It's a shame that, provided both are behaving more or less decently, players and fans don't interact more. Baseball's fun to play and fun to watch. (Of course, on a mind-bogglingly gorgeous night like tonight, sitting outside a bus station would be pretty much A-OK. But still.)

Take the bottom of the seventh. Carlos Delgado had just driven in Nick Evans to tie a loopily entertaining Mets-Braves tilt at 4-all. (As you might expect, more on that in a moment.) Now, Julian Tavarez was in and Fernando Tatis was up. He crushed a 1-0 pitch to left, where it zipped into the glove of Omar Infante a couple of steps from the fence. A young guy in the bleacher area's slot in the outfield wall had apparently been yelling something at Infante, grinning to take away whatever edge his words might have carried. Infante let his momentum carry him nearly all the way to the guy's face, brandishing the ball he'd caught. He was grinning too. It was the kind of moment you don't see enough, and it was pretty cool.

But Dame Fortune didn't agree. She began to weave her web.

We have six more to play against the Braves, so your chronicler will recite no eulogies for them, for fear of getting a little spittle in the aforementioned Mistress of Baseball's eye. Nor will you hear any triumphant braying about the prospects of the orange and blue -- besides the fact that that shit's for Yankee fans, last September will keep me woof-free until CitiField's days are numbered. But it's simple truth to observe that the Mets just played one of those charmed-life series against their old foes, one in which we got every big hit, every steely-eyed at-bat and every lucky bounce while they got absolutely nothing. We're not this good and they're not this bad, but sometimes baseball rules that you are and they are -- and while that's decree is in delirious effect, you enjoy every single marvelous moment.

Where to start? Well, the Braves' defense was appalling all series: Kelly Johnson looked like his glove had been replaced with a cheese grater, while Chipper had one go simply straight through his glove to extend a Damion Easley at-bat. (I swear I remember the same thing happening to us against them -- perhaps with Eddie Perez hitting? And no, I haven't forgotten Mr. Infante.) But first base was the real nexus of horrors for Atlanta. Mark Teixeira is gone and Casey Kotchman, his smooth-fielding replacement, missed the final two games to be with his ailing mom (whom we of course hope is OK), leaving Greg Norton and Martin Prado to do their meager best. Prado actually made a nice play on Delgado in the seventh, only to find Will Ohman had been gazing at the proceedings in fascination from the mound and wasn't where he should be, resulting in the ball sailing wide right and the Mets tying the game. In the top of the ninth, with Prado on second, Gregor Blanco grounded to deep second, where Easley made a nifty snag -- and a throw so bad it was good. Delgado had to lunge toward the coach's box to corral it, neatly blocking the view of Greg Gibson, who called Blanco out. I presume Blanco didn't argue because he was dazed from pancaking into Delgado's broad back, but what about the famously argumentative Bobby Cox? Maybe it was because he saw Prado had rounded third with an urgency generally reserved for continental drift. Bobby's been around the game long enough to know a lot of things, including the immortal truth that when you're going horseshit they fuck you.

Blanco's erasure paved the way for the ninth, and the feeling that somehow, someway, the Mets would prevail. First, at 10:03 by my clock, Poland the Nats had actually managed a win against Germany the Phillies. David Wright was on second, having turned an 0-2 count into a 3-2 double up the gap. (I love David Wright.) The Inescapable Delgado was at the plate against Vladimir Nunez, and at 10:07, on a 1-1 count, he hit a shoulder-high liner at Infante. Dame Fortune (remember her) ooched that ball into the lights and it glanced off Infante's glove. He fell down. At that same moment, Wright had gone too far towards third and tried to reverse course. He nearly fell down, leaving the two critical players in this little drama on the ground or close to it with the game in the balance.

It was a shorter distance for Wright: He found his feet and dashed his way to a dusty belly-flop home, while Infante contemplated how the distance from left field to the Atlanta dugout had somehow morphed from 300 feet to 300 miles. If that guy from the seventh inning was still at his station, you know he gave poor Infante an earful. And I hope he did -- not so much because Infante deserved it but because charmed baseball typically lasts about as long as late August imitates late May. You better enjoy both.

If you want to feel welcome at Shea Stadium (or its successor facility), here's a piece of advice. Don't be the man on the mound when the Mets clinch the pennant there. All will never be right for you in Flushing again.

Our sample size is two pitchers, so the rule is open to interpretation. But the precedent isn't pretty.

Case 1
Nolan Ryan enters Game Three of the 1969 NLCS in the third inning and pitches seven innings to close out the Braves, undoubtedly the most phenomenal long-relief performance in Mets history. Thirty-nine years later, he is invited back to participate in final weekend ceremonies at Shea Stadium and the New York Post reports he politely declines.

The better news is that the Mets, according to the Post, have invited "hundreds" of former players for the occasion (I didn't know that many ex-Mets sell Lincolns and Mercurys). If management has been saving all of them up for one big Sheagasm, well, great. I dream of a final Sunday like the one that closed Baltimore's Memorial Stadium in 1991 (from Peter Richmond's marvelous Ballpark: Camden Yards and the Building of an American Dream):

[T]hen Brooks Robinson steps onto the top step of the home dugout, pauses for a moment, hefts himself to the field, and jogs to third base.

And now everyone knows.

Then Frank Robinson jogs to right, turns, stops, takes the place he always took, and listens to the ovation. And Boog Powell lopes to first, and then Jim Palmer to the mound. Rick Dempsey to the plate. One by one they take their positions, each man waiting long enough for the man before him to reap his own ovation.

The sound in the stands is an unusual mixture of cheers and gasps and applause; there is no precedent, so no one knows how to react, although many people in the upper row of the upper deck are crying unashamedly.

Dave Johnson and Bobby Grich and Rich Dauer go to second. Lee May, Pat Kelly, Elrod Hendricks. Dave McNally, Pat Dobson, Mike Cuellar. Doug DeCinces. Russ Snyder. Mike Flanagan, Dennis Martinez, Scott McGregor.

For ten minutes they keep coming, and when it becomes apparent that it wasn't just the star Orioles who had returned, but everyone who had worn an Orioles uniform, life really does start to imitate art: Each successive name -- Glenn Gulliver, Dave Skaggs, dozens of them -- adds an extra chill to the moment.

By now the ovation has settled to a steady roar, like a waterfall, just as insistent; it is thanks for nothing less than thirty-seven years of baseball.

Finally, Cal Ripken comes out alone. And then Earl.

And for that single moment, there isn't anyone in Memorial Stadium who wasn't finally grateful for the ballpark's youth; because of it, the men who played in it -- almost all of them -- could return to bid it good-bye, all of them alive. Other parks speak of their ghosts. Memorial needed none. It had never happened before that a stadium could be visited by virtually all of its former players.

With that kind of crowd of former Mets, big and small, would anyone in particular be missed if he didn't show? Probably, because we all have favorites and favorites are capable of letting us down, but it should be enough. It should be enough that the Mets asked, for Nolan Ryan — who as a Major League club president should know better — to appear on the last scheduled day of Shea. Ryan's never been particularly sentimental about his time in New York, and one doesn't doubt some bitterness will always reside in the soul of a player given up on young and succeeding for a generation thereafter.

But c'mon, Nolie. Come back.

Nolan's never resurfaced for a Shea Old Timers Day (when we used to have them), not even when the '69ers gathered. Seaver skipped the skippable 25th anniversary wake in 1994, but he eventually returned. Yogi didn't believe anybody made his presence necessary in '94 either, but Yogi's dropped by now and again since (Piazza's catcher home run record celebration, Ralph Kiner Night). Nolan Ryan, the only other Hall of Famer associated with the 1969 World Champion Mets, hasn't been to Shea, to the best of my recollection, since he stopped pitching for the Astros twenty years ago. Other than for being an Astro at Shea at an inopportune juncture in October 1986, I don't remember Mets fans holding Ryan's post-Mets blossoming against him. It won't ruin the final weekend not to have Nolan Ryan around, but it would be that much sweeter if he remembered what he did on the Shea mound on an autumn afternoon when he was young.

Case 2
Mike Hampton pitches a masterful three-hit shutout against the Cardinals in Game Five of the 2000 NLCS. Combined with his previous outing in St. Louis, it earns him the MVP award of the series. He is hoisted triumphantly by his teammates for capturing them the flag.

Then we grabbed him and threw him under the bus, where he has resided ever since.

Mike Hampton returns to Shea tonight. It is not to commemorate the final season of Shea. It is, if he hasn't hurt himself since this morning, to try and stop the 2008 Mets Express from rolling all over his current team, the Braves. Remember when we worried Mike Hampton would sign with the Braves? Remember when we would have liked him to have resigned with us? Remember Mike Hampton throwing that shutout in Game Five? Or the seven scoreless innings in Game One? Or the 15 wins in the regular season?

Or do you just remember he took a lot of money from the Rockies and said something inane about the area's schools?

I've seen Hampton pitch at Shea twice since he left, in 2001 and 2002. Both times he was booed to with an inch of his Fu Manchu. Both times mocking him was great fun. Both times the Mets defeated him. Both times were good times.

Both times, however, I applauded him very softly when he was announced. He won us the fricking pennant, I thought, where's the appreciation?

From here, Mike Hampton never looked comfortable in New York. He was a salary dump by the Astros and a hired gun for the Mets. He was the ace we desperately needed who took a little time to live up to his previous notices (sound familiar?) but when we required a step up in class, he generally gave it to us. He did it in the heart of the regular season, he didn't do it against the Giants or Yankees in the postseason, but he sure as hell did it against the Cardinals. You could argue Alfonzo or Perez or Zeile could have been NLCS MVP, but you couldn't argue with Hampton.

Then he left as a free agent, signed an enormous contract somewhere else and insulted our intelligence some by implying he wasn't lured to Denver by $121 million over eight seasons, the eighth of them playing out as we speak. I recall the Mets making him an extravagant offer that was blown out of the water by Colorado's. I forget the exact numbers, but I don't think we were going beyond six years or much above $100 million.

Real bang for the buck that would have been.

Mike Hampton was never a terribly sympathetic figure in a Mets uniform. For some reason it irked me that one time he sat on the bench in a Cleveland Browns helmet, as if he wished he were in another place, in another sport. The football mentality, if he had one, should have been shown in some other way, like retaliating for Piazza and the bat shard in Game Two of the World Series. But that was all background noise to his Mets legacy in my mind. The main attraction was that NLCS performance, that clinching game, that pennant, still the last one earned by a Mets team at Shea Stadium. That alone should get you a hall pass to say all kinds of silly things about all kinds of silly schools.

If he's remembered by the Shea crowd tonight, eight years later, it won't be with fondness. But listen closely after he's introduced. You'll hear one fleeting round of very soft applause before he is treated like any other Brave.

And if he's languishing again on the DL come September 28, he's welcome back on my watch for the final weekend. He can take Ryan's place.

I have been reminded that the late Tug McGraw closed out an NLCS for the Mets at Shea in 1973. He remained pretty popular in Queens for the rest of his life, though like Jesse Orosco, who finished off the Astros in Houston in 1986, he was traded away one season later.