WW, of course, being scorecard shorthand for "wasn't watching."

Last night went down as a rare WW on multiple fronts. I did catch an inning or two during dinner at 2 Toms, the justifiably legendary old-school Italian place in Gowanus, seeing enough on their old black-and-white set to grasp that we were tenuously ahead and the Padres were wearing those camouflage disasters. But then they changed the set over to basketball. I protested, but fairly quietly, despite the fact that at that point I was already drunker than a monkey: 2 Toms is a bastion of Yankee loyalty, and my being a Met fan had already earned me an only-half-kidding growl of "You're on thin ice." If you've ever been to 2 Toms, you know that you don't mess around there, and I've already used up about eight of my nine lives where it's concerned: During the 2001 World Series Emily and I ate there with friends and in rapid succession our friend Pete (who has an amusing, maddening attraction to what you're not supposed to do) asked for the dinner options to be repeated (a no-no), then asked for something off the menu (a bigger no-no). And then we got caught cheering for the Diamondbacks.

Anyway, the rest of the night turned into a fairly taxing misadventure: There was the ill-advised bar after dinner, the subway may as well have been a tesseract given my tattered ability to navigate it, and I don't even want to talk about some of the other things that went awry. End result: For the first time in a very long time, I woke up this morning with no idea if we'd won or lost. Happily, my blog brother provided. Sounds like a great game, I thought, before staggering back to bed. (And when Keith noted that he was familiar with the wrong side of 4:30 and these days the recovery time is 72 hours, I nodded and moaned.)

The second WW, for today's game, could stand for "wasn't watchable."

Is there anyone among us who still thinks Victor Zambrano is salvageable? Here are the counts Victor ran leading up to pitches put in play, against a team whose hitters didn't exactly show themselves to be selective this series: 2-1, 0-2 (a home run), 3-1, 2-1, 3-1, 3-1, 0-2, 0-1, 0-0, 0-0, 0-1, 3-1, 3-2, 3-1, 3-1, 1-0, 0-0, 1-1, 3-2, 1-0, 3-2, 0-1. End result: 81 pitches, 44 for strikes, and a tired pen. A typically awful Victor outing, and don't tell me it's just that his location was horrible. He kept mucking around with predominantly change-ups and sliders when it was obvious he had no command of them, got into bad counts, then had to throw fastballs -- which, predictably, got hammered.

It's yet more evidence supporting an unhappy but inescapable conclusion: Victor Zambrano doesn't know how to pitch.

The arm is a gift from the gods, but the brain doesn't know what to do with it. Witness last week, when he followed Willie's curt scouting report that "he made bad pitches" by lamely arguing that the pitches were good but the location wasn't. Huh? Wha? That was reminiscent of Warren Spahn's famous quote that "for the first 60 feet that was a helluva pitch," but Spahnie was kidding. Victor approaches hitters backwards, is scared of his own superb stuff, is easily rattled, and shows no ability to bear down when he has to.

And he's going to be 31 this summer -- at this point, he ain't gonna learn. The fans loathe him, and I no longer feel sorry for him when they let him have both barrels. Yes, Victor's trying his best, and my philosophy is that you shouldn't boo anybody who's trying their best, saving the leather lungs for malingerers, the immoral or amoral, spectacularly negligent mental mistakes (which shouldn't have carryover) or repeated moments of incompetence in the same game that doom the team. (This also shouldn't have carryover.) But I do think there's something else that's boo-worthy: repeated evidence that a player isn't mentally prepared to perform at the necessary level. Armando Benitez is the obvious example, with his eggshell ego and his endless off-field disasters that he let follow him onto the mound. But Zambrano has reached that point too: He's taken the L in his own head before he ever throws a pitch.

And it's not survivable. Beyond the fans, the writers smell blood: When the beat guys start criticizing your clubhouse demeanor, you've entered a death spiral that's almost impossible to pull out of. Tom Glavine managed it last year, but Victor Zambrano ain't Tom Glavine.

Forget Scott Kazmir. This has nothing to do with Scott Kazmir. This is about 2006, and the dead spot in our starting rotation, and what's to be done about it before it costs us too many games. As for Rick Peterson's infamous prediction that he could fix Victor in about 10 minutes? I think there must have been an exponent missing.

Pedro Martinez and Mike Piazza will each be voted into in the Hall of Fame as soon as they're eligible. They have been great for a very long time. They may not have inhabited greatness in tandem when given the chance as early Dodgers and recent Mets, but they are two of the defining players of their generation.

If this sounds like deathgrip of the obvious, well, yeah, but sometimes the players are the thing and Saturday night, one couldn't help but be moved by the sight of legends doing what made them legendary.

Pedro has the world's greatest April record, the greatest record for any month in the history of baseball. Learning that during Saturday's Snighcast gives me a bit of pause for what he'll be in September, but that's a ways off. For now, it's been a revelation, for the second consecutive April, to watch him ply. Keith Hernandez said Pedro earned his paycheck the way he took care of the Padres. I don't know that anybody earns anything over $10 million annually without curing a disease or creating an alternative energy source, but in the terms of what he is paid to do, yeah, he's a bargain.

Martinez and Glavine both have been giving master classes in pitching all April. It's awe-inspiring. Have we ever had this before? Of course we had Tom Seaver when he and the world were young (we just passed the 36th anniversary of T. Terrific's 19-K/10-straight vs. SD) and Doc when Doc was never going to stop being Doc. But that's not what I'm talking about. Pedro and Glavine — sorry, there's only room for only one "Tom" in this paragraph — are bringing a long lifetime of experience at the top of their profession to the mound every fifth day, and they are doing it while still performing at that elevated status.

This isn't Warren Spahn trying to keep it going. These are two aces pitching like Cy Young emeriti, one who some began to doubt in Boston, the other who looked pasturebound after Atlanta. They've combined for eight starts this season and in all eight they have, in the Murphspeak, worn the hitters on their watch chain. It's not Seaver '71 or Gooden '85 or Pedro '99. It's something practically every bit as satisfying. It's not a matter of blowing away the opposition. It's outfoxing them at almost every turn. It's being smarter than the average batter and putting that hard-won wisdom to good use.

It's Pedro striking out eleven and going seven when doing both were ideal. I'm not sure he couldn't have gone eleven and struck out seven, conserving some pop here, working a corner there, teasing a Padre there if that indeed was what was called for. Once the Mets got him a couple of runs, did you doubt Pedro would tease, taunt and tame San Diego? They could don all the camouflage they wanted, but they couldn't hit, they couldn't run and they sure as hell couldn't hide.

If Pedro Martinez was the main attraction (and the indefatigable Carlos Delgado was the featured performer and our 6-7 hitters Nady and Castro headed a strong supporting cast), then you have to give it up for the walk-on made by someone whose name used to stick high atop the marquee and above the title. They're not Mike Piazza & The Mets anymore, but Piazza's cameo as fearsome enemy slugger did not make for an altogether unpleasant sight.

We won 8-1, so I can be generous. Mike got to 399 with a blast off Pedro. Pedro could afford it, so in hindsight, applause, applause. Sadly, I had turned the channel to a Barry Bonds' at-bat in Colorado and missed Mike's mash live (I thought we were still in commercial), but replays showed vintage Piazza, high, deep and almost straight away to center. As 2-1 became 4-1 and 6-1 and 8-1, I could feel good that he collected his first homer since Opening Day, even if it was against us, even if it was in Padre fatigues.

I figured out why Mike Piazza as a Padre taking his swings against the Mets hasn't really moved me. Because he's not a Padre in more than name. He's said all the right things. He talks about the Padres as if he really cares what happens to them, but you can tell he doesn't. He's as likely to throw a game as he to throw out a baserunner, but you know what I mean. This is a soft landing for The Greatest Hitting Catcher in the History of Baseball. This is a place to pad his power totals a little and get some sun and call it a night. He's not pulling that dreadful Johnny Damon "we/us" shtick. He hasn't suddenly contracted "always wanted to be a..." fever. He's a Padre because they pay him to be one. He's back to full-time Met legend as soon as he is no longer contractually obligated to be something else.

Of all the quotes mined from Mike this week, the one I liked the most regarded his amazement that a three-game losing streak in San Diego doesn't set off panic in Petco Park. It's just three baseball games. As Met after Met ran him into the ground, I couldn't help but wonder how many calls to WFAN such a stolen base surfeit would generate if he were still our catcher. I doubt anybody out west will much dwell on the details of Saturday night come Sunday morning. Whether he misses us or we're missing him, I think it's for the best that he is where he is and we are where we are in 2006. At this late date, Mike Piazza deserves a little benign neglect.

So he'll wear 33. He'll hit a few more out. Barring injury or early retirement, he'll come to Shea the second week of August to doff his helmet and cause a Mike-sized buzz, and two months later, I'm guessing, quietly depart from active participation in the game he dominated for a decade — and still can when his muscle memory cooperates.

The Padres had three hits. Mike had two. When he got the first one, the homer, it shouldn't have been surprising. The stats say he owns Pedro Martinez, which is a pretty impressive piece of real estate to claim. The second one was a solid single in the ninth that I was sort of, kind of, just a little hoping would have some lift and distance to it, because with a seven-run lead, would it have killed us to have seen Mike hit No. 400 in a Mets game?

No, but it would not have been optimal. Jorge Julio, perhaps imbued by a stream of shots poured down his throat while laid out flat on a bartop the way a crumpled Popeye revived from the cans of spinach Olive Oyl forcefed him (or don't you read the gossip pages?), has been suddenly, shockingly lights-out the last few times he's pitched. He was dynamite in the eighth. It would do us no good in the long-term to see him blow up in the ninth, not after the first two Padres got on via strikeout-wild pitch and error. Piazza's ensuing single scored nobody and Julio proceeded to emerge unscathed and the Mets had a win and maybe, just maybe, a bulletproof bullpen in the making.

That's an important detail, but a detail for another day. When you've seen Pedro Martinez continue to be Pedro Martinez for seven innings and Mike Piazza guest star as Mike Piazza for one mighty swing, it seems almost blasphemous to mention that anyone else played baseball Saturday night.