Well, we survived Augie Ojeda (7 for 14 in the series!), today's installment of Bullpen Roulette ("Some Met will be ineffective! Which one? Don't you wish you knew!") and an OK but not sky-high effort by Johan Santana (yeah, he needed nearly 120 pitches to get through six, but the Diamondbacks are freaking good, and wise beyond their years in the batter's box) to win two of three against the NL's best team.

This was shaping up to be a stinker, with Joe Smith's giving up the lead in the seventh prelude to Pedro Feliciano hurling Chris Burke's bunt down the right-field line, which was clearly leading to a Diamondback on second and nobody out in the eighth. But as has happened frequently this year, Ryan Church stood between the Mets and a meltdown. Felicitously, Feliciano's throw to Carlos Delgado was so terrible that it wasn't a bad throw to Church, who fired a strike to David Wright, waiting in mock idleness to pounce on Burke and erase him. (Somewhere, Pedro Martinez smiled.) Then, just as we seemed to be settling in for the long haul, Conor Jackson fired a ball three feet over Stephen Drew's head, and the Mets pummeled Chad Qualls into submission, making us briefly forget they'd been punchless much of the day. About time we had a game in which we weren't the much-heralded National League team that lost after commencing to play stupid.

In our house, this was one of those busy Sunday games that unfolded as everything else happened. Saturday was our annual Kentucky Derby party, which over the years has come to include a larger and larger percentage of children. The kids are now old enough to be turned loose downstairs with minimal intervention while the adults drink bourbon and beer upstairs, but they're also now large enough to reduce the downstairs to rubble within a couple of hours -- our house looks like it's hosted a cruise missile by the time we're done. When the game started things still hadn't been entirely put right, so the first few innings were kept track of on various TVs while surfaces were vacuumed and swabbed and washed and otherwise put right. (Well, except for a cobblestone in the backyard that the kids somehow fractured into three parts. I have no idea how they accomplished that and am not certain I want to know.)

With the house once more functional, it was off to the park with Joshua, who'd been foolishly promised a game of wiffle ball when the cleanup looked like it would only take a couple of hours. In deference to his feeble father being hobbled by a hurt toe, Joshua agreed he'd be both the Mets and the Tigers. (I don't know why he picks the Tigers. Occasionally the enemy team has been the Cardinals. We once had a showdown because I flatly refused to be the Yankees, even for pretend. I'm nearly 39 and don't know why you're asking.) While the virtual Mets and Tigers did battle, I kept track of the real Mets and Diamondbacks with a single headphone and my ancient radio. When I told Joshua that David Wright had hit a home run and it was now Mets 2, Diamondbacks 1, he looked baffled and reminded me it was Mets 8, Tigers 2.

When the babysitter arrived Emily and I headed out for a We Survived Derby Day dinner and restorative liquor. Normally a 4 p.m. start would see us go around the corner to the bar to see the rest of the game (I love my wife), but today basketball was claiming the TVs. (Stupid basketball.) So we decided to walk the 40 minutes or so down to Red Hook and the Good Fork, our favorite restaurant in the city, sharing a headset and only occasionally moving out of sync so that one listener or the other had earpiece and game suddenly ripped away. (By the way, walking single-file through a construction zone while sharing headphones, exhorting Met hitters and tapping out a text message ... it's difficult.) Wright popped up with the bases loaded near the Moonshine; Burke committed his sin of overeagerness near the Hope and Anchor, and with Jorge Sosa arrived on the mound we settled in at a table in the Good Fork's garden, under a slowly darkening early-evening sky. Figuring al fresco was casual enough for subtle al radio, I sneaked an update every 30 seconds or so, announcing the bottom of the ninth with raised fingers, as if I were the shortstop and Emily an outfielder.

One finger ... two fingers ... and reach for the off switch.

"Put it in the books?" Emily asked.

"Put it in the books," I said.

One year ago tonight, Julio Franco homered off Randy Johnson, right into that silly pool at Chase Field. One year ago tonight, we loved Julio Franco.

One year later, Julio Franco has hung the proverbial 'em up.

He didn't reach his goal of making it to 50 as a player. He fell about four months short. He barely made it to 49 in the Majors last summer, cut by the Mets, picked up the Braves, dazzling no one by September. He was hanging on this spring in the Mexican League with the Quintana Roo Tigers.

They were the last stop in a professional career that began in 1978, when he was 19, and included stints with the Butte Copper Kings, the Central Oregon Phillies, the Peninsula Pilots, the Escogido Lions, the Reading Phillies, the Oklahoma City 89ers, the Philadelphia Phillies, the Cleveland Indians, the Texas Rangers, the Chiba Lotte Marines, the Milwaukee Brewers, the Angelopolis Tigers, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the Samsung Lions, the Atlanta Braves and the New York Mets.

Now Julio Franco is done.

He told Mexico's sports daily the Record that retiring "was the hardest decision in my life. I always said I would be the first one to know the exact moment. I think the numbers speak for themselves, the production speaks and this is the right moment. I understand that my time has passed and the great men and athletes know when to say enough."

Given that he left the Mets fairly isolated from his teammates, I don't know that Julio Franco would qualify as a great man, but you can't argue the athlete part, not when he lasted for more than 30 years in professional baseball, not when he was playing in the big leagues in 1982 and was still playing in the big leagues in 2007. Though his vaunted clubhouse influence seemed to have waned or turned sour between the beginning and the end of his Met tenure, he seemed like a pretty good guy to have around in 2006 when so much was going so right so soon for his new club. His teammates then called him Moses, not Methuselah.

I'm a little more than four years younger than Julio Franco. I began getting published as a writer the same year he began getting paid for playing baseball. I get to keep writing as long as I like. I hope somebody will continue to pay me for it, as it is my primary marketable skill. Thanks to the Internet, I get to be published as long as I like (Buzz Bissinger's indignant sputterings notwithstanding). There is nothing remarkable about a 45-year-old writing for a living, or a 55-year-old or a 65-year-old.

It is astounding that a few months shy of his 50th birthday, Julio Franco was playing baseball and doing it competently and drawing a check for it. He'd been to bat 128 times for the AAA-caliber Tigres de Quintana Roo and was hitting .250. He homered once and drove in 15 runs. Carlos Beltran, whom Julio famously urged out of the dugout to take a franchise-altering curtain call two seasons ago, has driven in 13 runs over 96 at-bats in his league. A slow start at age 31, however, is worlds apart from any kind of start at age 49, no matter how amazing any kind of start at age 49 should be considered, no matter how tough it has to be say "enough" to doing what you have always done, doing what you have always loved.