(Before we proceed into the second circle of Met Hell, a word about a special brand of offseason Hell for baseball fans: evaluating a trade without getting to see the principals play ball. My 30-second take on Mike Cameron for Xavier Nady is that it's impossible to size up offseason trades and signings one by one. You have to wait until you're breaking camp in March, because all those offseason moves fit into the kind of plan you can't assemble during the regular season, when each day brings a win or a loss and a changed situation while you're scrambling for more pieces. Nady, if he stays, strikes me as a good complement to Mike Jacobs in a first-base platoon, which would eliminate one problem from this winter's lengthy list and free up some money to address the others. I'm also not sure what the trade's detractors thought we could get for Mike Cameron, a prince of a guy but a flawed hitter playing out of position and trying to recover from a devastating injury. For much more than 30 seconds' worth, check out Metsblog.com and MetsGeek.com. I think I reloaded those two sites approximately 15,000 times this afternoon.)

Those of you still left, well, let's move on to the exercise at hand. Dante's second circle of Hell was reserved for those overcome by lust, and while things are different in Met Hell, bad reputations are a factor here as well. For this is the domain of those less-than-beloved Mets beset chiefly by image problems. Their very souls seemed steeped in rancor and churlishness, and they marched to the fingers-in-the-ears beat of their own sneering drummer. So what are they doing out here on the margins? Well, for all their bad reputations, they never did anything too awful while they wore our uniform. We might have heard, thought or suspected they were jerks, and so regarded them with a certain wariness, but most of their jerkiness came before or after the Days of Orange and Blue.

Carl Everett -- Doesn't believe in dinosaurs. Or, apparently, the authority of managers -- he wound up as a Met after the Marlins suspended him for insubordination. Doesn't believe in the need to stay in the batter's box, the point of contention in the scary tantrum he threw on July 15, 2000 in Fenway Park while the Mets looked on in amazement. (Or perhaps Mike Piazza asked an innocent question about whether the most-famous sauropod should be properly called Apatosaurus or Brontosaurus.) Still, what did Everett do while wearing Mets colors? He got himself banned from winter ball after going Artest on a fan in Venezuela, but let's not pretend we care about that. Dallas Green didn't trust him, but it was Dallas' philosophy to never trust anybody under 30. What we're left with is the strange 1997 incident in which workers at the Met day-care center (a concept I found amazing to begin with) found bruises on his kids, which led to family court. My impression (which could be wrong) from the day-care mess was that Everett and his wife were believers in a level of corporeal punishment that's no longer generally accepted, but not abusive parents. It didn't matter: Carl was shipped to Houston for John Hudek, about whom I now remember absolutely nothing. I do remember a fair amount about Everett, particularly some amazing home runs, none more amazing than his '97 grand slam off Ugie Urbina in the bottom of the ninth for a 6-6 tie in a game we'd eventually win. Do I remember that Everett was also kind of psycho? Sure. But not for us.

Eddie Murray -- A shy and strange man, deeply suspicious of fame and people, with those people employed by the media drawing the deepest suspicion of all. But an amazingly smart player and by all accounts a terrific teammate. I wish he hadn't left town as the same odd cipher he was when he arrived. But beyond that, who gives a shit that he was mean to Tim McCarver?

Julio Machado -- It's among the more bland transactions in baseball history: On April 1, 1992 the Milwaukee Brewers placed Machado on the restricted list. Why? Well, he'd been accused of shooting a woman following a traffic accident in Venezuela. Now, it stands to reason that if someone who was once a Met goes to prison for murder, they get some place in Met Hell. Still, to be terribly shallow about it, it was practically in another hemisphere, and, well, he was a Brewer at the time. Extenuating circumstances? Not in the real world, God knows. But in Met Hell, it earns him a somewhat-awkward exile out here.

Juan Samuel -- It's painful to even remember. This was the period where having two centerfielders (Mookie and Lenny) was somehow a problem, so the solution was to get rid of both and import a second baseman to play the position, an experiment that was such a flaming disaster that the Mets insisted on repeating it with the likes of Keith Miller and Howard Johnson, until finally we were all so shell-shocked that we wanted to cheer when some hapless Met broke back on a drive to center without falling down. That original player in the wrong position, of course, was Samuel, who floundered through half a miserable season before getting shipped off for the malingering Mike Marshall and the wretched Alejandro Pena, two more players to make the ulcers reignite. What's easy to forget is that while everybody hated the Dykstra and McDowell for Samuel trade from the get-go, most everybody also thought Samuel -- a year removed from a 100-RBI campaign -- was a pretty amazing player. He wasn't; in fact, in Carlos Baergaesque fashion he hung around for years afterwards and was never more than so-so again. But while I'll always remember him with a dull fury, I'm not sure how much of the whole disaster was his fault.

Jeff Kent -- Another guy whose Met career was bookended by groan-inducing trades: Kent came to New York as an unknown in the exile of David Cone, then netted us Baerga in return. He certainly showed that he was wound too tight while in New York, with the most-famous incident coming at the beginning of his Met career, when he refused to go through the usual rookie hazing of being forced to wear a ridiculous outfit and seemed ready to fight the whole clubhouse over it. Kent's always seemed socially maladroit, and I never particularly liked him, but being out of step with the careening disaster that was the Mets of the early 1990s could be seen as a badge of honor. Hell, I was seething a lot of the time, and I didn't have to see the carnage from mere feet away the way Kent did. Certainly I remember he always played hard -- too hard, if anything. And wouldn't you like to have found a place in our batting order for the 256 homers and 1,000+ RBIs he's racked up since leaving town? Me too.

Next stop: The third circle of Met Hell, home of two representative unfortunates who destroyed all prior goodwill with poor departures.

Welcome to Met Hell, which you'll find owes a certain something to depictions of the real thing. Now, here's the good news: Compared to that real thing, the Hell that holds a lot more than baseball players, Met Hell isn't really that bad a place. Oh sure, as we descend you'll find some malcontents and miscreants, and there are some truly bad characters we'll encounter late in our tour. But not so many of them, thank goodness. Compared with some other clubs, we've gotten off pretty easy.

The first circle of Met Hell is Limbo. Dante defined it as the place for virtuous pagans and the unbaptized -- they weren't really punished, but they didn't get to hobnob with God, either. So it is with Met Limbo -- it's reserved for Mets we bear no particular grudge and may even have a certain fondness for, particularly since they were part of some very good campaigns. But there's a creepiness at the core of these guys that makes us reluctant to truly embrace them, whatever grand deeds they might have been a part of.

Rey Ordonez -- OK, he redefined shortstop in our eyes, and his debut was incredible. We were both there, Opening Day in the rain, and the throw he made to nail Royce Clayton at the plate (I can hear Gary Cohen yelping "FROM HIS KNEES!" as I type) produced a sound I'd never heard in a stadium before: the sound of 18,000+ people turning to the 18,000+ next to them and murmuring, "Did he really just do that?" An amazed burble, stadium-sized. Ah, but that wasn't all of Rey. It became clear all too soon that the O Rey wore on the back of his shirt was for "obnoxious." He sulked. He pouted. He pretended he couldn't speak English until the very end of his Met career, in which he used his sudden command of the language to seal his fate by announcing we were all stupid. (Um, no. Hypercritical, yes. Vindictive, sure. Bitter, absolutely. But not stupid.) He couldn't even remain interested in the entirety of his own highlight video -- if the Mets didn't edit out the scene of a bored Rey-O starting to wander away from Cookie Rojas, just imagine what they left on the cutting-room floor. The Mets could never turn his escape from Cuba into a stirring tale because there was the small matter that he left a wife behind who hardly ever got discussed because Rey found himself a new wife with unseemly haste. And the hitting? Ugh. Rey Ordonez may have been the stupidest hitter who ever lived. He bunted at the wrong time. He had not even the vaguest command of the strike zone. His determination to hit home runs made him a black hole in the lineup for weeks at a time. He was utterly and completely uncoachable, utterly and completely self-centered, and thoroughly unlikeable. Oh, but that stadium-sized murmur....

Rickey Henderson -- There's an asterisk on this one, because we knew perfectly well what we were getting. But we sure got it. Rickey's 1999 was fairly amazing -- he hit .315 and stole 37 bases at the tender age of 40 and (even more amazingly) managed to make Roger Cedeno a productive baseball player. But it all turned sour in the playoffs, and you could pinpoint the moment: Game 4 of the Arizona series, when Bobby Valentine pulled him for defense. Rickey's replacement (Melvin Mora) immediately proved Bobby right by gunning down Jay Bell at home, but Rickey whined nonetheless. Then he played cards with Bobby Bonilla while the rest of the team was fighting to the death against the Braves. In spring training the next year he started bitching about a raise, complained about the trip to Japan, then dogged his way through the next five weeks. Finally, the end: He jogged to first on an apparent home run against the Marlins, wound up with a single when it didn't go out, was booed mercilessly and properly by the fans and criticized by Valentine. His response? He threatened a New York Post reporter and said he'd do the same thing next time. There was no next time. "After considering everything that happened last night and this morning, something had to be done," said Steve Phillips, adding that "no matter how talent you have, if you continue to create problems and situations, you wear out your welcome. We got to the point where we had to compromise our ideals and what we expect from our players too often." Just for making me agree with Steve Phillips, he's on the list.

Kevin McReynolds -- An absolute killer of a season in 1988, when he and Darryl complemented each other so perfectly that they stole each other's MVP votes and delivered the prize to Kirk Fucking Gibson. Tremendous power, wily baserunner, terrific arm from the outfield. But he played baseball with the kind of passion normally shown by DMV clerks. His wife didn't help: Her infamous call to WFAN defending K-Mac's laser-quick departures from Shea because, as she explained, her man wanted to beat the traffic is probably in some manual for team wives on what not to do. Of course K-Mac didn't always wait for the end of the game -- in late 1989 he and Darryl got caught in the Wrigley Field clubhouse changing into their street clothes, which would have been fine except the game wasn't over and they had to hustle back during a desperate ninth-inning rally. Kevin McReynolds never did anything truly wrong, and he didn't owe fans any more than what he gave them on the field, which for a while was beyond reproach. But he's living proof that for baseball to be any fun, those of us watching must at least be able to imagine that the guy down on the field doing things we could only dream of doing gives a shit that he's doing them.

Darryl Strawberry -- What? Darryl? Our Ted Williams? The Straw That Stirs the Drink? Why is he on this list? C'mon Jace, he's not a bad guy, just a weak guy. A tragic figure. Well, OK, sure. But c'mon now. Didn't you get sick of Darryl Strawberry? Of his constant illnesses, including sick days that coincided with the recording of "Chocolate Strawberry," possibly the worst hip-hop song in history? Of the domestic violence? Of the fight on team-photo day? (Though the resulting photo is a classic, with Darryl and Keith Hernandez in a fury and Davey Johnson looking like he's just aged about a decade.) Of his stint in Smithers, which just happened to be timed to delay more potential domestic-violence charges? Of his equally phony stint as a Jesus freak? Of the endless sulking and whining and talking shit? Of the ridiculous book he, um, wrote? Didn't you get sick of it all more times than you care to remember? In Game 7 of the '86 series, Darryl hit a home run in the 8th to make it 7-5 Mets, and afterwards you can see Ray Knight intercept him before the dugout, telling him something urgent. He's telling him to be a man and shake Davey Johnson's hand. Moments after helping secure the Mets' second World Series title, Darryl Strawberry needed to be told to be a man. OK, fine, I agree. Darryl isn't a bad guy. Hell, he's a tragic figure. Would you still think so if he'd hit 15 homers a year?

Next stop: The circle of Met Hell reserved for those of unseemly reputation, and a weighing of their sins or lack thereof while clad in blue and orange.