5: Wednesday, September 24 vs. Cubs
If this week is about anything, ladies and gentlemen, it is about this: closure. We say goodbye to Shea Stadium and we aim to do it definitively. We wish to put a bow on a yearlong celebration and tie it tight. We don't want our home of 45 years to be cast off without the most complete and satisfying ending possible.

We hope we can say the same about Shea's final season. That we can't do anything about at this point. If we could, we'd do it every year...and we'd present for your consideration directly a far larger procession than we are about to.

Instead, we give you two men who will team to take down number 5 in the Countdown Like It Oughta Be. They are well suited to provide closure to Shea Stadium because these two men provided the greatest closure there is at Shea Stadium.

They caught the final outs of the two World Series won by the New York Mets.

Ironically, their stories are as much about beginnings as they are about closure. Each man became a Met and elicited a great deal of anticipation for what he might one day bring to the team. In both cases, their output was suspected to be pretty good. Nobody could have rightly dreamed that each would grasp a baseball that would clinch spots at the top of the baseball world in their respective dream seasons.

Start with our first man. He commenced his Met career in the veritable dark ages, 1963, in a far-away land known as the Polo Grounds. While his big league debut predated Shea Stadium, it was just a taste of things to come. He didn't arrive as a full-time, full-fledged Met until 1966. It would take a little while for it to become apparent that everything fans were hearing about "the Youth of America" wasn't hype. It was the real thing. Come 1968, there could be no doubt Mets fans were watching not just a good prospect, but a leftfielder who was the finest everyday player the Mets had signed and developed to date. He'd hold that distinction for years to come and remains, even now, one of the crown jewels ever polished by the Met system.

He'd hold something else as well. He'd hold a fly ball hit in the bottom of the ninth inning of the fifth game of the 1969 World Series. There were two outs when Baltimore Orioles second baseman Davey Johnson hit it toward him. When he caught it, there were three — and the Mets had reached their sport's pinnacle.

Ladies and gentlemen, the man who caught the ball that made the Mets world champions in 1969, Cleon Jones.

Our second man took a different route to Shea. His started on another club, in a different country. His reputation as one of the best at his position preceded him. It's what made him so attractive to the Mets and their fans. When he was acquired in exchange for a hefty bounty of young talent, it was agreed that he was truly worth it, that he could be the honest-to-goodness difference between the Mets being fine and the Mets being, as they were when Cleon Jones played left field, Amazin'.

This man, a catcher, indeed constituted that kind of difference. He played hard, he played hurt, he played brilliantly. He was a rock behind the plate, a fearsome threat when he stood at it. His mere presence transformed the Met lineup in 1985 and established it as the one that would dominate throughout 1986. And when he went into his final crouch of the 1986 postseason and caught a pitch that Jesse Orosco threw and Marty Barrett swung through, he, like Cleon Jones, found in his mitt not just a baseball, but a switch. When he grasped that ball, it was akin to pulling the switch that electrified an entire city.

Ladies and gentlemen, the man who caught the ball that made the Mets world champions in 1986, Gary Carter.

Cleon, Gary, you honor us by peeling No. 5 together, by reminding us for one more moment apiece what it was like at Shea Stadium when the Mets ascended to the top of the baseball world. To honor you back, the New York Mets and the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation are thrilled to announce the creation of two installations that will greet visitors to the Queens Museum, adjacent to the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

One is of a leftfielder cradling a fly ball.

One is of a catcher snapping shut his mitt on strike three.

You'll find their faces and forms very familiar.

Cleon Jones' and Gary Carter's defining Met actions will then, for all time, be represented on the site of Shea Stadium's spiritual sibling, the 1964 World's Fair, symbolizing for generations to come the moments when they and their Met teammates made Flushing the undisputed capital of the baseball world.

Number 6 was revealed here.

Number 4 will be counted down next Monday, June 9.

Bill Parcells (or maybe it's John Madden) likes to glorify football players who so come to play that you can toss the coin in the parking lot and they'll line up at midnight and knock the other guy on his ass. Wherever, whenever...they're ready.

I can dig that. I can dig the Mets winning wherever, whenever. As one who has meticulously inscribed the result of every single Mets game he has ever attended and as one who cherishes every single Mets win for which he has had the pleasure of inking a big ol' W, I'll take 'em where I can find 'em, wherever they put 'em, whenever I have to come and get 'em.

That said, even with the 201st win of my Log career easily secured and safely ensconced between 8:07 PM and 11:02 PM last night, even having benefited from whatever charge Johan Santana got out of an additional six hours and fifty-seven minutes' rest, I hereby introduce a measure to abolish Sunday Night Baseball.

Get it out of our lives. We don't like it, we don't need it, we don't want it.

We don't want to be on Sunday Night Baseball. We don't want to sit and stew for seven perfectly good hours on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. We don't derive any bonus from the exposure on Sunday Night Baseball. My apologies to any Mets fans outside the immediate New York area who are grateful for a few dozen innings a year they wouldn't otherwise see, but it's not helping the greater good at all.

Find me the Mets fan who is relieved that Gary Cohen won't be doing play-by-play, who is enriched by Jon Miller. Find me the Mets fan who is so sick of Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling that he welcomes the insights of Joe Morgan. Find me the Mets fan who enjoys eschewing familiarity with his team for obnoxious relatives who barge in three or four times a year to get your story completely wrong, the kind of people who make you swear you will never, ever invite these people over for Thanksgiving again. Are you out there, mythical Mets fan who actually appreciates SNY getting Sunday off in favor of ESPN interpreting your team as some kind of poor relation? As some kind of auxiliary club activity for bored Gothamites?

I used to think being on national television was some kind of reward or recognition for a team, that it meant you'd made it, that you had earned extra attention, that everybody getting a look at you confirmed your progress or your status. Instead, it's punishment for us, the hardcore fans. We get nothing from it, not a damn thing. We're not privy to fantastic announcing we'd otherwise miss. We're not receiving a brilliant perspective from fresh eyes that will help us understand the big picture. We get Jon Miller's tired blowhard act and Joe Morgan's pompous nonsense.

And we get 8 o'clock starts. On a Sunday. On a Sunday! Who on earth wants to wait around until 8 o'clock to watch a baseball game that could easily be played at 1 o'clock? And who on earth wants to wait around until 8 o'clock to attend a baseball game that not only could easily be played at 1 o'clock, but was supposed to be played at 1 o'clock, that was scheduled to be played at 1 o'clock?

Some weeks ago, my friend Joe asked if I wanted to go to one of the Dodgers games. Sure, I said, how about Sunday? Fine, he said, I'll get tickets. And he did. And very quietly, the damn thing was rescheduled. It's not a particular hardship for me as I keep pretty malleable hours. But Joe, like most adults, has to get up very early Monday morning. Joe would rather shred his scorebook than leave a game before it's over. Rubbing his eyes red, we stayed.

We were not in the majority. It's unfortunate enough when the Mets go in the tank as they have so often this season and the seats empty well ahead of the ninth. But on a pleasant night with a lovely win in progress, thousands and thousands headed to the exits ahead of the conclusion, especially families. By the ninth, it was mostly drunken 17-year-olds holding sway in the mezzanine.

Why the abandonment of ship by so many? It's not because they don't like baseball, it's not because they don't like the Mets winning, it's not because they choose to flaunt their prosperity by not watching all the game they paid for. It's because it's frigging late for people. It's a school night, for goodness sake. If you live in Flushing or Corona, it's convenient. If you live anywhere else, it's not.

Now if the ticket said "8:05 PM," then caveat emptor and so forth. But it didn't. ESPN makes this call. ESPN could have made this call months ago. ESPN could have figured out media market 1 was playing media market 2, that by the first of June neither team's marquee value or competitive prospects would be spent, that its phoney-baloney Joe Torre story line would be in effect and it could have issued an edict unto the Mets that Uncle ESPN Wants You. Instead, tens of thousands of seats were sold to an afternoon game — a Sunday afternoon game whose conclusion generally averts bedtimes of all ages — and thousands of seats no doubt went wasted because, hey, people have lives, even baseball fans. Many of those who didn't waste their tickets had to issue themselves a curfew.

Seven hours later than planned for. An hour later than a normal night game. Font for confusion among uninformed ticketholders. Fodder for Phil Mushnick. Three excruciating hours of Miller and Morgan. An excuse to cancel the Mr. Met Dash.

I'm not asking ESPN to get out of the baseball business. They do several things well. They produce wonderful research. They have that handheld camera that records homers going official when the batter steps on the plate. They have on their side many able minds, even if none of them belong to Steve Phillips. They can do a doubleheader some other night of the week. I'll complain far less if they can start on Sunday nights at 7:00, which is prime time for the rest of television. If they wanted to show only West Coast games on Sunday nights, when at least those would be 4:00 local games there, that would seem mildly fair to somebody. Instead, it's the same thing year in, year out. They take our Sunday afternoons and rob them from us. They stick our team on Sunday night and they shove their atrocious announcers down our throats. They keep us out past midnight or they chase us from our seats by ten. They get me griping after a 6-1 win, for gosh sakes.

I like the Mets winning. I like Johan finding his groove. I like Carlos Beltran blasting a "390-foot home run" to the base of the scoreboard (somebody get Shea a tape measure). I like Ryan Church standing and remaining in one piece and hitting, too. I like going to a Mets game wherever they put it, whenever they put it. But Sunday Night Baseball's unique charms are completely lost on me.

Hey, Mets! You've just put up a 5-2 homestand, playing the kind of baseball that makes even veteran fans and conspicuous doubters like us double-check that, yes, this was the same homestand that began with everyone wondering if Willie Randolph would emerge from his long-awaited meeting with the Wilpons and Omar still employed. So what's your reward? You get to fly all night and play in San Francisco tomorrow, of course! Thanks ESPN!

Willie Randolph, typically, said next to nothing after keeping his job. His actions were different, though: He played the rusty bench guys, sat down Carlos Delgado, gave His Boredness a rich southpaw compliment in cheering him for getting his uniform dirty, and saw Beltran and Wright and Reyes stop creaking and start humming. Suddenly the Mets look like the team they were before last Memorial Day -- and as it always is in baseball, we've gone (or are rapidly going) from wondering if we'll ever win another game to being mildly surprised when we lose one.

Emily, Joshua and I overnighted in Philadelphia Saturday, exiting the car just after Easley made the second out of the seventh, which is to say we skipped out before the turning point of the game. Last night we were talking with friends of ours (Phillies fans but, I assure you, good people) about Willie, about what had happened to the Mets for a year and about how good they really are or aren't. The conversation came around to how what we do as baseball watchers can often be reduced to telling stories that fit the already-established facts, and how we forget that it doesn't take much to turn one story into a very different one. If Ray Knight had ended Game 6 with a drive caught at the wall by Dave Henderson, nobody would talk about the indomitable swagger of the '86 Mets -- they'd be a bunch of irresponsible substance abusers who squandered their potential. If the '07 Mets had gotten something respectable from Tom Glavine in the final regular-seasong game and made a respectable showing in the playoffs, we might well have waxed rhapsodic about how they'd held off the valiant Phillies and everything they'd learned pulling themselves out of free-fall.

But what's the alternative? I'm not a stat guy, which has nothing to do with any distaste for sabermetrics. To the contrary, in fact: I love that stuff, but I struggle to internalize valuable metrics such as VORP and RCAA and BABIP to the point that I can assess their values the way I can dissect the traditional measures, limited though they are. And then there's the larger problem for me, which is that I can't fit a stats-minded understanding of a baseball season's ebb and flow into the narratives we naturally want to impose on it. If the Mets rebound and go to the playoffs, the truest explanation of what happened could be that key players like Reyes, Beltran and Heilman regressed to the mean. But that's not a satisfying narrative. No, if that scenario comes to pass, we'll say something along the lines of how singling out Delgado was the wake-up call for an underachieving clubhouse, shaking the players out of their lethargy and restoring the team's focus. Will that be true? Quite possibly not. But it'll feel true.

Anyway. The story of a season may be shaped in retrospect, but the story of tonight's game seems fairly clear. One day we'll stop feeling mildly disappointed that Johan Santana didn't pitch a complete game, strike out 15 and heal the sick in the field boxes and the front half of the loge with his aura. One day, we'll watch him coolly dig his way out of an early hole and hold a team at bay the way he did tonight and be very happy with that. Did you see that called third strike on poor Blake Dewitt to end the seventh? Mercy. Oh, and kudos to Johan for doing something pitchers rarely do these days -- exiting to a warm hand from the crowd, he actually tipped his cap.

Johan's supporting cast? Jose Reyes's electricity/stupidity ratio has been good enough to make me tempted to discard that unhappy measure, David Wright's bat could melt lead right now, Carlos Beltran looks awake and alive, Luis Castillo is moving well around second, and how about Ryan Church? Though somebody tell Brian Schneider to lay off the congratulatory helmet slap. It's a long way to San Francisco, even if you don't feel nauseous.

With a week of West Coast games on tap, you're going to be sitting around at 7:10 fidgeting. Fill up some of that empty time by ordering the famous Faith and Fear Numbers shirt, available right here.