Joshua, Met fan in training, made his big-league debut two years ago, watching Kris Benson get poleaxed by the Dodgers. Last year he saw the D-Train mow us down. So for his third-ever game, I was kind of sweating it. The kid's 0-2, what if he's a jinx?

Kind of sweating it, ha. The mezzanine was the approximate temperature of the surface of the sun, with the crowd on slow boil as the Mets failed to hit, muffed plays, relieved crappily and generally looked the way they've looked since clearing Customs. (And I didn't even know Jose Lima was back in the building for some unfathomable reason. The Neanderthal conservatism of major-league front offices, sheesh. Genghis Khan looks progressive by comparison.) Beyond the fact that it was too hot to move (though not too hot for my son to insist on being on the lap of whichever parent looked marginally further from heatstroke), the crowd's annoyance was held in check only by the fact that the Mets looked as irritated with themselves as we were with them. After Glavine failed to handle Zach Duke's bunt, he batted it back toward the pitcher's mound with his glove. Then he did it again, and for a moment I imagined he might just keep on swiping at it, muttering all the way, until ball and pitcher exited through the bullpen gate.

But then the worm turned. My son was dwelling in a parallel universe by then: The kid had spent a lively two-plus hours cheering for the Mets by number ("Get a hit, Number 11!"), then by uniform ("The man in the white shirt is my friend!"), broken briefly by disapproving of my hollering at Angel Hernandez ("You shouldn't say he's a BAD MAN, Daddy!") and crying because Number 7 had to wait his turn before he could bat again (with Reyes our only offense for much of the game, I felt the same way) until hot dogs and ice cream and heat and the lack of a nap had left him a ranting, overstimulated mess, more interested in trying to dismantle Shea than in whatever those guys down on the field were failing to do.

Come the 8th, the crowd's near-savage exultation fit his mood perfectly: He cheered madly for Endy's double that left us on the brink and then enjoyed his insane father waving him in the air like a boy turned American flag when Nady sent Wright and Chavez home to somehow give us the lead. Then Billy Wagner didn't make us incredibly nervous for once (maybe Heilman had already squeezed all the incompetence out of the relief sponge) and we were free and clear and my kid finally had a Met victory for the first page of what I hope will be a long ledger.

Later, walking the approximately 25 miles back to the car, the play at the plate on Chavez left me pondering an apparent paradox: Since Angel Hernandez is both incompetent and out to get us, how was Chavez safe? Had our otherwise-inexplicable employment of former Hernandez partner-in-crime Michael Fucker caused our least-favorite ump to abandon his ancient grudge? Or had Angel's primeval urge to screw up a call trumped his hunger to screw the Mets?

Imagine my astonishment when I finally queue'ed up ESPN Motion and it looked like Angel, by golly, got the call right. I suppose I should apologize, at least in some half-assed way, but let's not kid ourselves. This has been a week in which Angel Hernandez called a close play correctly and Alex Rodriguez came through in the clutch. If the sun rises in the west tomorrow, I won't be a bit surprised.

(Oh, and Greg -- the guy in the aisle next to us got skulled by a foul ball. My thumb emerged intact, as did my child, but that was through no action of mine -- I watched the ball arrive in mute, useless astonishment. Anyway, strange things are afoot in Faith and Fear lives. Let's be careful out there.)

Blowouts that go against you figure to be dreary business. Rare that you can attend an 11-1 loss and come away thinking it was one of the weirdest nights you ever spent at Shea Stadium. Yet despite the lack of eventual intrigue in the final score, it was.

I imagine that somewhere in the decisive fifth inning when Jose Castillo was at bat, Gary Cohen mentioned that one John Maine pitch was "fouled back into the crowd". Well, I was in that crowd. My left thumb was the leading edge of that crowd. I still have my thumb. I don't have the ball.

Through the thoughtful invitation of my friend David and the unidentified patron who favored him with two choice loge seats behind home, we had the unique perspective that loge can afford. You could really see the ball. You could see it being pitched, you could see it being belted and you could see it coming at ya. Like Castillo's foul.

It was coming at me. Not at my face but just to the left of me. It's making its way up over the boxes and into the reserved. And I have time for one thought, which was...

"I can catch this."

That was just silly. I couldn't catch it. I'm still following the advice of Marvin the Fifth/Sixth Grade Counselor from Camp Avnet, the sage who told us to leave our gloves in our cubbyholes as we filed on the bus for Shea Stadium 33 years ago next week 'cause "you'll just lose 'em."

If I wore my glove Monday night, I probably would have lost Castillo's foul, too. But it would have been healthier. I wouldn't have put my left thumb in the way of sizzling Major League harm. This was no lofty foul. This was the essence of "fouled back into the crowd". It glanced off my left thumb — the first time I've touched a foul at Shea after at least 2,700 innings of waiting — before hitting the guy sitting behind me on the arm and apparently beaning a woman sitting behind him before bouncing into someone else's hands (that was one magic horsehide). The lady was eventually presented with the ball in recognition of taking the worst Jose Castillo could mete out.

It's times like these that I'm thrilled that I've never been broken of the habit of chewing my thumbs. It's a lifetime of thumb-chewing, even through six years of braces, that has given me a marvelously strong callus which is where Castillo's foul hit. It felt like when you whack your funny bone provided your funny bone resides in your left thumb. It buzzed for a couple of innings but nothing was broken and nothing was bruised; nothing was gained, but nothing was lost.

'Cept the game, but that was going to happen anyway. When we weren't watching fouls make a beeline for our personages, we could see Maine (a surprise starter so surprising that I had no idea he was the man until I heard the third pitch of the game on the radio and no idea that Soler was gone; shucks) look unhittable for four-plus innings. His command abandoned him all at once.

In less than five frames, he was way over 100 pitches. That was weird.

The first-place Mets were hitting more than the last-place Pirates for most of the night, but not better, certainly not well enough to register a safety with someone in scoring position. That was weird.

By the time the Bucs began to slip away from the Mets, our relieving began to appear worse than our starting. That was weird.

And in the eighth, the mostly dependable Pedro Feliciano gave up two of the longest and hardest hit home runs, back-to-back, that I've ever witnessed from wherever I sat. That was very weird. Weird and disconcerting. I don't know the Pirates very well, but I do believe one of their eighth-inning sluggers was named McLouth. You can't spell McLouth without clout, that's for damn sure.

It wasn't just any 11-1 defeat, so it figured that the reactions would be somewhat out of the ordinary. Even though I don't sanction it, I'm surprised there wasn't more booing. Most of the hostility in our part of loge was funneled through one fan who kept telling Willie that he was "stupid" and should "go back to the Yankees." Maybe the promise of fireworks kept everybody seated comfortably.

Two attendees were determined to be just that. I prefer sitting on the aisle because it gives me more legroom. As compensation, I have to get up a dozen or two times a game, maybe more, to let people in and out. Once in a while it gets on my nerves but mostly it goes with the territory. Well, one row down from David and me, there was a lady on the aisle who wasn't having any of it, not by the ninth. Late in the game, a family of three had gotten up to do whatever and came back together. They wanted to return to their seats in the middle of the row. The aislekeeper put her foot down...or, more accurately, nailed her ass down. She and her son wouldn't budge to let them pass. The father in the threesome began cursing her out. She said nothing. An usher was awakened to settle the dispute.

Finally the lady burst out with her complaint: "I CAME TO SEE A BASEBALL GAME! I DIDN'T COME TO STAND UP AND SIT DOWN!" I can't argue with her logic, but since when does logic have a place at Shea Stadium? In exchange for being coaxed into standing for five or six seconds — "THIS IS THE LAST TIME I'M GETTING UP!" — so the aggrieved party could sit down, the usher moved her and her son into a few rows down into a box seat. The squeaky wheel got the grease but, judging from the applause of several in our section, nobody minded the appeasement.

When it was 8-1, I reminded David that I was here six years ago on another Fireworks Night, the Mets down by the same score. But this wasn't that night and even on that night, I didn't hang around for the Gruccifest. Thus, I bid David adieu once the final out sealed the Mets' fate. They've been outscored 27-8 since Sunday night. I'm 2-6 on the year. I've seen eight different starters and the only wins I've enjoyed were secured via Glavine and Pedro. A little foreboding, no?

On the Pirates: They're atrocious? They played like the Red Sox did last week. I don't suppose it had anything to do with their common opponent. Every game I see the Mets lose to the Pirates is a blur of futility. They lose by 9-0 and 5-0 and 4-0 and 5-1 and now 11-1. The only NL teams the Mets have a losing record against when I'm in the neighborhood are the Braves (13-21) and the Pirates (11-12). I should hate the Pirates more than I do, but look where hating the Braves has gotten me.

My favorite thing about Fireworks Night is that if you leave after the game, you have the easiest trip of the year out of Shea (unless the year is 1993 and the trippin' is automatically easy). 54,000 filled the stands/seats Monday night. Maybe 4,000 departed in advance of the postgame show. Walking unmolested to the 7 — no pushing, no shoving, no waiting — I fantasized I had a police escort. Clear the way, folks! Clear the way! Half of Faith and Fear has to make his train at Woodside! My fantasies are pretty tame.

Made that train. Was on it in Forest Hills when I saw colored lights filling the northern sky. It was those Shea fireworks after all. Got to see 'em and got to walk in the door before 11:30. The Mets still lost, the night was still weird and the foul ball was still elsewhere.

There's no moral except maybe that more kids should chew their thumbs.