I don't care how much they're paying us or how much icier the easily imagined alternatives are. Citi Field will be born from original sin. Spell it with a space, pronounce it with a pause, cite all the precedent you can and rationalize all the benefits you like. The fact is we'll be playing in a ballpark bearing the mark of corporate sellout. It's a sin to the sensibilities of every true blue and orange baseball fan.

To every Metsopotamian who says, "I don't care what it's called, just give me a winner," you've got to be kidding. You will care. That's your new home. To every Metsopotamian who says, "I'll just keep calling it Shea," you've got to be kidding. There's only one Shea Stadium. To pretend you can transfer identities between two very different buildings the way you transfer a payment from your money market to your Visa is delusional. Shea is Shea. Citi will be Citi. Let's not confuse them.

As these are done deals all around, our next task is not to throw ourselves in front of the bulldozers or preach against the sin of corporate namesmanship, but rather to offer the unborn park near-immediate absolution.

No Sheadenfreude here, old-guarders. We need this Citi thing to work for us.

Right now, as planned, Citi Field is essentially a nice pile of bricks. It's got to have more than bricks. It's got to have a soul. Twenty million bucks does not buy you a soul. But there is, I believe, a soul-ution.

Homecoming Weekend 2009.

You can't have a future without a past...your own past. So let's link what's come before with what will come later. Citi Field does not get a clean slate or a blank check. It has to reflect where the Mets came from, spiritually and geographically. That's why we have Homecoming Weekend in 2009.

This is a high school and college conceit, one I picked off from my new favorite prime time drama, Friday Night Lights. It is when your alumni come home and your heroes reappear and your tradition springs to life. It's more than an Old Timers Day. It's a vital nod to who you've been and who you are and who you hope to be.

Citi Field requires an injection of soul right off the bat. Any new park would, but one whose only clear references are to somebody else's favorite childhood team and a financial conglomerate really needs the help.

Wider concourses, increased leg room, pretzels baked the same day they're sold...that's all great, but going to a Mets game is more than that. It's looking around and knowing somethin' Amazin' happened right over there. It's saying I was here when that happened. It's passing it on and paying it forward.

Performance is, as ever, an unknown variable (though a no-hitter on Opening Day would be nice). Hence, it will be a long time before there's much beyond the novelty of the new to associate with Citi Field. Until there is, we've got to imbue it with as much Mets, the Mets we've known, as we can. And it's up to the Mets to make the first, second and third moves. Management must thread the present of 2009 and whatever future it holds to the glorious, yes I said glorious, past from next door. I don't mean flooding the bathrooms and creating wind tunnels. I mean you make damn sure that when you pack up all the history in 2008 that you don't just leave it in crates and forget about it.

The Mets do that too much already.

Some of us who haven't kissed the Citi stone with gusto (reportedly some have) owe our reticence not to Citi sponsorship or Shea nostalgia or retro recycling. Many Mets fans simply find themselves overDodgered by what they've seen to date. You won't find a single human being of any value who doesn't revere Jackie Robinson. I doubt too many people have a problem with him getting the rotunda. I sure don't. And if you're going to crib a classic design, you could do worse than Ebbets. But by the time this baby is delivered, the New York Mets will have put up a pretty impressive history of their own. 2009 will be the 48th season of Metropolitan operation. The Brooklyn Dodgers' 48th season was 1937. Do you think those Dodgers felt the need to genuflect daily and broadly before their 19th-century American Association ancestors by then?

While a nod to the Dodgers (and Giants...hello?) is not out of line, Citi Field needs to be Met territory. It needs to be Met territory as soon as it can be. That's where Homecoming Weekend 2009 — a three-day series of celebrations commemorating a trio of conveniently occurring Met milestones — sets things right. Some of what needs to be done will be due. Some of it is already overdue. All of it will be utterly Amazin', which is not a bad thing to be if you're planning on being home to the Amazin', Amazin', Amazin' Mets.

Homecoming Weekend 2009.

Clear eyes.
Full hearts.
Can't lose.

Friday Night Lights. In his rookie season, Dwight Gooden lit up Shea Stadium like nobody before or since. If there was one night that was truly his, it was Friday: Five home starts, five earned runs in 41 innings with 51 strikeouts. Dr. K operated at his best at the end of the week, so it's appropriate to kick off Homecoming Weekend with the return home of Dwight Gooden, three years clean and sober, on the 25th anniversary of his debut year to induct the franchise's second-greatest pitcher ever into the William A. Shea New York Mets Hall of Fame and National League Museum — known as Shea for short — an institution that will celebrate the rich heritage of the Mets, the Giants, the Dodgers, the Cubans, the Bushwicks, the Bridegrooms and almost every team that made a mark on Big Apple baseball (almost). "Shea" enjoys its grand opening tonight. It will be open year-round and be easy to find since the mayor has signed a bill that redubs 126th Street between Roosevelt Avenue and Northern Boulevard Bill Shea Way. Doc, after acknowledging the tough road back and thanking the fans for sticking by him after all this time, cuts the ceremonial ribbon with a scalpel. A strikeout tally board is installed in left field and officially dubbed the Doctor K Korner. Joining Doc in the Mets' first induction class since Tommie Agee in 2002 will be his first manager, Davey Johnson, marking his own quarter-century anniversary. He thanks Doc for making his first big managerial decision in 1984 — whether to add "the best pitcher I ever saw" to his rotation despite his tender age — an easy one. Following 1997 inductee Keith Hernandez's presentation of plaques to Doc and Davey, Omar Minaya assures all that the Shea Hall of Fame Induction will be an annual Citi Field tradition. "The Mets have a great history," he says, "and we're going to make sure we show it off even as we continue to make new history."

Saturday In The Park. Was there ever a more exciting moment that didn't involve playing than when a certain No. 31 emerged from the home dugout at Shea Stadium on a Saturday afternoon in May 1998? Mike Piazza's debut was so exciting that Mets fans voted it the eighth-greatest moment in team history. It will be an exciting Saturday when Mike Piazza emerges from the home dugout at Citi Field to see No. 31 become the first number since Jackie Robinson's 42 in 1997 — and the first Met number since Tom Seaver's 41 in 1988 — officially retired by the club. The occasion meshes nicely with the 10th anniversary of the most exciting season of Piazza's tenure, 1999, so it's also a good chance to reunite that particular Wild Card edition of Mike's Mets. By now, just about everybody from '99 is also retired, so just about everybody can make it back. And they do. Rickey Henderson takes his time emerging. Al Leiter waves a little longer than everybody else. Bobby V flies in from Japan and dons the mustache and glasses. The greatest defensive infield ever trots out to their positions together, though Todd Pratt tackles Robin Ventura before he can get anywhere near third. Mike himself thanks John Franco for "loaning" him 31 and "borrowing" 45 and returns the favor by calling the crowd's attention to the newly dubbed McGraw-Franco Mets Bullpen in right. It's not far from the spot on the right field wall where five numbers are posted now and forever. (Dozens of fans scattered throughout Citi sport updated Faith and Fear t-shirts while dozens of others opt for their worn 2006 models.)

Beautiful Sunday. The Met everybody flocked to Shea to see on any day he pitched will now be the Met everybody sees when they flock to Citi every day of the week. As part of the 40th anniversary celebration of the 1969 world championship, the CitiVision board takes us live to Stengel-Hodges Plaza, directly outside the Jackie Robinson Rotunda, where a parade of celebrants — Koosman, Grote, Kranepool, Jones — pulls the tarp from the first statue ever commissioned by the Mets to honor a Met. It's a larger-than-life likeness of none other than The Franchise himself, Tom Seaver. When we go to games, we can meet by The Knee...the lovingly sculpted joint with the trademark splotch of dirt that Seaver absorbed every time he went into that perfect motion. As his teammates file back into Citi Field, Fred Wilpon presents Seaver with a scaled-down model of the sculpture that will greet every Met fan before every game. Seaver, rarely at a loss for words, is genuinely humbled as he speaks from the mound: "I never pitched here, obviously, but to know I'll be a part of this great new ballpark means a great deal to me." He only wishes, he says, his teammates Tommie and Tug and Donn and his pitching coach and his manager could see "that awesome statue and this marvelous place," but as long as he's out there, forever pitching in bronze, "all of us from '69 will be a part of this."

Tom concludes his remarks and joins every living 1969 champ to ride in a stream of vintage Plymouths around the warning track. An impromptu ticker-tape parade breaks out. The cars depart through the centerfield gate, the grounds crew comes out to clean up the shredded paper and a black cat roams in front of the third base dugout. Way up in the Darryl Deck, somebody pulls out a handkerchief and cries "Goodbye Leo!"

Not everybody gets it, but those who do have a good laugh and share what it means. That's what you do at Citi Field.

News of Pat Dobson's death Wednesday night reminds us that there was a team 35 years ago that featured four starters who each won 20 games, only the second time such a conglomeration occurred. The 1971 Orioles could call on Dave McNally (21-5), Mike Cuellar (20-9), Jim Palmer (20-9) and Dobson (20-8) and be almost equally pleased every time they did. The way each man won his 20th was like something out of another Baltimore pastime, duckpin bowling. McNally knocked down No. 20 on September 21, Cuellar and Dobson picked up their spares in respective ends of a September 24 doubleheader and Palmer rolled his 20th on the 26th.

The '71 Orioles were the third straight spectacular regular-season Orioles club to dominate the American League: 109 wins in '69, 108 wins in '70, a measly 101 wins thereafter. Each division title was a breeze, each ALCS was a sweep (World Series were something else, heh-heh). Dobson, previously a journeyman with the Tigers and Padres, benefited from the coaching wisdom of Bamberger and the hitting and fielding prowess of Brooks, Boog, Buford, Blair, Belanger and assorted killer Birds. July in particular was quite a month for him. He started eight games, he won eight games, he completed eight games.

Who starts eight games in a month anymore? Who wins eight games in two months anymore? For goodness sake, who completes eight games in two years anymore? The CGs alone bring a "you and what army?" aspect to the mound. In 2006, only two Major League STAFFS (Cleveland and Cincinnati) exceeded for the year what Dobson accomplished in that one magical month vis-à-vis finishing what one starts.

By 1971, Palmer was en route to the Hall of Fame, Cuellar had a Cy Young in the bank and McNally was an established stud. It was Pat Dobson who turned the Orioles into historymakers, matching the 1920 White Sox (Cicotte, Williams, Faber, Kerr) in the category of outstanding quartets. It is why, quite frankly, I remembered him yesterday when I read he had passed.

At the risk of being crass, do we need to write an obituary for the 20-win season as well? Or would we be too late in paying it tribute?

You may have noticed 2006 came and went with no pitcher gaining 20 wins. Johan Santana and Chien-Ming Wang led the American League with 19. Nobody led the National League at all...not really. The most wins here in Pitching & Defense Land was 16, a milestone so pale it seems insulting to the concept of leading the league to specify which six pitchers reached it.

Now and then, 20-game winners are at a premium. In fact the N.L. hasn't had more than four in any one year since 1977. That speaks to the elite nature of winning 20. Is it possible that nobody's even close to elite anymore? Now and then, one league or another misses 20, but the National League is usually good for a 19- or 18-game winner. This year, if you had a pitcher and 17, you lost.

In the Age of Dobson, 20-game winners were everywhere. The four Orioles were joined by six other American Leaguers...TEN 20-game winners in one league TWO years before the DH eliminated the need to take starters out of close contests for offense. Come 1973, a full dozen American League pitchers racked up 20 wins and only a couple of them were Jim Palmer or Catfish Hunter. If you're not a nut about knowing them, I wouldn't be surprised if you told me you've never heard of Joe Coleman or Paul Splittorff or Jim Colborn (or, honestly, Pat Dobson). They were all A.L. 20-game winners back in the day.

On this day, nobody's a 20-game winner. In the three seasons previous to 2006, only four National Leaguers won 20, including Roy Oswalt twice. He's the only N.L. starter in his prime to have multiple 20s on his ledger.

Geez. What happened?

Well, it's not like there's not good pitching somewhere. Santana, for example, is pretty decent. He got to his 19th win on the final Tuesday of the season, putting him in line for a chance at a 20th win on the last Sunday. Ah, but there was a playoff for which to prepare. Why waste a lot of energy getting to 20 when there was something more important at stake?

For that matter, is 20 wins important? As a round number, absolutely. We love that stuff. Always have: Jerry Koosman merited the cover of the 1977 yearbook (first edition) for winning 20. Always will: I considered it marvelous that Willie Randolph sat Jose Reyes to protect his .300 average at the very end in Washington. Yet when the Mets won 97 games, were you picking apart the Ws and bemoaning Glavine's and (if you'll excuse the expression) Trachsel's failure to top 15 victories? Would you rather marvel at the anomaly of Steve Carlton in 1972 (27 wins on the 59-win Phillies) or watch Wright and Reyes exchange funny handshakes 97 times?

You shouldn't have to choose. The '69 Mets won 100 and Seaver won 25, good news all around. In 1971, the same season that Dobson was contributing to an epic accomplishment, Tom Terrific chalked up 20 wins himself, nailing down his final W on the season's final night and putting a bow on his greatest season: 1.76 ERA, 289 K's, a run-starved 20-10. Would have Seaver not had his greatest season had the Mets not bothered to score for him his last start 35 years ago? No, but from here, that 20 looks so much better than a 19.

The '90 Mets won 91, led by Frank Viola's 20, the last time of eight we enjoyed so many victories from one pitcher. That was 16 going on 17 years ago. The Mets haven't had a 19- or 18-game winner since then. Al Leiter won 17 in 1998, the most in the post-20 period. Nobody else has accumulated more than 16.

Why? You probably know why.

• Five-man rotations, foresightfully deployed by Gil Hodges and Rube Walker, became the norm, cutting down on starts per pitcher, cutting back on the opportunity to win 20. Hell, six-man rotations sneak in now and then.

• Pitch counts are part of the boxscore never mind the gameplan. Throw a lot of pitches early, you're not going the requisite five to be in position to win. Throw a lot of pitches early and you're probably not going to be in a position to win regardless, but 35 years ago, who was counting?

• Pitching staffs are routinely 12 men (if not 12 men strong). Relief is not a punishment, it's a specialty, one that is handsomely rewarded at this time of year. If you're paying a setup man exponentially more than you ever paid Mike Cuellar, you're using him, decisions be damned.

• Dude, everybody's handsomely rewarded at this time of year. Except for old goats with their eyes on a transcendent prize, few are seriously counting individual wins. Nobody's going to kill himself to get to 20, playoffs or no playoffs. Anybody who manages 19 wins these days is going to be compensated like a 30-game winner used to be anyhow.

Statlovers that we are, we also realize wins are as much luck as skill, the stuff of right place meeting right time. Maybe W's need to be issued those t-shirts that read PROPERTY OF NEW YORK METS. Tom Glavine driving to 300 helps (helped?) the greater good, but when he's undermined by circumstance and "his" win winds up as Pedro Felicano's, does it matter for more than a minute to us? Now that he's at 290, it would be sweet to see him get there in a Met uniform, but it's sweet to see any Met win anytime. It means our team won.

Quick, what pitcher was the difference between the Mets advancing to the World Series and the Mets going home a tad too soon? No not Trachsel; it was Jeff Suppan. Jeff Suppan beat the Mets in Game Seven but good. Except Jeff Suppan technically did not beat the Mets. Oh, he was the man, no bleeping question about it, but he exited in the eighth for Randy Flores who was the pitcher of record when Yadier Molina...you know.

That said, 16-going-on-17 seasons is a long-ass time. It's not the worst National League stretch going by any means — only eight N.L. teams have had as many as one 20-game winner since 1990. The Dodgers, the hallowed House of Koufax, Drysdale, Valenzuela and Hershiser if you can believe it, have gone just as dry. Hence, there's no real shame in any of this. Still when Reyes triples more often than any single pitcher wins two years in a row, I have a hunch we've got a legitimate drought on our hands.

So what gets here ahead of the other: the first Met no-hitter or the next Met 20-game winner? If current trends prevail, bet on neither.

If you haven't already, by all means get yourself a copy of the Nov. 27 New Yorker, and read the Roger Angell season recap.

I've loved Roger Angell as long as I've loved baseball -- I remember reading The Summer Game as fast as a young boy could read a pretty thick book and realizing to my happy amazement that there were other collections, too. I devoured accounts of seasons that had come and gone years before I was born, learning the names I'd soon know by heart (Mays, Robinson, Koufax, Yaz) and soaking in the ceaseless, easy beauty of baseball expertly chronicled, interrupted by sudden spikes of joy and troughs of depression. He made it real, made me wish I'd been there, made me grateful that he had been there to tell me what happened.

But reading Angell on the subway today, I realized something new: just how much we owe him. Not just as writers or as baseball fans -- I knew that already -- but as bloggers.

Yes, Angell talks to players and managers and umpires and officials; he goes into the locker room and the press box. But he also watches from the stands or in front of the TV. He's a professional and a partisan. And it's this double vision -- being simultaneously a smart, reasonably neutral observer of the on-field and front-office goings-on and a hopelessly lovelorn fan -- that each and every baseball blogger tries to emulate. Bill Simmons gets and deserves a lot of the credit for teaching a generation of sports bloggers to cheer at not being in the pressbox, but it was Angell who paved the road the Sports Guy walked down.

And more simply, a lot of his piece concerns the 2006 Mets. And when the last pargraph ended, to my amazement and embarrassment I started to cry. Not a-bit-dusty-in-here eye-rubbing, not a momentary sniffle, but a shocked dissolve, like a little kid.

Read it. It'll happen to you too.

Blessed be the player who keeps you rooting for your team when your team gives you little on which to root. Not that you're going to switch to another team or perceptibly scale back your allegiance if you're any kind of a good fan or a good person, but if you can't reasonably expect wins, it's nice to expect something.

From 1994 to 1996, Rico Brogna was something. Maybe not something else, but he was definitely a Met among Mets, certainly by my not altogether stringent standards.

Anybody can fall in love with Tom Seaver when it's 1969 or Doc Gooden when it's 1984. I did both. They were the key men on clubs that were getting great. Easy choices. But when your team is on an extended downswing, why do you choose whom you choose? What made Rico Brogna one of my all-time favorite Mets almost immediately?

Gosh, what didn't? When I recall the Met tenure of Rico Brogna, a gentle breeze brushes my right cheek. It's so...clean. Refreshing. Rico Brogna was the right man at the exact right moment, a scouting party of one sent ahead from a not-too-distant future to those of us wallowing in a despairing present. He arrived to tell me everything was going to be all right again, eventually. Don't worry, he said, the Mets aren't going to be the way they've been for too long forever — soon enough you will take pride in all those jackets and caps and t-shirts you bought, soon enough you will tell people "I am a Met fan" and not wait for the inevitable cringe.

Rico Brogna was a prophet without honor in his own time. He didn't last long enough to more than nibble on the fruits of progress. His three Met seasons each ended with losing Met records. Prosperity was just around the corner, but Rico never made it down the block.

I hate when that happens.

Rico Brogna came to the Mets in a transaction so quiet that it could have been consummated at Joe Robbie Stadium. At the end of Spring Training 1994, the Mets gave up on a former first-round draft pick, Alan Zinter, sending him to the Tigers for Brogna, a minor leaguer. I had forgotten Zinter was even in the system. I completely missed the trade. So when Rico was called up on June 20, replacing the groin-strained David Segui, I thought, "Who?" His first game was two days later at Fulton County Stadium. He went 0-for-3 against Greg Maddux. His first Met hit, a single off the Pirates' Paul Wagner, was recorded June 26 at Shea.

Two days after that, Dwight Gooden was suspended for violating his aftercare program. Doc tested positive again. Doc was back on cocaine. Doc was through as a Met. The last link to 1986 — the one that had survived firecrackers and bleach and earplugs and rampant surliness and 27-decision losing streaks and rookie hazing rituals gone awry and media boycotts and paranoid managers and miscast general managers and 103 losses and more than one allegation of sexual misconduct — had been severed. Through the misery of the early '90s, as the Mets got worse as baseball players and human beings, at least there was Doc, my favorite player for a decade. Now there wasn't.

On the night Dwight Gooden was suspended, Rico Brogna went 2-for-4 against the Cardinals. He was batting .333. He had nothing to do with any of what had come before him. He was utterly detached from the disasters of 1992 and 1993. He was clean. And it looked like he could hit.

I had a new favorite player.

It was a small sample, but the remainder of 1994, which only lasted until August 11, cemented my bond with Rico Brogna. If he wasn't a classic drop-whatever-you're-doing slugger, I still tried not to miss any of his at-bats. I loved the line drives. I loved the nifty glovework at first. I loved that he was a nice and polite young man. There was something about him that wasn't bitter or anonymous, that didn't point fingers. The best players the '94 Mets had to offer before him were guys who emitted personal flaws out their tailpipes. John Franco rarely hid his displeasure when plays weren't made behind him. Jeff Kent wanted to be anywhere but New York. Jose Vizcaino, a decent enough shortstop, had the personality of a turnip. We were finally getting that big season from Bret Saberhagen, but Bret Saberhagen was one snide comment away from another Clorox attack. Bobby Bonilla was still the life of the party. Everybody else was Doug Linton.

Rico wasn't any of this. He was Rico, or RI-CO! RI-CO! RI-CO! He was the first thing worth chanting at Shea in years. Even an impending strike couldn't dim the sense of possibility around Rico Brogna. On a Monday night in late July, the Mets played in St. Louis. The game was televised by that monstrosity known as The Baseball Network. Rico went 5-for-5. Swaths of the Midwest, if not the world, were now finding out who this Brogna kid was. He ended the night hitting .377, the shortened season hitting .351. The strike would be hell, but I would not shunt baseball aside as so many others swore they would irrevocably, no way, no how. I had Rico Brogna to look forward to.

Baseball came back. So did Rico. The next May, I got his autograph and shook his hand at a meet 'n greet in the Mets clubhouse store in Manhattan. He struck me as young, small, fit and, most importantly, so nice and polite. I knew I made the right choice stopping by. Rico's average didn't soar in '95, but there was power: 22 homers, 76 ribbies. I knew I made the right choice picking him as my favorite. The Mets were stronger, too, particularly in the second half when they reeled off 34 wins in 52 games to end the season. Rico was the best player on a team that was about to come of age. He was getting help. Isringhausen and Pulsipher were up. So was Alfonzo. And Everett. Hundley was beginning to show what the fuss was about. There was a future, just like Rico said. He was at its forefront. It was only going to get better in '96.

Actually, it didn't. The Mets stumbled. Rico hurt. They both regressed. Mets finished 71-91. Rico finished on June 19. He'd been plagued by a chronically bad back and now he was diagnosed with a torn labrum in his right shoulder. Managed only seven homers, though one of them was of the walkoff variety, winning a game against the Cubs that included the last brawl the Mets ever fought. When our dignity was at stake, I knew he wouldn't let us down.

I bring Rico Brogna and my fanly affection for him to your attention today, Thanksgiving Day 2006, for a particular reason. It was ten years ago, just before Thanksgiving Day 1996, that the Mets traded my favorite Met to the Phillies for two no-account relief pitchers. I was puzzled, I was livid, I was saddened. The Mets were terrible in 1996, absolutely horrifyingly depressing. Their plan to improve? Trade my main man for Toby Borland and Ricardo Jordan.

Oh the humanity.

Rico would recover from injury and forge a representative career for himself as a Phillie. He drove in 104 runs in 1998 and 102 in 1999. Except when he was in a position to beat us (which he did, 1-0, on a solo homer off Mlicki late in the '97 season), I always rooted for him. Even as a Phillie, as distasteful as that was. Even as a Brave, as dismaying as that was. When Rico went deep off Kevin Appier in our Home Opener in 2001, I stood and cheered. He wasn't in a position to beat us, but even if he had been, I probably would have put a hand or two together on his behalf.

I would recover, too. The Mets made a good trade a few weeks after that horrendous one, acquiring John Olerud from Toronto for Robert Person. Olerud was one of those who made the Mets in 1997 what I'd been waiting since 1990 for them to become again: good. I never let how much I loved Rico Brogna get in the way of how much I would love John Olerud. He was one of the most special Mets ever.

Which doesn't excuse the trade of Rico Brogna. Franchises shouldn't be allowed to trade your favorite player, but they do. No need to go down the litany of Mets who should have stayed Mets but didn't. When the litany starts with Tom Seaver, you really don't need any more examples. No matter how mature you get, they hurt every time.

The Rico Brogna for Toby Borland and Ricardo Jordan trade hurt immediately. I wasn't thinking about his 36 Met homers, his 126 Met runs batted in or his .291 Met average. I was thinking about what it was like to fall into the player who keeps you rooting for your team when your team gives you little on which to root.

Some people would never get that. Right after Rico Brogna was traded, I had to deal with one of them.

I hadn't had 24 hours to digest the Brogna bulletin when I found myself a reluctant pilgrim, in a car heading north to Westchester for Thanksgiving. Stephanie and I were in the backseat. My father was driving, his girlfriend of then almost five years was next to him. It was her family — daughters, sons-in-law, grandchildren, cousins — with whom we'd be sharing the day.

I liked her. I liked her fine. I was glad my dad found somebody when he did, not long after my mother died. It was a good thing all around. But that didn't mean I had all that much to say to her. Groping for news of any kind, I mentioned that I was kind of bumming because the Mets had just traded my favorite player, Rico Brogna.

She could have said, "I'm sorry to hear that" or "that's too bad" or even "that's life". I wasn't expecting a dissection of who would be setting up Franco in '97 or how much time Huskey could anticipate at first. I was just trying to fill the uncomfortable silences.

I sure as hell wasn't expecting this:

"Well, I don't want to be mean, but if they're not very good, maybe they were right to trade him, you know?"

No, I didn't know. And neither do you, I wanted to say. Rico Brogna has a tricky back but he's not the reason the Mets went 71-91 this year. He didn't even play after June. He was hurt. Maybe the Mets would have been better had he been healthy. Maybe a team in a constant state of rebuilding shouldn't be casting off one of its pillars so recklessly.

AND FUTHERMORE, what the fuck do you know about my team other than it's my team? That should be all you need to know. I get enough reminders at work, one month after the fucking Yankees won the fucking World Series, that my team isn't very good. I know I'm practically all alone as a Mets fan in New York and now my favorite Met has been traded to fucking Philadelphia and all you can say is it wasn't such a bad idea?

That's what I wanted to say. I didn't say much. Not in response to Rico, not through the car ride to Westchester, not at the drafty house with the onslaught of people to whom I wasn't really related. Dissing Rico Brogna was merely the first straw. It was just one thing on top of another (the group Macarena may have been the last straw) that made Thanksgiving 1996, hands down, the most pain-in-the-ass Thanksgiving I ever endured. And that's sayin' somethin' if you're last name is Prince.

Not to be overdramatic, but Stephanie and I found ourselves in essentially a two-against-dozens situation all day and night, with our only natural ally, my father, making like Switzerland and sitting it out. We may as well have spent Thanksgiving in an isolation booth.

OK, that is overdramatic, but not by much. Let's just say we didn't fit in and wanted no more part of this particular blended family. Nobody was mean. They just weren't who we wanted to be with and nobody seemed particularly interested in whether we were there or not. They were courteous enough to have us for my fathers' sake, but once it became impossible for me to spark a conversation with my dad, what was the point?

So we decided not to be a part of it all any longer. Thanksgiving ten years ago was the last of those mythic Thanksgivings that we took part in. My sister and her husband had already begun fleeing annually for the West Coast every mid-November. My father has remained enmeshed with his other family. Stephanie and I are on our own.

From the first time a teacher told me to trace my hand and pretend it was a turkey, I tried to buy into family-laden Thanksgiving as a great event. Everybody always said so many nice things about it. Yet time and again, these occasions were embarrassing or abrasive or tongue-bitingly non-confrontational and always endless. Amid company in which I am not at ease (which is most people) I am a clench. It is my nature to tighten up when I am not relaxed, no matter how Yogiesque that sounds. I'm self-aware enough of my antisocial tendencies to try and compensate with bursts of warmth and outgoingness, but I am to warmth and outgoingness what Rey Ordoñez was to batting cleanup.

I value nice and polite. If that's what you want, Rico Brogna or I am your man. You want warm and outgoing? Call Domino's.

1996 was the culmination of a lifetime of bad Thanksgivings. In the years that followed what we'll call for our purposes here the Rico Brogna debacle, we mostly hid from Thanksgiving. It is only recently that we have dared to embrace it on our own terms at our own table with our own Oven Stuffer. We have succeeded. So this, you see, is not an unhappy Thanksgiving story. We simply ignored the turkey-family industrial complex and made Thanksgiving our own. Just us and the cats.

The result is a holiday I used to dread and curse — to the point of cackling demonically when high winds interfered with the Macy's floats — is now one I genuinely look forward to every fourth Thursday in November because it's cozy and it's comfy and I can go on about Rico Brogna all I like if the mood strikes. (Just for variety's sake, my wife and I occasionally do chat about other things, though she does love her some Mets.)

On any given Thursday, we like everybody in our family fine. On this given Thursday...oy. There are 364 other days in the year, 365 sometimes, to commune with our loved ones. I didn't need this particular Thursday shoved down my throat like a third serving of Stove Top Stuffing just because it's supposed to be. Thanksgiving togetherness is very touching when we pop in the DVD of Pieces of April or the King of the Hill where everybody gets stuck in the airport. It's overrated in real life. At least ours.

Hence, nowadays we see my sister and her husband and my father and his girlfriend not because we have to but because we want to. And we do want to...just not on Thanksgiving. It's not like we held a family meeting to do away with the tradition to which we were all unwillingly tethered. We just stopped conferring on the particulars and there were no evident hard feelings. Funny how that works.

Meanwhile, that ornery Thanksgiving of a decade ago may have also led, in its way, to an unquestionably positive year-round development. It may have made this blog possible. You see, I think that dreadful Thursday was when I decided I'm going to live to do what I want to do at least when nobody's paying me to do something I don't want to do. I used to grit my teeth for family get-togethers. That Thanksgiving helped me realize nobody was benefiting from this behavior, not me, not the family.

Where does the blog come in? I guess I also made a semiconscious decision that in general I would seek out those who were passionate for what I was passionate about. I was passionate about the Mets. I began to semiconsciously cultivate the idea of the Mets logo as my coat of arms. Mind you I'm not so delusional to believe that a starting first baseman (not even the beatific Brogna or angelic Olerud) will rush to my aid if harm befalls me. My father or my sister would — as I would for them. I understand family is family. But catastrophes aside, with whom do I want to spend my time, invest my faith, confess my fear? Mets fans. Not exclusively, but mostly. Good Mets fans...good people who are good Mets fans if I could find them.

By Thanksgiving ten years ago, I knew a few well and had, thanks to technology, come to know a few more a little. As the late '90s proceeded and the Mets at last rode an upswing through the National League (no thanks to Ricardo Jordan or Toby Borland), they became more important to me than they ever were, even when I was a kid. I didn't plan it that way. It just kinda happened. Concurrently, I came to rely for good company on the good Mets fans and the good people with whom I shared this surpassing interest. One of them writes this blog with me. Another of them, I'd like to think, is you, whether we know each other beyond these pages or not.

So I guess I'm thankful for that.

The Alou family connection to the Mets has been revived. It goes back a long way.

First, there was the game of September 22, 1963 at Candlestick Park during which the Giants were drubbing the Mets so decisively (13-2 en route to 13-4) that manager Alvin Dark could afford to choreograph history. In the seventh inning, Dark removed Willie Mays from center and inserted Matty Alou in left, replacing Mays with Felipe Alou who had been in right and shifting Jesus Alou from left to right. Everywhere you looked in the Giants' outfield, there were Alous, the first time three brothers played alongside one another out there. After the season, Felipe was traded to the Braves, so it was the only time, too.

Three other notes of trivia from that day so trivial as to be infinitesimal: 1) It was the Mets' first series away from home after the final baseball game ever played at the Polo Grounds, so technically they no longer had a home; 2) It was the road debut of Cleon Jones; 3) It was the last time the famous Dodger Duke Snider would ever face his old nemeses the Giants; a year later, having worn out his welcome with the Mets, he would finish his career as a displaced San Franciscan.

The Alous were a staple of National League ball through the '60s and into the early '70s, but the next time one of them played in games of surpassing importance against the Mets, it would be as an American Leaguer. Jesus Alou was a part-time outfielder on the 1973 A's, thrown into a greater role in that World Series after the club lost centerfielder Bill North to injury late in the year. Alou started five of the seven games versus the Mets, his most notable performance coming in Game Two in Oakland with three hits and two RBI in six at-bats.

That game, won 10-7 in 12 innings by the Mets, is better remembered for three other events: 1) Mike Andrews' two errors, miscues that Charlie Finley tried to parlay into an in-Series roster switch that wouldn't fly with Bowie Kuhn; 2) The piss-poor out call on Bud Harrelson at home plate in the tenth which stood even as Willie Mays pleaded with Augie Donatelli to rule Buddy safe; 3) Willie, one bridge and ten years removed from coming out to allow the all-Alou outfield, perhaps realizing at last that it was time to come out of the Oakland sun once and for all.

In 1975, Jesus Alou would become the first Met World Series opponent to play for them, joining the Mets on April 16 in St. Louis and serving mostly as a righty pinch-hitter. Though he hit .350 in 40 such at-bats (complementing the .400 Ed Kranpeool put up as a lefty off the bench), he showed no power, driving in 11 runs and homering not at all. Alou would be released the following spring. With Matty and Felipe no longer active, 1976 was the first season with no Alous in the Majors since 1957. But Jesus persevered away from the bigs and would hook on with the Astros in '78 and '79 before retiring.

Felipe Alou, of course, became a fixture in the visitors' dugout at Shea from 1992 to 2004 as his Expos regularly tormented the Mets (or so it seemed). One of his key early weapons was reliever Mel Rojas, a nephew of all three Alou brothers. Montreal being Montreal, the team let him go when he got too expensive. He signed unhappily with the Cubs in December 1996 and was traded to the Mets in August 1997. He pitched for his Uncle Jesus' old club most of the 1998 season. The Met uncle-nephew combination that was always a rumored trade away was Doc Gooden and Gary Sheffield. Instead, it turned out to be Jesus Alou and Mel Rojas, albeit 22 years removed from each other.

The less said about Mel Rojas' Met tenure, the better. I think we were all calling out some variation of "UNCLE JESUS!" when he'd trot in from the bullpen, though we may have been pronouncing it differently than Mel did.

And now Moises Alou, son of Felipe, becomes a Met, presumably unseating his and Cousin Mel's onetime Expo teammate Cliff Floyd...whose 2007 destination is not yet known, so let's pretend his departure is not yet official. Alou and Floyd went back-to-back in April, in a manner of speaking. On a Monday night in San Francisco, Willie Randolph ordered Tom Glavine (also still not altogether gone, sort of) to walk Barry Bonds so he could face Moises Alou. Alou made him pay, homering with two on, driving in five in all and leading the Giants to a frustrating — for us — 6-2 win. The next night, Floyd, slumping viciously, broke out for an evening, or at least a swing, taking Jamey Wright on a guided tour of McCovey Cove. The Mets won 4-1.

(The next day was the Brian Bannister/Barry Bonds affair, repeated so endlessly on Snigh that it's easy to forget the Mets and Giants played a three-game series.)

Used to be a 40-year-old outfielder implied a fellow who earned the right to hang around but was probably staying at the fair too long — someone like Willie Mays, who logged 98 games in center as a Met at ages 41 and 42, including that final glaring afternoon in Oakland. But players play longer and stay in better shape today. Moises Alou got into 98 games total in 2006, the year he turned 40, and that was considered not miraculous but a little disappointing. He hit 22 homers and drove in 74 runs. That should be considered encouraging.

If you need something else, there's the day he was born: Sunday, July 3, 1966. The Mets hosted Pittsburgh a twinbill, falling short in the opener 8-7 (after trailing 8-1), recovering in the nightcap 9-8 (after trailing 6-3). One of the Pirates on the field that day at Shea? Moises Alou's uncle Matty. He singled as a pinch-hitter in the first game and went 0-for-3 in the second.

In the twenty seasons they called it home, I never visited Shea Stadium to see the Jets play. It never came up as a possibility or as a desire. I wasn't a committed Jets fan (a redundancy) until I was 15 and the mechanics of seeing an NFL game in person, even though the Jets didn't necessarily sell out every week until late in their Queens tenure, struck me as too daunting to even consider. Baseball was something you wanted to go to. Football was something you watched on TV if it wasn't blacked out.

Watching the Jets from Shea on television was strange, especially once I started going to baseball games there enough to be familiar with its topography. Where did home plate go? What happened to the dugouts? Is that the 410 sign? If Lee Mazzilli can handle centerfield, why can't Pat Leahy?

Most stadiums used to have baseball teams and football teams. Even historic old ballparks had both. The Lions played in Tiger Stadium forever. The Bears used to kick up dust amid the brown Wrigley ivy. Lyric little bandbox Fenway hosted Patriot games. When Yankee Stadium was still Yankee Stadium, it was also the Giants' stadium. It wasn't unusual. The Mets and Jets as co-tenants, albeit with the Mets as seniors treating the Jets like perpetual freshmen, was the way business was taken care of until fairly recently.

Somewhere between the Jets threatening to move to the Meadowlands in the spring of 1977 and the fall of 1983 when they abandoned New York in search of spiffier restrooms, I decided that it was OK they were here...even if they were tearing up our grass. As one who didn't attend Jets games, there were no practical concerns for me, but New Jersey? For the Jets? That was Giants territory. It was Giants Stadium, for crissake. The Jets were headquartered at Hofstra. What were they going to do? Practice in Hempstead all week and then cross two rivers on a bus to play on Sunday?

Yeah, that's exactly what they did and still do and will do for at least a little longer before they relocate all operations to the Garden State and begin playing on a new piece of swampland in conjunction with their Big Blue cousins. The setting has never set right by me (the green drapes help only a little), but again, it's all a matter of television when I bother to be interested, and they do sell out every game over there, so what do I know?

With the floodgates wide open for Shea Met memories since last Monday, it occurred to me that we happen to be right upon the 25th anniversary of the greatest Jet game I ever watched from Flushing. That I saw it on a portable black & white set in Tampa doesn't diminish the joy I recall at its resolution.

In the first semester of my freshman year at USF I didn't really know anybody, so the first acquaintance I made was sports. Sports I knew. No baseball in Florida then, but there was football. The Bucs were in their sixth season in 1981, on the verge of an unlikely Central Division title in the NFC. I couldn't stand the Bucs, though. They were just too damn absurd to take seriously. Since they were all that Tampa Bay had to get excited about — besides the NASL Rowdies, that is — I took an abiding dislike to them the whole time I was in school. (If you heard "hey, hey, hey we're the Buccaneers!" a dozen times a day on Q-105, you would have, too.)

So I wouldn't have to follow the Bucs with any kind of commitment stronger than osmosis, I listened to Dolphins games. Miami was nowhere near Tampa, but they'd been the state's team before anybody knew what a Buccaneer was, hence their games aired in locally on WFLA. I had liked the Dolphins when I was 9 and they were finishing 14-0 while my family was spending Christmas in North Miami Beach (though if I knew they were going to be annually obnoxious about it, I wouldn't have). I hadn't given them any thought since they stopped appearing in Super Bowls except to hope the Jets beat them twice a year. One Sunday in mid-November, my first semester, I was listening to the Dolphins' postgame show after they lost to the Raiders (boy did I have no social life) when it was noted the Jets had won in Foxboro and had moved to within one game of Miami for the division lead. Next week, it would be the Dolphins (7-3-1) and the Jets (6-4-1 after an 0-3 start) in a battle for first. At Shea.

Having grown up in New York in the '70s loyal as a matter of principle to our home teams (how the bleep could you live here and root for the bleeping Cowboys?), I had had very few football games to which I could look forward, Jets or Giants. This one, on November 22, 1981, automatically became my biggest autumn Sunday to date. I anticipated it all week. I may have been something of a Johnny "Lam" Jones-come-lately to the Jets' cause, but a battle for first at Shea was a battle for first at Shea. I'd been waiting for one since 1973.

So it wasn't the Mets. You can't have everything.

One of my suitemates at my off-campus dorm (four guys, two rooms, connected by a bathroom) was from Fort Myers, about two hours down the coast. He was a Dolphins fan. Although the Mets were my calling card, I had made it clear that I liked the Jets. Well, he said, looks like we're going to have something to watch on Sunday. Lucky for me he had a TV and even luckier just about all Dolphins games were televised in Tampa.

Well, it was a great game. Richard Todd wasn't even supposed to play because of cracked ribs, but they outfitted him in a flak jacket. Generally not having Richard Todd wasn't that much of a hardship, but he was the starter and it was no time to leave our starters on the bench. Todd played magnificently. The Jet defense (in this, the year of the New York Sack Exchange) curbed Miami and gave Todd a chance to lead the Jets to victory. It would be tough. They were down 15-9 and on their own 23 with just over three minutes left.

But he did it. He hit six different receivers along the way. The last pass was to Jerome Barkum for a touchdown. It was 15-15. Then Leahy, never a sure thing kicking into Shea's Edmund Fitzgerald winds, nailed the extra point. Just like that the Jets were in first place.

The Jets were in first place!

My suitemate whose TV it was had left for work by the time his Dolphins lost. So it was just me and his non-fan roommate watching at the end. At the final gun, I did one of those leaps from a sitting position that one does without thinking. You're pretty excited there, the other suitemate said. You've got to understand, I told him. This is the first time I've seen the Jets in first place since 1969, a year I always liked to stick into sentences whenever I could.

He didn't care. But I did.

Shea Stadium was going wild, too. Sitting and leaping out there that late afternoon/early evening were 50,000-plus of the green and white who considered Shea home every bit as much then as I would for the next quarter-century. No doubt a lot of them were Mets fans as well as Jets fans. No doubt a lot of them were season-ticket holders who packed up with the Jets in 1984 and kept going to see them in the Meadowlands, fall after fall, decade after decade (bus after bus).

But the Jets have never looked right over there, even on TV, even when they were beating the Dolphins 51-45 in 1986, even considering they've now spent more years in Jersey than they did in Queens. They looked good at Shea a quarter-of-a-century ago tomorrow. They looked great. So did Shea.

Nothing strange about that.

Congratulations to Ryan Howard, the National League's Most Valuable Player. He joins Joe Girardi, N.L. Manager of the Year, and Brandon Webb, the circuit's Cy Young winner in the 2006 awards pantheon. Great jobs, fellas.

Howard, you beat out Carlos Beltran (fourth in the voting after becoming the first Met to win a Gold Glove and a Silver Slugger and start an All-Star Game in the same year), Jose Reyes (seventh), David Wright (ninth) and Carlos Delgado (twelfth).

Girardi, you topped Willie Randolph, the runner-up skipper.

And Webb, you finished way ahead of Billy Wagner, sixth among pitchers when all the ballots were counted.

You guys rocked. And you were smart. You piled up your qualifications and then beat the rush. I mean you and your Phillies, your Marlins and your Diamondbacks were all home by the evening of October 1, the morning of October 2 at the latest. Our Mets had to keep working for almost three more weeks.

What suckers.

But seriously...

Franchise record for homers (tied).
Franchise record for runs scored (broken).
Silver Slugger.
Gold Glove.
All-Star starter.
Team has best record in sport and wins division by largest margin.

And he finishes FOURTH?

Where's that New York bias we're always hearing about?

Greetings from Omar Minaya's pocket. That's where I'm wintering.

The healthy level of skepticism one should maintain in any situation has seeped away where me and the Mets' GM are concerned.

Trade away relatively young lefty Royce Ring when lefties are lefties? Omar knows what he's doing.

Sign potentially decrepit Damion Easley off a tepid year? Omar knows what he's doing.

About to grab Moises Alou, the recently achy 40-year-old who doesn't move well and isn't a stickler for hand sanitation? Omar knows what he's doing.

I'm a shill. I'm Tony Snow. I've got sunshine on a cloudy day if Omar Minaya's my forecaster. My hot stove is room temperature. There's nothing to debate: Omar says it; I believe it; that settles it.

When did I get this easy? I didn't trust Steve Phillips as far as I could throw him even after he general-managed us to a World Series. Omar Minaya could package Jose Reyes and David Wright for Jimmy Wynn and lawn furniture and I suspect I'd rationalize it.

Getting rid of those contracts now is going to free up the budget nicely. Reyes never did get to 20 homers or 20 triples. Wright has yet to win an MVP. That GQ spread was pretty embarrassing. Wynn's a proven commodity. He's the Toy Cannon! Sixty-five isn't that old for a slugger. If he hit 37 homers playing in the Astrodome in '67, imagine what he'll do at Citi Field in '09 when his option kicks in. Lawn furniture will come in handy when we start to move. Omar's a genius!

This is supposed to be the time of year when we question authority, when we assume that every move our team makes is the wrong one. You know, like swapping that stud Mike Jacobs for that malcontent Carlos Delgado...like taking on the overrated Paul Lo Duca...like letting go of good ol' Jae Seo for Duaner Somebody...like giving up dependable Kris Benson for a Yankee patsy and a minor leaguer nobody ever heard of...like soaking up Quadruple-A flotsam along the lines of Endy Chavez...like signing clearly decrepit Jose Valentin off a tepid year.

What I can't figure out is where I got the idea that Omar knows what he's doing.

I like to give Hozzie The Cat a little chest/belly rub when he allows it, which is infrequently. Tonight he did. As I crouched down to find his purr zone, I serenaded him with a quick and unoriginal chorus of Ha-ZEE! Ha-zee Ha-zee Ha-ZEEE! I was a little more off-key than usual when it occurred to me that it must be more than a week since I'd caught myself wandering around the house singing the "Jose!" song. I'd been doing that a lot during the playoffs and afterwards. Same for "off to never never land!" I even entered November breaking into occasional chants of LET'S GO METS! with no Mets (or cats) in sight. So much of that stuff had built up on my brain since the first game of the postseason that there was no way it would evaporate with the last out of October 19.

It's November 19 now. An entire month has passed since Carlos Beltran passed on a curveball. Somewhere along the way, the mourning period passed. Just like that, we've crept deep into the offseason.

The World Series came and went. Sports Illustrated's World Series issue came and went...into the trash. An MLB holiday gift catalog came today. The back page features all kinds of world championship merchandise, with the METS misspelled terribly and various shades of orange and blue registering as red. MLB should get itself some better copyeditors and a new printer.

It's been a month and it still annoys. But it's been a month. You think you'll never get over these kinds of losses and...well, you don't, but you do. You don't in the sense that you're always going to replay and regret in your mind what you can do no longer do anything about on the field. That's baseball's evil beauty. But you do get on with your life, limp as your life is without any new baseball to fill it.

A month is behind us. Nineteen weeks are ahead of us until Opening Night in St. Louis. ESPN has been thoughtful enough to make a rematch between us and the Cardinals their Sunday night lidlifter on April 1. The bad news is the last time we were assigned this particular slot and responsibility, we were postponed (it was April 2, 1995, "Mets" and "Marlins" in replacement baseball until a judge issued an injunction to stop the madness; actually, that wasn't bad news at all). The good news is the Baseball Equinox has been moved up by ten hours from our previous estimate. On Tuesday, January 9, at 9:55 PM, we will be just about exactly between that final called strike in October and whatever 2007 brings us starting in April.

One month removed from 2006, we're closer to next year than we've ever been before.

Tom Seaver and I have this much in common: We had crappy 32nd birthdays. Mine culminated in a cafeteria at C.W. Post on New Year's Eve 1994. But never mind me.

Tom's? Well, I don't know where he was coaxed into "celebrating" by well-meaning/misguided/übertouchy relatives on November 17, 1976, but I do know that thirty years ago today, he did not get exactly what he wanted. The Atlanta Braves, not the New York Mets, signed Gary Matthews as a free agent. It was perhaps the signal event that led to the departure of Seaver seven months hence along with the intents & purposes collapse of National League baseball in New York.

Happy birthday to us.

When I think of Gary Matthews — now Gary Matthews, Sr., I suppose — I usually think of the Sarge who helped lead a platoon of Cubs over the hill in 1984, capturing the divisional flag that was very nearly ours. His numbers weren't astounding (14 homers, 82 ribs, .291), but it seemed like he collected all of them against the Mets. By then, Matthews was 34, playing almost every day for the last time in a career that ended in 1987.

Right now, I'm thinking of the Gary Matthews who didn't become a Met in the winter of '76-'77. That Gary Matthews, 26, had lots of company. Every player in the very first free agent class, just freed by the death of the reserve clause, didn't become a Met. The critical mass of the suddenly shuttered Oakland A's dynasty was on the market, but none of them — not Rudi, not Tenace, not Bando, not Campaneris, not Fingers, not Athletic by way of Baltimore Reggie Jackson — was coming our way. Nor was Bobby Grich or Don Baylor or Don Gullett. Nor did we think they might.

This was the daring new world some were salivating over and others were dreading. This was a clutch of star and superstar ballplayers who would become available to the highest bidders every November. This had never happened before. Instead of engineering trades or banking on minor leaguers, you could just buy the guy you needed. Pay the man and he was yours.

Not the kind of atmosphere that sounds conducive to the business practices of one M. Donald Grant. Maybe if Mrs. Payson were still alive...Joan Payson, after all, wasn't stingy. It's been said the Mets' original owner, who died in 1975, tried to buy Willie Mays from the Giants when he was truly Willie Mays. She wanted to purchase Stan Musial from the Cardinals to kick things off in grand style in '62. Grant might have gone for that, a cash transaction from his team to another team. But the idea of forking over a barrelful of currency to the player himself? That wasn't Grant's game even if it was rapidly become everybody else's.

So if you read the papers, you didn't entertain too many fantasies about Reggie Jackson reporting to Huggins-Stengel in February. Though the Mets made their picks like everybody else in the re-entry draft (in which you chose whom you'd have the rights to negotiate with, a rather pointless barrier that was done away with in the next collective bargaining agreement) and they were theoretically thinking about several players, it was clear the Mets were not going to part with top dollar to snag top names.

There was one player, however, who seemed like a fit. That was Gary Matthews, then of the Giants. He had just completed his fourth full season in San Francisco. His stats weren't stunning, not even by the standards of the day — 20-84-.279, 12 steals — but he was solid. Good outfielder. Didn't miss games. Entering his prime. In other words, he was the kind of regular the Mets were missing. Despite a spurt that earned the Mets their best record since 1969 (86-76), the Mets were hurting for offense in 1976. Only Dave Kingman managed more than 15 homers or 80 RBI...and he batted 238. Heck, Matthews would have led the '76 Mets in stolen bases.

Those Mets, as was their fashion for nearly a decade, relied on pitching. Jerry Koosman caught fire and won 21 games, finishing second for the Cy Young. Jon Matlack chipped in 17. And Tom Seaver? Future lock Hall of Famer Tom Seaver? Nine-time All-Star Tom Seaver who led this power trio in strikeouts (235) and ERA (2.59)? Tom went 14-11.

Like the Met offense of the mid-'70s, that was just sad.

The world was changing around Seaver. It always had. The June amateur draft was just coming in when Seaver was first eligible in 1965. The Dodgers tabbed him but he opted to stay in school at USC. The next year he was thrown into a January draft that, according to a very thorough Met historian, included those who had been drafted the year before but did not sign — a status that would have been impossible to garner without there having been a June draft in the first place. The Braves picked him and signed him but hadn't noticed or decided not to notice that the Southern Cal season had begun when they secured his signature. They were two non-Pac 10 games and Seaver hadn't pitched in them, but they violated a line between professional and amateur. The Brave contract was voided and, after Seaver was deemed ineligible for college ball, every Major League team was afforded the opportunity to match Atlanta's offer to Tom.

That led to the greatest hat there ever was, the one into which three pieces of paper were tossed representing the three teams who thought it was worth signing 21-year-old Tom Seaver for a little more than $50,000. One said Phillies. One said Indians. One said Mets.

You know which one was drawn.

Seaver's appeal upon his Met debut in 1967 wasn't just the pitching, though that was key. The writers loved him. He was educated. He was articulate. He thought about things. He was the harbinger of the erudite athlete and at the vanguard of the Mets who would no longer be automatic losers. It was his professionalism as much as his right arm that made Tom Seaver one of the icons of his age.

All those qualities also manifested themselves into a player who dared to use an agent to negotiate a contract (heresy until the early '70s), to be very active in the union and to speak his mind about how his team was run. By 1976, he had made two things fairly apparent: he wanted to be paid what his pitching was worth and he wanted the Mets to pay a hitter who would make his pitching pay off.

He wanted Gary Matthews. He didn't get him. None of us did. While Grant, as recounted by Jack Lang in the indispensable New York Mets: Twenty-Five Years of Baseball Magic, did make an offer, it wasn't competitive with what Ted Turner was willing to ante in Atlanta. Three decades ago today, as Tom Seaver blew out 32 candles, Gary Matthews went to the Braves, agreeing to $1.2 million for five years — barely enough to win you one year of Damion Easley now, but big bucks then.

Repercussions?

Tom Seaver was burned twice. First, no middle-of-the-lineup hitter. The Mets entered '77 with essentially the same personnel from '76, meaning their offense was a disgruntled Kingman and seven other fellows who weren't here on hitting scholarships. Lee Mazzilli and John Stearns may have portended a youth movement, but neither was a slugger-in-waiting. Otherwise there were several aging parts (Grote, Harrelson, Millan, Torre) and not a lot of improvement.

Second, Tom Seaver was being outpaid if not outearned by the new free agents. Seaver, who had been voted three of the previous eight National League Cy Young awards, had signed a new deal in the spring of '76 just ahead of the gold rush. Now the likes of Wayne Garland, who timed his single 20-win season perfectly to earn a ten-year $2.3 million deal from the Indians, were racing by him. The Yankees made Reggie Jackson a very rich man. The Angels, Padres and Rangers all invested in ex-A's. They didn't succeed but it wasn't for lack of investing.

Seaver was on a team that wasn't trying to get better and now he was being underpaid, certainly relative to what the first free agents were getting ($225,000...less than Wayne Garland on an annualized basis). He didn't have much use for the way Grant was taking care of business, feeling he'd not been dealt with in good faith when he last signed. A feud erupted and by the third month of the 1977 season, Seaver, like Kingman (also contract-discontent), was gone.

The Mets were done. They were already playing badly and they just got worse. They finished last for the first time in ten years in '77. They would repeat the feat in '78 and '79, performing their unremarkable brand of baseball before handfuls of the disinterested. They fell off the map in a manner that makes 2002 and 2003 and 2004 look like a golden age.

If thirty years ago today, when Tom Seaver turned 32, the Mets had decided it was worth topping Ted Turner's bid and had signed Gary Matthews, would have things changed? Would have Seaver thought, hey, that's a great addition and maybe taken a different tone or tack in attempting to renegotiate with Grant? Would have Grant, probably looking a bit like a hero, softened, too? Would have there been more player activity? Might have the Mets made a move on Reggie Jackson who greatly admired Seaver and was not yet in the Yankees' pocket and never said which New York team he'd have to play for in order to get that candy bar? Would have the city's baseball landscape shifted one way instead of another?

That's a lot of ifs there and they probably ignore the systematic rot of the Mets' operations that predated passing over Gary Matthews. Still, even though the early free agentry didn't help too many teams (many got hurt or old and Matthews never broke out as a superstar), it would have sent a message to the fan base that the Mets weren't living in the past. When Grant fired Joe Frazier at the end of the next of May, he exclaimed things were going just peachy in light of the Mets' successes in 1969, 1973 and the two good months at the finish of '76.

Oh brother, I thought at the time. We are so screwed.

Seaver, of course, would have more dalliances with the changing times. His second go-round as a Met ceased abruptly with the bizarre experiment known as the compensation pool. Had the players and owners not negotiated such an insipid compromise to their free agent haggling in 1981, Seaver never would have been available for the White Sox to pluck after their pitcher, Dennis Lamp, signed with the Blue Jays in a spectacularly unrelated move.

Oh brother, I thought at the time. We are so screwed again.

Seaver's Major League coda, his truncated comeback with the Mets in '87, was also a product of the free agent waters turning choppy. He was on the open market the winter the teams were colluding. He said a couple of years ago he is convinced this kept anybody from giving him a legitimate looksee after his perfectly decent showing with the Red Sox in '86 when No. 41 was 41. His stay in Boston ended injured, but he insists he was healthy and good to go the following spring. By the time the Mets auditioned him in June, it was too late and his career was over.

Add 'em up and you have four separate instances — amateur eligibility violation, the first re-entry class, the compensation pool and collusion — in which off-field machinations very much tied to their times had a profound effect on where Tom Seaver played. He wouldn't have been a Met without the Brave mistake. He might have stayed a Met had Matthews not been a Brave. He might have finished a Met had it not been for Lamp and the White Sox (and Cashen's front office not protecting him). He might never have put on the Met uniform a final time had collusion not gotten in the way of him continuing his career unobstructed.

The one we're interested in at the moment is the Matthews component, and not just because this, Tom's 62nd birthday, is the 30th anniversary of it. This is the 31st free agent season, the 31st winter in which baseball teams have been allowed to pursue ballplayers in mostly unfettered terms and the 31st winter in which ballplayers have happily accepted their advances.

It's definitely not the 31st year in which the Mets have been an enthusiastic participant in these sweepstakes. After avoiding taking it seriously in '76-'77, they dipped a toe in the next winter. Two toes: Tom Hausman and Elliott Maddox. We were led to believe free agents could change our lives. Reggie Jackson did that for Yankees fans. Reasonable contributors for a few years apiece, Hausman and Maddox weren't lifechangers. The Mets didn't go after those. Oh, they took a brief run at Pete Rose in the winter of '78. But Rose laughed them out of the room when they came in about two- or three-hundred grand lower per annum than what he grabbed from the Phillies. Also, the Mets weren't any good and Pete Rose (no good in a different sense) recognized that.

The Mets' first honest-to-goodness bid for name free agents came in the winter of '80, chasing Dave Winfield and Don Sutton. By then, Wilpon and Doubleday were in charge and were desperate to be taken seriously. They missed out on both eventual Hall of Famers, settling for reMetsing Rusty Staub plus Mike Cubbage and the pitcher Dave Roberts. 'Twas nice to have Rusty home, but otherwise, not a lot of impact there.

Frank Cashen pretty much stopped after that. He was building a farm system and making shrewd swaps. His disdain for free agents was practically Grantlike. Once in a while, a Dick Tidrow or a Don Aase would wander in through the back door, but otherwise, free agentry was tantamount to the plague in Flushing for the balance of the 1980s. Given that it was the Mets' longest period of sustained excellence, it was hard to argue the Bowtie should have gone the other way.

The '90s represented a sea change. Cashen was leaving, Harazin was taking over and the Mets were trying to fend off mediocrity. It was time to bring out the checkbook. Coleman following 1990, Murray and Bonilla following '91. Bobby Bo was the prize, as hard as it is to believe today. The Mets outbid the Angels and the Phillies to get him. It was considered a good thing.

As you know, all three were disappointments (to put it kindly) and the Mets retreated from free agentry; their only significant additions between the 1992 and 1998 seasons via the FA route were Joe Orsulak, Brett Butler and Lance Johnson. It wasn't until Steve Phillips succeeded Joe McIlvaine that free agents were pursued with any sense of purpose, an approach that yielded Robin Ventura and Rickey Henderson for 1999, the first time any free agents played a major role in major Met success.

Phillips' later stabs — Zeile, Appier, Trachsel, Cedeño, Weathers — didn't click nearly as consistently. His last winter crop, specifically Tom Glavine and Cliff Floyd in '02-03, wouldn't pay off until much later. The Mets fell down a veritable well and the next GM, Jim Duquette, didn't find much of a rope in free agentry. He would sign Mike Cameron, Braden Looper and Kaz Matsui but lowball Vladimir Guerrero. Duquette used free agentry to plug holes rather than make splashes.

That all changed with Omar Minaya. Pedro Martinez and Carlos Beltran and Billy Wagner are Exhibits A, B and C. The results were happy. This winter, the Mets will try to sign somebody of substance. If they don't get it done, it won't be because they don't really want to or don't really know how to. This quote from a Bob Klapisch piece in the Record this week shows how differently free agentry is treated by the Mets — and how differently free agents treat the Mets — on Tom Seaver's hopefully happy 62nd birthday from the way it all went down (or failed to) on The Franchise's 32nd:

"We're hot. It's hot to be a Met, we've got a good thing going on here," said one club official. "A couple of years ago, we couldn't get Henry Blanco to come here, and that was even after we offered him more money than anyone else. He still said no. That's all changed."

As we like to say in these parts every November 17, that's Terrific.