Derby Day is in the rearview mirror, the apartment remains standing, it didn't rain, the guests seemed reasonably entertained, and Steinbrenner's horse lost. (Though the bipeds he owns are looking a little better, darn it all). Which isn't to say that my blog silence reflected an information blackout: The Pedro 'N' Carlos Show was on as Derby Day wound down last night, with yours truly pausing for an update whenever hosting duties and drunken errands took me by the set. Weirdly, the first two times I stopped long enough to watch an actual bit of the game, Beltran promptly hit home runs. (Later, Emily hollered at me to get my ass upstairs because Carlos was back at the plate. I was late and she was PO'ed at me because he settled for a bunt single.) My weird timing had the effect of minimizing awareness of how perilous Saturday's game actually was -- heck, everything I saw seemed to be going just fine.

Today, of course, I got to watch the whole thing. And it was my 36th birthday. So what did Tom Glavine give me for a present? An ordinary performance, shot through with bad luck. Thanks, Tommy! Sad that this was actually a step up for the Manchurian Brave. As I watched bloopers fall in and bleeders trickle through, I worked myself into a mildly hungover fury (in other words, muttery pique) imagining just how Glavine would subtly distance himself from the whole thing. As indeed he did: "I don't know that I have given up that many bloopers and broken bats and whatever else in one game in my career, but that's kind of the way things go when things aren't going your way personally." Sounds reasonable and properly philosophical, but still has a faint bad smell, a whiff of excuse-making and an instinctual attempt to suggest that Tom Glavine isn't really an actor in this whole drama, but some poor bystander caught up in the chaos when things got messy.

In other words, it's the kind of thing he always seems to say.

"He's a solid hitter, but I don't think you expect him to hit two homers and have all the RBI he has. He's not a guy you look at and equate a lot of power with." (That was his first start -- he's talking about Joe Randa. Subtext: Joe Randa got lucky. Woe is me.)

"Well, there's a couple plays that were tough plays to make. That's the way it goes. It's not like those plays today were easy plays, but they're the kind of plays, obviously, if you make them, they're spectacular plays and they go a long way towards me being more comfortable and more confident out there, and maybe the outcome of the game is different." (That was after A.J. Burnett and the Marlins mauled us, and it's probably the ultimate Glavine quote: Sounds diplomatic, but shot through with alibis at every turn. Subtext: If Matsui wasn't such a frickin' butcher, I would have been great and we would have won. Woe is me.)

I'm sure I could find more, but I'm too tired to get more pissed about it. Anyway, it's a representative sample: bloodless, aloof, subtly uninvolved. Yep, that's our boy. Sorry we're the spots of tarnish on your Cooperstown plaque, Glav.

As for the non-Glavine portion of the game, poor Chris Woodward had a hell of a day. With his shortstop instincts firing from the wrong side of the diamond, he was like a guy trying to play while looking in a mirror. Victor Diaz looked a bit baffled at being on the opposite side of the outfield as well, and David Wright seemed slow-legged on those fatal plays to his left in the ninth.

Oh, and Spivey sure looked out to me. I'd carp about that more, but you know what? They had 17 hits. Seventeen! When the other guys score 17 hits, seeing a backup infielder on the mound isn't out of the question. And anytime you walk off the field after giving up 17 hits, you don't get to bitch that you got jobbed.

Roberto Hernandez was practically in tears after saving Saturday night's win over the Brewers. That's not a snide read on his emotions. He told Ed Coleman that he thought he was going to cry since it was his first save in three years. His reputation, you see, was built on collecting saves. He's had as many as 43 in one year and entered 2005 with 320.

I wanted to be happy for him. But I wound up thinking, save it, Roberto. That goes for all of you closers, used-to-be closers and would-be closers.

The world has sure come a long way from the days of Ball Four when reliever Jim Bouton worried that there wasn't a stat that adequately reflected how well bullpen guys were doing their jobs. Of course that was back then a player needed all the ammunition he could get to negotiate a bump from $10,500 to $12,500. It was also the year the save became an officially recognized statistic.

Look what the save has wrought. Relief pitchers trip over each other for the opportunity to close out games. It's great to see competitors show the fire to be firemen. Of course you should want the ball with the game on the line. But it's not as simple as "I wanna help the team."

No, it's about money. At a time when $12,500 is earned for a few pitches (or a few warmup tosses), every reliever wants in on the saves because the saves are where the big payday is. Closers make more than set-up men. Set-up men make more than middle relievers. Middle relievers make more than long men. If you're going to be a long man, you may as well be a starter -- where the real money is.

And if it's not money, it's pride. Marsellus Wallace told Butch Coolidge in Pulp Fiction, "Pride only hurts. It never helps." That may be an exaggeration (Marsellus wanted Butch to throw his next fight, after all), but pride of saves has rattled many a capable reliever's mind and skewed the corps' priorities well out of whack.

Roberto Hernandez Saturday night is only the latest example. There was Roberto Hernandez Friday night, when he stomped off the mound angry to be taken out for Koo in a lefty-lefty situation in the ninth. I might have left Roberto in, but his ire didn't really stem from "dang, I left the team down," but rather "there goes my save opportunity."

So what? Who cares? Saves are -- and this isn't an original thought -- one of the least definitive stats in the game. Look at Braden Looper's save against Philly this past Wednesday. He entered the ninth with a 3-0 lead and departed with a 3-2 win. That's saving something? That's a demerit in any other inning.

It's easy to blame Tony LaRussa and his patented Eckersleyism for skewing the equation. That was the manifestation of role-definition for relievers. He set it up in Oakland so Dennis Eckersley would enter at the start of the ninth, not before. You weren't going to see Gene Nelson or Rick Honeycutt. You were going to see Eck, period. As long as it worked for the A's, you couldn't argue with it. But it didn't work for everybody and it doesn't work now.

John Franco, a forerunner of Hernandez in the arithmetic of accumulation, was even more stricken with saves fever. One of the reasons it took me almost ten years to warm to John Franco was the way he expressed annoyance in his first September as a Met when Buddy Harrelson called on him to help the Mets out of a jam before the ninth. He acted startled and offended that as one of the premier closers in the game he would be asked to pitch in anything that wasn't the ninth inning. "You'll have to ask Buddy what he's thinking," is the huffy quote I remember.

We weren't but four years removed from Orosco and McDowell trading save opportunities to the betterment of the 1986 Mets. And it didn't seem light years since Yogi Berra would bring Tug McGraw into a game in the seventh to start finishing it. But I guess it had been a long time. It was all about the saves by 1990. (Roberto Hernandez came up to the Majors in 1991, his whole career playing out in The Saves Above All Era.)

Franco made a huge deal about it anytime it appeared somebody else might get to close. His "pride" had been hurt when Armando Benitez was given the closer's role in 1999. And Armando went from being a wonderful eighth-inning pitcher to a complicated ninth-inning one. It was just an inning's difference but, like pride, it only hurt.

When Benitez was traded in the middle of 2003, it was wondered who's gonna save games now? Aside from the obvious answer of nobody (your team has to win games for there to be a save), it turned out not to matter. Franco, Stanton and Weathers each got a few and the republic continued otherwise undisturbed. The following winter, the Mets signed Looper and he became the designated statman. He did well in 2004, a little shakier of late.

It's too late to turn back now. Closers get ninth innings. It's news when they see the eighth. It's a story when somebody else sees the ninth. It's a horror show when the whole thing doesn't work. Feelings are wounded and glances are exchanged and words get heavy. It's all a bit much. The ninth inning is crucial. But so are the eighth and the seventh.