel it. And every time you feel it, it’s hurting it a little bit more. That’s why I’m trying to immobilize it as much as possible.”

Am I laughing at all this? No. In fact, my wrists kinda hurt right now just typing about it.

You don’t often hear injured ballplayers talk about their physical aches and pains. But it’s pretty obvious that they deal with the kind of pain on a daily basis, even when not “injured,” that most of us would find intolerable. You foul a ball off your foot and you’re supposed to “walk it off.” Someone steps on your hand wearing spikes and if it’s not broken in three places, you’re expected to remain on base. A line drive bounces off your solar plexus and knocks the wind out of you, and people expect you to scratch yourself a few times and then shrug it off like it was a mosquito bite. Because you make All That Money, you are expected to be made of iron, with deader-than-dead nerve endings to match. If you’re in that lineup, boy, you’d better produce.

The Mets were very shrewd when they put this year’s team together. They knew they were going to have a lot of potentially old-and-busted in their lineup and in their starting rotation, and they planned accordingly. Forty-year-old Moises Alou yanks the crap out of his quadriceps? No prob, that’s why we have Endy Chavez. Carbon-dated El Duque’s bursitis acts up again? Sweat not, Oliver Perez will give us number 2-type starts. Born-during-the-first-Mets-Miracle Jose Valentin rips his ACL? Here comes barely-younger Damion Easley to pick him up. Which is why I say you can spend all the money you want on your team, but you’d better get lucky with the guys you pick up off the scrap heap. Because you will get banged up, it’s just a matter of how well you prepare for it.

But sometimes, it seems like even the guys who are “healthy” all have owies at the same time. David Wright has played the last three games with back spasms. Back spasms frigging hurt. Even if you’re David Wright. Your back muscles don’t care how much is in your bank account or how many young girls are tortured by dreams of you; if you tweak ‘em, you tweak ‘em. Carlos Beltran — leading all NL outfielders in All-Star balloting by about a million kilometers, by the way — finally made it back into the lineup tonight after sitting out the weekend with a badly bruised knee.

A bruised knee, you say. What a giant wuss. Yet seeing Beltran out there taking his 0-for-4-with-a-walk and gimping around the bases with his chronically sore quadriceps en route to scoring half of the Mets’ runs tonight (one) was a stark reminder of just what he does for us, every game, without complaint. No whining about the agony of sock removal for this guy. But you know it had to be killing him, crawling out there like he knew he had to with two-thirds of the outfield (Alou and Shawn Green) already disabled.

Come to think of it, now my quads don’t feel so great either.

Now this just warms my cockles. (And to paraphrase Jim Bouton, I like having my cockles warmed.) From today’s Bergen Record:

Fans turn blind eye to Barry Bonds

Opposing players rarely find a warm reception once they arrive in New York. Wednesday will be even more daunting for Barry Bonds.

Driven by the goal of keeping steroids and illegal drugs out of baseball, volunteers of BoycottBarry.com will be at Shea Stadium ready to hand out the “Bondsfold,” a blindfold that fans can wear when Bonds steps up to the plate to demonstrate their desire for authentic records and an even playing field.

Awwww, isn’t that cute. But let’s get real here, Barry boycotters. You bought a ticket. You bought food and drink. You sat in the seats. Do you really believe none of that money, not a dime, is going to anyone not named Barry Bonds who is similarly juiced? That no current Mets, for example, could possibly be on anything stronger than NoDoz?

Yeah, Bonds is a ginormous target because of that artificially enlarged head full of hot air volumnious enough to carry Jules Verne and 12 of his closest buddies anywhere on earth they want to go. But the only reason we know any more about the state of his body chemistry than we do about anyone else’s in MLB is because of leaked grand jury testimony. He’s just the tip of the iceberg. He just happens to be a particularly nasty tip, is all.

Boo him if you are the booing type, I haven’t a problem with that as long as no objects are thrown. Opposing players who are surly, obnoxious and more talented than they have any right to be are why our creator gave us pursable lips. Heck, wear the Bondsfold if you really want to.

But please don’t kid yourself about why you’re doing it. You’re doing it because you want the home run champ to be an Officially Good Guy, someone who is grateful and humble and makes noises like he considers himself specially blessed to have attained such an exalted state, rather than someone who saw what he wanted and decided he was going to get it for himself at all costs. I can’t say I blame you for that; you want to feel like your money is going to someone who is all about love, not someone who is trying to shove his considerable gifts up the world’s small intestine in a fit of pique because he never felt respected enough (or that his father was respected enough, either).

But if this is All About the Roids for you, please understand that there are players you love, players you respect, players you would never suspect or want to believe for a moment could possibly be dirty, whose identities will shock you as they are revealed in the months and years to come. Try, just try, turning a blind eye to that when it all hits the fan(s).

And be sure to wear your Motafold when Guillermo Mota rejoins the Mets tonight after his 50-game suspension.

How much of a Metsochist are you? Take my quickie quiz and find out.

1. I think Tom Glavine is:

a. A blackhearted mole sent over to the Mets in greatest secrecy in 2003, under the guise of signing with the Mets as a free agent, for the express purpose of losing key games to the Braves intentionally.

b. An overpriced has-been who the Braves were smart to pass on re-signing when they did.

c. Still a pretty damn good pitcher, even if he’s not at his absolute peak at age 41 — plenty of teams probably wish they had him, maybe even including the Braves.

2. I think the Braves:

a. Are still the best team in the National League — they may be behind the Mets now but that won’t last long, it never does. “We” really have no business playing them, they kill “us” every series, always have and always will.

b. Have a tendency to put all their energy into beating the Mets, then turn around and get pasted by other teams in subsequent series, which is why they’re still in second place.

c. Will probably be in the division race right down to the end, and that’s probably a good thing — better the Mets should have to fight for a playoff berth, rather than waltz to one like they did last year and peak too soon.

3. I think the wild card:

a. Is for chumps who weren’t good enough to win their division — it’s a cheater’s berth, it will never count in my mind, ever.

b. Is a perfectly fine way to capture a flag — the last five World Series had at least one wild-card pennant winner, after all, and Red Sox fans aren’t exactly complaining that their 2004 champs were WC winners instead of division winners.

c. Would be great, but the Mets probably don’t have what it takes to win it.

If you answered a, a, and c, you feed your Metsochism with an eyedropper like it was a starving kitten.

If you answered c, c, and b, you are Nellie Forbush. Or maybe this guy.

My answers? All of them, depending on what inning you asked me in.

Tonight it seemed like the Braves led quite the charmed existence — how about that umpiring squad, huh? Not content to let Angel Hernandez, the second base umpire, have all the fun inflaming the Mets with brain-frying calls the way he’s always done, first base umpire Larry Young let loose with a doozie on David Wright with the bases loaded and two outs in the third inning, calling him out on a third strike on an appealed check swing that was so obviously not a swing that the normally insouciant Mr. Wright actually threw his bat and his helmet in outrage. Home plate umpire Mark Carlson’s Silly Putty strike zone constantly benefitted Braves starter John Smoltz (whose 200th career win this was) and squoze Glavine over and over and over again. And yes, the bleary-eyed Mr. Hernandez couldn’t resist getting into the act, calling Kelly Johnson safe on a steal attempt in the seventh inning when it was clear to anyone with half a cornea that Johnson’s fingers never touched the bag.

It’s like the ump crew all got together and said, “Let’s make this a very special night for Braves fans.” I expect equal dispensation when Glavine goes after his 300th, which should come up in the next two months unless he gets stuck with the same Bad Eye Bunch on every start.

On to Florida, and all the palm bark they can eat.

On the cusp of the first Mets-Yankees series this year, I almost wish today was an off day.

No, really. When you get a game like yesterday’s, with the Mets staging the kind of dramatic, thrilling ninth-inning comeback that you get about as often as you get talking cats, when they score five runs in the bottom of the ninth and beat the Cubs 6-5, don’t you want to savor it? Who needs the Yankees coming in and ruining everything, like they always do?

I always said the thing that drove me insane about the NFL is that if your team loses, you have a whole week to stew about it until they play again. But in MLB, the downside is that a true delicacy of a win like yesterday’s can evaporate as soon as the team takes the field again the next night. As long as that win hangs in the air, I feel like nobody can get me. I am no longer some unprepossessing nobody nothing, a mere member of the mouse-clicking secretary-spread hoi polloi. I am sparkly with orange glitter from hat to ankles, I am weightless, I am Carlos Delgado redeeming an afternoon’s worth of boos with a game-winning hit that just sneaks past a diving Ryan Theriot. He makes the kind of money he does to “be” me, to put wings on all our battered sneakers. Even if he only does it once in a while, the sneaker mileage is immeasurable. It lasts and lasts and lasts.

Meanwhile, over in Yankeeland, where they are now 9.5 games out and slouching towards season-defining series not just with the Mets but with the Red Sox too, you have Tino Martinez, of all people, going on ESPN Radio’s Michael Kay Show just this past Tuesday and slamming the Yankees for not having the “desire” that his Yankee teams used to have. According to Tino, only his ex-teammates Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada “really care” that the team is getting buried in the standings day by day. The rest of them just don’t have “that really burning desire to win.”

Really? The Yankees are losing because they “don’t care”? Not because they’re old and busted? Haven’t we been here all too recently in Metville, when Robbie Alomar and Mo Vaughn were gimping around on the last of their bony cartilage just a few years ago? I never bought for a minute that those guys “didn’t want to win” or “didn’t care.” Roberto Alomar, a guy who during his entire career actually played winter ball in Puerto Rico long after he attained superstardom and hardly needed the money or the exposure, didn’t care about the game? Mo Vaughn, who wanted to play so badly he hired some flaming numbnuts of a trainer to make him push a weighted wheelbarrow around to “strengthen” his degenerative-arthritic knees, didn’t care about the game?

To paraphrase the immortal George Clinton, think, folks — it ain’t illegal yet. If you actually applied a sprinkling of intellectual curiosity to the whole situation, which seems beyond the ken of most of the Paid Media and their nonthinking lap-pets, wouldn’t it have seemed more likely that they stopped caring because they lost their ability to play, and not the other way around? The Yankees are probably no different. Just as swagger follows winning and not vice versa, losing too is self-regenerative. If anyone really knew what, besides sheer dumb luck — and making sure the guys you sign up still have some cartilage, eyesight and functional ligaments left — made some teams take off and others not, they could purchase the lifetime services of all gods, fairies, elves, angels and sprites in every known cosmos. And that would cost more money than even Steinbrenner has.

But the Yankees, being the Yankees and having perenially Very Fortunate Laundry, could still ruin everything for Mets fans this weekend and even beyond. They could barrel their way into Shea and sweep, then come home to the Bronx and turn the Red Sox into Alpo, like they’ve done so many times before when they’ve been up against the wall and the “Joe Torre could lose his job” stories in the papers start multiplying. And then the Mets will be forgotten by all but the diehard once again.

Desire, my lower left buttock — I’m sure the Washington Nationals have “desire” out the wazoo. The Yankees, on the other hand, have been proven with time to be A Thing That Doesn’t Die, twenty-five cockroaches glue-gunned together and coated with bulletproof flannel, which no shoe however large or spiky could ever batter into full submission. They are not something you want in your house, no matter how tempting a target they might appear if you’ve got yourself some brand-new custom-made size 28 Chuck Taylors or an uncle who can get you all the free boric acid you think you’ll ever need. Okay, so these days even Yankees fans don’t want the Yankees in their houses. But that doesn’t make me pant to bring them on.

Last night, the Mets took advantage of some hair-fryingly stupid in-game “strategy” from the opposing manager to beat the Cubs on a bases-loaded walk, 5-4. OK, let’s rack ‘em. You (the Cubs) have a relief pitcher (Michael Wuertz) on the mound with a tie score in the bottom of the ninth. You have jackrabbits (Jose Reyes and Endy Chavez) on second and first with two outs, the latter of whom reached on a walk, and it’s obvious your pitcher couldn’t throw strikes if the plate was moved two inches from the end of his runny nostrils. Your pitcher is facing Carlos Beltran with Carlos Delgado on deck, and he has a 3-1 count on Beltran. And your manager decides to go ahead and walk Beltran intentionally to load the bases, putting the winning run on third base. So what happens next? Does Michael Wuertz suddenly figure out how to get the ball over the plate, or does he manage to walk Delgado too, and force in the winning run? Take a look at the final score and find out. Ewwwwwww.

That opposing manager’s name? Lou Piniella. A man who keeps getting managerial jobs because…why again? Oh yeah. Because of fawning press coverage like this and this. They want this guy to come back to New York and do what he didn’t manage (sorry) to do in 1986 and 1987, which is make the poor Yankees win by sheer force of personality (by which they mean frequency of upending clubhouse buffet tables). Well, at least Wallace Matthews admitted a sliver of the truth in his own pro-Lou droolfest:

It’s just too bad he isn’t managing here. You can’t help wondering what would have happened if George Steinbrenner had done what he wanted to do after the Yankees collapsed against the Tigers in last year’s ALDS. What if he had fired Joe Torre? What if he had brought back Piniella? The Yankees might be every bit as bad as they are now - like the Cubs, they are 17-19 and way behind in the division - but a lot more fun to cover.

Yes, never forget that managers are hired for the amusement of reporters, not because they actually know what they’re doing.

I could just picture it if Lou (rhymes with ewwwwwww) ever pulled something like the shenanigans from last night while managing in New York and it cost the Yankees a game. Or ten. That “I’m the anti-Torre” act sure would wear thin in a hurry, wouldn’t it? Gee, it’s too bad they didn’t think to snatch Louewwwwww away from the Cubbies while they still could’ve. Mets fans would be eating it up like soggy nachos, hearing about him flinging headcheese in the nude around the Yankee clubhouse, trying to “motivate” players who, apparently, aren’t already sufficiently embarrassed to be 8.5 games behind the Red Sox in mid-May, and watching the Yankees continue to Loooouse and Loooouse and Loooouse. Somehow the Paid Sports Media has this notion that you goose multimillionaire veteran major leaguers into winning the way you do the Bad News Bears, and somehow general managers keep falling for it.

As long as one of them isn’t Omar, it’s fine with me.

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