Need a Father's Day, graduation day, birthday, whatever day item? Just want to enhance your sense of Metsian self? Several items have crossed our proverbial desk of late that are worth your knowing about, perhaps worthy of adding to your baseball library, your baseball wardrobe or your baseball life.

The Faith and Fear T-Shirt
OK, I'm cheating a bit by leading off with this one because it's not new. Rather, it is the classic illustration of the Mets' four retired uniform numbers: 37, 14, 41 in Flushing orange, 42 in Flatbush red. Many of you have treated yourselves to FAFIFwear and are happier for it. Many have you denied yourselves. I feel bad for you if you're in the latter category. We recently heard through the shirtvine that some of you are waiting for an updated shirt that reflects the yet unretired number of Mike Piazza. I personally have been waiting for the Mets to retire the numbers of Willie Mays and Keith Hernandez for many a season, yet I enjoy my FAFIF shirt at every opportunity. As does Jason. As does this gal and this guy and this kid just about everywhere he goes. The Mets do not move with the dexterity of a lizard in numerical matters, so my heartfelt, objective recommendation is to not let year upon year go by without honoring the sacred memories of Casey Stengel, Gil Hodges, Tom Seaver and Jackie Robinson, just as the left field corner of Shea Stadium has since 1997. (We are aware of the honorary retiring of the name SHEA as well, but we're sabermaticians when it comes to shirts: we deal in numbers.) To gander, mull and, if you are so moved, order the classic Faith and Fear shirt, go here. The price is $17.31, so it's not like Mex and Mike aren't involved with the shirt in a very real way. As for Willie, you get 24 thank yous from Jason and me for your time and consideration.

Gary, Keith & Ron
Our beloved SNY announcers are lending their names and images to a shirt concern of their own, operated by Lynn Cohen, to raise funds for charities near and dear to them. I chose the "It's Outta Here!" model and it's sharp, I tell you what. The best part is you don't have to wait for Carlos Delgado to get into a power groove to wear it. Coupon code "yodaddy" will fetch you a 15% discount through June 15. Shirt-buyers are eligible to buy $10 tickets to Gary, Keith & Ron Day at Shea, July 10. Check it all out here. (Dana Brand has a nice story about meeting Lynn at his blog. Dana Brand also continues to have a wonderful book here.)

Ramets
My friends at the Crane Pool Forum get their Forest Hills on with merchandise that — Gabba Gabba Shea! — honors Mets history in the sedated style of Joey, Johnny, et al. I really like the "Grote" part of the shield. Check 'em out here.

Working at the Ballpark
From the same publisher who brought us the perpetually awesome Mets By The Numbers comes an insider's look at the game from those who work every angle of it: players and coaches, yes, but also the media, the scouts and the stadium personnel. I meant to mention this last Friday when I related the story of my brother-in-law the onetime Shea vendor but, well, forgot. For what it's worth, author Tom Jones found peanut and beer guys who seem less hostile about their ballpark jobs than my sister's husband was. But their tales are entertaining nonetheless. Find out more here.

101 Reasons to Love the Mets
We don't seem to have been favored with a full-out coffee table book to remember Shea by (we deserve something along the lines of this imperial tome which, it pains me a little to admit, is spectacular if you love pictures of ballparks, even ballparks that are homes to teams you can't stand), but 101 Reasons is a nice, colorful history volume, arranged chronologically and written breezily. If you have a small coffee table, it's perfect. Look into it here. (This is not to be confused with the compelling text that is 100 Things Mets Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die, which you should also have by now, I should hope. Acquire them simultaneously and you'll be up 201 things and reasons over the less informed fan.)

The New York Mets: Ethnography, Myth and Subtext
I read this during the winter and held off on writing it up because, quite frankly, I'm not over the moon about it despite the intriguing title (and picture of Endy on the cover). I'm not sure I share much of Richard Grossinger's worldview on what it means to be a Mets fan — he's a little dour and a bit uncomfortable that he's devoted chunks of his life to such a lightweight concern — but he certainly gives the matter some thought and his story about working with Terry Leach is fairly gripping. Investigate further here.

Jewish Major Leaguers Baseball Cards
The latest edition of this glossy, glatt set is out and it's a beaut, featuring a salute to Hank Greenberg on the 75th anniversary of the rookie year of the original Hammerin' Hank. Met angles include new cards for Shawn Green and the surprisingly undepressing Scott Schoeneweis. You don't have to be Jewish to love Jewish Major Leaguers 2008. Kosher, collector or otherwise, they're a world of fun. Flip through 'em here.

Heckuva Day
The makers of the enchanting documentary Mathematically Alive are working on a new film, one in which Mets fans can wax rhapsodic (or, I suppose, vitriolic) about their Shea experiences. Info on their next group shoot here if you want to share your perspective for posterity. Chance to purchase their first DVD here.

The New York Mets: Essential Games of Shea Stadium
These discs, covering Game Four '69 WS; Game Three '86 NLCS; Game Six '86 WS; Game Five '99 NLCS; 9/21/01's return to NYC baseball; and Wright's walkoff hit that beat Rivera (plus worthy extras), deserve a more thorough going over, but a glimpse through the box's contents — I fast-forwarded immediately to the bottom of the fifteenth of the Grand Slam Single game — indicates a Mets fan wouldn't want to live without this set for very long. We all know every Mets game played at Shea is essential. I don't know that these are the six most essential the ol' ballpark has hosted (presumably rain delay favorite May 19, 2006 ranks as one of the most available for transfer to digital video), but you can't go wrong with any of 'em. Rumor has it Faith and Fear may be giving one or two away in the near future, but winning DVDs from us is never easy...certainly not as easy as enjoying a Faith and Fear shirt this summer (which is super easy). Essential viewing and ordering detail is here.

I dressed all wrong for it, of course. The game that Stoneham and I had fixed upon was a midweek afternoon meeting between the Giants and the San Diego Padres in late June — a brilliant, sunshiny day at Candlestick Park, it turned out, and almost the perfect temperature for a curling match. I had flown out from New York that morning, and I reported to Stoneham's office a few minutes before game time. He shook my hand and examined my airy East Coast midsummer getup and said, "Oh, no, this won't do." He went to a closet and produced a voluminous, ancient camel's-hair polo coat and helped me into it... [When] we went back to Stoneham's office, I took off the polo coat, and Stoneham hung it up in the closet again. I suddenly wondered how many Giants games it had seen.
—Roger Angell, "The Companions of the Game," Five Seasons, 1975

What can be viewed as a certain sameness to every baseball season can also be looked upon as reassuring if momentarily distressing regularity. You know there's going to be the indignity of Sunday Night Baseball; you know there's going to be the late night West Coast opener that your system and your team aren't quite geared to handle; you know you'll be cursing your talented but erratic (or erratic but talented) lefty deep into the next morning when that opener, in fact, is not well handled; and you know you'll be waiting far too long to avenge the bad taste of last night's 10:15 start with another 10:15 start.

You also know, or at least you may have noticed, that there will be one tiny gem tucked into the schedule most every year. There will be a weekday afternoon game in San Francisco.

There was in 2006: a Wednesday afternoon win following a Tuesday night win following a Monday night loss. There was in 2007: a Wednesday afternoon win following a Tuesday night win following a Monday night loss. And there it was again in 2008, the very same pattern made famous first by Brian, Barry and Billy and then by buzzcuts. This time around, Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco was more mundane if ultimately no less satisfying: score early, pitch well, feel unease, hang on, what's for dinner?...ooh, they're showing it again!

You can't necessarily count on the West Coast trip breaking just this way — although vigilant reader Ben pointed out to me after Ollie's implosion Monday that the Mets were poised to follow a seemingly irrefutable pattern, going so far as to note we'd won the Tuesday night and Wednesday afternoon games by three and two runs, respectively, in '06 and '07...which is just what we did in '08. You can't necessarily count on anything in baseball, but you like the idea that you can, especially day baseball from San Fran.

I actually took off from work in 2000 to watch the Mets play an afternoon game on TV during their first trip ever to Pac Bell. My Baseball Tonight glimpses whetted my appetite that much. It was a terrible game and a terrible series, setting the stage for the Mets' first several sojourns there. Pac Bell (and let's just refer to it as such, for the constant jangling of its ever changing nom de phones just gives me a headache) behaved as Turner West at the dawn of the century. It took the Mets four seasons and thirteen tries to win a single regular-season* contest there, and that didn't happen until Piazza, New York Catcher sacrificed his groin — so to speak — to avoid being hit by an inside pitch from Jason Schmidt. Mike was pronounced out indefinitely. Then the Mets finally won a regular-season game at Pac Bell. Talk about a tough way to change your luck.

(*Feel free to interject that the Mets won an enormous and thrilling postseason game in October of 2000 at the very same venue. That took the edge off any potential Pac Bell curse before it could start leaving threatening messages on our voicemail.)

The bad taste of any given loss drenched in San Francisco sunlight will eventually block out the good vibes I have coming in to every day game there, but those vibes are always good the next time around. Pac Bell remains the best-looking park in the National League for afternoon baseball, at least on television. It simply sparkles. It's never cloudy...never — at least not on my watch. That green lawn beyond second base just expands out into forever. Not so good for Fernando Tatis, but a damn fine sight for the invention of color TV. The brickwork, the arches, the stationary cable car, the peekthrough walkway, the fanciful glove, the silly Coke bottle, the massive scoreboard that starts somewhere near Market Street and ends in Sausalito...plus where else you gonna get a whole bay to keep you company at a ballgame?

You can count on hearing the same things from the fellas when you tune in for day baseball from San Fran. You will hear that it's a gorgeous day, that it's 57 degrees (it's always 57 degrees in San Francisco), that it was a little chilly last night but it's 57 and gorgeous this afternoon, that this is so much more comfortable than it was at Candlestick, that Candlestick was, in more polite terms than is permissible to mention on SNY, the ass end of the earth. Pac Bell, according to Gary, Keith and Ron, is everything that Candlestick wasn't. Too much wind at Candlestick. Too much foul territory at Candlestick. Too many roving biker gangs at Candlestick. Horace Stoneham had one too many nip one fine morning at Candlestick Point in the late '50s and was convinced by crooked elements to stick a stadium out there on the edge of the Arctic. Horace took another nip and signed on the dotted line.

Here at Pac Bell, you've got the scenery and you've got the observations that come with it. There's the Bay Bridge — it takes you to Oakland. There's Willie's statue — 24 Willie Mays Plaza, to be exact. There's McCovey Cove — imagine how many Stretch would have hit here. There's the kayak korps — whoops, they went the way of Barry Bonds. But what a nice place, huh? What a nice day for a game, huh?

The bundling-up of the San Francisco crowd is always duly noted. I bundled up on my one trip to date to Pac Bell — a Friday night in July — and I was overmatched by the elements. My friend Fred, not a huge sports fan but an observer-at-large second to none, chuckled when I told him how Stephanie and I required defrosting after seven innings: "Yeah, whenever they show highlights, I notice everyone at a Giants game is dressed like it's winter in the middle of summer." Given how frigid it gets at Pac Bell yet what a marked improvement it represents in climatological terms, I can only imagine that Candlestick must have been an ice cube tray in a deep freeze in Green Bay in a particularly harsh January.

One thing that jumped out at me yesterday afternoon was something I'm not used to seeing from San Francisco in this decade: swaths of empty seats. Paid attendance was 35,646. Similar crowds were announced Monday and Tuesday nights. Horace Stoneham would have killed (or maybe even sobered up) for such figures at Candlestick, but they're a bit thin compared to what was the norm at Pac Bell for Mets games when the park was novel, when Bonds was productive, when the Giants were any good. Capacity in San Francisco doesn't much exceed 42,000. For several years, the wind was against you if you wanted your choice of ticket. Now, no matter how pretty their park remains, it is a veritable breeze. Something for us to think about in parochial terms down the road...perhaps.

Something else: In 2006 and again in 2007, the Mets scored five runs in the first game they played after leaving Pac Bell. And they won. Should it happen tonight starting at 10:05, you read it here first.