Well, as Greg already told you, now it's official: Billy Wagner is facing Tommy John surgery.

This sad news doesn't change much about how I feel about this unlikely September and potential October: I never thought we'd get this far, and finding ourselves in a pennant race is happy surprise enough that anything else will be gravy. And kudos to Jerry Manuel for managing a dicey bullpen in ways Willie Randolph never could have. Willie would have immediately installed a new closer, stuck guys in roles where they might or might not have fit, and stuck to that plan through thin and thin, grimly insisting he had faith in his guys and things would turn around. Jerry has been open with the media, the fans and (by every indication) the players themselves: He's making things up as he goes, at this point in the season winning ballgames is everything, and anybody who wears his uniform will have to be ready to do whatever's asked. We've been without Billy Wagner for more than a month, with Luis Ayala the closer by default rather than declaration and the entire supporting cast on hand as understudies. For the most part, it's worked. Can it work for another seven-odd weeks? Heck if I know. We'll find out soon enough.

But before we plunge back into the terrors and joys of a pennant race, a moment for Billy Wagner. He's never gotten his due in New York, which is partly the nature of the town and partly life as a closer. It's by no means uncommon for pitchers to spin out of control for 10 to 15 hideous innings before regaining their equilibrium, but such a stretch is very different for starters and relievers. If you're in the rotation, that's two or three bad outings; if you're a closer, it can be five or six wins converted into losses, attended by the same number of vitriolic back pages and hours of talk-radio screaming.

The cliche of closers is that to survive they develop very short memories. But I always had the feeling Wagner didn't do it that way -- that he actually had a long memory, one that preserved every failure and slight, and that he survived by being tougher than most any of us could imagine having to be.

Wagner's story sounds like fiction, but it isn't: He was born to teenage parents in dirt-poor Appalachian Virginia, and passed among relatives throughout his childhood, attending 11 schools in 10 years as caretakers came and went, struggling with hunger and the shame of food stamps. (He co-founded the Second Chance Learning Center, which offers academic and emotional counseling for at-risk kids in southwestern Virginia, and you better believe his work there means far more to him than some athletes' tax shelters do to them.) In school Wagner poured his rage and hurt into sports, firing balls at targets and firing himself at enemy football players. He became a lefty after he broke his right arm -- for the second time -- and grew into a schoolboy legend, at one point fanning 19 batters out of 21 faced. But nobody in pro ball cared: Sure, he was a lefty who already threw 85, but he was 5-3, weighed 130 pounds and lived in an American backwater where you were derided on the rare occasions you were noticed at all. No scout even came to see him until he went to college and shattered NCAA strikeout records -- and had filled out enough to escape baseball prejudices.

Wagner finally found a father figure in college -- the father of the woman he'd marry. The day after the Astros put him on the 40-man roster, his father-in-law and his wife's stepmother were shot to death in front of the stepmother's six-year-old boy. That winter, with the trial looming, the Astros tried to strong-arm him into going to winter ball in Venezuela, hinting that his roster spot could be in danger. Wagner replied that he needed to be with his family, and there were 20-odd teams who'd be interested in him if the Astros weren't. Compared to that, what's Pat Burrell thinking you're a rat or Met teammates angry that you called them out for being away from their lockers?

As we all know, Wagner became the Astros' closer, entering games to "Enter Sandman" long before the closer of a certain fourth-place team farther east became identified with the song. That was a long way from southwestern Virginia, but it wasn't exactly easy. In '98 Kelly Stinnett rocketed a line drive off Wagner's skull that left him lying on the mound, legs twitching and blood coming out of one ear. He was back in less than three weeks. In the summer of 2000 he had surgery for a partially torn elbow tendon and was soft-tossing in September.

Wagner's 37 now, and at that age the kind of surgery he's about to have is inevitably and correctly called "career-threatening." It's possible he'll never pitch again. But I wouldn't dare bet against him. If Wagner doesn't return, it'll be because his body couldn't take it, and not because of any lack of courage or determination. If you doubt that, just go up and read those last few paragraphs again.

Billy Wagner used to be the closer for the New York Mets. He's going in for surgery on his left flexor pronator and MCL. I don't know what a flexor pronator is exactly, but MCL stands for Mets Closer Lost for this season and next. Wagner's contract is up at the end of '09, by which time the last meaningful pitch to have come out of his left hand will have been whacked for a two-RBI single by Geoff Blum (the play on which Mark Loretta and Hunter Pence formed a human pyramid atop Ramon Castro). That was in the ninth inning, August 2.

The Mets are 22-11 since.

The Luis Ayala Era, however interim in nature, is surely in effect. The Billy Wagner Era, pending medical marvels, appears over. He'll work hard to get back and pitch somewhere, and I'll root like hell for him personally because, as prickly as he can come off, I admire how much he cares, how well he means and how much he did to close games that for too long had gone uncloseable in these parts. But this is a real page-turner where the Mets are concerned. No way in hell does his $10 million option for 2010 get picked up. No way in hell can the Mets now not think about Francisco Rodriguez if the Angels don't lock him down. No way in hell can the Mets jump on K-Rod without qualification because we've seen, first with Pedro and now with Billy, how short-term benefits and long-term risks unfold where free agent pitchers carrying significant mileage are concerned. But that's for later. For now, it's Ayala and staff and a two-game lead with nineteen to play.

Sleep with one eye open. Good luck Mr. Sandman.

(I was at both games of yesterday's doubleheader. Will be back to tell you about the last longest day in the history of Shea Stadium when I'm fully recovered from it.)

That sudden blast of hot wind you may have felt in the New York City area about an hour ago wasn't Tropical Storm Hanna coming back around in the batting order -- it was millions of Met fans exhaling.

The math of pennant races is cruel: The Phillies got two stellar pitching performances, put the Mets back on their heels, couldn't complete the sweep and so leave having gained just a game in the standings. Let the record show that in this case, I'm all for cruelty.

The cruelty would have been on us, of course, if Johan Santana and Carlos Delgado hadn't been kind. Those two contributed 116 pretty good pitches and about 870 feet of home runs to the cause, erasing two and a half days of grinding frustration. Now we can forget about Friday night, with Brett Myers throttling us and ball after ball bouncing the Phils' way and Brad Lidge dancing through a hard rain of solid Met at-bats and somehow not getting wet. We can forget about the anxious thumb-twiddling of a soaked Saturday, with pennant races reserved for drier climes. And we can forget about Sunday's first game, where the weather was gorgeous and everything else was hideous.

If you're feeling magnanimous, you can admit a game like yesterday's matinee was lurking in the cards somewhere. Smacking Jamie Moyer around a couple of weeks ago was the exception to the usual rule (and didn't get us anything), so it made sense that for a long time the only thing standing between us and the potential humiliation of being no-hit was a bunt single from a rhinoceros-sized catcher. (Comparison animal not chosen idly: As with rhinos, Robinson Cancel is faster than you think. By the way, has anyone ever won 243 games more quietly than Moyer?) Meanwhile, the Mets had been remarkably lucky this spring and summer in escaping the logical outcome of bracketing Carlos Beltran with guys who have no particular business playing the outfield. Sunday they weren't so lucky: Fernando Tatis misplayed a fly ball into a double, Jose Reyes neglected the extra duties that the presence of Nick Evans (or Daniel Murphy) put on his plate for a tack-on run, and even Beltran misjudged a ball that should have been caught.

That was difficult to watch, but not wholly unexpected -- if one can possibly find perspective when we're playing the Phillies in September. Harder to shrug off was the fact that Pedro Martinez apparently had no problems getting loose, had decent velocity, and it didn't matter. While some of the day's runs should be taken off his ledger due to outfield shenanigans, Pedro looked old and ordinary, and his aura alone is no longer enough to mesmerize an opponent. (Oh by the way, I hate Greg Dobbs even more than he hates us. His swing is apparently perfectly tailored for hitting balls a foot over Shea Stadium fences.)

And so the waiting for the nightcap, with football and anxiety equally unwelcome visitors in the Fry household -- and the added burden of hearing that Billy Wagner had walked off the mound after just a dozen or so pitches, the last of which hit poor Gustavo Molina in the ankle and did something worse to Billy's balky forearm. (Oh, and did you hear Tom Brady hurt his knee? Seriously, I think ESPN hollered town criers to spread the word. I'm always bemused that the first true day of football season invariably includes several marquee players sustaining injuries that end their season. Can you imagine if our Opening Day was like this?)

And then the nightcap didn't get off to a great start either, not with Johan's location way off and the Phillies smelling blood in the water. Ugliness seemed imminent. I thought of the possibility of Greg spending 10 hours in Queens in which he'd discover little more than that first place was gone and witnessing six hours of humiliating baseball isn't good for your health.

But the fucking worm was turning, if you'll forgive paraphrasing Joe Torre. Cole Hamels didn't look so good either, and unlike Johan he wouldn't gather himself. And suddenly it was the Mets getting breaks and the Phillies getting unlucky. (Catcher's interference and being out at third but called safe -- quite a bottom of the first for David Wright.) Beltran got us even and Delgado began his assault on Hamels, punching a single up the middle. By the time Delgado came up in the third, Santana could direct his change-up properly and I was willing to watch the game from the couch instead of peeking out from under it. (Hey, I said I wasn't scared -- I never said I wasn't one anxious sonofabitch.) Delgado helped push that anxiety further away with a moonshot, prompting me to wonder out loud what he had written in his famous composition book afterwards. I imagine it was something like this:

9/7/08 HAMELS, PHI. BOT 3. 0-2 CURVEBALL, CENTER OF PLATE. I HIT IT TO FUCKING MARS.

Which was soon followed by this:

9/7/08 HAMELS, PHI. BOT 5. 0-0 CHANGEUP, HIGH. I HIT IT TO FUCKING JUPITER.

From then on I kept begging for the Mets to score, oh, about five more runs to make me feel vaguely safe. Pedro Feliciano and Brian Stokes did stalwart work after Santana departed, but tell me you weren't freaking out after Luis Ayala singled not one but two ludicrous little worm-killing singles to Shane Victorino and Matt Stairs. Ayala, who'd already disposed of the evil Dobbs, got Andy Tracy (who somehow never played left field for us in the pre-Evans/Murphy farce) to fly out, trading a run for a much-needed out. Up stepped Jimmy Rollins, the count went to 1-2, and I told Emily that whatever was gonna happen, you knew Rollins' at-bat was going to take at least seven pitches, each of them possibly meaning a week off my life.

Ayala promptly fanned Jimmy to end it. Sometimes it's great to be wrong.