Sometimes I just want to e-mail my friend Rob Costa. No particular news, just the impulse to stay in touch with an old friend, maybe bring him up to speed on some positive development, send him a link to an article, revisit an inside joke. It remains an impulse unfulfilled since December 3, 1998, ten years ago tonight.

I came home from work on the ten-something train that night in my usual complaint mode. Stephanie, not yet in her new job in the year after she finished grad school, was up, so she was there to listen to me spout off on whatever had gone wrong that day. It was after eleven o'clock when we were in the living room and the phone rang.

Once you reach a certain age, you don't want the phone to ring after eleven o'clock.

I picked it up and it was someone whose first name I forget but whose last name was Costa. I didn't really have to hear what followed. I just knew. Rob had died. His brother was going through his address book, saw my name and number and thought he should contact me to let me know and invite me to the wake tomorrow.

Whatever was bothering me when I got home from work was forgotten. My friend from college, 33, was dead.

I won't pretend Rob and I were particularly close by 1998. But we each knew where the other was. I was in his address book. He was in mine. Our relationship was mostly that of e-mails since 1994. He was one of the first people I had already known who was online as a matter of course when I became fascinated with this new and wondrous avenue of communication. When I'd work late, really late, I'd take an AOL break (which entailed firing up the art director's Mac) and maybe find a message from Rob. Or start a thread in his direction. It would go back and forth for a while, probably longer when I was in procrastination mode. We'd trade progress reports regarding the relatively new elements of our respective lifestyles: his being gay and my being a cat person. They weren't really equivalent, but I had the sense we got the same rush from exploring a previously repressed part of our true selves. OK, so they weren't close to the same, but our respective fervor of the converted seemed similar enough. I was crazy about my kitties and he was, well, happy to be out.

Funny thing about Rob and phone calls. I knew what his brother was going to tell me in '98 just as I knew what Rob was going to tell me on a Friday night in the summer of 1990. He called me at home while the Mets were playing the Cubs at Shea. We didn't speak that often and hadn't seen each other since just after New Year's in 1987 (Flo & Eddie — the Turtles — at the Bottom Line), which in turn was two years after we were in school together. Anyway, he calls and says he has something to tell me, a little hesitant in tone, and I thought to myself, "He's gonna tell me he's gay." And he did. Damned if I knew how or why I intuited that. I had never particularly considered whether he was or wasn't. I went through the "come to think of it, I never saw him with any girls in college" bit in my head, but that didn't really prove anything (like I was a Lothario at USF).

As I tried to keep one eye on El Sid and Greg Maddux, I listened to Rob tell me how he knew it for a long time, how he dreaded admitting it to his family, how they were far more accepting than he could have hoped and how now I was the first straight friend he was telling. That floored me more than the news flash. We knew each other for one academic year, my last. He transferred to UConn thereafter. With him in Connecticut (Fairfield County when classes were not in session) and me on Long Island, we got together a few times, but "first straight friend" to get the call? Really? Not that it's a contest, but I felt honored...and not even that mad to have been distracted from the Mets beating the Cubs.

Rob always had a great way of saying something that made you feel good about yourself or about humanity. For instance, on my dorm room wall, I had a pretty lame but free poster from my local Anheuser-Busch distributor. It had an outline of the state and a beer bottle making like a rocket ship. BUD'S TAKING OFF IN FLORIDA, it said. As I began the process of packing up, Rob asked it he could have the poster as a reminder of his one year at USF so he could put it up at UConn and think of all the good times we'd had. It didn't amount to more than drinking and bullshitting and that sort of thing, but that was such a nice thing to say. When Rob's brother called, with only the vaguest idea who I was, and when I met him and the rest of Rob's family as well as Rob's partner (who greeted me with, "oh yes, you're the baseball aficionado") at the wake, I wanted to tell them, "I'm the guy from the Florida poster."

We invited Rob to our wedding in 1991. He was kind of down when I spoke to him in the weeks leading up to it, but I urged him to show, it'll be fun, bring somebody if you like. I noticed that on the table where all the place cards waited, that one sat alone once the festivities were in full swing: Rob's. We got married three days after Magic Johnson revealed to the world he was HIV-positive. I felt silly (and a little ignorant) immediately thinking the worst because my friend was gay, but I had this very bad feeling that Rob wasn't prevented from attending by car trouble or the blues. Sure enough, he let me know that he and a famous basketball player had something in common. HIV is what finally got him seven years later.

Adjusting to his health situation pretty well when it was still fairly new, however, he accepted our invite to visit us the Friday of Thanksgiving weekend, which was a couple of weeks after the wedding. He was the first guest we received as newlyweds and it was a wonderful time. Stephanie liked him from the get-go. Since Rob and I were comrades in pop music tastes, I inflicted a sampling of a medley I had created the year before: a six-sided salute to more or less every hit of the '80s. In describing the painstaking process that went into what was then the crowning creative achievement of my life, I told him if there's ever a fire in our place, the first thing I'm grabbing is these tapes.

"I would hope the first thing you'd grab," he cautioned, "would be Stephanie."

That's the feel better about humanity stuff I mentioned.

During the e-mail era, Rob, by then working as a salesman for a pharmaceutical firm, was keeping his virus in check. Now living on Long Island, he met us on a Sunday in the summer of 1995 for a Mets game. His firm had box seats that he normally gave to clients. This Sunday we were his clients. I asked where the seats were. He had no idea, he said. He just handed them out usually; he hadn't been to Shea since I invited/dragged him to a doubleheader in 1986 (during which we drank a good bit of the Bud that was taking off in Flushing and the Mets split with the Cardinals). Our return was a momentous day in the history of The Log: Bobby Jones beat the Marlins and it created my first winning streak in a very long span. It actually helped turn around my entire Shea history. Before that day I was 39-51. From then on out, 179-133. It felt like it was going to rain all day. It never did.

The last time I saw Rob Costa was a sunny Thursday the following April. He was visiting clients in the general vicinity of my office and let me know he had four tickets for the upcoming Sunday game. He couldn't go but wanted to give them to me; he'd drop them off where I was working. The least I could do, I figured, was take him to dinner in appreciation. As we walked to the local Bennigan's, he asked me how "B 'n' C" were doing. I told him I didn't understand. He was referring to Bernie and Casey, he said — you know, your beloved cats.

Oh, I laughed. I thought you were referring to something else. When Stephanie and I go grocery shopping, I said, we refer to my cereal of choice, Banana Nut Crunch, as BNC. I was wondering why you were asking me about it and, for that matter, how you knew our nickname for it. I thought it was, at best, slightly amusing. Rob, however, turned almost melancholy in considering what I'd told him.

"I'm just thinking of you and Stephanie grocery shopping — making your list, going through the Sunday Times, clipping the coupons...it's so sweet that you do that together."

I never thought about Banana Nut Crunch quite the same after that.

Ten years. Ten years since I got that post-eleven o'clock call. I don't think of Rob Costa all that often, but I do think of him. I would love to drop him a line.

"Josh. What are you doing?"
"I don't know. What are you doing?"
"Protecting oil companies from litigation. They're our client. They don't lose legal protection because they make a lot of money."
"I can't believe no one ever wrote a folk song about that."
—Sam and Josh, "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen," The West Wing

When my mother wanted to hurl an insult my way, she'd call me an idealist. It came out when I expressed an opinion or conducted an action that didn't fit with her world view. By definition, an idealist isn't practical. The nerve of me, in my late teens and early twenties, for not having it all figured out according to somebody else's standards.

I've never considered myself all that idealistic. In theory maybe. Otherwise, I've just thought what I've thought and done what I've done. Sometimes it appears idealistic. Perhaps from being browbeaten for alleged idealism, I more often instinctively followed the pragmatic road to realism. I'm generally more realistic than idealistic. I try to see the big picture and operate within that framework. I'm not a dreamer. A close friend, concerned by my lack of concrete goals, once fretted that my problem was I didn't have any dreams. The "idealist" charge, wielded as epithet, probably tempered the dreamer in me.

The realist-idealist dynamic came to mind with the ongoing flap over the name of the Mets' new ballpark. Two years ago, when it was announced we would be watching our team play in a structure called Citi Field, I balanced my reflex antipathy toward the sale of such corporate naming rights with my awareness that almost no stadium's identity is not put up for highest bidder. My conclusion was Citi Field was all right:

Listen, I advocated going for top dollar and avoiding utter embarrassment if possible. The Mets seem to have achieved the first part, and while the second part is a matter of taste, Citi Field — albeit a little generic to the point of fictional and rather resonant of a minor league facility in Islip — isn't a total disaster. As Mets fans, we've conditioned ourselves to treat noncalamities as moral victories. Score one for us.

Quite the rallying cry, eh?

Citi Field is already a part of our Met lexicon even though the Home Opener in its corporate confines is a little less than nineteen weeks from now. Even as we've intermittently debated the merits and potentials of our unborn ballpark, we have thrown the Citi name around as a matter of course, just as those who signed on the dotted line had hoped. For two years, it's been "Citi Field this" and "Citi Field that," whatever the context. The branding was in full swing and, until last month, it probably represented invaluable word-of-mouth advertising. Now...not so much.

When the Mets partnered with Citi in November 2006, it sure looked all good on paper. The Mets were going to get their not inconsiderable sum of $400 million over 20 years while Citi was going to receive whatever benefit companies believe is en route when their names are plastered all over sports facilities. Despite having lived through the mishegas of Enron and other magically disappearing stadia signage, you couldn't ask for a more solid bet than Citigroup in terms of continuity (been around in some form since 1812); locality (two Citi towers in two boroughs in plain sight along the 7 line); fluidity (despite some "rhymes with..." issues, it beat Jason's predicted Federated First Union Bankshares Field, to say nothing of Petco Park); liquidity (big, big company) and image. I don't know that Citi had the best or highest profile, but they didn't have, to the best of my knowledge, an evident Enron problem lurking.

Not a pitch has been thrown at Citi Field, yet hoo-boy, have things changed. The long-term prospects for Citigroup and the Citi name are no better than that of any three Met relievers. Whatever regional cred they had has likely dissolved into the morass of however many of the 52,000 jobs being lost come from the New York area (52,000 — why, that's more people than you could fit inside Citi Field). And as far as image, it's going to take a lot more than $20 billion in cash and $306 billion in assumed assets to bail out Citi's PR.

This is reality. And it's not ideal. Not by a long shot. Not ideal seems to be the going rate for much of reality these days. I am not equipped to explain it or analyze it. Hide under the bed from it is the best I can come up with.

The baseball end of things, admittedly not a patch on the Francesalike fanny of the economic crisis, should be examined within the parameters of its own foul lines, and there it is tempting to see the ideal coming into view if you squint hard enough: Having been visited by the Ghost of Naming Rights Yet to Come, one Wilpon or another snaps awake, realizes what a folly Citi Field is and pastes over those wretched salute-to-Domino's logos with the finest four-letter word this side of Mets...

Shea.

Fat chance, we were told Tuesday, but it's nice to dream, says the man who doesn't much bother with such frivolities.

Ideally, Citigroup; a slew of other gigantic corporations; the regular folks who work for them and are impacted by the lot of them; and the whole darn country aren't in a mess of massive making, either, but let's stick to baseball. It would be ideal if William A. Shea would continue to be honored, seeing as how he is no less responsible for securing us our franchise now than he was in 1964. It really would be better. We wouldn't have to wait for the inevitable next knife to drop. We wouldn't be gritting our teeth and rolling our eyes in anticipation of Citi being called something else down the road. We wouldn't feel so used. We wouldn't be reminded countless times in 2009 not just that corporate naming rights never really feel right but that this corporation's name feels really misplaced in light of what it came to represent in the fall of 2008.

And yet I can't really commit to that seemingly ideal vision, as much as I'd kind of like to join the torch and pitchfork brigade. Perhaps it's because I'm in no mood to align myself with those who have demagogued the Citi-Mets issue. Politicians (surprise!) have done it. Hack columnists and worse have done it, using the bailout as an excuse to dump all sorts of unrelated nonsense on their favorite blue and orange targets. Even those media members for whom I have enormous respect have brushed up against the easy answer of assigning villainy and sticking out tongues. Vile corporate bastards! Venal baseball business! Vengeance be ours! And your bullpen sucks, too!

It's not that simple, it really isn't. It's also not fair to the principals, as unsympathetic as they come off at every turn. Whatever role Citigroup played its own near-demise, the matter of $20 million a year to name the Mets' ballpark for 20 years isn't at the crux of its ills. A $20 million commitment for, say, 2017, has very little (or less) to do with hundreds of billions gone awry. Marketing expenses, whatever you think of the efficacy of ballpark-naming as a business-building exercise, are legitimate expenses. You and I, at our federal government's behest, are literally supporting Citigroup with the idea that they will stay on their feet so as to prevent widespread fiscal calamity. Marketing's a part of that, a part of what every company does. I don't know how you quantify the impact of this kind of sports facility marketing, but there must be a little something to it since so many companies have invested in it and so many franchises continue to jump on board.

I'd redirect the $20 million due the Mets for 2009 to save 52,000 jobs if it worked that way. I don't get the sense that it does. Among other moves, Citigroup is selling its German unit and is cutting back on investment banking (another big surprise). "Don't sponsor the ballpark" is not going to reverse those kinds of presumably necessary strategic decisions or bring those particular jobs back. Citigroup's annual operating costs are supposed to be reduced — reduced — to $50 billion after all its cuts. If we were to have them not pay the Mets for Citi Field next year, then it would be $49.980 billion. A couple of business writers have used the rather cavalier term "a drop in the bucket" to describe the company's baseball obligation. Easy to drop that in a bucket if you've got it, which I'm guessing nobody reading this does on his or her person. But $20 million is 0.0004% 0.004% of $50 billion. A drop in the bucket?

Yeah, basically.

Twenty million dollars in the eyes of the Mets, on the other hand, is not a drop in the bucket. That's a Cy Young winner on the mound, or at least the money freed up to pay one because the debt service on the ballpark has a going source of cash. The Mets are counting on that $20 million. The Mets and Citigroup have a deal.

Is it ironclad? I haven't seen the contract and I'm not a lawyer, so how the hell should I know? But why the hell would the Mets not want to get paid? They've set up their whole business model in order to get paid. Sometimes the intersection of the Mets and money is plainly obnoxious, and as fans we feel it directly (which will feel like a discretionary drop in the bucket once all these bailouts come due), but can you blame the Mets for not wanting to rip up the Citi Field contract? If somebody said I'd be getting an enormous sum of money in return for promotional considerations, I'd want the money. We all would.

This is not the moment in time when you want to be promoting a ballpark named Citi Field, that's for sure. The Mets will have to decide (if market forces don't do it for them) whether it will always be the wrong moment for promoting a ballpark with that name. The First National City Bank of New York, Citigroup's progenitor, dates to 1812. They weren't supposed to be Enron or any of the other now-ya-see-'em/now-ya-don't propositions that got into stadia and arenas. They were supposed to be solid. Nearly two centuries of brand equity and marketplace goodwill was supposed to have legs.

Might all the brand equity and all the goodwill have gone the way of those 52,000 jobs? Could be. Could very well be. At this moment in time, it ain't there. But is that the forever answer? Forever is a long time. Is this a passing public relations storm or a low-hanging, unpuffy, uncumulus cloud that will never lift?

I don't know. No one does. Apparently the Mets don't think so, or don't want to think so. If it were a one-year deal, I imagine some smart lawyer would have undone this pact. It's for 20 years with a 200-year-old enterprise. The principals, particularly the Mets — the principal with everything to lose in flying the Citi banner — are banking (if you will) on the long term being more forgiving that it would appear presently. Should Citi become less a sponsor than a stain on the Mets brand, one imagines a squadron of skilled attorneys will be dispatched to deCitify every sign in sight.

Given that we have sadly passed the age when we name no more than a showy rotunda for a great human being, an extrication from Citigroup would merely open the gates to another alliance with another corporation. The most relevant commentary I've read regarding the Mets' position comes from Darren Rovell of CNBC, who wrote, in the wake of the bailout, "No other company, in this environment, would give them $20 million a year. I don't even think they could get $12 million at this point, to be frank." Twelve-mil is better than no-mil from a financial (if not spiritual) standpoint, but it's not in the same ballpark as twenty-mil. The contract calls for twenty-mil. If the Mets are willing to withstand the current undeniably lousy publicity, then they stand to collect.

It's a screwed-up triangle among the Mets, Citi and the taxpayers, to be certain; not a few teams find themselves under the TARP of this kind of awkward three-way arrangement. Taxpayers are bailing out to one extent or another the rights holders of Chase Field, PNC Park and Comerica Park. Not a lot of hands are clean, not even at pristinely dubbed Yankee Stadium (major corporate partner on deck: TARPed up Bank of America). Leave it to the Mets to become the quick and convenient symbol for all that's wrong in this realm.

(Of course it might be helpful to their cause if ownership would refrain from offering baffling soundbites like, "It's not really Citi's fault they're in this problem," when it's clear 52,000 jobs didn't mysteriously eliminate themselves by some random act of mondo attrition.)

Maybe this is the weapons of mass distraction shooting irrelevancies at their deadliest, but if the money's flying around in unconscionable sums and it's going to land at the turnstiles of privately held baseball clubs, well, damn it, let my baseball club get the share it signed for, and let them remain competitive. Playing in a park named for a bank, as has been amply demonstrated at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, is no foolproof recipe for on-field success. But that's Pittsburgh. This is New York. These are the Mets. We've seen them fall achingly short with a big payroll. We've seen them come not remotely close with a lesser one. There won't be enough seats and the prices will be too high for those there are in that vanity plate of a venue rising in what used to be the parking lot, but from wherever I follow them as long as Citi Field stands, I'm going to want its team-in-residence to play well and contend. Taxpayers were stuck with the bill for the previous stadium as a matter of course. We get stuck again for some unforeseen aspect of the coming attraction?

So what else is new?

They held another media tour of Citi Field Tuesday, the first since the grass was planted. It's shaping up as a very pretty park from the pictures I've seen. Staring at them and reading all about it whets my appetite for baseball and certainly stokes my curiosity. I'm convinced it will be fresher than its predecessor; it can't help but run smoother. I'm not convinced that will make it extraordinary, which is what I want it to be versus what else has been built, but that's something that cannot be judged without some innings shared between me and it. Right now, frankly, the photographs sadden me more than they excite me. It looks like some place from somewhere else. It doesn't look like where the Mets play, at least not as I've always understood it. Perhaps the Mets need to actually play there to rectify that particular perceived liability.

It would be ideal if Citi Field lives up to its overwrought World-Class billing and feels like home immediately. But like I said, I don't get too terribly hung up on what's ideal versus what's really going on.

ADDENDUM
Good and comprehensive article (minus the demagoguery) on Mets-Citi by Richard Sandomir in Thursday's Times here.