On Thursday night Tom Seaver paid one of his periodic visits to the broadcasting booth, an occasion that should be a happy one for Met fans but somehow never quite is. Why not? Because whenever Seaver visits, you get the definite impression that he treats such drop-ins as if he's Zeus come down to blister a mortal or two with his radiance. When Keith Hernandez -- not even a Hall of Famer! -- had the temerity to ask Seaver how he lost all those games, the laughter was loud and long, and Seaver was smiling. But there was a slight hinge of hysteria to the guffaws -- Keith had danced gleefully onto a third rail, and Gary and Ron didn't seem entirely sure that he'd get off it alive.

But hey, it was definitely funny. Less funny was Seaver narrating footage of himself talking pitching with a gaggle of Met hurlers, including Joe Smith and Mike Pelfrey. Seaver made no bones about being unimpressed with Pelfrey (whose name he apparently didn't know), relating bemusedly that he'd been discussing the pressure point of a change-up grip and the kid hadn't known what he was talking about, making Seaver realize he had to go a lot more slowly. Not exactly a comfortable moment in the booth -- thanks for the vote of confidence, Tom!

Seaver gets a pass for these things for two reasons. The first reason is because he is the closest thing to God among those who have worn the blue and orange -- the only guy who wears our cap in Cooperstown, as any of us could tell you. But the second reason is because he is one of the most cerebral students of one of the world's most difficult crafts -- the ability to throw a baseball over and over again to certain points with certain velocity and spin, an act which is the culmination of a demanding choreography between body parts, some of are making unnatural motions and will require being packed in ice to avoid permanent harm, and all of which aforementioned stuff would be hard enough without another preternaturally gifted athlete standing a bit over 60 feet away waiting for the smallest mistake that will allow him to slam that ball back at you harder than you threw it. Tom Seaver was a superb physical specimen, yes. But he every bit as much of a Hall of Famer from the neck up, studying pitching with a lab scientist's pitiless scrutiny and an engineer's fever to tinker.

And psychologically he was a monster, waiting to devour any hitter who betrayed a weakness. One of my favorite stories is about Seaver pitching against the Pirates in the rain, and waiting to throw the ball until a droplet of water had grown heavy enough so that it would wiggle off the bill of Manny Sanguillen's helmet and into his face while Seaver's pitch was traveling. Few other pitchers would have thought of that, but Seaver regarded such things as a crucial part of his arsenal, and he never had much use for those who didn't devote the same care to that mental side of pitching. Seaver knew his profession was thick with throwers and chuckers, guys with million-dollar arms and heads worth a lot less than that, and always seemed faintly affronted that they had the same job description he did. Pitching, he said last night, "is using what you have to work with on any particular day and it changes within the context of the day. It's the definition of pitching, it's not the definition of throwing."

Seaver said that in discussing Pedro Martinez (tip of the quoting hat to Mark Herrmann), but it would have applied even more so to Johan Santana tonight. Santana, frankly, didn't look terrific -- his location was off and his pitchers seemed to lack the zip and bite they've had recently. Roy Oswalt, his counterpart on the mound, looked better, but wound up with that left-handed compliment for pitchers, the eight-inning complete game.

How? Well, luck certainly had something to do with it. Santana rode the edge of disaster a couple of times (particularly when he batted down Lance Berkman's centerbound scorcher with two on and two out in fifth) and got some help from poor baserunning by Hunter Pence. Oswalt, on the other hand, was nicked for a run on one of the least-wild wild pitches in baseball history and a bloop single, made one bad pitch the rest of the night, and lost.

But it wasn't just luck -- far from it. When your fastball's electric and you can throw the ball to a dime-sized target, you can do pretty much whatever you want on the mound. It wasn't exactly that kind of night for Santana. But because of that, I bet Seaver would say it was a victory to savor even more. Johan turned so-so stuff into seven shutout innings, using what he had to great effect. He won from the neck up -- which was enough to make even Tom Terrific proud.

Welcome to Flashback Friday: Tales From The Log, a final-season tribute to Shea Stadium as viewed primarily through the prism of what I have seen there for myself, namely 385 regular-season and 13 postseason games to date. The Log records the numbers. The Tales tell the stories.

7/2/75 W Chicago 1-0 Matlack 2 3-1 W 7-2
When it comes to baseball, I may as well have been raised by wolves. My human family didn't have much to do with my development in this realm.

Oh, that's just the romantic version. No wolves were involved in the raising of this fan. More accurately, I brought myself up on baseball. I sat on my own knee and told myself stories of the old days, namely whatever I divined from books, magazines and Ralph Kiner. Mom and Dad and Big Sis, they facilitated at times and didn't throw up cumbersome roadblocks, but they were not proactive in the process of my becoming a baseball fan, let alone a Mets fan. I didn't expect them to be, because, when I started this at the age of six, I had no proof that families liked baseball as a unit.

My role model in baseball fandom was Charlie Brown. Did you ever see Charlie Brown's parents? No, he was out organizing all the kids who didn't have much use for him into what appeared to be pretty complex sandlot games. Then he came home and went moony over Joe Shlabotnik.

Charlie Brown raised himself on baseball as far as I could tell. So I tried the same trick. No way I could round up seventeen other kids for actual playing ball, but in terms of cultivating lifelong fanhood, I'd say I did a helluva job bringing myself up. I had to be a mother, a father and an older sibling to the boy. Like I said, my family offered benign support; no worse than benign neglect. If I wanted to be the oddball in the house, that was my business.

Once, though, I sucked everybody into this thing of mine. I don't remember why anymore. Maybe it was an elementary school graduation present. If it was, it was a good one. It was a trip to Shea Stadium on a Wednesday night, a couple of weeks after sixth grade ended, the four of us...the four Princes. It was like what I was beginning to suspect normal families did: four people related to one another piling into a large American-made sedan and driving from their home in the suburbs to the nearest multipurpose stadium to watch the local team.

Worked for me.

Dad parked our 1970 Chrysler Newport in the lot across Roosevelt Avenue. We sat in decent Loge seats on the first base side. And the Mets beat the Cubs which was of surpassing importance to me, incidental, I'm certain, to everybody else.

This is what I recall:

• In the middle of the game, I heard what sounded like terrible thunder. It was actually behind-the-scenes Sheananigans — operations in action. Gates closing, dumpsters dragging, something like that. I sat in Loge last night, probably for the last time ever, and heard the same noises. It's still thunderous.

• We were behind a large bloc of large men, all out on a firehouse expedition. Every one of these men had huge guts. They liked their Schaefer and they liked their hot dogs and they were upset with the member of their party tasked with fetching the franks because not nearly enough mustard had been secured for their picky palates. So one of them got up and returned moments later with the entire mustard dispenser. Big damn thing. Nobody else on the first base side of Loge would be dressing their dogs, but our heroes were roaring with laughter at the ingenuity of the move. My mother observed this blend of bonding and hijinks with the look of a lady who had stepped in bubble gum.

• I was told I would be receiving a brand new Mets cap to enjoy for the balance of the summer of 1975 at game's end. As we approached a concession stand en route to the parking lot, by the subway entrance across Roosevelt, I asked if I could have two caps: the Mets model and a red-billed, blue-domed lid bearing the stylish T of the Texas Rangers. I was briefly enamored of the Texas Rangers when I was 12 and couldn't believe their caps were for sale right there in Flushing, so far from Arlington. I was informed by my mother that I was being greedy and now I would get no cap: no Mets, no Rangers, no nothing. The mustard-stealing firemen apparently tested her goodwill beyond its boundaries. I've carried no grudge about the rescindment of the cap or the impugning of my character for 33 years and have not brought it up with scant prompting since.

• We got back to the car and discovered someone had broken off the antenna from the Newport.

The next time the four of us went to Shea Stadium together never occurred. There would be games with my sister until I was old enough to take matters into my own hands, and games with my parents when they picked up the baseball bug from their son, but no complete nuclear family outings out Shea way ever again. I continued to raise myself on baseball in upstairs solitude.

The entire mustard dispenser...I thought it was hilarious.

Why must my beloved Shea Stadium be strategically infested with morons? And can they remain inside the building once the demolition commences?

My morons from Thursday night stay in the game the way morons do: by drinking and cursing and not shutting nor toning down their yaps for a solitary second. There is nothing wrong per se with drinking or cursing or saying things. But it's just a bad combination when it's all stirred together for nine innings when I'm trying to enjoy the Mets beating the Braves.

Excessive drinking never helps matters. One beer, two beers...go ahead. The beverage industry appreciates your patronage and it's legal. Taken in moderation, alcohol beverage intake has been shown to have beneficial health effects. Maybe you've heard of the French Paradox. It suggests drinking red wine can be a heart smart activity. But what of the Shea Paradox, the one in which the more the morons behind me drink, the less I enjoy being at my favorite place in the world?

Go figure.

I found it revealing that my morons (a quartet of them, two laddies, two lassies) told each other stories of "how I was so fucking drunk" over and over and over. Truly every third story for about six innings involved unseemly displays of drunkenness. It seemed to get them thrown out of every venue they'd been permitted in, including — shocker — Shea Stadium. No, not last night, darn it all to heck, but in the past. The most demonstrative of the morons did confess that this one fucking time when these fucking people were fucking mad at him for fucking standing and fucking cheering and they fucking called over a fucking usher who fucking threw him out...well he might have fucking deserved it because he's pretty fucking sure he fucking wore his fucking Yankee jersey that night and had had like seven fucking beers in the first three fucking innings and he was (his words) pretty fucking obnoxious.

Credit must be given for that much self-awareness, I suppose.

Such behavior is to be expected by kids getting their first taste of hops, barley and freedom, except these were no kids. One of them complained (or fucking complained) that LeBron James is eight years younger than he is. LeBron James is 23, which would make this young man 31. At 31, you shouldn't be fucking getting thrown out of places with such frequency. Nor should your baseball repartee be limited to, when Nick Evans is at bat, calling out "N-i-i-i-i-ck!" in a "funny" voice six or seven times and laughing hysterically every time.

When I attended Mets-Braves games in the past, I considered the Braves the greatest obstacle to my happiness. After the Mets completed their sweep of Atlanta, I had to rework my rankings regarding nemeses in such a scenario:

1) The morons behind me
2) The Braves, even in their present state
3) The fellow to my left who invaded my foot space with about a thousand peanut shells but was otherwise stone quiet until the score was 5-4

When Delgado drove in Wright (who walks a guy in a slump to get to a guy with four hits, open base or not?), I didn't much care about the gentlemen and ladies behind me in what was technically Row D but was spiritually Row F. I was too excited by the events of the previous minutes: the Phillie loss going up on the big board; the Met win unfolding before my eyes; the knowledge that there would be no extra innings and that my shotgun acquaintance with the fab four would be ending as soon as I exited, stage left (they were relieved too, 'cause it meant their ringleader could go "fucking smoke"; doing so at Shea earlier this season got him fucking thrown out, you know). I picked up my bag — its strap soaked by those fucking guys' fucking spilled beer — and put immediate distance between me and them.

After I interrupted our post-win revelry with a rant on what jerks we were stuck sitting in front of, my friend Mike, as civil and cerebral a sort as you'll enjoy a game with, confessed he hadn't really heard a whole lot of what they were carrying on about because he is adversely affected by aural nerve damage.

Out of respect for Mike and the gift of hearing in general, I won't say some guys have all the luck.

Another story on how Chipper Jones loves Shea in today's News. I'd squeal with delight if I ever heard a Met talk like this.