Jose, we love you. Rest assured of that. Now, please keep working on working counts. Um, especially when the pitcher's walked three guys in the inning and the opposing manager doesn't have a reliever warm. Please, Jose?

But OK, yesterday's gone. In the New York Post, Kevin Kernan has a nice piece about Tim Hamulack, the Norfolk reliever we summoned to Phoenix but not, apparently, to the BOB, let alone the roster.

Stories like these are a bit of an obsession with me on two levels. Hamulack didn't quite achieve almost-Met status -- guys who put on the uniform, made the roster and never got to play. We've got four of those: Jerry Moses in '75, Terrell Hansen in '93, Mac Suzuki in '99 and Justin Speier in '01. (We've rattled on about this before.) Joe Hietpas would be stuck on that list if not for the fact that he got to catch the final inning of 2004, the only good move Art Howe ever made. It looked like Mike Jacobs would be an almost-Met, but we know the rest of that story.

Of those guys, Hansen is the one I've never been able to stop thinking about: He got sent back down, knocked around the minors for another decade or so, but never got the call-up. Got a number (21), a baseball card, clubhouse time, a chance to loathe Jeff Torborg, but never a line in the Baseball Encyclopedia. I'm sure it bothered him that he never got a chance to play in '93, but he was young and had to figure his day would come. It never did. Hell, compared with Terrell Hansen, Moonlight Graham looks like a lucky guy.

Hamulack's a 6' 4" lefty who can throw 95 and has held opponents to a .175 average. He's nearly 29 and has been in the minors for 10 years, without a single day in The Show. Sounds like a guy we could use in September. Sounds like a guy to root for.

Ehh. Sometimes you get beat by a good pitcher. Believe me when I say that the following...

BOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

...is intended to help finish the road trip on a good note, not a recrimination for Saturday's 2-1 loss. You didn't expect the Mets winning streak to reach infinity, did you?

Did you?

Good news is Philly lost, so it's still 1-1/2 between us and them. Marginal news is they now have Michael Fucker (you're right, it's always misspelled). I don't know if that's an impact trade, but Ramon should wear an extra pointy chest protector just in case.

A tip of the cap to our boys for shaking off a bit of that West-of-the-Mississippi Mud before coming home. The Dirty Thirty, even after succumbing to Jason Schmidt (and Armando Bleepnitez), is now a nearly respectable 10-15. The Mets are 9-9 in this geographic situation since I suggested they approach their remaining Denver, Houston, San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco dates the way Indians manager Lou Brown might have during Cleveland's miracle run to the A.L. East title in the late '80s (they made a film about it, you know). If the Amazins win this last Giant game, they'll be 11-15 Out Yonder with four games in St. Louis remaining.

It is still my belief that we need to enter that Cardinal series having garnered more than 10 wins west of the Mighty Mississip'. Busch Stadium is only a heartbreaking Jim Edmonds walkoff drive from said body of water, but to me it's part of what has been an expansive geographical and traditional trap for virtually every Met team, this one included (this week excepted). All the cities mentioned above, along with Oakland and Seattle in '05, always seem to kill us. This year all but Phoenix have, and I take nothing for granted in St. Louis. So grabbing the getaway game Sunday afternoon will ensure no worse than an 11-19 record in the Dirty Thirty no matter what happens in Missouri, which to my way of thinking is a lot less bad than looking back at the end of the season and saying "if only we hadn't gone 10 and 20 in those 30 games..."

Of course if we lose four in St. Louis in September, we're pretty well screwed. And I haven't forgotten about the other teams and towns and so forth, all of them deadly crucial at this stage. As Bobby V used to say (and probably still does, albeit in Japanese), this is the most important game of the season because it's the one we play today.

Today marks 150 consecutive days of posting at Faith and Fear in Flushing. We like to think of ourselves as The Rembrandts of this particular art form: We'll be there for you.