Dear Mets and Mike Pelfrey,

Wanna start converting some skeptics into believers? Beat the best pitcher in the National League tonight.

Your opponent, lifetime at Shea:

4 starts, 2 wins, 1 loss (a 2-1 affair in which Victor Zambrano went deep, throwing the game of his life), 29 innings pitched, 29 strikeouts, 5 walks, 18 hits, 1 earned run.

Brandon Webb's earned run average in those four Shea outings: 0.31

This year overall, Webb is 11-2, toting a 2.58 ERA and wielding a WHIP of barely more than 1.

Alou isn't available (the sun shifted imperceptibly this afternoon, requiring Moises to undergo an MRI). Chris Aguila is apparently up, Abraham Nuñez undeniably down. The Mets are riding 'round in a hole in the ground.

Want us to believe you're worth believing in tomorrow? Beat Brandon Webb or at least his team tonight.

Cordially,

F.U. in Flushing

F.U., of course, stands for Fired Up.

We should be careful not to read too much into an isolated incident, but it stood out for me as a metaphor for a Met career that had veered off track and still wasn't quite where it needed to be. On April 15, Jose Reyes was having one of his periodic breakout games, one of those nights when Jose was getting back to being Jose and all that Jose means to the Mets, one of those nights when the bat and the eye and the glove and the legs were all gearing into overdrive.

He singled to lead off. He doubled in the third. He tripled in the fifth. He singled in the seventh. He was both a home run shy of the cycle and a hit of any kind short of 5-for-5.

Who wouldn't want to see that? I know I did. So did Jason and so did Jon and Matt, the Mets By The Numbers authors who invited us to join them at Shea that Tuesday night. So did everybody in the park. We collectively urged Jose on to go for it.

He listened to us.
He swung at three pitches in his eyes.
Jose Reyes should have known better.

Today is Jose Reyes' 25th birthday, which seems impossible unless you decide 25 is the new 15, in which case, OK, Jose is something of a rambunctious adolescent when it comes to baseball. It's adorable when it works. It's frustrating when it doesn't.

Too much of the time, it doesn't. Too much of the time, Jose doesn't know better. Too much of the time, Jose Reyes has not grown into the ballplayer almost every one of us in Metland thinks he will be and probably thought he already was.

Happy birthday Jose. You've given us a great deal to consider ever since you reached your twenties.

When we first laid eyes on Jose Reyes, he was 19, hours from 20. His debut on June 10, 2003 came just in time to make him the last of ten teens who have played for the Mets. It's mostly trivia (Ed Kranepool, Nolan Ryan and Dwight Gooden stand out; Jim Bethke and Jerry Hinsley don't) but it tends to reinforce the notion of forever young where a player is concerned. How is it possible Jose Reyes is 25? He just came up when he was 19!

When will Jose Reyes be a little less young? When will Jose Reyes be not the kid who seems to have been called up five minutes ago but a player who's been in the big leagues five years now and shows that he has learned a great deal? When does a five-year, 25-year-old player qualify as a veteran?

Calling out erstwhile wunderkinder does not come easy for me, particularly where this onetime wunderkind is concerned. I loved Jose Reyes from the moment he got here, and an office decorated generously in Jose Reyes' image would attest to his ongoing status as my favorite active Met. I gravitated to Jose in 2003 because, as Murray Kempton once wrote of Mayor Lindsay, he was fresh when everybody else was tired. Jose Reyes personified the break from the surly present of the moment and represented to me the future when the only thing that looked good to a dying-hard Mets fan was the suddenly distant past. June 10, 2003 was the moment, I surmised, when we'd come together to remake this great franchise so that it would always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.

He smiled.
And he ran.
And he hit.
And he ran some more.

And he got hurt, but you knew he'd recover. You knew he'd get hurt again, but he'd keep on healing. And at the end of too many days on the DL, he'd be off and running unstopped and unstoppable.

2005 was that year. 2005 was when Jose Reyes wasn't hamstrung, wasn't striding uncomfortably. First he couldn't take a pitch. He didn't walk for a full month. But then he settled down...and then he lit it up. Jose made the move in-season, jumping three levels as easily as he legged out three bases. In April and May, it was maybe he'd be better off if he were sat or sent down. By early summer, he was showing signs of getting it. By the middle of summer, he absolutely got it and was off and running with it.

Straight into 2006.

Roughly around the time of his 23rd birthday, Jose Reyes became a star. Inside a month, he was a superstar. By September, he was a legend at Shea Stadium. Come October, he loomed among the best players in the game. Given the combination of tools and the electrical charge his personality and ability gave them, it wasn't insane to think of Jose Reyes of the New York Mets as maybe the best player in baseball.

2007 did nothing to abuse you of that notion if you were indulging it. At least not until the last of his 24th birthday cake was gobbled up. The candles were blown out on Jose Reyes Superstar in the weeks that followed. Jose had been demoted: from best there was to merely extraordinary; from extraordinary some nights to alarmingly ordinary on others; from ordinary to worse by September.

The Jose Reyes I knew I loved and thought I knew...he's been kind of missing. And I miss him greatly.

I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on statistics. I watch the Mets too much to seek guidance from data, so I was a little surprised when I looked up what Jose has accomplished to date in 2008:

61 Games
75 Hits
17 Doubles
5 Triples
8 Home Runs
29 Runs Batted In
42 Runs Scored
23 Stolen Bases
.288 Batting Average
.352 On-Base Percentage
.485 Slugging Percentage

The batting average is a bit off, but the other percentages align favorably with 2006. Prorate the cumulative numbers for 155 or so games and they don't look too bad for a full season. Through Sunday he had more extra-base hits than any shortstop in either league. Throw in his recent 30-game on-base streak, and his 2008 is by no means terrible. It's actually pretty good.

But it's not great. Couple it with watching him, and it's not close.

He still runs. He still hits. He sometimes fields spectacularly (even if he sometimes pulls boners that would make 1993 Tony Fernandez moan in agony — and not just because of gallstones). He smiles his Jose smile, but it just doesn't quite light up a room like it once did.

Am I being too hard on the kid or am I just tired of waiting for the kid to definitively grow up? It's less a matter of chronological age than five seasons in the books, and perhaps less about statistics and performance than stature. Now and again we hear about good influences on Jose: that Jose Valentin was a good influence, that Luis Castillo is a good influence. Jose Reyes been at this Major League Baseball enterprise since 2003. Shouldn't Jose Reyes — two-time starting All-Star shortstop, erstwhile bona fide MVP candidate, the only Met I can ever remember being serenaded by name over and over and over again — be influencing some younger player for the good by now? Granted, the Mets' roster is dead last in wetness behind the ears, but where's the maturity? Where's the leadership? Where's Jose Reyes from 2006 getting better while gaining wisdom?

OK, I guess it is about statistics and performance as much as stature. And I guess I wonder if two years ago was once in a lifetime. Jose's 2006 was arguably the most exciting individual season turned in by any Met since Dwight Gooden's 1985. No way I didn't expect the most exciting individual season after Doc in '85 wouldn't be Doc in '86, then Doc in '87 and so on. Didn't happen. It doesn't happen. They're called career years for a reason. I'm beginning to suspect Jose's had his already.

And maybe he is who he is and maybe that's who he'll be when he's five years older if not necessarily five years obviously wiser. Every individual should be accorded his own learning curve. But he has such an excellent example to follow in his left side compatriot.

We should be careful not to judge too much from an isolated incident, but three nights after Jose's swing-swing-swing and miss for the cycle against the Nationals, David Wright was in a similar situation in Philadelphia. He came up needing only a four-bagger to forge a 5-for-5 cycle. He calmly accepted a walk when the pitches dictated that's all he could expect. David Wright is almost as young as Jose Reyes yet in another demographic altogether regarding development as a ballplayer and, as judged from afar and through several filters, a leader.

Maybe it's different for David. He's been talked up as captain-in-waiting since he was all of 23. I've never heard anybody articulate a co-captaincy as Jose's destiny. Nobody puts Jose out there as spokesman for anything more substantive than Wise Potato Chips. Nobody expects him to take responsibility for anything but getting on base and then stealing another one. It's tiresome, frankly, to listen to Wright tell the media hordes every night that we have to "dig down deep and make a stand," but it is also as admirable as the Mets' current drought is long that he so dependably takes one for the team. Surely Jose could dig down deep and wave a few of the reporters over to his locker and spout a few clichés of his own, thereby taking the pressure off his overwrought teammate.

I'm not wishing for Jose to assume the visage of grim death in the losing clubhouse. Or on the field. I was never in the camp that attributed September '07 to his creative and interactive gestures; it wasn't what he was doing with his hands that killed us — it was what he wasn't doing with his head and his bat (his head, his bat and the similar equipment that belonged to about thirty of his coworkers). It's good to see Jose building a decent-plus season. It's good to see him race as hard to first in 2008 as he did to third in 2006. It's good to see him smile at every opportunity.

It's not just great is all.