...or we'll undress you on the scoreboard.

They say on any day or night you might see something in baseball you've never seen before, but a ball skipping up an outfielder's sleeve and rolling around inside his uniform as runners circle the bases? Never seen that before, can't imagine I ever will again. (Though, as Gary Cohen noted, the Mets won a game in 1992 when Daryl Boston got hit by a pitch that wound up in his shirt. Set your clock for 2020 and the Mets' next shirt-related adventure.) Actually, poor Ed Rogers did a pretty good job, all things considered, coolly reaching up and fetching the ball from behind his neck. He might have been better off having Julio Franco's single go up his sleeve too, considering his throw to the plate almost left Shea Stadium. (When the ump called obstruction on Miguel Tejada, I was briefly and intensely sorry that that sneaky traitor Lee Mazzilli wasn't still the O's manager.)

David Wright hitting a grand slam, on the other hand, is something I devoutly hope to see at regular intervals for the next two decades. Today's was particularly sweet for the way it erased all the frustration that had been building. Adam Loewen's "Bull Durham" level of wildness (Don't dig in there, boys!) made him appear ripe for a shellacking all afternoon, but it had been a weekend of waiting for shellackings that never came, hadn't it? Wright's drive (on a pretty good pitch) reversed all that in mere seconds, letting the crowd finally give the Mets the roar that a 9-1 road trip deserved. I won't ever understand people who think baseball's boring (which isn't the same as claiming I find every moment of it interesting), in part because all that nothing happening ratchets up the tension until it finally snaps with a big something happening. And then you think, "Oh, I see. The point of all that stuff was to make this a better story. Cool!"

Our lost Friday and Saturday night? We didn't even lose any ground, thanks to the Braves' continuing descent and the Phillies tangling with the juggernaut known as the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. And with that lead standing at a fairly luxurious 9 1/2, there wasn't even a thought of running the full varsity out there for a day game after a night game in wretched heat. That should be good for Delgado and Lo Duca at the tail end of the season, and it's not like we missed a beat with the JV: Ramon Castro looked like the 2005 edition, Julio Franco leapt and hit and ran like he was 27, and Eli Marrero made some nice plays out there in right. (Though his game saver in the 6th was mostly impressive because he had to salvage a bad route to the ball.)

And hey, points to Jon Stewart, who more than demonstrated his bona fides by recalling Jim McAndrew and Joe Foy. Stewart was the other end of one of my enormously rare NYC celebrity sightings: Emily and Joshua and I were walking through the Village when a guy who looked vaguely familiar glanced at my Met cap and touched the bill of his own with a smile. Waitaminute, wasn't that... I thought a few steps later. Yep, it was. He's one of us.

Crappy losses to dismal opponents generate little cause for concern as regards our unassailable Mets, but they're still crappy. I didn't like 'em in '86 and I don't like 'em now. But they happen, sometimes in twos.

The second day of the rest of our lives went suspiciously like the first: flat and flat again. Maybe it's just some kind of delayed jet lag or bus lag or whatever weariness that kicks in after you've finished conquering your foes and elevating yourselves above the rabble. It may surprise some of our younger readers (or older readers with limited recall) to learn that the Mets can get beat in a pair of games and it's not a sign of the apocalypse, certainly not with the Phillies comatose and the Braves in the morgue...tied for last with the surging Marlins, in case you're wondering why you can't find Atlanta without a magnifying glass.

Need immediate gratification? The Nationals won in inspiring fashion Saturday to move into sole possession of third, about a hundred games behind the Mets. They are granted special dispensation on this Interleague weekend, as will be other NL East teams when they play the Skanks. Even in the heat of 1999 and 2000, even when it was the Braves, I've always given our intradivision rivals my blessings in those contests. Some matters loom larger than any displeasing, fleeting shift in the standings.

As for the Orioles, they're annoying. Brandon Fahey? Nick Markakis? Chris Ray? They're the new Expos, except we only have to play them three and out (and they'll still exist next season). Come to think of it, three encounters with Leo Mazzone's charges versus the traditional nineteen is a perfectly reasonable tradeoff. Kris Benson heating up like a hot tub instead of emitting the lukeyness to which we became accustomed? Well, you could see that coming from 200 miles down I-95.

Yellowing mental snapshots of Benson and Melvin Mora are two of the souvenirs I've kept from what I consider the best day I ever spent inside Shea Stadium, October 3, 1999. Benson pitched the game of his life to, thankfully, no decision. Mora emerged fully grown from obscurity and sparked the most crucial rally of the decade. The Mets won the right to play another day and then for another two weeks after that. Realizing they were both in the visitors' lineup last night made me smile just the slightest bit. It didn't, however, make me wistful as it would have at any point in the past five years. 2006 isn't about wist for the past. It's about thrust for the now.

I'm trusting we'll get back to thrusting ASAP.