It's not losses in October or September or April through August that try Mets fans' souls. It's what goes down in the offseason. It's Lastings Milledge for Brian Schneider and Ryan Church and all the rationalizing one is forced into when it happens.

Hey, Schneider's a pretty good defensive catcher. He gives us strength up the middle. He can handle a pitching staff. And Church? He sprayed doubles all over RFK last year. Get him in a less cavernous setting and who knows what kind of power numbers he'll put up? Also, he was probably naïve and didn't mean anything offensive when he said the one thing anybody remembers him ever saying.

Yup — nothing like a steady diet of chicken salad and lemonade to get you through the winter.

My crystal ball is completely fogged up so I can't tell you how much, how little or how not at all we will regret the departure of Lastings Milledge. He could be as multifaceted and dynamic as his flashes of brilliance have suggested or he could be a hopeless head case forever baffled by the intricacies of the curveball and the niceties of clubhouse decorum. There is ample anecdotal evidence to support either possibility. Don't know and won't find out with the Mets. I suspect a little of each is probably what the Nationals will get.

I would have liked to have found out here, though. I would have liked to have watched a 23-year-old rightfielder who we've seen dash around first and hit into gaps and make circus catches and throw out baserunners try to do a little more of that on a fulltime basis. I would have liked to have discovered how jaunty his home run homages would have become...or observed how he toned them down as he grew older. But I would have liked to have seen the home runs. What I don't like is that a kid, yes a kid, with as much talent as he's shown has been shown the door based on personality — probably the simple misdeed of having one.

Know your place, rook, indeed.

That's gotta be why Lastings Milledge is a Washington National. It's not because two partial-season auditions didn't yield Rookie of the Year stats or automatically secure a corner outfield job. It's not because of a couple of complex handshakes. It's not because "his stock has dropped" as a performer. Who can tell what his stock is at 22? He had his ups, he had his downs, but he still has his future. He couldn't bring you the mythical frontline starter just now? That means he had to bring you two middlebodies instead of perhaps developing into the kind of player others call you to obtain? You give him up for a catcher and an outfielder whom, intuition suggests if they were such hot stuff, would have been picked off by a smart team that saw their value long ago or deemed building blocks by the Nats and thus stubbornly maintained? Without having at hand the transcripts of every dialogue every GM has been having with Jim Bowden, I can't say for sure that no other team went looking for Brian Schneider and Ryan Church. But I wouldn't bet there was a huge market and I would bet recent top prospects weren't offered in exchange.

Listening to Omar explain the heretofore hidden desirable attributes (perfect Met fits, it turns out) of Schneider and Church on Friday was more painful than cramping up at Twister. Schneider is gonna give us that strength up the middle we've been so yearning for...though I don't remember "strength up the middle" even once entering the conversation as a dire need to be addressed in the past two years. And Church? He's a gem — a gem! — Omar tells us. He's just what we were looking for and we didn't even know it.

What's that old bromide about baseball general managers, lying and lips moving? I don't expect Omar to come out and declare "somebody didn't like Lastings Milledge, thought he was a bad seed, decided he was never gonna grow out of it and we had to get rid of him pronto à la Carl Everett for John Hudek; Schneider and Church were who I could come up with on short notice, and it turns out they play positions where we have holes at the moment, know what I'm sayin'?" But the lines weren't that tough to read between. Unless this was a trade made on perceived merit, in which case...Brian Schneider and Ryan Church in exchange for a tooled-up outfielder who in no way had played himself out of further consideration and who will not be 23 until April?

Come now, Mr. Minaya.

With the caveat that this offseason has been rife with making cases for or against infielders and catchers who aren't or were never going to be 2008 Mets, thus maybe we ought not take any projections involving Church or Schneider too seriously, what's done is done. If we wanted to root for a team that had no chance of giving up on young talent for older mediocrities, we should have devoted ourselves to fantasy baseball. Otherwise, our club (any club) will occasionally bring you players you weren't seeking, give away players you anticipated enjoying and engineer trades that make you miserable at worst, rationalize at best. The gamest among us can Google VORPs and whatnot to detect the positives in Chruch's production or suddenly remember the time Schneider nailed Reyes at second when it appeared Jose had the base stolen cold. The rest of us can stew, brace for the genius move coming next and take not a little solace in the knowledge that we've been known to be plenty wrong about plenty of trades before.