There's one possibility nobody has brought up. I don't think anybody ever said that maybe I just lost my control. Maybe your control is something that can just go. It's no big thing, but suddenly it's gone.
—Steve Blass to Roger Angell, 1975

It wasn't a doubleheader per se, but there were two games for the price of one too many in Philadelphia Saturday afternoon. The one that began with a clever double play in the bottom of the third and ended on a less amenable version of the same in the top of the tenth was compelling theater. Unfortunately, that was merely the game within the game, as the bigger picture included everything Oliver Perez and Sean Green threw, most of which completely eluded the strike zone.

A Met was tagged out at home while 13 other Mets were left on base, but ultimately insufficient production seemed a secondary matter in this not-quite twinighter. The Mets' failure to push across the one extra run that would have forgiven poor control was the stuff of the news crawl (and, to its damnable credit, Jayson Werth's right arm). The headline has to be Very Bad Ollie and Not So Hot Sean, neither of them giving us any kind of chance to breathe, both of them continuing down an almost uninterrupted path of disaster. They bookended some mighty fine relief work — which in turn allowed a few clutch Met hits to gain relevancy in the course of the narrative — but separately and together they ended any realistic chance the Mets could grab this win.

And the win seemed pretty grabbable, what with Jamie Moyer showing his and my age; Ken Takahashi welcoming himself to the big leagues with a custom-made 1-2-6 DP (FYI, Jerry Manuel thinks his name is Takahishi); Daniel Murphy displaying a stroke Billy Squier could admire; and Ramon Castro emerging from the presumed dead. Alex Cora extracted the utility from futility, demonstrating why all bit players are not created equal. J.J. Putz was J.J. Perfect. There was even a Carlos Delgado sighting. Why, we may have been no more than a silly Omir Santos millimeter from winning this thing in the eighth. He made a nice slide but was cut down by a nice throw and a nice tag.

Yet so much for nice when Ollie Perez is burying you in the first and second and then driving the stake through your heart in the third with four walks, the last of them to Moyer. It's no longer Good Ollie or Bad Ollie. It's a made-for-TV remake of The Steve Blass Story every five days now. Steve Blass was a Pirate pitcher of some standing in the early '70s who lost his way from the mound to the strike zone and found himself out of the business in an eyeblink of evaporated control. In his last full season as a Buc, 1973, he went 3-9 on an ERA of 9.85, walking 84 in 88 innings. You gotta believe he was a prime reason Pittsburgh didn't nail down a fourth consecutive division title that year (not that we minded).

Ollie's beginning to look, feel and tabulate eerily Blassily. Saturday's line: 2-1/3 IP, 6 BB, 5 H, 4 ER, 41 balls vs. 36 strikes. The number you can't hide from after five starts, four of them dreadful, is Perez's ERA: 9.97. That's just about 10 earned runs per game, fueled by a frightening 21 walks in 21.2 innings. No amount of clutch hitting, should it ever come consistently, can cover an almost automatic ten-run deficit.

After the game, all media questions asked, essentially, "Whither Ollie?" A trip to the minors (on which he'd have to sign off)? A stay in the bullpen? Another shot at the Phillies, the team he allegedly pitches well against, this Thursday? Actually, it doesn't seem possible that he gets his next scheduled start, but five days is a long enough time to tinker with mechanics and mentality, so who knows? In the interim, Ollie withers.

And Sean? To date, Green's major contribution to the 2009 Mets was throwing inside at Albert Pujols during the afternoon game in St. Louis when Gary, Ron and our inner Wally were crying out for somebody to Do Something. The horse was out of the barn like Mine That Bird that Thursday, but it felt right that someone in a Mets uniform was finally standing up to someone, anyone. Alas, it feels all wrong lately when Sean Green comes in and carries on in the tradition of Met middlemen before him. That tradition, it was thought, was expunged in the offseason. Yet like swine flu, apparently it's one of those things that never quite leaves the atmosphere.

I've always harbored the notion that middle relievers are middle relievers because they're not good enough to be starters, setup men or closers. That said, some do a very sturdy job. Green has yet to march regularly in that elite corps. An infield hit, such as that collected by Pedro Feliz with one out in the tenth, is just a bad break. But hitting Matt Stairs, then (after retiring the previously invincible Greg Dobbs) walking Chris Coste and human hemorrhoid Shane Victorino...not a bad break. Just more bad pitching from the guy who asked out of wearing No. 48 because he didn't want to remind Mets fans of Aaron Heilman. I've got news for Sean: it wasn't Aaron's number that left us in hives. ERAs are not necessarily a leading indicator for relievers, but Green's 8.76 is close enough to Ollie's to make those of us sitting and rooting for the Mets squirm in Victorino-like discomfort.

The Mets made a pretty good showing between Ollie and Sean. Too bad only the whole thing counts.

If there's going to be walking anyway, then walk to the most convenient venue possible and order Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

Then, by all means, join Jason and me as we ride the Seven Train to Shea with Matt Pignataro, Sunday night at 7; catch a reairing of FAFIF's closing spot on the current Mets Weekly; and check out this rousing in-depth interview with SportstalkNY if you're not all plugged out already yet.

Wait a minute, we scored runs after the first?

Wait a minute, J-Rolls and the Flyin' Hawaiian and Utley and Howard were batting in the ninth (do they ever not?) and there was a two-out walk and the inning didn't end with a Met closer whirling around in horror to stare at a point somewhere above the outfield fence?

Wait a minute, Greg Dobbs got a big single as a pinch-hitter to launch a Phillie uprising -- and then screwed up on the basepaths to derail his team's comeback?

Wait a minute, there was no rain to quash Met comeback hopes or umpire transforming a fielder's choice into a game-ending double play or death march through extra innings or Aaron Heilman looking like he just found a cigarette butt in his Coke?

This was Phillies/Mets, right?

It's not that bad, of course -- but it was bad enough. The Mets, you may have noticed, have been playing flat, bad baseball, with a disconcerting habit of showing the enemy their soft, blue and orange underbelly in the late innings. The Phillies, you may have noticed, have been playing ... well, Phillie baseball, which may not statistically look a whole lot different than ours but sure feels different, and last year ended with a trophy instead of recurring trauma. And so with that buildup we were going to Citizens Bank? Without Delgado and with David Wright all but barfing at the plate while squeezing his bat into a little anthill of sawdust? My midafternoon Twitter update was this:

Already mad at the Mets for losing. Figure it will lessen the blow of the actual event.

And no, I was not trying to hoodwink the baseball gods.

But a funny thing happens when you plunge yourself into baseball despair: actual baseball, which will always have the capacity to surprise you. Carlos Beltran continued his sublime hitting, and even rediscovered the ancient strategy known as sliding. Wright wasn't Right, not just yet (Keith did an excellent job breaking down how out of whack he is at the plate), but he did go 2 for 4, and I couldn't help feeling that he was helped by having Beltran being frisky on the basepaths while he was at the plate. David has thought himself into this hole, and protecting a runner in motion can pare your job as a hitter down to the elemental. On the mound, Mike Pelfrey was ... OK. He pitched in some bad luck in that three-run third, between Raul Ibanez's broken-bat parachute and Pedro Feliz slapping one through the hole Alex Cora had vacated to cover second. But he also made 17 pitches on 2-0 or 2-1 counts, including every batter in the top of the first, and somehow came out with a W. I wouldn't recommend that as sound strategy.

And then there was that sublime bit of ridiculousness in the sixth, with Jose Reyes surrounding a hot shot from Rollins. Jose has no play! No, he's going to third! And he overthrows Wright! And Coste is heading home! No, he's not! He's going back to third! Only now Dobbs is going to third! And now Dobbs is going back to second! And Santos tries to throw the ball into center field! But Cora leaps up and grabs it! And now Coste is going home! And the throw to Santos ... and HE'S OUT!

Not exactly how you'd diagram anything likely to happen on a baseball diamond -- it reminded me of my parents approaching various ailing cats armed with medicine, a towel and anticipatory Band-Aids -- but somehow it worked out. And we'll take it.