We hold these truths to be self-evident: There can never be enough interesting/entertaining writing about baseball in general and the Mets in particular. Sure, the Mets play nearly every night and are covered by some 10 local papers and a fleet of blogs. But even then, eventually you've read everything the knights of the keyboard have written, and you're still wanting more. Because damn it, it's six hours (or 20, or two or 0.25) until there's a game on, and you're worried about Pedro's rehab, the state of the farm system, Mark Teixeira and what statistical simulations suggest will happen for the rest of the season, to name the first four things that pop into your head.

Over there on the left we've got a lot of links. But on this off-day, I wanted to spotlight two writers I find particularly entertaining and interesting.

The first is Marty Noble, the veteran reporter turned MLB.com scribe. I've got enormous respect for Noble's years of hard work, baseball knowledge and the unfussily straightforward way he offers insider analysis. But what I really love are his mailbags. (Truth be told, I don't read game stories anymore, no matter who writes them.) Noble seems to save up the dumbest questions Met fans can imagine for some day when he just can't stand it anymore. Then it's time for a mailbag -- in which Marty lines up the witless and whacks away at them until he's got his equilibrium back.

Take this one. Things start off OK, as Noble uses a reader's disbelief about Rickey Henderson's leadoff homers vs. the Mets' to illustrate how great players can seem to distort statistics. But from there ... well, buckle up.

Jordan R. supposes that Duaner Sanchez will be a free agent when he comes off the DL, at which point the Mets should sign him to a two- or three-year contract because "he is so valuable to their bullpen when he's healthy." Noble's fairly restrained here, calmly correcting the record about Sanchez's contract status before getting a bit testy: "Now, why would the Mets want to offer him anything more than one-season contract, even if they were competing for his services?"

Alex X. wants to move Fernando Martinez to second base for no particular reason I could detect. "I've never quite understood the public's fascination with changing players' positions," huffs Marty, then dispenses with a similar question suggesting Ramon Castro man first.

Next comes the overly sentimental Marty C., who wants Mike Piazza back as a backup catcher and World Series DH. "So you want the Mets to acquire a player who might serve as a DH for a maximum of four games in October and carry him for 2 1/2 months as a backup catcher with tarnished defensive skills?" asks Noble, and you can easily picture his eyebrows arching higher and higher until they're levitating and have to be retrieved with a stepladder.

My favorite Marty Noble mailbag, though, came in April. This one starts off calmly enough, with straightforward analysis of Pelfrey, Humber, Vargas and the rest of the waiting-in-the-wings pitchers. Marty's pretty even-keeled, except at the end, when his advice is "lest you all be labeled junior Steinbrenners, be a tad more patient."

But then, oh, that next question. It still makes me laugh half a season later. The luckless Dan R. wants to know why the Mets keep using Aaron Heilman "when all he does is throw the same pitch over and over again and get destroyed by hitters." Marty coolly acknowledges Heilman's recent woes and explains what Willie's thinking about the bullpen is. But then he can't keep it in any more: "He has been an invaluable asset for two seasons. You want to do what with him now? The rotation? The Minors? Exile? Prison?"

My other new favorite is the New York Sun's Tim Marchman, who's consistently very smart, bitingly acerbic and really funny. He first caught my eye with this terrific scouting report of the '07 Mets, including his pitiless, laugh-out-loud summation of Moises Alou: "a horrible defensive outfielder, with the range of a box turtle."

But then whenever Marchman writes, I know I'll laugh out loud at least once, shake my head at a particularly pungent line, and come away thinking about something differently. Take this analysis of how Omar Minaya simultaneously finds diamonds in the rough like John Maine and Oliver Perez and wastes roster sports on Jose Lima and Chan Ho Park -- "pitchers so bad no one was aware they were still playing professional baseball." (The answer: Minaya likes reclamation projects, but only if they're flyball pitchers with decent peripherals and at least some recent success.) Or read this smart take, from June, on our vanishing outfielders and what we should and shouldn't worry about. (And now Beltran and Gomez are gone. What a bizarre year we're having.)

There's this, from our July near-death experience: "There is bad baseball, and there is pitiful baseball, and there is painful, embarrassing baseball, and there is the kind of baseball the Mets have played this month, which is none of these things, but is instead just depressing. Watching the Mets these days is like nursing yourself through a hangover, or looking at happy photos of yourself with someone who threw you over for your best friend." There's this piece, that did a beautiful job explaining how ballplayers age and why Carlos Delgado should be fine. Or this reassuring take on our failures in the clutch, with a bit of priceless psychology: "When they miss every opportunity without fail, the team is glum and fans become pessimists, and big hits like Chip Ambres's game-winning single in the 10th inning yesterday can even irritate by their contrast with the usual shoddiness."

Some weeks Marchman writes five times a week, and his consistency is awe-inspiring: When he's good he's the best sports columnist in New York by a wide margin, and when he's just OK he's the best by a small margin. Kind of like the 2007 Mets, I suppose. Read him.

It was neat.

That's the word my vocabulary sent up to describe the sensation of watching Billy Wagner retire Mike Fontenot and secure Tom Glavine's 300th career (and 58th New York Mets) win Sunday night. Some round numbers are more spherical than others and this one is a perfect circle. Perfectly neat.

The guy's career began 20 years ago this month. He goes out approximately every fifth day, skipping the Disabled List altogether, and posts an average of 15 wins annually. Perfectly consistent, too. I remember when one of the pitchers who was on the verge of 300 wins in the early '80s neared this mark, Warner Wolf said to put it in perspective, imagine a pitcher winning 14 games a year for 20 years: he would still need 20 more to make it to 300.

You don't need to go to the videotape to know baseball has been populated by awesome pitchers who did not manage this perfectly neat number. Nobody's pulling the plaques of Bob Feller or Sandy Koufax or Bob Gibson or Juan Marichal or Jim Palmer or Catfish Hunter or Ferguson Jenkins for not getting there; nor should anybody think any less of Tommy John or Jim Kaat or Bert Blyleven for finishing a bit short (or Randy Johnson if he hangs 'em up 16 shy as back problems may dictate).

But getting to 300 certainly merits extra credit. Every starting pitcher would love to win a 300th but only 23 have achieved it even though we're talking about the most single-minded creatures on the diamond in any game they play. They help their teams when they win but they help themselves first. They revel in getting the W. They express gratitude for being taken off the hook. They can barely force a smile if their good work is not personally rewarded.

Quick, what's Jose Reyes' won-lost record and how does it rank among shortstops? How many wins did Cleon Jones accumulate in his career? Was Ray Knight ever no-decisioned?

It doesn't work that way. The whole "pitchers aren't players" line Keith Hernandez doles out every night isn't simply the raving of a mad Mex. It is different for starting pitchers. Their schedules are different. Their metrics are different. Their responsibilities are different (though let us forever note that the first run of Tom Glavine's 300th win was driven in by Tom Glavine). With few exceptions, you — a family member, a teammate, a fourth-estatesman — can't talk to one of them on the day he pitches. Imagine David Wright or Carlos Delgado telling a reporter, "Sorry, I don't do interviews when I'm starting."

Their near-term goals are different, too. When Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez went dry in their quest to get off of home runs 754 and 499, respectively, it made perfect sense. Their job has never been to go up and swing for the fences. It's to hit the ball somewhere fair. They have the talent and ability to hit it far and sometimes the damn thing travels out of everybody's reach. When Bonds and Rodriguez started to think about it, they had to have adjusted their thought processes from "see the ball, hit the ball" to "must...hit...next...home...run." With that attitude, it's not surprising each of them was going to hit nothing more than a figurative wall for a week.

Starting pitchers, unless they're aiming for a strikeout record, one supposes, don't have that problem. Their job is to get an out, any kind of out, to get at least 15 outs with their team ahead or as many outs as it will take to rate a win. As we've discussed a bit of late, it's kind of a silly statistic. A starter can throw nine brilliant innings and be pinned with a loss. A reliever can enter an inning with two outs, pick off a runner and exit for a pinch-hitter and eventually be credited with a victory because his teammates score a passel of runs on "his" behalf. Thus, on a case-by-case basis, whoever gets one win is sort of irrelevant.

Whoever gets 300 of them, however, must be doing something very well for very long. That sounds a lot like Tom Glavine.

Since we began this blog, Tom Glavine has been something of an odd figure in its pages. For a while, we called him The Manchurian Brave, as some combination of Questec and his own stubbornness seemed to have turned him into a mediocre pitcher, one whose struggles just reminded us of his dominance wearing that other uniform. (Not entirely his fault, but that's fandom.) Then Glavine finally listened to Rick Peterson and to what his own stats were telling him: He had to change. He did so, reinventing himself in mid-2005, at a stage in his career where refusal to do so might have won him grudging plaudits for staying a very successful course even if it had needed a late course correction that didn't come -- he did it his way and all that. That adaptation won us over, and we started referring to him as The Eventual Met.

But it's true that neither Greg nor I could ever quite get into his corner, leading to the rather odd scenario of a New York Met -- an honest-to-goodness New York Met -- chasing his 300th career win while two of the biggest Met fans on the planet tried to rally themselves to be truly excited about it. Greg chronicled his feelings last week; by the time I got to a set for Glavine's first attempt, the main attraction had yielded the field to the relief corps.

Today was going to be a baseball doubleheader. Joshua and a number of his classmates descended on Keyspan Park with all the energy a gang of sugared-up, excited four-year-olds can bring. I'm glad to say Keyspan is still standing. I'm happier to say that Sandy the Seagull visited, mugged for pictures and was generally charming, which mollified Emily enough to put aside her two-year-old grudge. Joshua, meanwhile, took a bizarre liking to the Aberdeen Ironbirds' centerfielder that Emily and I refused to share or even countenance. (Matt Angle, if you somehow get stuck with the nickname Li'l Boopy, I apologize. It doesn't make sense to me either.) Fortunately, there were numerous Cyclones runs to celebrate -- a Cyclone and an Ironbird hit balls over the right-field fence, something I'd never seen even once at Keyspan due to the stiff wind usually blowing in from the ocean. After the game, Joshua ran the bases, without dad's accompaniment. "I'll meet you at home plate -- you remember where that is, right?" I told him as he got ready to run from first. If a four-year-old could have scoffed, he would have. Perhaps he might have mentioned that he knows Carlos Gomez is actually faster than Reyes, so shut up about home plate, old man. Or perhaps he might have pointed out, more practically, that he'd have to be pretty obtuse not just to run where the other kids were running. On the way out, Joshua and his friend Nicholas saw one of those inflatable batting-cage things where you can see how hard you can throw and decided they wanted to do it. The other people in line and assorted bystanders weren't particularly thrilled by this, but they cheered after Joshua reared back and tossed the first one right through the hole in the center of the catcher's mitt. Kind of a mini-eephus pitch (the gun recorded it at 12 MPH), but still.

I have no idea where these genes come from.

So we got into the Zipcar for the bottom of the first of the main event, and followed Glavine's quest through car radio and handheld radio and upstairs and downstairs TVs. I shook my head to realize that Glavine had been sent to the showers by a double from Angel Pagan, once upon a time a Brooklyn Cyclones heartthrob cheered by us from the Keyspan stands. Whether you're talking baseball history or just your own personal subset of the same, the only surprise should be when such connections don't appear. Baseball provides them for anyone paying the least attention.

Despite my own lukewarm feelings about The Eventual Met, I found myself sitting bolt upright in bed for the last several frames of Glavine's pursuit of 300, exhorting Mota and Feliciano and Heilman and Sosa and finally Wagner along. Part of it was for Glavine, of course -- and not just the laundry he wears, I'm pleased to say. (Not thrilled, but pleased. Hey, I'm trying.) One of the reasons Glavine's never connected with many Met fans, I think, is that he's so bloodless about how he does things. It's a detachment that can be taken for aloofness. But he wasn't bloodless in the ninth -- he was nervous and smiling and fidgety and a host of things we've rarely seen him be. Christine Glavine's anxious vigil helped, too -- if you didn't respond to her mostly suppressed tears as the margin turned to a few outs and then a few strikes, you've truly got a heart of stone.

But there were other things that had me sitting bolt upright. Like not wanting to endure another round of questions and bullpen mea culpas and assorted distractions for five more days, when we've got other goals to pursue. Like wanting to beat the Cubs at Wrigley, of course, because who doesn't ever want to do that? And like knowing that the Phillies and Braves had won, so there was business to be taken care of.

All of these considerations were right and proper -- a Met's milestone, a father and husband and son's quest, a team's need to keep the eyes on the prize, the numerical reality of the standings. Whatever proportions we each felt them in, as Met fans and baseball fans they were there for all of us.