First of all, let's make something clear: Greg and I have never lobbied Omar Minaya, Jeff Wilpon or anybody else in the Mets organization for the job of bringing Mettle the Mule back to life as a clever, two-person costume. For Omar to insinuate otherwise in a press conference is despicable, and we're not sure how we'll be able to blog about the Mets given what's happened. Also, the new GM should listen to the doctors and figure out how to manage a roster. Thank you.

The annual summer trip to my folks' hilltop cottage in Maine is always a place to take stock of a couple of things: the march of technology and the state of the New York Mets.

Technologically, we've from dial-up Internet to cellphones that don't particularly work very well, from snowy rabbit-ears reception to post-digital-transition converter boxes. The rule for years has been that WFAN doesn't come in until after dark, so games get joined around the sixth inning. This isn't to mock the summer house for being backwards -- rather, it's to note that here, technology assumes a back seat for a few days to reading books, picking blueberries and just sitting. Which, at least for a while each summer, is how it should be.

As for the Mets, well ... Maine has rarely been kind to them. There have been dismemberments by unlikely Pittsburgh Pirates and other disasters I can't summon up for linkage because I'm on dial-up, but remember as a vague ache and bedrock sense of wariness.

This year, it seemed, things would be different. There's now a big AT&T cell tower on a neighboring hilltop (invisible, happily), so my cellphone reception is an order of magnitude better than it is in, say, Brooklyn. And with MLB At Bat, the sundown rule was repealed: WFAN was just one of 30 radio feeds I could listen to if I so desired, day or night. And the Mets? They'd acquitted themselves admirably down in Houston.

But something about the piney woods just spells embarrassment for my team, it seems.

I followed Tony Bernazard's long-awaited comeuppance via Twitter, with fellow faithful giving me the news 140 characters at a time. (This is me, by the way.) Press conference at 3:30 pm. Something big. Ah, Tony B. was out. Good. Now he'd have to abuse people who weren't college-aged prospects or below him in the office hierarchy -- people who could fight back, and hopefully would. I hope Willie Randolph danced in a hallway and then tore his shirt off in celebration.

I tweeted that being a Mets fan had just become slightly less embarrassing, and headed out to do errands with my dad. On the way back, I pulled out my phone and punched up Twitter. What the hell? There was Steve, suggesting I reconsider the lack of embarrassment. There were Zoe and Caryn and Will and Vaccaro and Heyman and lots of other Mets- and sports-related folks. The iPhone was practically red-hot processing it all.

I pieced it together one bite-sized chunk of disbelief at a time. Yes, Bernazard was out. Omar had offered some nonsensical blather about the Mets' HR folks looking into the situation even before Adam Rubin's scathing stories in the Daily News; seeing how that was coming from the Mets' front office, I dismissed it as nonsense. But there was more. Much more. Omar had called out Rubin in the press conference, all but accusing him of having it in for Tony and lobbying the Mets for a job. Rubin, rightly indignant at being bullied from the pulpit, had sent both barrels back Omar's way. "Despicable," he called the GM's behavior, and properly so.

My mouth was hanging open. Omar Minaya, who could at least be relied upon to shield his many failings with a veneer of plastic professionalism, had apparently lost his mind. The Mets had fired someone who richly deserved it, and even that had become an utter fucking farce. The Twitterers' heads were spinning. Over at Metsblog, you could tell Matt Cerrone was pinching himself between increasingly unlikely updates.

For a split-second I ached to be in New York, monitoring all this firsthand.

The last couple of seasons have shown us -- in excruciating detail -- that nothing said by any member of the Mets' baseball operations should be taken at face value. The team that takes the field each night is too often a shambles, with players who should be on the DL active but unavailable and the bench and/or pen painfully short. Obvious roster moves aren't made, aren't made in a responsibly timely fashion, or are leaked to the papers and then not made anyway. (Spare a moment of pity for poor Tim Redding.) Injuries are habitually misrepresented, leaving you to wonder if the team employs incompetent doctors or ignores the advice of competent ones. And, as we now know, the VP of player development bullied prospects, campaigned for the ouster of one manager while fraternizing with another, abused clubhouse guys doing their jobs, screamed obscenities at deputies in public and nearly came to blows with players on buses.

And an organization with this shoddy, sorry track record attacks Adam Rubin? It wasn't exactly hard picking whom to believe, and whom to side with. It is indeed despicable to attack someone for doing their job when the real issue is you not doing yours, and classless to try and use the trappings of your office to intensify the attack. I've never had reason to doubt Rubin's reporting; on the other hand, I've had reason to doubt Omar Minaya's competence -- and now his truthfulness -- night after night after night.

I've written before that the barrage of injuries to high-profile Mets would probably save Omar's job when he deserved firing for a lot of other sins. But yesterday changed that. If he lost his cool up there, that's a straw that ought to break the camel's back and result in his own firing in short order. If, on the other hand, he trained his guns on the Daily News on the orders of ownership, he ought to quit posthaste for the sake of his own honor. (Jeff Wilpon's presence as Omar kinda sorta apologized -- and promptly got undermined by his boss -- makes me as suspicious as it does Greg.) If that's what happened -- and I really hope it isn't -- the Wilpons need to think very seriously about what measure of blame they deserve for the dysfunctional disaster their team has become. Whatever the case, the very culture of this organization is fundamentally broken, and everybody that's part of it needs desperately to look in the mirror and ask hard questions about why and what needs to be done about it.

That was a lot of rage to boil down to 140 characters. So I fired off this Twitter update: "Does any #Mets fan believe anything Omar Minaya says? Fire him too, right now. What an absolute f------ disgrace this team is." I offered much the same on Facebook. And then, looking out at the Maine woods, I realized I didn't want to be in New York. In fact, I was thoroughly and heartily glad that I wasn't. The turkeys were crossing the meadow again, and I wanted to see if I could get a short video of them. Perhaps the fawn and his mother would emerge from the woods once more. A front had rolled through, promising a beautiful sunset. Maybe there would be fireflies.

Ah, but there was a game to be played. And Cora's Irregulars had shown some admirable fight these last two days. Mets back at home, against the wild-card-leading Rockies. And, more basically, a summer night with baseball to be played. Time to fire up the iPhone and get Howie and Wayne on the line.

The game started. The Mets fell behind. I was still fuming. And then, little by little, the anger seeped away.

We had dinner. Joshua was put in the bath and put to bed. We washed up. Did the usual things of a vacation night, as the sun went down (beautiful as hoped for) and the night came up, the wood thrushes' calls giving way to the tap-tap of insects against the porch screen. And all the while, the game was unfolding a pitch at a time, obeying the usual rhythms of baseball on the radio at night, heard through the doorway and amid the scuffling of chairs and the clink of gathered silverware. Called strike threes. Pitchers looking in for signs. Long drives, but playable.

Hey, I thought, they're only two runs down. Let's go, boys! And then a short sharp rally to even things at three, and then another one to threaten the Rockies' pen and bring up the prospect of K-Rod coming in for the save. In the Maine night, my thoughts had turned from the mess of the afternoon to the age-old conundrum of whether Daniel Murphy should bunt the runners over or swing away. He bunted and Jeff Francoeur was walked and Cory Sullivan gave way to Fernando Tatis, last year's inspiring story turned this year's tale of frustration. Tatis fell behind 0-and-2, and the mind turned to Omir Santos and whether he could shake a little more magic out of his bat. Except then Tatis was swinging from his heels and the ball was flying and it was GONE and Fernando was floating around the bases, fist in the air, and the roar of the crowd was a joyous crackle fighting its way out of the iPhone's pinprick speakers, and I wasn't thinking about Omar Minaya or Tony Bernazard or Jeff Wilpon even the littlest bit.

The intrinsic beauty and joy of the game of baseball is asked to redeem a lot about the sorry and ugly business of baseball. Sometimes the asking seems like too much. But incredibly and improbably, baseball often manages to pull it off. Nothing about the Mets' team coming back to beat the Rockies makes the Mets' organization less of a mess. But for three hours, somehow, the Mets made me forget about the Mets. And for that I'm grateful.

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The only surprise, one supposes, is it didn't happen at three in the morning.

No, this time it was around 3:45 in the afternoon, televising the execution live on their own network. They planned to off Tony Bernazard. Instead they shot themselves in the foot — a foot that must be made of titanium.

They shot off their original feet long ago.

They did it again, didn't they? And when you think of the Mets doing it again, the initial inference you make is never "you mean they won another ballgame in exciting fashion?"

Yet somewhere in there Monday, they did that, too. It was indeed exciting, almost thrilling, the way several Mets players built a little rally in the eighth inning, setting the stage for a big blast by a nice man who hasn't given them much in 2009. Fernando Tatis had become synonymous with double play. Now you can reclassify him under clutch grand slam, one that beat the Rockies, one that closed the Mets' remotely plausible deficit for the Wild Card to 6½ games. They're still behind seven teams, they're still teetering on the brink of contention extinction, they've still got quite a hole out of which to dig themselves before we can say they have redeemed what has been, up to now, a lost season.

Spending a few hours at Citi Field watching the Mets beat Colorado 7-3 was a lovely distraction from the way the Mets braintrust conducted itself Monday. But it's not supposed to work that way. The baseball players and the baseball games are supposed to be the focus of our attention. If we know who any of these people in suits (or out of their shirts) are, it's because we bought the yearbook and didn't flip straight past those first few pages with their pictures. Men like Omar Minaya and Tony Bernazard shouldn't be our concern. Even in this hyperattentive age when those holding their job titles will inevitably step into the spotlight's glare, we don't much care about them as a rule. Make a good trade, sign the right free agent, don't screw up the draft is about the extent of our interest in the Executive Vice President & General Manager or the Vice President, Player Development.

As much attention as I pay to the Mets, I wasn't much more than mordantly amused by the Bernazard escapades at first.

• He yelled at someone who worked for him because someone was sitting in his seat? Tacky, but all kinds of idiots get in positions where in they can abuse their underlings and it unfortunately happens. I didn't know if it was news, but it was certainly bad form.

• He challenged minor leaguers to bare-chested brawls? Sounded unseemly, but what do I know about jocks and motivational tactics? Not textbook management, to be sure, but if it somehow worked, it would seem old-school charming in its way.

• The thing I read Sunday, however, by Adam Rubin (now the world's most famous baseball beat reporter, if in fact he is still a baseball beat reporter), really bothered me. It was the "bus driver story," which you can read here; the essence is Tony Bernazard was rude, crude and a world-class jerk to a clubhouse guy on another team for no reason other than he could be. This was not his "deputy," nor was it a group of Binghamton Mets technically under his jurisdiction. This was the Lakewood BlueClaws' Clubhouse guy— someone Big Shirtless Ton' judged not worthy of an answer to the innocent question, "Can I help you?"

About then, I was asking myself, "What is the net benefit of keeping Tony Bernazard?" I hadn't noticed a cascade of prospects landing at Shea Stadium or heading toward Citi Field on Bernazard's watch. From a cold, hard self-interest perspective, was Tony Bernazard some kind of baseball wizard whose outbursts were worth indulging as idiosyncrasies because he was going to make my team better? Even if he was (and you can form your own judgment from some evidence presented here), I became less and less interested in divining Tony Bernazard's magic or acumen or whatever it was that made the Mets value him. Perhaps if the Mets were more successful these sorts of stories wouldn't seem so damning. Then again, stories like these probably give a pretty good hint as to why the Mets aren't all that successful.

Personal conclusion: I didn't want him associated with my team. I felt dirty knowing the team I love was employing somebody reported and corroborated as behaving this badly.

Yet I didn't feel nearly as dirty rooting for a team that gave Tony Bernazard major responsibility as I did when they got around to firing him.

I've always looked for the silver lining with Omar Minaya. I've disagreed with many of his decisions and have thought, particularly since the Willie Randolph firing, that he is the wrong man to face a camera or a microphone under duress. But I bought into the idea that he turned the Mets around. He signed Pedro. He signed the first Carlos. He eventually got the second Carlos and then Billy Wagner and then Paul Lo Duca. He didn't trade David Wright or Jose Reyes, something I'm convinced Steve Phillips would have done. Just for not being Steve Phillips I liked Omar. I liked Omar's biography, the Queens roots, the experience with the Mets when they were winning in '99 and '00, the good college try he gave it with the Expos. We had turned pathetic under Phillips and Jim Duquette seemed overmatched. I bought into Omar.

When I buy in, I buy in for the long term. I cut slack if you've given me some reason to recall why I wanted you around in the first place. On some level, I'm still grateful to Fred Wilpon for being part of the ownership group that rescued my team from the deterioration of the de Roulet era. Sterling Equities has probably done more harm than good to the franchise since taking over completely early in this decade, but I keep thinking about what it was like before Fred Wilpon (and Nelson Doubleday) arrived in 1980 and can't let that residual gratitude evaporate altogether. Same for Omar. Omar arrived in October 2004 and things got better. Things peaked in October 2006 because, I believe, Omar made many good moves. Since then he's made many bad moves, but I want to believe that the man who rescued us from the abyss is still the man in charge, that's he a competent executive and a decent person and that he's capable of returning us to where it seemed we were headed.

I no longer believe that.

Omar Minaya has surpassed the realm of clumsy statements and questionable deals. He has revealed himself — to borrow a phrase that would make the Dodgercentric chairman and chief executive of the New York Mets officer tingle with joy — a bum. He has crafted an inept baseball apparatus, entrusted authority to a lowlife in Bernazard and then, when all else failed, blamed somebody else for his problems.

He blamed the media. It's what politicians do. Vice presidents and would-be vice presidents have been doing it for ages, and what is Executive Vice President Omar Minaya if not the most lugubrious of politicians at this point? He was the guy who tried to spin two consecutive final-week, final-day choke jobs as strong second-place finishes. About the only thing he did with grace the last two years was not drop the oversized novelty checks as he handed out ginormous contracts to Johan Santana and Francisco Rodriguez.

So now Tony Bernazard (internal investigative findings notwithstanding) is Adam Rubin's fault. Adam Rubin, if you keep up with what beat writers produce, is the class of the Mets press corps. This is not a latter-day Dick Young or a peer in any tangible way of Wally Matthews. This is not someone who publicly pushes a personal agenda. This is a reporter who does his legwork and presents the facts he's found in a straightforward manner. If he learned a top Mets executive was making an ass of himself, Rubin looked into it. When he found there was something to it, he published it.

There's nothing wrong with that. It's what the media does. It pursues stories. It pursues stories that make you happy if the circumstances add up to "good" news, and it pursues stories that will inevitably constitute "bad" news. For six years I've read Adam Rubin. I've never once thought, "This is a guy who's out to get somebody."

When Omar Minaya flat-out accused Adam Rubin of writing stories about Tony Bernazard's antics as a way to clear space on the Mets' payroll for Adam Rubin to succeed him as VP of player development, Omar Minaya crossed to the dark side. Dark and dim. It was, as Rubin put it uncomfortably in the aftermath of the press conference that I hope we Mets fans can look back on someday as Omar Minaya's richly deserved Waterloo, deplorable.

It was deplorable because it was a shot at someone for doing his job. Adam Rubin works for the Daily News, not the New York Mets.

It was deplorable because it defames someone who, reading him regularly indicates, is a good reporter with an excellent track record when it comes to his beat.

It was deplorable because the Mets don't get how much good they derive from those pesky reporters informing the ticket-buying public of their every move, flattering or not.

It was deplorable because it makes no sense that Rubin — if we are to believe he was after Bernazard's job — would seek it by writing for mass consumption one article after another that put his theoretical prospective employer in a bad light.

It was deplorable because it revealed that the Mets have zero sense of media relations or public relations savvy. Does anyone prepare Omar Minaya for these press availabilities?

And maybe it was deplorable because someone did prepare him.

I can't quite get past the use of one word in particular Omar repeated several times...and no, it wasn't "investigate". It was "lobby". As transcribed by Amazin' Avenue, Omar lobbed his grenade as thus:

Adam, for the past couple of years, has lobb[ied] for a player development position. He has lobb[ied] myself, he has lobb[ied] Tony.

Lobbied. (Or "lobby" as Omar pronounced it in the past tense.) It struck me as a strange choice of phrasing. It could mean nothing — maybe he walks around the office saying "lobby" or "lobbied" all the time — but it didn't sound like a natural word for Omar Minaya to toss around in conversation. There was even the slightest pause before he spit it out the first time.

What it sounded like was a talking point, the kind politicians use ad infinitum on talking head shows; the kind that is intended to spread virally so it will become woven into the discussion, a discussion you wish framed on your terms; the kind consultants drill into their clients for maximum impact in the hopes that if it is repeated enough, it will begin to sink in as fact.

If Omar Minaya says "Adam Rubin has asked how you get a job in baseball," it doesn't sound particularly nefarious. If Omar Minaya says "Adam Rubin has lobbied..." that's a whole lot more proactive and opens up the question of a reporter's motive beyond trying to nail down a story. Now suddenly Adam Rubin isn't some innocent byline in the News. Adam Rubin is an underhanded sneak who dared to gasp...lobby! the Mets for Tony Bernazard's job.

As much as it appears Omar went off the reservation in attacking Rubin, his fondness for "lobby" hints, to me anyway, that there might have been more here: that, even with Jeff Wilpon materializing Monday night to tut-tut the notion that Adam Rubin did anything wrong, somebody worked with Minaya not just on a clean, legalese statement about Bernazard but on the most effective way to malign Rubin.

What I'm thinking is this was a coordinated effort to "get" a reporter who wrote things that made the Mets uncomfortable. If my inkling is anything close to right, then I feel even dirtier being a Mets fan now than I did after I heard the accusations in the first place.

Minaya later said he shouldn't have chosen this "forum" to say what he did about Rubin. Well, no, you shouldn't have — unless you thought you could get away with it, which you clearly didn't. If a conflict of interest is what truly distressed the general manager, there were ways to approach it. You talk to Rubin. You talk to Rubin's editor. You whisper in a competitor's ear that "you know, there's a reason Adam's all over this alleged story." You sure as hell don't step on your own Tony Bernazard damage control press conference and turn it into an attack on Adam Rubin's character.

That's not baseball. That's not media relations. That's politics at its worst. And that's, per the way this organization runs itself continually into the ground, incredibly deplorable.

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.