Mets fans hate losing to Greg Maddux. All of us, right?

Wait a second...is that a smile I see in the crowd? Why, there's a traitor to the ranks. There she is! String 'er up!

Wait another second, it's Laurie. I'll vouch for her. She's one of us, just a little more skewed in her priorities. While most of your orange & blue bleeders were shaking their heads and fists Tuesday night, Laurie was thrilled.

Because Laurie loves Greg Maddux. Loves him as a pitcher. Not respects. Not admires. Not appreciates an all-time great but still wishes an anvil would fall on his head when he faces the Mets (my default position). She thinks Mike Maddux's brother is the bee's knees.

When it comes to the scope of his long and distinguished career, she's right. We don't have enough living legends floating by, and we should be able to applaud them when they cross our radar screen. Then we should, you know, kick their ass.

But Laurie doesn't think this way about Greg Maddux. She doesn't mind when he paints his corners on nights when the other team is ours. She thinks it's swell that Mad Dog's stuff still has its bite. Needless to say, we've parted company on this matter a number of times over the years. But we remain friends somehow.

She's not a Cubs fan. Far from it. We still celebrate Brant Brown Humiliation Day every September 23. She used to be a Mets/Braves fan until that got sticky and she peeled away all the Atlantaness from her being. She's down to only one Brave now and that Brave happens to pitch for Chicago and happened to have pitched yet another gem against us.

Like you, I'm in no mood to relive this debacle. So I'll let somebody who found some value in all of this explain herself. (And no, I didn't lose a bet or my mind.)

Laurie, it's all yours tonight:

Greg Maddux is so far past the point of idolization now that you don't even want to know how far. Now it's like watching Michael Jordan at the end of his career...every time I watch him I try to sear every pitch into my brain because I know it won't be long before it's all just a memory. He just thrills me. I know he shouldn't because he was a Brave and now he's a (UGH) Cub...I know it's disloyal, and I know you get mad at me for it, but I can't help it. He's the classiest, most incredible pitcher ever. I get physically ill when he gets hit. Actually nauseous.

His first start this year (this is what I never told you), he got bombed...the Mets had been slaughtered the day before and I was fine. But then he gives up five runs (that's when I turned it off) and I'm a shaking, sobbing, nauseous mess. I sobbed for a good half-hour. It was unbearable to watch. Actually physically unbearable.

I think it's because I know I'm on the verge of losing him soon and I can't handle it. I think about it and I get ill. I really idolize this guy as a pitcher. He's just the best. Keep your stupid Clemens, that self-aggrandizing bully...he actually referred to HIMSELF as a future Hall of Famer last week!!! I can't IMAGINE Greg Maddux doing that, just like I couldn't imagine him demanding attention and accolades for his 300th win. Even though HE IS GOD.

Now, I doubt you'll want to print any of that... but it felt good to get it out.

Well, that stank.

On Day Two of the Return of MSG/FSNY, I bailed out early, tired of watching Kris Benson's neck snap back and Greg Maddux go through the lineup like a combine. Not that things were much less painful on the radio. Fortunately, there's a day game tomorrow. Hopefully we can flush the memory of this one away by 5:30 or so. (Hopefully it won't rain.)

Ed Coleman just had Bam Bam Burnitz on Mets Whatever. I had forgotten his unmistakable voice. My Lord. He sounds like a guy who read for Floyd in "True Romance" but lost out to Brad Pitt's much more nuanced, subtle performance. Somebody get Jeromy some beer and cleaning products -- I'm not sticking around to hear the highlights of this one.

I'm glad that the regularly televised baseball I ordered up for your birthday finally arrived (just in case my reminiscences about myself weren't enough for you). For you and all the FSNY/MSG-deprived out there, ya got your money's worth Monday night. Those of us in safe-til-'06 Cablevision territory got antsy and kept changing channels, missing many of the best bits and pieces. It was a schlep, but we made it through the rain with a win. We'll pry our eyelids open for one of those anytime.

The odyssey of Jeromy Burnitz has been an unfortunate one. He never should've been traded following 1994. That was all Dallas Green who could come down with the strangest case of assburrs over the most random players. Burnitz wasn't random when he was young. He was a No. 1 draft pick with power and an arm who didn't deserve to be given up on. All those years that we screwed around without a regular rightfielder (which has been basically ever since Burnitz was traded following 1994) might have been prevented.

Might have. Like Kent, the trade of Jeromy didn't look all that insane immediately after the fact given that his production wasn't all that with Cleveland. Plus we did get three interesting pitchers in Byrd, DiPoto and Mlicki. Interesting became depressing after a fashion and Burnitz became a genuine slugger.

I was hot for him to come back in 2002 and we remember how that worked out. Despite his decent stretch of play in '03, enough to pump up his exchange rate (Hello Victor!), his return to Shea was a sad one. Watching him in Wrigley, I decided Jeromy Burnitz's best years in blue and orange were the ones I imagined. And now I feel nothing for him except resentment over his nice catch.

Cub.

It's good to be three above .500 for the second time this season. It will be better to be four above .500, then five, then at a level where .500 is a given. Once we get to four above, just like that we'll be at our highest watermark since 2002. If/when we get to eight above, we will be in our best place since 2000; in '02, we peaked at 18-11. That's pretty damning of the last four seasons. Even as Art Howe's Mets battled for first last July, they never rose above 43-40. In 2001, amid that crazy, inspiring and ultimately doomed August-September rush, 79-74 was the best that could be achieved.

So let's get it up, right to the top. Let's get it way above .500 anyway. One game at a time of course.

Nah, let's play a dozen or so at a time. When will I learn that an all-sports radio station isn't generally a good thing? Today's afternoon show on the Mets' flagship featured a contrived controversy from Nimrod and Know-Nothing over whether Willie would be holding out Pedro from the Yankee series, more than a week away, because he feared an old-fashioned pinstripe smackdown would ruin everything he's accomplished thus far. It was insisted that Pedro was brought in for moments like these.

Ed Coleman, who unfortunately is too even-tempered to tell the hosts to shut the fuck up for once in your lives you overrated, self-important morons, countered that while nothing was official yet, it seemed unlikely that Randolph would want his ace to miss the Braves' and Marlins' series that follow. Those are, Eddie needed to explain as if to a small child, divisional matchups that, pound for pound, are really more important than the Yankee games.

Of course none of that made sense to Blowhard and the Blitherer who are only interested in the Mets when it suits their needs to trash them. Guaranteed that if the Mets were actively setting up their rotation to expressly get Martinez into the Yankee series, the spin from Dickhead and the Douchebag would be: C'MON! GROW UP! YOU CAN'T COMPETE WITH THE YANKEES ANYWAY! STOP BEING OBSESSED WITH THEM! YOU CAN'T USE UP PEDRO IN A GLORIFIED EXHIBITION GAME WHEN YOU'VE GOT CRUCIAL DIVISION SHOWDOWNS COMING UP!

It's too bad that in fact Willie has since decided to give Pedro a bit of extra rest and that he will indeed start the Friday night game at Shea against the crosstown rivals. It's not bad that Martinez will face them. It's bad that Schmuck and Shit For Brains will take credit for it.

I swear I've seen tonight's game 100 times before: Early-season trip to Wrigley, horrid underwater conditions, a gale that you know will abruptly vanish at some undetermined point, pissed-off Cub fans out to crucify one of their own, umpires behaving strangely, testiness all around, cruddy field conditions that will play a role, at least one starter turning in a good performance that will become a footnote, random good plays from not-so-good players, sucky relievers lurking in both bullpens like land mines, and the only thing you know for sure is that you'll be very tired when it's finally over.

I'm just glad it didn't end with Sammy Sosa hitting one into the weird batter's-eye shrubs off John Franco. In fact, I was heartily glad not to see Sammy Sosa or John Franco at all, for opposite but nonetheless related reasons.

I think Heilman 2.0 can be moved out of beta and declared saleable -- that change-up is awfully good, and the fastball has enough sink and slither on it that he can miss and not automatically get killed, the way Heilman 1.0 constantly was. (Still, it didn't escape me that after all that hoo-ha about Don Drysdale, the secret to Heilman 2.0 seems to have been undoing all the damage done by Met minor-league instructors.) I think Mike Piazza is not done yet after all. (Ain't it great being wrong?) I doubt they keep stats on this, but Doug Mientkiewicz has a chance to save four figures' worth of total bases with those soft hands of his. Heath Bell is properly fearless. Dae-Sung Koo, on the other hand, has forfeited his right to be called "Mister Koo" until he demonstrates he can get people out when it really matters. In fact, I'm not going to acknowledge his first name at all until he improves. He's Koo from here out. I think the Cubs' groundskeepers need to read the DiamondDry manual again. (But last year Jose Reyes would have been carted off the field, so that's something.)

On the Cub side of the ledger, Jeromy Burnitz is still every inch the wacky player whose misadventures and very occasional triumphs diverted us in those two tours of duty. He's like Bam Bam in a baseball uniform: None of the parts ever seem to be in sync, and you're always vaguely afraid he'll brain himself with a bat or get so tangled up that his limbs fly off in opposite directions. Those two singles he hit were ridiculous -- triumphs of muscle and dumb luck over pitch selection. And that catch off Floyd? Six inches higher and it's in the basket. Six inches lower and it hits Burnitz in the throat, sending his head pinwheeling into the stands or injuring him in some other preposterous Burnitzian fashion. As it was, he got to run off the field with the ball like the world's happiest golden retriever.

I always liked Burnitz -- anybody ever seen him and Rocky Swoboda in the same room? -- and for a while there I was sure he was going to beat us, because that's the kind of Wrigley Field night it was. I felt bad that his return to the Mets was such an unmitigated disaster, that he would have done a lot better if he'd cared a lot less, and that he'd only just started to win the fans back when he shipped off to L.A. Still do. But all that said, I like him a lot more playing somewhere else.

By the way, now that the Great Cable War of '05 is over, does Keith Hernandez have the best job in sports or what? Dissect a few finer points of the game (he was clear and interesting as always), cop to boozing it in Chicago and playing hungover as hell, skedaddle long before "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." Nice work if you can get it.