Wow, a Royce Ring sighting. That reminds me of a story for an off-day. Be advised that this story has almost nothing to do with actual baseball. In other words....

Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Geek Alarm! Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!

We've occasionally discussed The Holy Books, my pair of binders collecting baseball cards for all the Mets since 1962: one card for each new Met, ordered by year. (Answer to unasked trivia question: The 1961 draftees lead things off and are represented in order of selection, making Hobie Landrith the first-ever Met and Lee Walls the only non-Met in the book, since he was drafted and escaped before '62 rolled around.) What hasn't been discussed is that The Holy Books have an even-more-OCD counterpart: The Unholy Boxes, a repository for every Topps card of every player to ever put on the uniform, regardless of what team they were with at the time. Before anyone thinks "Those must be insanely valuable!", all the old Mays and Berras and what-not are in really bad shape. Like practically round. The Unholy Boxes are not valuable, just insane.

Anyway, one of the tasks involved in being the custodian of The Unholy Boxes is the need to track down obscure Topps cards as players become Mets. (Please see "OCD," above.) Did you know McKay Christensen had a draft-pick card? That Braden Looper and Brian Rose share a rookie card, requiring that I have doubles of it? That Brady Clark and Marco Scutaro have now graduated to Topps card status? That Roy McMillan and Jesse Orosco got special/highlights cards in years they didn't have normal cards? Such are vagaries of Topps. (On a road-not-taken note, Mike Piazza shares his '93 rookie card with Brook Fordyce and Carlos Delgado: An already-annoying double would have become an expensive triple if not for a certain Joe Cocker-worshipping agent and the chatty Senator Al. The fourth player on the card is someone named Donnie Leshnock. If he's a Long Island Duck right now, I don't want to know about it.)

What does this have to do with Royce Ring? Well, he has a Topps card. A really obscure, really annoying Topps card. A few years ago, Topps started making small sets of draft picks that appeared only in the "hobby sets" -- the complete boxed sets that appear after both series have been released. Ring was #8 of 10 in the holiday version of the 2002 complete set, which only included #6 of 10 through #10 of #10 -- #1 of 10 through #5 of 10 appeared in the non-holiday version of the complete set, in an apparent bid to spark a rash of suicides among hardcore collectors. I wound up shelling out $10 for an ineptly cropped card of Ring pretending to pitch in front of what looks like a junior-high gym, even though there was no guarantee he'd ever be a Met. And now he will be! Take that, Fates!

(By typing that, I of course just condemned Royce Ring to the Hell that is Terrell Hansen status. Sorry Royce.)

Why would I spend that much money on a really obscure, really annoying card of a guy who didn't seem likely to ever be a Met? Because of what happened a decade ago with Rich Sauveur.

Rich Sauveur, besides forging a cosmically unlikely major-league career (just look at the transactions), is the patron saint of stupid Topps cards. In 1992, Topps started making parallel versions of the regular cards with gold lettering. But they weren't sure what to do with the checklist cards -- who cared about a gold-lettered checklist? So for the Gold set, they replaced the checklist cards with a handful of 26th men from big-league rosters.

I only realized Topps had done this when I stumbled across a 1992 Gold card of Terry McDaniel, the first Met to annoy everyone by wearing #0. (Why didn't Topps make the Gold cards more interesting by issuing, say, alternates of star players? Good question. I'd like to say the answer is Topps is also a little bit OCD. But really I think it just didn't occur to them. The only Gold player who ever amounted to anything was Rod Beck.) After discovering the McDaniel card, one of the annual chores of card collecting became tracking down the handful of scrubs who existed only in the Gold set, in case any of them were Mets, had been Mets, or might become Mets.

You'd think this would be easy enough, but it wasn't, for a few reasons. First off, in the early 1990s baseball cards were considered hot collectables, so all sorts of semi-employed misfits with more greed than sense bought them by the truckload and tried to make a quick buck selling them. This meant that at a card show, some of the dealers were the people who knew the least about baseball cards. Second, very few people cared about the Gold set in the first place. Third, very few of those people cared or even knew about the scrubs who replaced checklist cards in the Gold set. Fourth, in these proto-Internet days, there was no easy way to find out who the replacement Gold cards were. So I spent too many Saturdays hungover and pawing through boxes of Topps Gold, gazing at cards of borderline major-leaguers, turning over the ones I didn't remember (which was many of them), and seeing if their card number matched one of the checklist numbers.

1993 passed before I managed to track down all of that year's Topps Gold scrubs. It wasn't until next year that I was able to consult a mammoth tome of checklists on the sly in the mall and discover that one of the missing cards was Rich Sauveur -- the same Rich Sauveur who'd logged 3.3 dismal innings for the Mets in 1991. Well, goddamn it. After some grumbling I got down to it. At every card show I'd look around the depressing hotel half-ballroom in search of tables with lots and lots of cards, hoping someone might have brought a box of 1993 Topps Golds, and having I'll-want-these-minutes-back-on-my-deathbed conversations like this one:

Me: Got any 1993 Topps Golds?
Dealer: Yeah, right here.
Me: No, these are '94s.
Dealer: Oh. Huh. Well, what are you looking for?
Me: One of the cards that replaced the checklist cards.
Dealer: I've got a holographic insert Barry Bonds for $20.
Me: No thanks, I don't collect those. I'm looking for a '93 Topps Gold, one of the cards that replaced the checklist cards.
Dealer: The what? What player you looking for, buddy?
Me: Rich SO-ver. It looks like SAU-vee-UR.
Dealer: Never heard of him. How about $18 on the Bonds?
Me: Oh, forget it.

Week after week after week. Rich Who? Topps What? I've got some at my house, but they're not worth bringing. Why you want to collect that? Never heard of it.

So one Saturday I drop by a motley card show at a Howard Johnson's in Alexandria, Va. The first table I walk by has about 100 cards, all in plastic protectors, arranged across the face of one of those cases that has black fabric inside and a glass front that can be tilted up. There's nothing else on the table, which is a clear sign for me to keep going, since I collect dopey common cards that are invariably packed into big boxes with the rest of the chaff. Except something catches my eye: There's a Topps Gold card in a plastic protector clipped to the tilted-up glass front. I only glance at it, because that area is the exclusive province of Willie Mays and Barry Bonds inserts and other very expensive things. And then I stop. It's a '93. And even though this makes no sense, it's the Rich Sauveur card.

The couple behind the table are utterly unremarkable. I chit-chat with them for a minute, look over their other cards, and casually say, "Hey, Rich Sauveur."

One important point here: The 1993 Topps Gold Rich Sauveur is not a valuable card. It's worth anywhere between a dime and a quarter. This, in fact, is why I couldn't find one: Rare, expensive things actually aren't hard to find, because everybody wants them, meaning most anyone who gets his hands on one will offer it for sale. On the other hand, obscure, inexpensive things are virtually impossible to find, despite being cheap and plentiful, because nobody wants them and therefore nobody thinks to sell them. I'm sure there's a fancy economics term for this, but there you have it.

It's obvious the people at this table have a wildly inflated idea of the value of Rich Sauveur, and I'd rather not pay a huge premium for a basically worthless card. But I'm not too worried about this, since even a phenomenally overpriced Rich Sauveur card can't possibly cost me more than about $5 -- an amount of money I'm more than willing to pay to end this irritating quest.

"Oh, you know Rich? He's our neighbor! Rich is a great guy!"

OK, that's quite possible. I banter about Rich Sauveur for a couple of minutes (which isn't easy to do) to cement our good fellowship before asking, "So how much do you want for the card?"

Suddenly the people behind the table get very serious.

"Oh, it's not for sale," the man says.

"What do you mean, it's not for sale?"

"It's not for sale," he says, a bit cross. His wife is now glaring at me like I just asked how much for a...well, never mind.

"I've been looking for that one for a while," I say. "It'd sure be nice to scratch it off the list." I smile and wave the list inanely.

"I told you, it's not for sale."

At this point it's clear I've fallen down the rabbit hole. The urge to leap across the table and shake these two until my arms get tired is overpowering. WHAT PART OF COMMERCE DO YOU TWO MORONS NOT UNDERSTAND? WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU PUT A CARD IN YOUR DISPLAY CASE THAT YOU WON'T SELL? THIS IS A GODDAMN BASEBALL-CARD SHOW! THAT MEANS YOU SELL BASEBALL CARDS TO PEOPLE WHO WANT TO BUY THEM! THAT'S WHY WE'RE ALL HERE! LOOK AROUND YOU! THIS IS NOT A MUSEUM! THIS IS NOT COOPERSTOWN! AND THAT IS NOT A FRIGGIN' NEAR-MINT T-206 HONUS WAGNER! IT'S RICH SAUVEUR, FOR GOD'S SAKE! RICH SAUVEUR! I MEAN, JESUS! WHAT ON EARTH CAN POSSIBLY BE WRONG WITH YOU?

I don't say any of these things. I'm too flabbergasted. Instead, I say, "Look, I'll give you $10" -- the equivalent of paying $30 for a can of soda (or $18 million for Roger Cedeno), but what do I care? At which point the guy, now red in the face, unclips the card from the case and tells me he thinks I ought to be going. And that was that.

Of course I found two of the damn card the very next week for a nickel apiece, which somehow irritated me more. Needless to say, when I discovered Royce Ring had a weird Topps card, I went online and bought the first one I could find, no questions asked. Because sometimes when questions get asked, you don't like the answers.

(By the way, it's some small comfort to find out Rich Sauveur himself might understand.)

Glavine's been mostly terrible for us. Pedro's been mostly wonderful for us. Benson's been hurt. Ishii's been hurt. Zambrano's a mystery. Trachsel has a disc.

And none of them came up through the system.

Weren't we renowned for our pitching at one point? At several points? Weren't we Seaver, Koosman, Ryan, McAndrew, McGraw, Gentry, Matlack, Swan and later on Gooden, Darling, Fernandez, Aguilera, Cone, Orosco, McDowell, Myers?

Ancient, ancient history, but also what put us over the top and into post-season the first four times we were there. Playing in a pitcher's park, pitching is what allowed us to compete at a high level. That and defense. It sure wasn't hitting.

What all those pitchers had in common was they were produced by the Mets for the Mets, either originally signed by us, pulled out of a hat by us or traded for as pups by us. Those guys were our signature piece. We could even afford to squander Nolan Ryan and not feel it in the rotation for years to come.

We haven't come up with anybody like them in more than a decade. The last starting pitcher we manufactured to our long-term benefit was Bobby Jones and as a talent he wasn't quite in their class.

Which brings me to Jason Jacome.

Surely, you remember Jason Jacome. Jason Jacome was the Heath Bell of 1994. Everybody who thought they knew anything knew we had to get Jason Jacome up here from Norfolk right now. Jason Jacome was piling up wins in the International League. Jason Jacome (pronounced hock-a-mee) got a mention in every other Mets Farm Report on Mets Extra. That was the first year I discovered there were other Mets fans talking about the Mets in a virtual manner on AOL, and the guy who they were all talking about was Jason Jacome. It brought me back to when I was 12 and started reading minor league stats in The Sporting News and couldn't wait for a retread named Bill Laxton to come up from Tidewater and start racking up saves the way he was down there.

We got our wish in a roundabout way. Doc tested positive for coke again and was suspended. He was replaced with Jason Jacome. And Jason Jacome did not disappoint. He pitched well in his first start in San Diego and then threw a shutout against the Dodgers in Los Angeles. The downtrodden Mets now had two young, mostly unheralded stars in the making: Jacome the lefty pitcher and Brogna the lefty bat. Word was they were buddies. Perfect. And with Jacome and Jones backing up Saberhagen (having a stellar year), 1994 would be good for as long as it lasted.

Jacome finished with a 4-3 mark in eight starts and a 2.67 ERA before the strike hit. The important thing was we could pencil him in for 1995 and beyond. He and Jones and Isringhausen and Pulsipher, who were burning up the minors, and the kid we drafted No. 1 in the nation, Paul Wilson. In the interim we had Saberhagen and traded for Harnisch. They could take some starts until all our young pitchers were ready. In the meantime, we had Jones and Jacome, who didn't throw hard but got people out and got here first. They were Generation J.

1995 started late because of the strike. Dallas Green gave the ball to Jones instead of Saberhagen on Opening Night with some murky explanation that he was going on the basis of who was ready, not who had the reputation. That was in Colorado, the first-ever game in Coors Field, ten years ago this week. Nobody pitched well in Coors Field that night (or almost ever) and the Mets lost on Dante Bichette's walk-off, look-at-me 14th inning homer, the most irritating loss in an Opener prior to 2005. Jacome pitched the second game. The Mets lost that one, too, but his line wasn't so bad for Coors: five innings, two earned runs, left with a lead. The bullpen coughed it up and the Mets went home 0-2.

And that was essentially it for Jason Jacome as a Met. He started four more times. All of them were dreadful. He was 0-4 with a 10.29 ERA in five starts before being sent down on May 22 and traded to Kansas City on July 21 for reliever Derek Wallace (another toast of the Tides who didn't pan out at a higher level).

I've never been clear on how somebody who looked so solid went downhill so fast. I don't remember an injury per se being the culprit while he was here. What then? Success go to his head? To his waistline? Dallas' trademark patient ways get to him? Jacome's stints with the Royals and the Indians didn't yield much more than his 1995 with the Mets did. His career mark was 10-18, his lifetime ERA was 5.34. He last pitched in the Majors in 1998.

He was 27.

We're now approaching the tenth anniversary of the heyday of Generation K, which is to say the heady months of 1995 when we imagined the great things that we would never actually get from the combined forces of Izzy, Pulse and Paul. And since then, we haven't come close to getting even a Bobby Jones out of our system. It's been almost all Glavines and Leiters and Reeds and Hamptons and Rusches and Trachsels and Martinezes and Appiers and Chens and D'Amicos and Hershisers and Yoshiis and Bensons and Nomos and Clarks and Astacios and Bohanons and Esteses and Rogerses and so on. It's been almost all somebody else's retreads, castoffs or high-priced talent subbing for the missing young Mets' starting pitchers we simply haven't been able to send to the mound. Some have been sublime. More have been subpar. All have been, in one way or another, emergency starters brought on by a catastrophic inability to develop the kind of pitching that once made Flushing famous.

The jury enters its third year of deliberations regarding the eventual utility of Jae Seo and Aaron Heilman, though they say if a verdict hasn't been delivered by now, it's hard to believe a consistently favorable one will result. I don't doubt somebody's putting up good numbers in Norfolk and better ones in Binghamton. I can't bear to look. I can't get excited about Heath Bell or Royce Ring until they do something in the bigs and do it for a while. And I still can't soap up a rueful lather over Scott Kazmir, as bad as Zambrano looks, and he looks pretty damn bad.

Jason Jacome looked so good so young so soon. What the hell happened?