7: Monday, September 22 vs Cubs
Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived in the final week of the 2008 baseball season, the final week of regularly scheduled competition ever to take place at William A. Shea Municipal Stadium. One week from now, pending potential playoff participation, the New York Mets will cease to call Shea Stadium home.

Not only does it feel like this last season of Shea just began, but we are left to wonder, with seven games remaining from the start of tonight, where did 45 springs, summers and falls go? Where did the 45 seasons of Mets baseball go? Where did all those games against all those worthy Met opponents go?

All but seven contests have been played to their conclusion and all but one National League rival has made an appearance as part of this season's separation process. Since there is no home game without a visiting team, we want to use the number 7 to pay homage to the role that the one team which waited until tonight to touch down in Flushing in 2008 played in building the legend of Shea Stadium long ago.

With them present at last, we recall the first genuine rivalry in which the Mets ever battled for high stakes, a rivalry forged in the heat of Shea Stadium's first pennant race and a rivalry at the heart of the most unforgettable season the patrons of this ballpark ever experienced.

Tonight we remember the New York Mets and the Chicago Cubs and 1969.

It's a happier story told in Queens than it is in Wrigleyville, but it's a story complete only with the acknowledgement that there were two sides to the miracle coin. One team's and one fan base's eternal joy is somebody else's cause for sleepless nights and teeth gnashed to the gums. Nearly four decades later, it would not be sporting to say to the Cubs and their followers "we couldn't have done it without you."

Even though we couldn't have.

On the other hand, Mets fans have learned some painful lessons in recent seasons, lessons in being ahead and falling behind, lessons that expectations sometimes exceed results. If this doesn't necessarily put Mets fans in league with Cubs fans, then at least they might now speak two dialects of the same language.

In any event, to Mets fans in 1969, one Cub represented all that was imposing about the team they hoped to overtake in the course of the summer. He was one of the best players of his time, some would say a Hall of Famer in everything but title. Few National League third basemen were surer bets in the field or at the bat and few Chicago athletes have grown as revered as this man, Ron Santo.

Nobody could have imagined in the summer of '69 that the Mets would bring Ron Santo to Shea Stadium to sing his praises. It was, after all, Ron Santo who drew the ire of the Mets and their fans for his habitual clicking of heels after Cub victories. It was Santo who was seen as the overbearing leader of the team that was standing in the way of the miracle that would change us all. Goodness knows Ron Santo never sought a spotlight at Shea. In fact, his exact words in 2007, upon being asked about the imminent final season of this ballpark where the Cubs' hopes have crumbled before his eyes as a player and announcer, were:

"I would come personally back here to blow it up. I'd pay my own way. Maybe even just to watch it."

In another time, those would be fighting words. But this is the end of time for Shea. It's hard to think of Shea without 1969 and it's impossible to think of 1969 without the Mets playing the Cubs in September, winning a tight one one night and a laugher the next. So we asked Ron to join us on this September evening from the Cubs' broadcast booth. We didn't pay his way, but the Mets did make a sizable donation to the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, a cause Ron has supported vigorously for many years. When it comes to fighting disease, the only enemy is the malady itself.

So please welcome Ron Santo to the field.

Ron, as you can see, is happily hitching a ride in the Met bullpen buggy that's been recharged for the final week of the season and he is heading now to the rightfield corner to remove number 7...he is exiting the cart now and he is approaching the wall...he is about to take part in the most sacred honor Shea Stadium has to offer...

AND WHAT'S THIS? It's a Black Cat! A black cat, just like the one that crossed in front of the Cub dugout and around the Cub on-deck circle on September 9, 1969 as the Cubs were en route to falling out of first place. The black cat, likely one of the dozens of feral cats for which Shea is so well known, has frozen Ron Santo in his tracks and...the black cat has leapt up in front of Ron...and the black cat is peeling lucky number 7 down with its teeth and its claws! The black cat appears to have gotten it all in a couple of swipes and gotten the best of the Cub great once more.

Ron Santo is shaking his head in dismay, making what looks like a gesture of pushing a button, as if he wished he'd stuck to his original plan of blowing up Shea.

That, of course, was never an option.

Our mysterious feline interloper — and folks, this was totally unplanned and unforeseen — delivers 7 to Ron Santo's feet, one final gesture to remind this North Side icon that accomplishing what he has set out to achieve at Shea Stadium is a task that will perpetually elude him. Ron is getting back into the bullpen buggy and is driven through the centerfield gate never to set foot on Shea soil again. Goodbye Ron Santo — we hate to see you go.

The black cat appears to be clicking all four of its heels. I believe we hear some purring, too.

Number 8 was revealed here.

Number 6 will be counted down next Monday, May 26.

"We needed to care more about each other if we're going to be the kind of team that wins a championship," an unidentified Met told John Harper in today's Daily News. "I think we kind of took that for granted. The meeting made us realize that."

So...can we safely assume Billy Wagner and Carlos Delgado spent the boarding process of the charter flight to Atlanta unfailingly caring for each other?

"Take the window seat, Carlos."
"No, Billy, I insist — you enjoy the view."
"But you find the vistas so relaxing. Perhaps gazing out the window would replenish your soul and, as a result, your swing."
"Why thank you, Billy. Can I at least grab you a pillow on which to nurture your valuable left arm before we settle in?"
"That is a most thoughtful gesture, Carlos. Muchas gracias, amigo."
"No dear friend, thank you."

Maybe that's not what One Met meant, but whatever it was about the most momentous meeting since Yalta that, to use Ryan Church's phrase, "relaxed" the team, well, keep it coming, loves. It's proved a more effective let alone more palatable solution to busting up a team slump than passing around a gold thong (brrr...).

Will the Era of Good Feeling Last? Do these eras of good feelings ever last? How many times last season were we reassured in deed or words that whatever was bugging the Mets last week was past them now? How many good weekends gave way to blues by Tuesday? How does beating a last-place team after getting beat by a last-place team reknight us a first-place team in waiting? How will we know if the Mets are going to stop being ungood and, by god, start being real good?

Atlanta would be a good place to start finding out for the positive. And Colorado would be a good place to continue. Then home for Florida and Los Angeles and so on. It's way too early to make over-the-hump assertions just as it was too early to decide Washington had buried our 2008 in irredeemable mediocrity (though, to be fair, mediocre would have been a step up from what we witnessed in three of our last four National League games).

The Mets for the past decade, maybe longer, have always struck me on some level as an exercise in unadmirable restraint. Even before Willie brought calm to a new state of placidity, the Mets tended to veer toward not panicking too much for my tastes; yours, too, probably. No one game is ever worth getting excited about. No one rival is ever worth getting overly amped for. No extended morass ever sets off alarm bells, not even for something as benign as a team meeting. Perhaps the fierce urgency of now finally tapped the Mets on the shoulder and shook them from their maddening complacency. Two good games don't change everything. But two wins are far better than two losses. Even the Zennest team of them all would have to cop to that much.

If you'd like a little precedent to hang your cap on, I've got something. It doesn't involve the same players, it doesn't even come from the same century, but let's assume there are some common bloodlines pumping between Mets then and Mets now.

Hark back with me to the beloved year of 1985, the year when we all cared about each other. Every Mets fan who was around in 1985 will, on substance if not bottom lines, take it as the year to remember over 1986. 1986 was awesome, but 1985 was beautiful. The success of those Mets, to paraphrase Joey "The Lips" Fagan in The Commitments, was irrelevant. The '85 Mets raised our expectations of life, lifted our horizons. Sure we could have won championships and had parades and stuff, but that would have been predictable. This way — 98-64, unaided by Wild Card after a 162-game struggle to the death against the dreaded Redbirds — it was poetry.

What's generally forgotten about that unbannered year is that the Mets stumbled badly for an uncomfortable portion of it. Not long after a swift 8-1 start, the Mets, almost every damn one of them, stopped hitting. Speaking for himself in If At First..., Keith Hernandez referred to it as being lost in a dark forest. By the end of June, Darryl Strawberry had been out for more than a month-and-a-half and the whole lineup experienced a power shortage. Mike Lupica made his columnist bones with zingers like a Met rally is when one of them works a three-and-one count.

The joke was easy enough to construct. Keith was batting .251 through June 30. Gary Carter had sunk, after a brief surge, to .271 (with a paltry 33 RBI for nearly a half-season's work). Darryl, everybody's answer, came back and dipped immediately from .215 to .208.

Mookie Wilson — .263
Rafael Santana — .251
Wally Backman — 246
George Foster — .237
Howard Johnson — .186
Ray Knight — .171

After a flickering mid-June boost in which the Mets won five straight and jumped from 3-1/2 back to a first-place tie with the Cardinals, the forest darkened to pitch black. They finished the month with seven losses in eight games, scoring four in the ten-inning loss that started the slide and then not tallying more than three runs in any of their final seven contests...the last three of which were head-to-head defeats in St. Louis that put them five out. The Mets hung up exactly three runs on the Busch Stadium board in 29 torturous Missouri innings that weekend.

Could it get worse? Sure seemed to on the first night of July when the Mets returned to Shea and lost to the last-place Pirates, 1-0. This dropped the Mets to 38-35, or 30-34 since they sizzled out of the gate. All around New York, the Mets' 1985 chances were penciled in on the endangered species list. Would they ever break out? Would they ever start winning? Would they do anything at all?

In a word, yes.

Yes, they would break out: five runs on July 2, six on July 3, sixteen in the legendary July 4-5 game. Yes, they would start winning: nine in a row and ultimately thirty of thirty-seven into mid-August; a 30-7 mark to obliterate the 30-34 forest. Yes, they would do plenty. They would go toe to toe with St. Louis into September, through two bloodletting series versus their archrivals, right down to the final weekend when all of us stood and cheered the most valiant runners-up we could imagine and none of us uttered a disparaging word about what we just saw. The Mets finished three back and out of the playoffs. You couldn't have divined that from how good we felt about the season played out.

I thought of this last night after the Mets had won all of two in a row against the Yankees because it, too, came on the heels of a discouraging 1-0 loss to a last-place team and it, too, came after weeks of hand-wringing about the Mets seeming incapable of scoring or winning or doing anything at all. Granted, the '08 Mets don't have vintage Dr. K, but modern-day Johan Santana may just be warming up. They don't have late-prime Gary Carter, whose production (21 HR, 68 RBI) from July 2 on was Hall of Fame-worthy, but they do have guys who have been known to get seasonably hot for reasonably long stretches. They don't have Keith Hernandez except in the broadcast booth, but would you put it past a David, a Jose or at least one Carlos to enjoy a .392 month the way Mex did July '85?

"Four in a row," Keith wrote in his diary after July 5, the win that followed the Independence Night marathon. "The mood on the team has turned completely around. A week ago I was worried. Worried. Now I have that old feeling again about this team and this season."

It's just one potential precedent. I could probably dig up a 1-0 loss from 1962 that would show a perceived nadir can easily bottom out and bottom out again. But damned if I didn't think of the midsummer revival of 1985 after this truncated Subway Series sweep at Yankee Stadium.

Every year I tell myself that the Subway Series doesn't mean what it used to. This year, the initial evidence seemed to agree: I woke up at 1:30 on Saturday, glanced at the clock and realized with what fuzzy horror I could muster that the game had already started. (I'd completely missed Jeter giving the Yankees a 2-0 lead, but I did get to see Moises Alou get picked off while I was trying to wake up. Hooray!) When neither half of Faith and Fear in Flushing can wake up for first pitch, we are a long way from Dave Mlicki.

But then came tonight. When Carlos Delgado's pole-clanger was declared foul on unnecessary further review (nothing good ever happens to us in that corner), I began a slow burn. And then, when Delgado persevered with a run-scoring single, it erupted.

"FUCK YOU, YANKEES!" I screamed at the TV. "FUCK YOU, MORON UMPS! FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE FANS! FUCK YOU, FORD EDGE! FUCK YOU, SUZYN WALDMAN! FUCK YOU, STEINBRENNERS!"

Hmm. Maybe next year.

The Mets are, of course, welcome to play a crisp game with minimal mental goofs whenever they want. (This one wasn't spotless: Jose was lax in a rundown and Oliver started thinking about cartoons or something for a half-inning, but 5 RBI in two games and 7 2/3 of solid pitching, respectively, will forgive a lot of sins.) But I think any Met fan will agree that these two well-played games were particularly timely in talking all of us in off a very high ledge. (Though we have four with the Braves in three days, the first one against T#m Gl@v!ne, so we've still got the window open.) By the late innings tonight I was comfortably ensconced on the couch, thumbing through the remnants of the Sunday paper and entertaining myself by surveying the crowd and playing Spot the Yankee Fan. It's nice being relaxed in a Subway Series game, as that means the alternatives -- vein-popping tension or existential despair -- aren't necessary.

Not that I feel the least bit sorry for them, but without A-Rod and Posada, the Yankee lineup is pretty naked -- that final five of Giambi-Cano-Cabrera-Gonzalez (who?)-Some Molina Brother wouldn't particularly scare the Zephyrs. While I maintain we needed Friday's rainout, the game that went missing will probably feature both missing guys when it returns as part of yet another two-stadium doubleheader. It's a wonderful idea, marred only by the fact that terrible things happen to us during them.

But that's for later. For now, we can take heart in finally beating a last-place team in convincing fashion (third time's the charm, I guess) and happiness that said dispatched last-place team was Them. We did it with luck (the pailfuls of garbage we hurled at Andy Pettitte in the fourth inning Saturday) and with pluck (Delgado's determined at-bat tonight). Provoked by the sins of diabolical umpires, we put our faith in Church, whose weekend included a couple of nifty catches, a great throw, one no-doubt-about-it home run and five runs scored. I should have done this a couple of weeks ago, but I'd like to take this occasion to officially apologize to Omar Minaya for this post. Lastings Milledge may still become a star, but Church is far more than a platoon outfielder, and Brian Schneider can hit just fine.

Heck, even Joe Morgan was fairly tolerable. (Everything's tolerable when you win by nine. Except, maybe, ESPN's silly new video decoupage tools. What the hell was that crap?) OK, his Song to Shortstops was ridiculous -- the difference between Reyes and Jeter isn't that one's a tailback and one's a fullback, but that one has range and the other doesn't. Still, I didn't hear a single reference to Odalis Perez, and that's something.

As a postscript, one final note about Jeter. Remember Saturday, when he tried to stretch a single into a double and got gunned down by Beltran? Jeter was lying in the dirt, hand not even on the base with Castillo holding the ball on him -- and Alfonso Marquez called him safe. Castillo looked amazed. So did Jeter. And so did I. And then I hung my head in despair. He's Derek Jeter, the beaten-down little-brother part of my brain whispered. Against us, he gets called safe even when he doesn't touch the base.

But then Marquez, quite properly, called him out. Jeter picked himself out of the dirt and trotted back to the dugout. Matsui struck out. We won. Once in a great while, things aren't actually as bad as you think.