Well, the New York Mets are now officially what we've been saying they are for some time: a .500 team.

Stumbling to that dismal pass tonight, however, I had a dreadful thought: One of Willie Randolph's defenses for his tenure, as expressed to Ian O'Connor before Willie started seeing conspiracies at work in the SNY production trucks (a bout of lunacy he's since apologized for), amounted to "Hey, I'm not Art Howe." But watching the 2008 Mets dreadful night after dreadful night, don't they kind of remind you of an Art Howe team?

They're a more-talented, more-expensive bunch of listless dullards, to be sure. But underachieving is underachieving whether you're a 71-win team that probably should have won 77 or 78 (and what an accomplishment that would have been) or a .500 team that should be on pace for 90 wins. What's the difference in how they go about their business, exactly? Does Carlos Delgado wave in the vague direction of passing base hits with a verve that Todd Zeile could only dream of? Are Luis Castillo's failures with runners on base gritty and life-affirming, whereas Danny Garcia's were placid and soul-killing? Do the 2008 Mets lose by seven with a fire that the 2004 Mets sorely lacked in similar situations? Art Howe was bland and sunny; recent descents into paranoia aside, Willie Randolph is bland and surly.

Is the comparison exaggerated? Of course it is -- you'll forgive me if I get a little worked up while watching my team sleepwalk through getting its collective ass handed to it again. But who is Willie Randolph to be roasting Art Howe over the coals, considering he's 76-78 since Memorial Day with a far better team than Howe ever sent onto the field? The cliche of the Art Howe era was that his Mets battled. Wouldn't you like to see Randolph's Mets battle?

So what did this latest horrible game feature? Well, Mike Pelfrey got victimized by an error by the singularly useless Luis Castillo (only 1,227 days until we're out from under that contract, Omar!) but then showed very little grace under pressure. The relief pitching was bad, the hitting was nonexistent, and Moises Alou appears to have hurt himself standing in the outfield, which sounds like it should be a joke but isn't.

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You know what? Enough. We've got all year to talk about this crappy baseball team.

One of the sad parts of Willie's meltdown was it took away from what should have been an outpouring of honors for Mike Piazza, now formally a former baseball player. At first, I admit, I didn't take much notice of the announcement -- after leaving us Piazza had become a Padre and then an Athletic, a retreat from New York baseball consciousness that only could have been furthered if he'd begun 2008 playing in Hokkaido or on Mars. But amid the gloom of the doubleheader loss, I kept finding myself thinking about Piazza -- and not about the farcical move to first, or the way I always wanted him to be a general instead of a lieutenant. No, I was thinking about the fact that you never, ever went to the bathroom if Piazza was coming to the plate, and about all the games I saw him win, and about all the joy he'd brought us. I wound up pouring all that out into a piece I wrote for the Wall Street Journal Online today -- which, if you like, you can read here.

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Aw, what the heck: If you'll allow me one more indulgence, this is the 100% true story about how I tried and tried to see Bruce Springsteen in concert when I was 17 and he was my musical hero, and how I finally did see him -- when I was 38.

It all turns out OK; it'd be nice to say the same about the 2008 Mets.

He threw six innings. He wasn't touched in the final five of them. He took a seat. And he smiled the broadest smile I ever saw from him.

The devil bared his fangs.

In the detritus of September 30, 2007 (as we continue to live in a post-September 30 world), it makes me wonder all over again why T#m Gl@v!ne ever left Atlanta.

John Schuerholz was under pressure from AOL-Time Warner six years ago to reduce payroll and Gl@v!ne, as much of a modern athlete (and Players Association big shot) as anybody, saw the potential pile of money on the table in another city and lunged for it, but honestly, how much money do these guys need? Not once in five seasons in a Met uniform — if not exactly a Met — did T#m Gl@v!ne ever look remotely as happy as he did after his six innings of light tossing Tuesday afternoon. Likewise, I watched his welcome back press conference last November and he was more at ease (with reporters, of all things) than I've ever seen him. It's obvious being an Atlanta Brave agrees with T#m Gl@v!ne, never stopped agreeing with T#m Gl@v!ne.

Maybe it's the fabric they use down south. Maybe it's the proximity to The Varsity. Maybe it's the soothing presence of Coxie and Smoltzie. But we never got that smile, that relaxation and, way more importantly, that kind of wriggling out of a first-inning jam and segueing into a rocking chair for five more frames, not when the world depended on it.

To be fair, between 2003 and 2007 Gl@v!ne never had the benefit of facing the Mets in that situation.

If T#m Gl@v!ne had gone into life insurance or become a pharmacist and he had never come to my attention and somebody tried to tell me about this swell guy who was an ideal co-worker and a real smart cookie, I'd nod and maybe say that sounds like someone I'd like to hang out with. Instead, he went into baseball and we know the route his career took — straight through our gut several times, kicking us in the intestines from all angles. Thus, it's impossible to hear his former teammates and the media that covered him sing his praises as a human being and not want to retch for a couple of weeks straight. Baseball brought him to our attention. Baseball is why we give a damn about total strangers we'll never meet or know. Baseball is why I tune out every he's-a-jolly-good-fellow endorsement from every otherwise trusted source — even our trusted trio of announcers.

For his diabolical doings as a Brave from the late '80s until the early '00s; to his job-blocking of hard-working, well-meaning ballplayers who got caught up in a labor mess not of their own making; to his wary, tenuous tenure as a half-decade Met; to his disastating, devappointing farewell; right up to yesterday when he grinned the grin of a canary-swallowing cat after yet another afternoon of short-circuiting Met hope and Met happiness, he remains now and forever T#m Gl@v!ne, pronounced just as he's spelled.

If he'd smile his Satanic smile out of SNY camera range, if he'd flash his demonic dimples in someone else's faces, I'd not feel any need to dredge him up again. But there he #@! was yesterday, looking relaxed, seeming pleased as punch with himself, still #@! revolting us to high heavens and ever deeper hell.

Will September 30 ever #@! end?

That was the highlight of Keith Hernandez's story of finding himself in his first tornado around 1974: He opened the windows because he'd heard somewhere that the pressure differential could destroy a cheap apartment building, only his new stereo was getting wet, so he closed the windows, but he was still worried about the pressure thing, so he "ran outside into a gully" -- and, shockingly enough, quickly found himself chest-deep in water.

Definitely one for the Crazy Keith files -- and I quietly filed away the information that if I'm in an emergency in the vicinity of Keith Hernandez, I should not assume his cerebral cool on the ballfield means he's going to have good ideas. But metaphorically, Keith's tale of bad ideas and compounding mistakes was an accurate enough description of Tuesday, May 20, 2008 in the annals of the New York Mets. Let me see if I've got this right:

* Willie Randolph, apparently having decided the Mets need more distractions, had to answer a bunch of questions about a racial conspiracy theory, and this one didn't have anything to do with Paul Lo Duca or Billy Wagner -- he seems to have thought it up basically on his own.

* Off to an apparently roaring start, the Mets ground to a screeching halt against T#m Gl@v!ne and got manhandled.

* They then got their butts handed to them by some anonymous pitcher, dropping the second half of a double header in ignominious fashion.

* Ryan Church, the 53rd out of the day and a player who missed time with a concussion less than three months ago, wound up face-down and bleeding in the dirt when everything was over and needed to be helped off the field. (Postgame update: Mild concussion.)

Did that cover everything? Or have I forgotten something else awful because my neurons are overcrowded after an endless day of Met awfulness? It's quite possible. (Oh yeah, Mike Piazza retired. He was already retired, but having it be official still sucks.)

Assuming Church is OK (and Yunel Escobar too, because let's be decent about things), you have to give the 2008 Mets credit: No team does a better job confounding any attempt to figure out what they're really made of. The team's obviously terrible -- can't do a damn thing against a horrible Nationals team that might actually recruit pitchers by taking the guys turned down by the Dallas police after responding to the ads above the urinals in the upper deck. Well, no -- they beat the Yankees in convincing fashion, working counts, having smart at-bats and running up the score. So they're actually pretty darn good, right? No -- after an off-day they come out and play 18 innings of prairie-flat baseball, marked by giveaway at-bats, dimwitted baserunning, indifferent fielding and lousy pitching.

It's easy to be average -- just plod along and win some and lose some. But that's too simple for the Mets of late -- they have to be average by yo-yoing from bad to good and bad again at a truly fearsome velocity. It's no easy thing to be at once fundamentally mediocre and completely exhausting, but they're managing it.