Something looked wrong with that play from the first tentative step Luis Castillo took back and to his left. Something was awry with his footwork, with the way he was staring into the night sky, with the set of his shoulders ... I don't know, but something looked wrong from the start.

Granted, a properly paranoid fan (which is to say every fan) always holds his or her breath on a game-ending pop-up that stays up there long enough for horrible thoughts to creep into the brain. But 999 out of 1,000 times, those horrible thoughts evaporate when the ball is squeezed, the held breath is released and the game is safe. But ... I don't know. Something told me this might just be that 1,000th time, and it was.

Did Castillo lose it in the lights? Did he hear Ryan Church's footsteps? Did he ... oh, whatever. It hit him right in the pocket of the fucking glove, the one his other hand was nowhere near. That's whatever.

The rest of a messy but fairly entertaining game now goes right down the memory hole, alas. The Mets were patient (and corporeal) when Joba Chamberlain and his annoying straight-billed hat kept throwing pitches around the plate and into Met bodies. Gary Sheffield blasted a from-the-heels home run that was decidedly satisfying; David Wright came back from what looked like a fishing expedition of a failed at-bat against Mariano Rivera to rifle a ball up the gap and score Carlos Beltran. Shawn Green and Pedro Feliciano offered bullpen hope, even if newcomer Jon Switzer made an instantly persuasive case that he is not the answer to the search for that other lefty in the pen. Livan Hernandez pitched ably enough on a night when you knew the two teams involved were going to trade broadsides for the duration and lost leads were the stuff of concern, not disaster.

No, disaster is hit about 200 feet in the air and a lousy 140 feet from home plate.

Well, I do at least have my hatred back. This week I learned a valuable lesson: Don't confess to anything less than a desire to see every Phillie and every Phillies fan left destitute and living in a refrigerator box on an active railway. The line to batter your correspondent was long: Faith and Fear readers, other blogs' readers, my wife, my co-blogger. Duly noted. Settling in for tonight's game, I knew there would be no such issue. Just the sight of Derek Jeter sticking his hand out behind him at the plate was enough to make me grit my teeth. Ditto for the first glimpse of A-Rod's oversized Mickey Mouse batting gloves, Joe Girardi and his annoying, presumptuous uniform number, and the sound of those awful post-Yankee-homer bells. It wasn't until the seventh inning when my jaw unclenched. (A temporary condition. Thanks, Luis.) Sometimes people who don't know me very well try to plumb the depths of my hatred for the Yankees, and I explain that seeing that the Yankees have won a spring-training game pisses me off, at least for a moment. When we're in a zero-sum affair, every pitch to a Yankee that's a ball is a bruise, every Yankee hit is a wound, every Yankee run is a near-death experience.

And every Yankee victory that comes with two outs in the ninth on a dropped pop-up by a fat, overpaid second baseman you've spent the year trying reluctantly to accept? I'm kind of amazed I can type. Shock is a powerful thing, I suppose.

I haven't seen enough of the new Yankee Stadium to form an impression of it, but it's definitely true -- as Gary, Keith and Ron noted -- that the place was oddly quiet. The score can't be an explanation, so what gives? In April Citi Field seemed oddly quiet itself, but it hasn't felt that way in a while, now that the weather has warmed and people have stopped touring the ballpark. Curious. I have no idea about the interior because I was too annoyed at Kevin Burkhardt being gosh-and-golly about the Museum of Pinstriped Fascism. (Memo to Kevin: This is a bad place for bad people. You should be a somber, reluctant guide, like you're showing us around an exhibit of war crimes.) Beyond that, the right-field stands gobbled their share of Yankee baseballs, but only Jeter's wouldn't have been out last year.

Just heard Howie Rose's call of the fatal play. Excuse me while I projectile-vomit.

Where do we go from here? I don't know, man. Ruinous loss against the Phillies. Another ruinous loss against the Phillies. A jaw-dropper of a disaster against the Legions of the Vertical Swastika.

Baseball, man. It'll fucking kill you sometimes. And now I'm off to stare at the ceiling and replay that one in my head. I'll do that with this play several thousand times in my lifetime. May as well get started.

METSTOCK: 3 Hours of Pizza and Baseball is coming to Manhattan on Thursday, June 18, 7:00 PM. Meet the authors of A Magic Summer, Mets By The Numbers and Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, talk baseball with us, watch the Mets beat the Orioles just as they did in '69 with us and not discuss FUCKING LUIS CASTILLO AND HIS FUCKING APPARENT LACK OF A FUCKING OPPOSABLE THUMB. Details here.

Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook. NOTE: FACEBOOK IS EASIER TO USE IF YOU HAVE A FUCKING OPPOSABLE THUMB, APPARENTLY UNLIKE LUIS FUCKING CASTILLO.

That's all.

Welcome to Flashback Friday: I Saw The Decade End, a milestone-anniversary salute to the New York Mets of 1969, 1979, 1989 and 1999. Each week, we immerse ourselves in or at least touch upon something that transpired within the Metsian realm 40, 30, 20 or 10 years ago. Amazin' or not, here it comes.

"Pick one," Stephen Colbert likes to mock-pressure his guests. "We're at war." There are times that's legitimate advice. This weekend certainly qualifies.

You can't be a Mets fan and not, at some point, find yourself strongly disliking the Yankees, their fans and just about everything they stand for, whether they actively stand for it or just make noise like they do. If we can separate baseball hatred from the more dangerous real-life kind, insert "hate" for "strongly dislike". They've been bringing it on themselves for as long as I've been aware there was another New York team besides the Mets.

I was ahead of the curve as a kid, prior to their late '70s renaissance and our concomitant disintegration. I strongly disliked...OK, hated the Yankees when they were comprised primarily of Frank Tepedino, Jake Gibbs, Jerry Kenney, Steve Kline and Lindy McDaniel. It wasn't a sidebar as much as an agate-type box, but it was there. I didn't want them to exist. But in the heyday and afterglow of the Miracle Mets, it wasn't a big deal. Certainly there were those inevitable bus stop arguments over who was better — Seaver vs. Stottlemyre, Agee vs. Murcer, Grote vs. Munson — yet not a few kids in my circles more or less liked both teams (as 6% of New Yorkers claim to do now). Perhaps that was a reflection that after 1969, with the notable exception of a few hot weeks in the late summer and early fall of '73, both were competent but neither was setting the world on fire. Perhaps it was just the unfully formed judgment of youth not quite capable of making a proper decision. Come 1977, though, this "I'm a Mets fan but I guess I like the Yankees" behavior all but disappeared. If you were a Mets fan, you hated the Yankees. If you were a Yankees fan, I wasn't too crazy about you. I never was.

From what I could gauge from my encampment on the late '70s Met side of the fence (where except for the steadfast Joel Lugo, I didn't have a lot of company) it didn't always go the other way. That makes sense. One of the things we intrinsically despise about them is the haughty lack of awareness of anything that isn't them. Why would they hate what they failed to acknowledge? Without the Interleague play we'll be encountering this weekend, you'd have to go out of your way to know the Mets were still in business if your team wasn't scheduled to play them. By 1979, you almost never heard about us. That in itself was maddening, but another kind of maddening.

The saving grace to being a fan of the sixth-place Mets in 1979 was that Yankees fans were consigned to rooting for a fourth-place club. It was a delightful respite in the long, hot summer of Richie Hebner, Sergio Ferrer and everybody else who made our club so darn embraceable. My interactions with Yankees fans were far more satisfying than in '77 and '78 because all they knew was their team was subpar (89-71 but never remotely close to the eventual division champion Orioles). Thus, instead of "Mets suck" as the automatic response to anything I said about their team, I reveled in their head-shaking agreement that, yes, their Yankees sucked now. Ah, clarity.

It was easy for me to choose sides thirty years ago because the sides were clearly defined for me for ten years prior. On the other hand, I never got the hang of the other pressing dispute if that Disco Demolition summer when some moron named Steve Dahl was blowing up records in Comiskey Park and the White Sox were forfeiting the nightcap of a doubleheader to the Tigers.

Rock vs. Disco was, like John Maine at the moment, a non-starter to me. At sixteen, I was and had always been a Top 40 listener. Come 1979, it encompassed rock and it encompassed disco. Most disco hits ran about two minutes too long in their 12-inch format but otherwise Chic, Donna Summer, Sister Sledge, McFadden & Whitehead...it was all good to me. Yet when Neil Young would come along and sing defiantly or perhaps morosely that hey, hey, my, my, rock 'n' roll will never die, I dug it. Led Zeppelin was coming in through the out door with a new album. Cheap Trick emphatically wanted you to want them. Supertramp was pretty logical. Rock 'n' roll wasn't dying. I liked it, but not to the exclusion of what so many bristled at. Blondie blended rock and disco in "Heart of Glass" and it was sublimely transparent to me that both genres could co-exist. I was smitten by the c-c-catchiness of the Kn-Kn-Knack; I kn-kn-knocked on wood with Amii Stewart; I hummed along when Anita Ward rang her bell even. People out there, as John Stewart reported in the summer of '79, were turning music into gold. It all had value when I listened.

Agee over Murcer. Mazzilli over Rivers. Wilson over Kelly. McRae over Williams. Beltran over Cabrera. Those are worthwhile arguments. Let's Go Mets trumps all.

METSTOCK: 3 Hours of Pizza and Baseball is coming to Manhattan on Thursday, June 18, 7:00 PM. Meet the authors of A Magic Summer, Mets By The Numbers and Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, talk baseball with us, watch the Mets beat the Orioles just as they did in '69 with us and have a generally great time. Details here.

Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

The country thunder of Raul Ibañez didn't seem all that admirable, did it?

Fucking Raul Ibañez (all fucking Phillies will be, until further notice, referred to in this manner — and none of that cutesy-poo "phucking" spelling either) completely unplugged what had been an electric series Thursday night, one a Mets fan could imagine relocating to October and throwing off sparks under the NLCS banner until a most worthy league champion is crowned.

We Mets fans have great imaginations, don't we?

For 29+ innings dating back to Tuesday, it was real enough. This was 51 hours of outstanding baseball and gripping theater. Then came Ken Takahashi and fucking Ibañez and his fucking laser beam of a home run that bolted right through the Flushing fog causing the curtain to fall and the show to close. Exit the Citi Field crowd, stage left.

Yeah, fucking Ibañez was quite the buzzkill, though to be fair this game didn't seem to crackle like the two before. But so what? We were winning 3-1 for a while. Tim Redding was touchable but not overly penetrable. With his seven innings of walkless, gut-check ball, Redding became the latest "who he?" Met starter to move up the ladder. He would have anyway because of John Maine going on the DL (oh, by the way, John Maine is going on the DL), but he earned the promotion from "disturbing uncertainty" to "one thing we don't have to worry about as much as other things," not unlike Liván Hernandez's 2009 trajectory.

The Mets' strong points include Liván Hernandez and Tim Redding. What a season.

Redding gave the Mets a real chance to win. He outpitched fucking Jamie Moyer, whose only saving grace is that he was born 43 days before I was, thus making him the only obstacle between me and my mortality. As long as there's a baseball player older than you, you still have a chance to grow up to become a baseball player. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. That said, fucking Jamie Moyer was quite touchable and seemed plenty penetrable, but I looked up from my Cascarino's chicken roll and my Nathan's fries — the food remains awfully good at Citi Field — and noticed penetration wasn't much achieved all night.

Fucking Moyer. And their fucking bullpen. Save for a stray open barn door single to Omir Santos to start the superfluous bottom of the tenth, fucking Clay Condrey, fucking Chad Durbin, fucking Scott Eyre and fucking Ryan Madson gave up not a darn thing to the Mets after fucking Moyer departed. The Mets (rather Luis Castillo by way of Carlos Beltran) did all their scoring by the fifth. Then it was time to tuck the bats in for the evening. Sleep tight, Sluggers!

Takahashi? Maybe he had some awesome stranglehold on lefty hitters, lefty pitcher that he is. That was my guess to my friend David who invited me to share in his interesting left field Promenade Box seats (interesting is code for neat perspective if you don't worry too much about tracking every little fly ball to left or center). I recalled Takahashi made his debut against the fucking Phillies in early May after Oliver Perez — name ring a bell? — was knocked out. Ken acquitted himself decently then, so maybe removing Bobby Parnell before fucking Chase Utley could spank our young man again wasn't a bad move.

I didn't know lefties were actually batting about two-thousand off Takahashi. I was out in left field. What was Jerry Manuel's excuse?

Well, there ya go. The Mets had a chance to sweep the fucking Phillies and instead lose the last two in a row. The fucking Phillies lead the Mets by four games. They're without fucking Brett Myers and fucking Brad Lidge but they just stormed through a gauntlet of a road trip. Maybe the injuries will catch up to them in the same way the Mets' mind-blowing lack of depth began to hit them after they acquitted themselves so wonderfully in San Francisco and Boston (when not sucking the chrome off the proverbial trailer hitch in L.A.).

The fucking Phillies aren't admirable. They're just good. If we start admiring good, then let's drop the artifice and become Dodgers (or Lakers) fans at once. It is the depleted Mets who are admirable for keeping up to this point. Even allowing for the performance du jour of a Sheffield, a Santos, a Castillo — and the heady leadership of Alex Cora — this lineup is Beltran and Wright and hide your eyes from the fright. The whole product is being held aloft by two All-Star hitters, one stellar closer and, at the moment, four generally sound to spectacular starting pitchers. The fifth, Maine, is off to the land of Perez and Putz, Delgado and Reyes and whoever else we've disabled (check closer, and I'll bet you find Pedro Astacio rattling around on the 15-day). Johnny got lit up by the notoriously inept Washington Nationals last Saturday which should have been the tipoff right there that something was very, very wrong. Get well, John. And let us know if you run into Ollie.

Saturday's starter in Maine's place will be...determined at a later date. I listened on the LIRR home as Steve Somers guessed Nelson Figueroa, which directed me to root around my schlep bag in search of expired medications that could dull the pain. Before I could swallow any out-of-code Ibuprofen, Ed Coleman came on to speculate it will probably be Jon Niese (a Saturday morning in 2011: "You know, Richard, Jon Niese never really recovered from being called up to make that start in place of Maine in the Subway Series before he was really ready a couple of years ago. It's a real shame what happened to the kid.") or maybe Fernando Nieve, a starter only masquerading as a reliever...which would describe Ken Takahashi as well. I don't know who will start for us between Liván and Johan. I do know the Mets should don Red Sox uniforms for the next three days because they seem to work wonders against the Yankees...though it probably helps to fill them with Red Sox.

Lest this resemble the Thursday night fog in its gloom and doom, it wasn't a bad night at Red Brick, not with David one seat over for the first time since we swept the Rockies last July; not with visiting New York expatriate Andee dropping by from Portland, Oregon for the denouement; not with the aforementioned chicken roll; not even with the unwanted conclusion of the all-time Either Log record winning streak of seven games (which was mostly a mélange of triumphs at the hands of the Bucs, Nats and Fish, but ya play who ya play). The Citi Field novelty has, unlike that dense fog, officially burned off for me, and that's fine. I don't want it to be novel. I want it to be where I go to see Mets games (Mets wins ideally). Perhaps it's because I was showing David around on his maiden voyage that I no longer felt remotely like an alien in my ostensible home park (not when there are others who by dint of their personal schedules still do). Listen, there remain things I don't like about this ballpark, things I don't love about this ballpark, things I would change about this ballpark, but 36 seasons at Shea went by and those types of things existed there, too.

Congratulations, Citi Field. In your way, you're becoming Shea Stadium to me.

Three things have helped me permanently accept this ballpark besides the reality that it's not a weekend carnival that will fold up its tents Sunday and realight in Woodhaven next weekend:

1) Familiarity, familiarity, familiarity. It's not the back of my hand, but after fourteen games, it's creeping down my arm.

2) It's where they keep the Mets, and as down on them as I tend to plummet, I still like to join them as often as possible.

3) My coming and going rituals.

My coming ritual is simply stopping by my brick, no matter which way I'm headed. I can go Left Field, Right Field or Rotunda, but I gotta at the every least nod to my brick, maybe tap it with a toe. Last loss before last night? The last time I didn't acknowledge my brick.

My going ritual is exiting through the Rotunda. I don't particularly care if I come in that way, but I just about have to go out that way. Early in the season, I was scuttling out any ol' rathole. I didn't like it, particularly in tandem with trudging down those awful schoolhouse staircases. It was like ending a day at the ballpark with a tedious fire drill. Though they're slower than what I was used to at Shea — nice technological breakthrough 45 years later — I've come to enjoy the stroll down the left field ramps. In the right light, I feel enveloped by those enormous banners of great Mets moments, the ones that face out so people who are not at the Mets game can enjoy scenes of Mets history while people at the Mets games don't have to be bothered by any of that silly team-intensive imagery. While everybody else is spilling right toward the William A. Shea Memorial Parking Lot when we approach the final ramp sequence, I veer left and walk through Field Level, which isn't all that crowded by the time I'm downstairs. That allows me to exit grandly down one of the winding Rotunda staircases. Whatever time I'm taking by not hustling down those soulless back stairs is more than made up for by landing steps from the subway entrance. I find I leave in a much better mood, win or lose, than I did when I was first getting the hang of this place. Heading out the front door assures me I just spent a few hours belonging in that place. It makes me want to come back to see how it's doing, like I have a proprietary interest in its well-being, even as there are things there I don't like, don't love and would change.

I rather enjoyed the temporary ritual in between the coming and going, the one I established in May watching the Mets reel off seven consecutive wins. Perhaps that will be revived in the near future.

Until then, fuck the fucking Phillies. Imaginary NLCS previews are on hold. What we have to do right now is go beat the Yankees. I'd say "fucking Yankees," but that seems redundant.

METSTOCK: 3 Hours of Pizza and Baseball is coming to Manhattan on Thursday, June 18, 7:00 PM. Meet the authors of A Magic Summer, Mets By The Numbers and Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, talk baseball with us, watch the Mets beat the Orioles just as they did in '69 with us and have a generally great time. Details here.

Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.