Hot one out there. I think I need to wear a cap. Why, I'll just put on my...

MERCURY METS CAP?

For those of you who wonder how co-bloggers surprise each other after a dozen years of continual baseball contact, it's with one of these babies. My reaction upon its presentation by Jason unto me?

"THE MERCURY METS? HOLY FUCK!"

Surely you remember the Mercury Mets. In case seven years have erased your memory of what the future was supposed to look like (suddenly 1999 is a very long time ago), this was our marketing department's twist on turning the clock ahead. Teams were supposed to be wearing uniforms that were sneak previews of what we could look forward to in Century 21. It would have worked better if we took the field dressed in gold jackets.

It's not that the Mercury Mets unis were gruesome — they were — or that we lost in our only appearance in them — we did. It was the one step too far that made it quintessential Metsiana, certainly to Jason's way of thinking (he seems to believe knocking down Shea will wipe away all the bozoness this organization brings to the table, first place or not; I think he's delusional, but don’t tell him I said that...he just gave me a Mercury Mets cap). Although the conceit of the promotion was how "futuristic" Major League shirts and pants would look in 2021, nobody bothered to remind the Mets that 2021, even then, was only 22 years away.

The experiment got away from us when Rickey Henderson stepped into lead off and DiamondVision presented Mercury Met Henderson with three eyes. Three eyes. Twenty-two years. Fun is fun, but Rickey wasn't having any of it. Neither was starter Orel Hershiser who thought the Mercury symbol was a little demonic for the tastes of The Man Upstairs, and I don't mean David Howard. Shaken beyond his hymnal, Orel took the L in that game, bowing to Pirate rookie hurler Kris Benson, someone else who allegedly had a boffo 21st century ahead of him.

A Wild Card, a Division Series triumph and a hard-fought National League Championship Series didn't erase the stigma of the Mercury Mets in 1999. The first National League pennant of the 21st century was also caught in their orbit. A snippy letter to Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated summed up the 2000 World Series in part as "Pinstripes vs. Mercury Mets outer-space uniforms". Given the choice, I'd take space.

But like I said, HOLY FUCK! It's scalding hot having a Mercury Mets cap, albeit in a size that requires me to wear it like a yarmulke if I'm to wear it at all, but that's just my big head talking. Now I'm two-thirds of the way to my goal of owning every Mets cap that will never be part of any retro craze or Sotheby's auction. There's this one, there's the reviled white ice cream cap of 1997 (of which I have two) and there's the 1976 Mets Bicentennial pillbox cap. It's like the one the Pirates wore for several years except this was blue with horizontal orange stripes and was absolutely abominable. I've wanted one for thirty years. Had one in my grasp in 1978 but passed on it in favor of a far more pedestrian Superstripe cap endemic to that era. Poor choice.

Same could be said of those ticket-takers who have not refused me admission to Shea of late. Monday night was a good night for headgear, but The Log endured another beating. At 1-5, I'm off to my worst six-game start since 1995's legendary 0-6 launch. I've been to 17.6% of my team's home games yet attended 35.7% of their home losses. Why does the best National League team this side of Mercury melt at the sight of me? It's not like I've got three eyes or something.

Some baseball games are made for converting newcomers to the sport, for infecting them with the fever, for teaching them about double plays and the hit-and-run and bunts and the infield fly and then blowing them away with the sheer joy of a come-from-behind win.

Tonight's game? It wasn't one of those.

Yes, Bronson Arroyo turned in a fine effort. Ken Griffey Jr. hit No. 548, tying Mike Schmidt. El Duque was good but not good enough. The odds caught up with Chad Bradford. Carlos Beltran hit a monster home run that didn't particularly matter. 4-2, meh, everyone get home safe. I'll remember the strange double play with El Duque snagging Arroyo's bunt attempt and then patiently waiting for Brandon Phillips to accept his remarkable degree of outness (as both teams kind of wandered off the field), but that's about it.

But wait, that's not true. I'll remember something else. Behind the outfield wall, in the parking lot, there are cranes. Cranes and stacked concrete blocks, walled away from the cars and the curious. They're the first signs of new Shea.

And tonight they were particularly welcome, because I'd had just about enough of old Shea. I used two different bathrooms. One had a busted sink; the other was out of soap. Both were flooded. (My suggestion for Diamondvision's next Define This Word contest: crepidahyrdrophobia, the not-unreasonable fear of having to use a flooded Shea Stadium bathroom in sandals.) The beer was warm. With five or six customers still in line, the woman churning out soft-serve ice cream stopped to carefully count the quarters in her register. And that level of decay and dysfunction doesn't even add up to a bad night at Shea these days. Walking out with Greg, I craned my neck to look at the cranes (um) and had a brief fantasy that they were constructing catapults out there, and soon I might get to see those giant blocks hurtling through the air (think the Pepsi Party Patrol, but gigantic and pissed) to level the grandstand and its hot-dog-free hot-dog stands and random caches of escalator parts and pigeon perches and flooded crappers and broken seats and soapless dispensers and urinal ads recruiting for the Dallas police (yes, really). Too harsh? Well, when you've twice had to step gingerly through a lake of toilet water, nostalgia isn't uppermost in the mind. Right now 2009 seems awfully far away.

Ack. Gotta close with something better. Fortunately, I have something. This afternoon for my day job I wound up doing a TV shoot at Sotheby's, which is about to have an exhibition of baseball memorabilia. Not cards and stuff like that (though there are cards, including 1968 Topps 3-D prototypes no one knew existed) but bats used by Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, balls signed by the 1927 Yankees (that's old enough for them to have lost all but a whiff of brimstone), and uniforms worn by Jackie Robinson and Ted Williams and Warren Spahn (as a Met!) and Hank Aaron when he was a rookie. There's a 1858 scorer's report from an All-Star Game in Brooklyn that looks new and one of the first gloves worn by a fielder.

And there's the centerpiece of the show: a Senators road jersey worn by Walter Johnson sometime between 1919 and 1922. I was standing with a Sotheby's official chatting about the uniform and the amazing condition it was in and she said, "It's wool -- you won't believe how heavy it is. Here, feel it."

Um...feel it? Walter Johnson's uniform? Really?

I did. Gingerly. The jersey didn't spontaneously combust. I wasn't carted off to the gulag. It was heavy -- heavy enough to pity anyone who wore it in the summer, in fact. Wow, the Big Train pitched in this, I thought. Wore it to face Cobb and Ruth. It's been around for all these years and now it's here. Right here between my fingers.

Even on a night when we lost 4-2 and our park seemed like a particularly shabby antique, I'd call that a pretty good day.