I, as a Faith and Fear in Flushing blogger in good standing, hereby pledge to:

1) not suffer two-game losing streaks in greater proportions than I enjoy four-game winning streaks as joy should be twice as good as sorrow is bad, not the other way around.

2) not blame time zones for our problems no matter the havoc it wreaks on my biorhythms because doing so will only encourage my team to take the same tack.

3) not underrate an opponent, even in my head let alone on our blog, given that an opponent can stop being offensively tepid at just the wrong moment.

4) not overreact to any trade rumor floated between now and 4 PM Sunday -- and take a deep breath after learning whatever actually happens or doesn't happen in that realm.

5) prepare reasonably acceptable alibis for breaking any and all of these pledges when emotion gets the best of me for I am not only human, I am a Mets fan.

Overheard on the red-eye from Colorado to Texas:

Are you there God? It's me, Victor. Thank you for the runs. Please don't let them trade me to Texas.

Wednesday with Extra Innings was a 15-game treat. Thanks to ESPN's national cablecast rights and the vagaries of the schedule, every pitch in the bigs was available. Dipped in and out of MLB all day and night. Was particularly taken with the ghosts who haunted my screen.

• There were Jay Payton and Marco Scutaro, not good enough to be Mets, plenty good enough to be streaking A's.

• There was Joe McEwing striking out in a critical situation for the Royals who won anyway.

• There was John Olerud being the first Red Sock to slap post-save hands with Curt Schilling, still jarring to see considering their roles on opposing sides of a wonderful walkoff six years ago.

• There was Al Leiter hanging on and Hideo Nomo fluttering across the Bottom Line as the next candidate to join him at the Last Ditch Pitching Café.

• There was David Weathers closing out the Dodgers after Jason Phillips failed to throw out Ryan Freel stealing five different times, a new Red record.

• And in the game of the night, the briefest of Met apparitions -- Gary Matthews, Jr. and James Baldwin (!) -- led Texas in the outlasting of Baltimore, 11-8, in eleven innings. Melvin Mora struck out on three ugly swings to defuse a rally that could have won in it for the home-O's in the ninth, but the ghosts who really scared up my attention were Javy Lopez and Sammy Sosa. Lopez was a villain of the first order in Atlanta. Now he's an A.L. East helper. I cheered his game-tying tater. As for Sosa, a periodic Mets-haunter during his Chicago epoch, he tried to score the winning run in the tenth on a single to center but was nailed rather easily at the plate by Matthews' bullet to Rod Barajas. Sosa came at the Rangers' catcher's chest protector spike-high. You hear that expression but you rarely see it. It was a little gruesome. Sammy looked more shaken than Barajas as in "what have I done?" Benches emptied and Barajas left the game. It felt like justice when Matthews hit the three-run blast to ultimately win it and Baldwin (!) came on to save it. What this may mean, if anything, to Texas in terms of its plans for Alfonso Soriano is unclear. But quite a game -- and quite an invention, this digital cable.

Awesome article in SI by former Blue Jay spring training invitee Tom Verducci on the the power of Pedro. What a pitcher. What a signing. Sleep tight in Houston city. Now we've got a different Pedro watchin' over us.

9-3 wasn't nearly enough. Not when it's the Rockies playing in our own personal dungeon. Thinking that my memory was just possibly faulty in grumbling that we had a 3-54 record all-time at Coors Field, I hopped on over to Retrosheet to figure out our real record. Which, by my calculations (meet my version of sabermetrics, a.k.a. "addition") is now 23-27, with '93 and '94 being played at Mile High. (Where my ace math skills suggest we were 4-8.) My calculations unfortunately including the error-inducing variable of myself, I flipped over to the Mets' press notes for tonight's game to double-check. The notes announced blandly that the Rockies lead the all-time series in Colorado by (drumroll) 93-31.

Something tells me that's not right either -- but emotionally it feels about right, doesn't it?

Why do I hate this park so much? Part of it is that it makes a mockery of the game, where fastballs can't be gripped properly, breaking stuff doesn't break, and balls have to be stored under conditions that remind you of one of those expensive, pointless experiments conducted on the space shuttle. Part of it is the stupid Mountain Time starts, which are late enough to annoy and confound and make you feel guilty for going to bed, but not late enough so you either psych yourself up for a week of baseball games that end at 1:30 a.m. or decide screw it, your fan credentials won't be stripped for missing one. Part of it is the all-too-obvious gap between how a visiting team needs to approach Arena Baseball and how we seem to approach it: getting less selective at the plate and positioning our outfielders too deep. (As Victor Zambrano became the 10,000th pitcher to discover in his one, um, rocky inning, it's not homers and doubles that imperil you here so much as the deadly tick-tock of singles landing in no-man's land.) And then there's the weirdness that always seems to accompany a trip to Colorado: It figures this would be the park where Danny Graves ("has not allowed a run in four of his last six appearances," the press notes offered with that Ac-centuate the Positive air of an aunt cajoling you into a doomed blind date) doesn't give up a run.

So however you quantify all this bad karma, good for Victor's run support and a bunch of nifty strikeout pitches, good for Eric Byrnes somehow not spearing Wright's liner, good for Marlon Anderson and good for Ramon Castro too, good for Willie for giving a shell-shocked Mike Cameron a much-needed day off. And good riddance to Coors Field. Which is good.

And while we're ac-centuating the positives in this glass-half-empty glass-half-full glass-half... who-the-hell-knows semi-pennant race, we might have missed the opportunity to make up ground in the last two days, but the division waited around for us anyway. Forget the Braves -- those unis march away from us no matter what collection of Richmonds and retreads put 'em on. Talking wild card, we just leapt over the Phillies again, we're tied with the Cubs, the Nationals are three games ahead but hurtling earthward, and between us and the Nats stand the Astros. Who now await us. Coors Field can make you feel like you've lost 93 games instead of 27 or two in a row, but we've survived and we're headed for Houston. Which has more than a whiff of Arena Baseball about it too (damn that stupid train), but at least it also has air.

In fact, by all indications Pedro is already there. Which means one less game he had to spend in the cursed environs of Coors Field. That's gotta be a good thing, right?