I sat here Saturday night and declared we had all the starting pitching we could possibly use right inside our three blue walls.

Since then, we've given up eight runs a game.

I opined last night that Paul Lo Duca, not Mike Piazza, is the best possible catcher we could have right now.

Then tonight's game ends with the bases loaded, Lo Duca at bat and a defensive inside-out swing that sends Bobby Howry's slider to nest in Neifi Perez's glove.

Our pitching's gone to seed.
Lo Duca didn't deliver.
I'm a little nervous about spotting any good of consequence in anything I see from the Mets.

Thus, consider the source when I tell you that Tom Glavine has really great hair.

No kidding. I see him surrounded by microphones and notepads offering up explanations like they're fastballs high in the strike zone after these losses, and I'm like, "man, that guy looks pretty good." Looks better in the clubhouse than on the mound lately. I generally don't notice these things, but it's a shame he has to wear a cap.

If he comes out bald next week, he can blame me. But if his hair is all we lose, then we'll be all right.

Before we move on to tonight's game, a quick acknowledgment that last night saw the unveiling of another significant work by The Artist Currently Known as Keith Hernandez. Xavier Nady ended the sixth when Jacque Jones made a very nice running catch that left him nearly flipping over the padded wall beyond the right-field foul line. We had friends over for dinner and were keeping half an eye on the game, sound off, while chatting. As Jones made the catch, a fan in the front row cringed comically away from the ball like a man who suddenly finds himself sharing an inflatable raft with a Great White Shark.

Man, I thought. When they come back from the break, Keith is going to be killing that poor blighter.

Sure enough, after Phil Nevin grounded out to start the seventh, out came the replay. We turned up the sound expectantly. Keith was all over it -- he even used the telestrator. "In sandlot," he said, "that's the guy you put in right field." Ouch!

I laughed and then turned expectantly to Emily, who didn't disappoint.

"You're lucky that wasn't you," she said, hitting her mark perfectly. And therein lies a story, one veteran readers may have heard it before. (If so, sorry.)

May 11, 1996 was marked by an 18-minute fight that began when Pete Harnisch cold-cocked Scott Servais -- amazingly enough, the last fight the Mets got into, not counting slow walks to the foul lines with furrowed brows and Mike Piazza chasing relievers around infields. John Franco celebrated John Franco Day by getting ejected for his part in the melee. Great game, great fight. But that's another story.

Earlier in that long-ago game, Emily left her seat for refreshments, leaving me and our friend Chris, the Human Fight of commenting fame, in the mezzanine. While she was gone, a batter hit a ball right at us -- no angle, depth perception absolutely zero help. And, well, not to put to fine a point on it, but we cringed away from it. You might call the nature of our cringing spasmodic. You might call it pathetic. You would not call it a particularly proud moment.

Someone about 10 feet in front of us wound up with the ball and held it up proudly as the Human Fight and I exchanged a somewhat-ashamed glance.

"Good thing," he said finally, "that your wife wasn't here to see that."

As if on cue, enter Emily from the tunnel, hot dogs and what-not in hand.

"YOU TWO!" she boomed. "I SAW YOU ON TV! YOU COWERED AWAY FROM THAT BALL!"

Much merriment in our section. Muttering and foot-gazing from the Human Fight and me. Cringing telestrated guy who's spent today getting crap from his buddies, I feel your pain.

Well-said, blog brother. (If you just got here and want to know what I'm going on about, skip down a bit.)

I'll go a step further and say that while I'll always have an extra-large spot in my heart reserved for Mike Piazza, this team is better off with Paul Lo Duca. And it's not just a factor of timing, of Piazza's inevitable decline allowing someone else to take the stage. It's more than that.

Don't get me wrong: As you noted, Mike Piazza lifted this franchise out of the doldrums essentially by his lonesome and became a New York icon. He'll be back soon and the fans better be on their feet. (And to think he ended his first year receiving A-Rod-level boos. The shame!) But while obviously a smart, thoughtful guy, Piazza never seemed comfortable in the spotlight. There was a very revealing quote about him in one of those periodic devastating stories about the Mets, one that appeared in the New York Times Magazine during the wretched Alomar years.

Piazza said his favorite movie was "Patton," and noted that he'd love to work for a guy like that. Work for a guy like that, not be a guy like that. He didn't want to be a leader, he wanted to be led.

But while there may be born leaders, more often that not leadership is something that's thrust upon people -- if you want to stick with your military history, look at Grant, a man transformed by leadership's call from a drunken shopkeeper to the savior of the Republic. It was a call Piazza never chose to hear -- he wanted to be an ensemble guy, letting leadership settle on players on the decline and players who didn't deserve the mantle and pitchers with the front office's ear and even relievers.

Lo Duca isn't going to the Hall of Fame. He's not the kind of player that makes you put off the trip to the men's room if he's due up this inning. But in one important respect, he's far more than Piazza was: He leads, and he's not the least bit shy about doing it. There's the clubhouse leadership so ably captured by Tom Verducci in SI last week, and there's the on-field variety, too. Even before the Mets starting reeling off victories and collecting clutch hits and running wild and playing pinch-me baseball, there was something different about them, something new. And it didn't take long to find the source: When the game was in the balance, there was Lo Duca coming out to the mound to bark at a pitcher losing focus, or making sure the infielders knew their assignments. The crackle and sizzle of this team begins behind the plate, with Captain Red Ass. And it's an energy, an edge, that I never saw with Piazza.

I love Mike Piazza. He defined an era with this team and carried us up from nothing to some of the happiest years of my life as a baseball fan. And I want to see his 31 up on the wall with 14, 37, 41 and 42. But this is a better team with Lo Duca. It's not so quantifiable through OPS or VORP or RCAA, but you can absolutely see it in the most important stat of all: W-L. There's a reason Lo Duca is still beloved in Los Angeles and Florida, a reason his old manager chose to wear his number. This year, it's been our great good fortune to appreciate why.