That's whom I was thinking about when Shingo after came in and gave the Marlins a bingo. (By jingo!) Him and Billy Taylor. Dial-up being dial-up, I'm not going to investigate, but I'm sure Taylor and McElroy might have made decent first impressions before being packed off after a single partial season.

Yes, a nice win today, followed down here in Vacation Paradise (which it totally was today -- 80, just enough breeze to cool things off) via the WB and FAN, which was accessible with some mild gymnastics while walking about. Was particularly glad to see Clifford hit one to dead center (fuck the Marlins for every goddamn time one of their fielders has caught a drive from us in one of Soilmaster Stadium's 440' cul de sacs), Wright pour it on late and Seo show that whatever nuttiness is going on, he's not coming out of the rotation. And to see some tolerable production coming out of second base -- all is not lost, Kaz, just do what you're capable of and don't get hurt, y'hear?

It's funny about the Braves. I don't have the same dread that usually manifests itself when we arrive in Turner Field with a season in the balance, and you've absolutely nailed why: Because it's extremely hard to claim that we even deserve to be in the running for something at this point. If the Braves knock us into 2006, it will hurt, but it won't be the shock that '98 or the '99 postseason or '01 were. Those were a lot better teams than this one; an end to '05 would just be finally coming back to earth, even if it were Schuerholz's Slaughterers offering the coup de grace.

Which isn't to say I don't like this team. I do -- a lot, despite my grousing about Victor and Kaz and Kaz and Ice and Offerman and Looper and Koo and Graves. There's a difference between bad roster moves and bad guys, and of this year's Mets, Offerman and DeJean are the only ones who seem like they might be guys you wouldn't particularly want to root for. I like this team and I'll cheer madly for whatever wild-card hopes we have until math dictates otherwise (and we still might win -- plenty of time left), but this ain't a great team, and no amount of devotion can hide that. It's a .500 team trying to make the leap to the next level, but the mismatches and the growing pains and the roster mismanagement and the injuries and the bad luck strongly suggest that's not going to happen. That's OK in a year in which .500 and respectability would have been accomplishment enough -- mission most definitely accomplished even if nothing else happens. Do I want more than that? Of course. Will I be disappointed not to get more than that? Sure. Will I be surprised not to get more than that? Absolutely not.

The Redbirds were glowing with success as they lined up in the narrow runway between their locker room and the ball field. They were serene, confident and rich. They followed their drillmaster, Dr. Walter C. Eberhardt of St. Louis University, to the grass along the first base line. "Con-grat-u-lations on your last season," Eberhardt sang out in a deep voice between exercises. "But that was last season, men, and this is another year. Now, on your backs, stretch out, stretch out, now bend to the waist, sit-ups, three, four."
—The defending National League champion St. Louis Cardinals report to spring training, 1969, as recorded by Joe Durso in Amazing: The Miracle of the Mets.

Nice win Sunday. Now go get another one.

No kidding. Beating the Marlins after losing two to them is a fine thing. Picking up ground when the top three in the Wild Card race lost it is beautiful. But don't give it back. Not Monday.

The Mets are lucky. They're pretty good, but they're mostly lucky. They don't deserve to be under any kind of post-season consideration. After 136 games, can you tell me you've seen a team in Mets uniforms that you can picture playing beyond October 2? Unless the October opponent is the Diamondbacks, I don't think you can. I can't.

But they're here, so it's time to make the best of it, albeit in the worst possible place to try.

Atlanta. Turner Field. It's where Mets dreams have been dying for almost a decade. If it doesn't stop this week, we're gonna have to wear commemorative patches next season.

Like every sensible Mets fan, I've been dreading this trip. The relatively easy part is over and that didn't flow all that smooth. Now it's Atlanta, followed hard by St. Louis. At the moment when we can least afford to screw up, we are thrown against the league's two best teams, two teams whose tournament we want to wheedle our way into. The Redbirds are far and away the class of this circuit, but never mind them right now. It's the Braves who stare us in the face. It's the Braves who always stare us in the face. We're two losses out of a playoff spot but it's not hard to imagine us being five behind somebody by Wednesday night. No matter what happens when the other WC wannabes play each other, precedent suggests handling our own affairs will be a chore.

We have to win games in Atlanta. Plural. We shouldn't be in a position for it to matter. We've lost too many times in too numbskullish a fashion to be called contenders, but that's neither here nor there any longer. We are contenders. Our colleagues in four other cities have been thoughtful enough to be almost as mediocre as us, so let's take advantage of their largesse. Let's not do what we did against Philadelphia and Florida. Let's not lose games. Plural.

A New York Mets win should always be something to revel in, but the New York Mets have left us little in the way of that luxury. Nice win Sunday. Now go get another one.

While we must look forward, I can't let Saturday night pass without an attempt to put its stupefyingly defining moment into proper context.

Has anybody in the history of the New York Mets made a worse first impression than Shingo Takatsu? Given what was at stake, I'd have to say no. He is the Anti-Jacobs. To the extreme.

I've tried to think of a Met whose first Mets moment was as horrid and costly as Shingo's. I gravitated to pitchers. A position-player generally doesn't have that kind of negative impact at his fingertips. He might go 0-for-5 or make three errors but it's unlikely that he and he alone will kill the team. Pitchers are different. They've got the whole game in their hands.

Here are some Takatsuan performances that come to mind. Please send the children to their rooms. This isn't pretty.

• Tom Glavine: Before we loved him to death, The Manchurian Brave opened the 2003 season in Arctic conditions at Shea and did nothing to warm anybody's heart. His line on March 31: 8 hits, 4 walks, 5 earned runs 3-2/3 innings. His ERA was 12.27. The Mets lost 15-2. Things remained chilly for the pitcher and the team for a loooong time.

• John Thomson: He was Wild Card insurance or at least a theoretical boost to the rotation down the 2002 stretch. Thomson had the misfortune to make his Mets debut some 40 minutes after the season's most devastating loss, the August 3 first-game choke by Armando Benitez against Craig Counsell and the Diamondbacks at Shea. With the joint having all but cleared out for the nightcap, Thomson took to the hill and surrendered 7 hits and 3 walks for 7 runs (only 3 earned, but nobody was in the mood for technicalities) over 6 innings. The Mets lost and would lose without winning at home for the rest of the month. Thomson is the starting pitcher for the Braves tomorrow.

• Brett Hinchliffe: He turned an emergency start into a catastrophic one. Two innings on April 26, 2001 in Milwaukee yielded 9 hits and 8 earned runs. He left the game, the team and the bigs with a lifetime Met ERA of 36.00 and no parting gifts.

• Mike Hampton: Don't know if it was the schools, but something about Japan didn't agree with our newly anointed ace. Mike Hampton had the honor of throwing the first pitch in the first Major League game outside this continent on March 29, 2000, and he went with that theme. He threw many pitches outside. Hampton, traded to the Mets after a 22-4 season in Houston, walked 9 in 5 innings, allowing the Cubs 2 runs. Just two? He lured Chicago into four ground-ball double plays before leaving (the Mets lost 5-3). It took several starts for Hampton to settle in as a Met...and one year for him to decide he didn't want to.

• The Rutles: They were the Dirk, Barry, Stig and Nasty of the Mets bullpen. Our very own Prefab Four: Yorkis Perez, Toby Borland, Barry Manuel and Ricardo Jordan composed a group debut on April 1, 1997, coming on in "relief" in San Diego once Pete Harnisch began to lose it in the sixth. What Harnisch started, the lads finished, combining to surrender -- and it really was a laying down of arms -- 6 hits, 6 walks and 9 earned runs in a 12-5 loss. The Mets got better as 1997 progressed. These blokes had absolutely nothing to do with it.

• Alejandro Peña: The once-reliable Dodger set-up man made his Met debut at Shea on April 9, 1990, Opening Day. He faced Jay Bell. Bell doubled. He faced Andy Van Slyke. Van Slyke doubled. He faced Bobby Bonilla. Bonilla singled. He faced Barry Bonds. Bonds singled. He was removed. That he was ever invited back was astounding.

• John Candelaria: On September 11, 1987, Ron Darling went out for the year with torn ligaments in his thumb. At the tail end of a year when the adage that you can never have enough pitching resonated all too forcefully, the defending world champion Mets fished around for another hurler. On September 15, they dealt two minor leaguers to California for veteran lefty John Candelaria. On September 18, desperately groping at the first-place Cardinals, they started John in his prior place of business, Three Rivers Stadium. The Candy Man immediately went sour, facing 12 Pirates who pillaged him for a leadoff homer (John Cangelosi), a double, two triples...8 hits in all, leading to 5 earned runs in an inning-and-a-third. Candelaria's Met ERA teetered at 33.75. To be fair, there wasn't much good pitching in what turned out to be a 10-9 final in Pittsburgh's favor (hmmm...familiar score and pattern). John made two more starts for the Mets and won both. The Mets finished three behind St. Louis.

• Mac Scarce: The ostensible replacement for Tug McGraw made his first appearance as a Met in Pittsburgh on April 11, 1975. He came on to face Richie Hebner with the score knotted at three and runners on first and second. Hebner singled. The Pirates won. Scarce, swapped four days hence to Cincinnati for Tom "The Blade" Hall, never made another appearance as a Met. His first, last and only impression was one batter, one game-losing hit.

• Roger Craig: The first pitcher to pitch for the New York Mets, in St. Louis on April 11, 1962, was responsible for setting a rather atonal tone for the club's inaugural campaign. In the first inning of his team's existence, Roger Craig gave up 3 hits and a balk, resulting in 2 runs. After tossing a spotless second, Craig was touched up for four singles, a double and a stolen base, yielding 3 more Redbird runs in the third. Craig left after three frames with the lowest ERA in Mets history, 15.00. Of course it was the only ERA in team history.

There. Nine debuts to remember because to forget them would be to repeat them...though I guess we just did Saturday. In the words of Leonard Pinth-Garnell, stunningly bad. Exquisitely awful. Couldn't be worse! Yet no matter how many productions of Bad First Impressions I've looked at, none ranks quite so low as Shingo Takatsu's.

Most of the above came in April, the calendar early enough and the circumstances innocuous enough so as not to be fatal. The ones that didn't, those by Thomson and Candelaria, were at least wrought by experienced arms in situations where the managers in question could feel reasonably confident that terrible things wouldn't happen.

Shingo Takatsu was a reclamation-project callup coming in to take on budding superstar Miguel Cabrera with the bases loaded at a perilous juncture in a critical September showdown against a Wild Card rival when there was no track record to indicate that this might be a good idea.

This was worse than Candelaria.
This was worse than Hinchliffe.
This was even worse than the Rutles.

This was, to channel Mr. Pinth-Garnell once more, monumentally ill-advised.

And yet we get to play more meaningful games. Isn't baseball something?

You and your Unholy Books. Ever since I bore witness to them almost five years ago, I have rooted for them and for their contents to flourish. I keep up on who's a new Met first and foremost in order to confirm with you the status of the next entry within those heretofore sacred volumes.

Therefore, in the bottom of the seventh when Willie pulled Padilla (Met No. 766) and replaced him with Shingo Takatsu, I wasn't thinking "What The FUCK?" or "WILLIE! THIS GUY NOW?" or "here comes an American League reject who hasn't pitched since I don't know when to make his debut against one of the best hitters there is in the absolute most crucial situation in the absolute most important game of the year."

I thought, "Oh good, No. 770. I wonder which card of Shingo Takatsu's Jace has."

I'm apparently not enough of a Toppsmudic scholar to have correctly interpreted the purpose of The Unholy Books. I realize now they exist to record and reflect reality, not create it. Nobody's successfully created a Met out of thin air since George Weiss did so with Hobie Landrith.

Anyway, it didn't look any different or better at home than it did in your vacation paradise. YNH Stadium continues to disturb with its assortment of patio furniture in the bullpens and its men's room tiles scattered about various side walls and its 40,000 empty orange seats sweating and its yard markers calling attention to a pockmarked infield and its superstrength light bulbs borrowed from the climactic scene of White Nights shining in the eyes of converted second basemen who are hopelessly lost and generally befuddled in right field to begin with.

That said, it would've looked just fine if Victor Diaz could've held onto a fly ball, if Larry Poncino could've made a one-way-or-the-other call on the pitch that got away from Lo Duca while Castro dashed into contemplation mode and if I had never, ever found cause to be more than dimly aware of the man who would become the 770th player to enter a Major League game in a New York Mets uniform -- somebody holding the fate of our hard-fought season in his funkyjunky right hand, somebody named Shingo Takatsu.

Having my consciousness raised where the massive talent of Miguel Cabrera is concerned is another phenomenon I could've put off for the foreseeable future.

To be fair, our newest pitcher stayed in and retired the next four batters, which perhaps provides the answer to the one question we all had to be asking in our heads: "Aside from that, Mrs. Takatsu, how did you enjoy the game?"

Shingo's statistically successful Mets debut (ERA: 0.00) combined with the Astros' loss -- about time that Clemens voodoo doll kicked in -- and the Nats' comeback win over the Phillies keeps us within dreaming distance. As I watched Washington triumph (bang zoom, indeed), I couldn't exactly decide if it was good or bad for us. Good in eyes-on-the-prize terms, but we're last in the N.L. East again. What the hey -- I didn't like being mired amid all those teams anyway. If this Wild Card chase has reinforced anything, it's how much I absolutely despise the Marlins, the Phillies and the Shingo Takatsu of divisional opponents, the Nationals (I'd never heard of them either at this time last year). If this is our competition, I just as soon not belong to any pennant race that would have us as a member.

On the other hand, I still like and admire The Holy Books. I just wish they were entering Sunday a 769-card affair.

Now, an unfair comparison I've resisted making...until now:

FOSTER VS. BELTRAN
FIRST YEAR AS A MET
THROUGH 135 GAMES
FOSTER 1982: 13 HR 63 RBI .252 AVG
BELTRAN 2005: 14 HR 62 RBI .265 AVG