We didn't have any great, great superstar players where one guy got all the shots. It wasn't that kind of a team.
—Willis Reed to Dennis D'Agostino, “Garden Glory“
My earliest, most serious sports allegiances were to the 1969 Mets and the 1969-70 Knicks, both champions in the making. I haven't stopped since '69 where the Mets are concerned but I was never again the Knicks fan I was at ages 6 and 7. I can't say I'm a Knicks fan at all these days. Haven't been remotely enthusiastic about them for more than a decade.
Why? Lots of reasons, but the one that comes back to me now is I was spoiled at an early age. Not so much by the success but by the personalities. My introduction to basketball was Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley and Dick Barnett. The starting five. After your first exposure to something comes at its highest, most sublime level, maybe everything that follows is bound to disappoint.
I can still see and hear those Knicks. My parents were huge fans and holders of season tickets not that many rows from the floor. When they weren't at the Garden, they had the radio on and we'd listen to home games during dinner via Marv Albert on WNBC. If the Knicks were on the road, we'd watch on Channel 9. It was an article of faith in our house that Willis was exactly what his title said he was, The Captain; that Clyde was one cool customer; that Dave The Butcher (which is what I could swear they were calling him on TV) was tougher than Gus Johnson; that Dollar Bill was brilliant; that quiet Dick Barnett with his “fall back, baby” jump shot was every bit as important as his more celebrated teammates.
Every week the Post printed a list of the league scoring leaders. There never seemed to be any Knicks at the top of it. I once asked my father about it, and he explained it was because Red Holzman didn't want any of them to score all that much. He wants them each to pass the ball, to play smart, to hit the open man, to keep everybody involved, to play as a team on offense and to get back on defense. If the players wanted to, he said, they were each capable of scoring 30 points a game.
The math as processed by my unnuanced, six-year-old way of looking at things — five guys each scoring 30 points every night would mean the Knicks would have 150 points in the bank — didn't add up to anything bad, but whatever Red was doing was working. The Knicks of Reed, Frazier, DeBusschere, Bradley and Barnett started the year 5-0, lost to the San Francisco Warriors and then won their next eighteen, an NBA record. They were 23-1 in a blink. If none of them scored as much as that Al Cinder guy from Milwaukee everybody made such a big deal about (turned out his name was Lew Alcindor and he would eventually become Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), it didn't matter. They won together.
Neither basketball nor the Knicks ever captured my fancy the way it did the first time around, but I still revere that starting five to a degree that remains almost unmatched in my affections. If I love how much larger than life the '86 Mets were (and I do), it was the way the '70 Knicks were perfectly lifesized — one inch equaled one inch — that stays with me to this day.
I don't know that I'd seen anything like them until now. But now I have.
The first five batters of the 2006 Mets composed a unit within a unit that I'd imagine has set an unreasonably high standard for Mets fans who have just taken their first steps on the orange and blue brick road. As marvelous as the entire team effort was, in the same sense that those champion Knicks needed the Minutemen contributions of Cazzie Russell, Dave Stallworth and Mike Riordan (and even backup center Nate Bowman whom my mother dismissed as if he were a proto-Danny Heep), the 2006 Mets were defined in black ink by those who hit first through fifth most every night.
Isn't every good baseball team, though? I suppose. You can't talk about 1986 without Dykstra, Backman, Hernandez, Carter and Straw, right? No, you can't. But Lenny and Wally were often spelled by Mookie and Teufel, and Ray Knight batted sixth and there was some very impressive pitching mixed in there. The '69 Mets were a platoonist's dream. Even the '99 Mets, who crafted their own ideal top of the order with Rickey, Fonzie, Oly, Mike and Robin, had everybody from Orel Hershiser to Pat Mahomes to Shawon Dunston saving their bacon when the pressure was on.
This past year was absolutely a team effort as well. That wasn't just lip service paid to Greatest 2006 Mets Nos. 49 through 6. Glavine was important. Chavez was crucial. Pedro was Pedro. You could argue that Wagner, Sanchez and Heilman comprised the firewall that maintained the sanctity of the fortress. I wouldn't argue against the bullpen as an MVP candidate unto itself.
Yet who was irreplaceable? No starter stayed healthy for the duration. Duaner gave way to Guillermo. And Endy…Endy was great. We don't win as much as we did without Endy. Or Valentin. Or, believe it or don't, Trachsel.
Ah, but the Top Five was really the Top Five on this team. When I think of the Knicks of my childhood, I don't immediately think of Dave Stallworth, y'know? So when I think of the Mets who were the Mets as I settled into middle age, the first five guys who come to mind will be the first five guys on Willie Randolph's lineup card.
2006 was 2006 because somewhere within the first twenty minutes of any given game, depending on the site, Jose Reyes strode to the pate, Paul Lo Duca loosened in the on-deck circle, Carlos Beltran waited in the hole, Carlos Delgado hung around the bat rack and David Wright took practice swings. Those actions right there…that's why we had the kind of year we had.
Individual players in other uniforms rolled up gaudier stats. Somebody from somewhere else will be named the National League's Most Valuable Player next week. But I'll take these five, our five, over any other five, starting last April and into eternity for as long as I'm capable of remembering 2006.
Easy enough to point to the milestones they reached, but what impresses me about (in alphabetical order) Beltran, Delgado, Lo Duca, Reyes and Wright is they knew what they were doing. Talent? Sure, loads of it. But these guys knew how to work counts, where to hit to, why they should take and what they should be looking for. They knew who they were. You didn't hear it enough, but they were five smart players.
They played both sides of the ball. We think of them as hitters, but they could defend. All right, Delgado isn't much of a first baseman, but after a half-decade that included more Vaughn and Phillips and Piazza and Jacobs and Offerman than Mientkiewicz, he was a pro. The rest were more than above average at their positions. Beltran earned his Gold Glove by floating through the air with the greatest of ease. Lo Duca was a ballast behind the plate. Wright and the third base line had an interesting relationship but when he closed the gap between him and it, it was something to see. Reyes? He's pretty handy in a hole.
None of them was one-dimensional, not on the field, not off it. Wright was a touch wide-eyed and Reyes' joie de ball was as innocent as it was contagious, but you know they didn't get this far this soon without being savvier than their years. Beltran was stoic, but not beyond smiling widely when relaxed, which he usually was for his and our good. Delgado was the brains of the outfit, a de facto life and hitting coach, but the emotion of making it to a playoff series positively glittered off of him. Lo Duca was tough, was hot, was indomitable. One also assumes that with his divorce and his diversion making unlikely headlines, he was hurting. He did a good job of hiding it.
Delgado (38 HR, 114 RBI) made the lineup dangerous. Lo Duca (.318 as a catcher batting second) replaced an icon and never looked back. Beltran (41 HR, 116 RBI, 127 R) radiated excellence. Wright (116 RBI, .311) demonstrated some mighty strong shoulders. Reyes (122 R, 64 SB, 17 3B, .300 along with 19 HR, 81 RBI from the leadoff spot…leadoff!) keeps running. These five, from the guy who finally learned to take four balls to the guy who was never stressed out by two strikes, acted as one. They built rallies. They built streaks. They built a season. Sports Illustrated picked the right five to feature when it wanted to spotlight the intrepid Mets.
So who was the greatest Met of 2006? I'm tempted to say it didn't and doesn't matter.
One lit up the basepaths and roused appreciative choruses.
One lured the malleable into our lair and created an army of loyalists.
One powered up at the plate and wrote down everything he hit.
One demonstrated an uncommon facility for every aspect of his trade.
One yielded not a single speck of ground to those who'd charge toward him or those who'd call him out.
I like the sum, but each part has its merits. Take your pick if you must.
If I wanted to give it to Carlos Delgado for providing all kinds of heart to the order, I wouldn't be wrong. I have him fifth.
If I wanted to give it to David Wright for busting out of the gate and fronting the franchise, I wouldn't be wrong. I have him fourth.
If I wanted to give it to Paul Lo Duca for playing through every kind of pain and never not producing, I wouldn't be wrong. I have him third.
If I wanted to give it to Jose Reyes for creating a renewable energy source and electrifying all of our fanly impulses (not to mention being so irresistibly serenadeable), I wouldn't be wrong. I have him second.
I want to give it to Carlos Beltran. I have him first.
Carlos Beltran should have stood up sooner for that first curtain call and shouldn't have stood by staring at that last pitch, but otherwise, for my money, he did everything to the best of his ability in 2006. And his ability is enormous.
When the Mets ascended to the mountaintop, when they emphatically put the rest of the division and the league behind them in May (10 HR, 25 RBI) and June (8 HR, 25 RBI), it was Carlos Beltran who planted the flag so it and they would not be moved.
When the Mets buried the curse of Turner Field once and for all in late July, it was Carlos Beltran who turned over the heftiest spade of dirt (12 games vs. Atlanta, home & away: 9 HR, 19 RBI, .318).
When the Mets refused to succumb in Houston, it was Carlos Beltran who pulled the plug on his old team, putting to rest his own personal demon even if it meant taking on a Minute Maid wall to deliver the last rites.
He swung the single most dramatic swing of the year at home, the one that trumped Pujols and the Cardinals. He ended the longest game of the year, the one against Madson and the Phillies. He hit more home runs, recorded more extra-base hit and scored more runs than any Met ever had. He answered almost every ball dialed into his area code and was rightly awarded by N.L. managers and coaches for it. He rose up from the kind of first New York year that would have crushed lesser spirits and made everybody just about forget it ever happened. He wasn't completely healthy in April or September, yet he had maybe the best year any Met has ever had.
In a sport that values strength up the middle, it's no coincidence that Carlos Beltran hits third and plays center. Whatever surge or slump the two teammates who batted before him and the two teammates who batted after him were enjoying or enduring, every pitcher who faced the Mets had to worry about the man in the middle.
I think I'm right in declaring Carlos Beltran the Greatest Met of 2006. But however you choose among Beltran, Reyes, Lo Duca, Wright or Delgado, I know you couldn't possibly go wrong.
Up next from 2006: Something that doesn't matter anymore.

In the spirit of woodchucks and how much wood they can chuck, the 2006 Mets were the best Mets to use as many Mets as a Mets team used.
They used 49. As a frame of reference, the 1962 Mets used four fewer. There was a whatever-it-takes quality to these particular Mets, so if it meant shuttling starters in and out as injuries necessitated, inserting relievers for day here and there, resuscitating third and fourth catchers or giving last shots to outfielders you'd all but forgotten about, they did whatever it took to win. And they won.
On Tuesday, a senator who famously invoked the wisdom that it takes a village to raise a child won resounding re-election from a constituency that couldn't help but notice it took all of Flushing to win a division. Coincidence? Perhaps.
In any event, if the 2006 Mets represented a team effort, it's fair to recognize every member of the team, 49 to 1.
49. Bartolome Fortunato Has never been seen with Juan Padilla and Jose Parra at Shea Stadium at the same time.
48. Victor Diaz Long may he run, and when he gets there, long may he find himself facing LaTroy Hawkins.
47. Jose Lima Only a few pitchers become landmarks for those who follow. Every fierce competitor is compared to Bob Gibson. Every unbeatable lefty can only hope to be mentioned with Sandy Koufax. For the rest of time, every rundown, over-the-hill, slightly absurd though nonetheless endearing starter the Mets conjure up despite his showing nothing anywhere of late will be the next Jose Lima.
46. Ricky Ledee When he was a rookie, I read he grew up watching the Mets on superstation WOR in Puerto Rico, so I always had the slightest of soft spots for him. It's not that soft anymore.
45. Jeremi Gonzalez Started the first Subway Series game of 2006 and the Mets won it dramatically. Scratch no further beneath the surface and it sounds pretty good.
44. Eli Marrero One great catch versus Baltimore. One necessary trade from Colorado.
43. Kelly Stinnett Threw out a runner in his first Mets start in 11 years. Can't wait to see what he's got in the tank come 2017.
42. Philip Humber Wasn't expecting a first glance this year. Got two of them, both encouraging.
41. Henry Owens Threw very hard. Then hardly at all.
40. Heath Bell The flights from New Orleans will be longer than from Norfolk, so I hope he finds a closer AAA-MLB route to travel next year.
39. Royce Ring Congratulations Mr. and Mrs. Ring. It's a lefthander!
38. Victor Zambrano The really sad part is he was awesome for those final four batters against Atlanta.
37. Jorge Julio Came along very nicely. Then went away even better.
36. Mike Pelfrey The future's so bright, it's gonna be tall.
35. Roberto Hernandez Didja miss me? Turns out, not as much as we thought.
34. Mike DiFelice 2005: Dead weight. 2006: Good guy to have around.
33. Ramon Castro 2005: Good guy to have around. 2006: Wasn't around enough.
32. Kaz Matsui Big hits, nice plays for a few weeks. Those counted, too.
31. Michael Tucker Not the only ex-enemy who made himself useful.
30. Chris Woodward From Super Joe upgrade to latter-day Super Joe. Next time get the labrum fixed sooner.
29. Alay Soler The pan was flashed by several Mets pitchers in 2006. This guy did it enough to make you think it was more than that.
28. Dave Williams Someone adjusted his mechanics. Or time on the DL gave him a chance to reconsider his motion. Or obscure southpaws are still southpaws. However it happened, he was just short of extremely reliable.
27. Brian Bannister Always pitched well enough not to lose. Hit far too well for his own good. Didn't see him coming, so it was all gravy.
26. Anderson Hernandez His batting average and fielding percentage combined probably barely topped a thousand, and if you saw him hit, you know that's a compliment to his glove. Made the best play of the year that didn't involve a fence or a plate.
25. Oliver Perez Threw the six innings heard 'round the world. All previous question marks irrelevant in hindsight if not going forward.
24. Lastings Milledge On a team that wasn't exactly sucking wind, he was a breath of fresh air. Alas, things grew rather stale rather quickly in his wake.
23. Shawn Green Contenders have a history of picking up scuffling vets who rejuvenate themselves in time for October. Shawn Green was almost that vet. A few key hits are inked to his account but so are too many awkward swings and two tough noncatches in right. Not his fault the ride ended where it did but he didn't do anything in particular to keep it going.
22. Xavier Nady The f-word here is fate. It was not Xavier Nady's fate to stick around for August and September and October, which was too bad for him and probably us. A very good supporting-cast member whose departure weakened little by little every other link in the chain.
21. Darren Oliver He was going to retire? Nobody else wanted him? More proof that the people running baseball teams don't actually know anything. Most of them, anyway. Omar Minaya knew Darren Oliver could eat a few innings, occasionally at critical junctures. Nice work, both of you.
20. Cliff Floyd 53 fewer games played. 23 fewer home runs. 54 fewer RBI. 29 points lower on his batting average. It was easy to forget Cliff Floyd was a part of the 2006 Mets who as a whole improved by 14 games and two playoff rounds over 2005, when Cliff was his Monsta self. His brief return to health in the NLDS reminded us what this team really could have been if Cliff Floyd had been well from start to finish. Unfortunately, the finish (his and everybody's) was rather grim. Sooner or later, it was going to catch up with us.
19. Pedro Feliciano Some years calling on a lefty to get out a lefty is a chore. Other years Pedro Feliciano is on the team.
18. Chad Bradford The reason his right arm comes down so low? To demonstrate how deep this bullpen's depth was with him as a specialist-plus. Runners on base when Chad came into games wound up doing most of their reading at The Strand.
17. Julio Franco Somewhere in his remarkable Met tenure to date was a pinch-hitter and occasional first baseman who did a respectable if eventually unsatisfactory job with the bat. But we all know Julio Franco wasn't here for his bat or his glove or anything else that had to do with playing. What he was here for, by all accounts, he did very well. The results didn't show up in the boxscore — not next to his name, anyway.
16. Steve Trachsel Waited his whole career to pitch in the postseason. He's still waiting. If the Mets have ever had a less impressive 15-game winner, he's not springing to mind. But 15 wins are 15 wins…or were 15 wins. His ineffectiveness in the NLDS was glossable but his absolute meltdown in the NLCS sealed his Met fate. Observed Emma Span of the Village Voice after Game Three, “To say that Steve Trachsel had nothing tonight is to insult the void.” The only thing unsurprising about his 45.00 ERA against the Cardinals is it wasn't all that surprising.
15. Guillermo Mota We can assume Guillermo Mota's revival was not a result of clean living. The revival, however, did occur and the Mets benefited from it when they needed a shot in the, uh, arm.
14. John Maine I have to check, but I don't recall many caveats making the rounds last January to the tune of “sure we got rid of a decent mid-rotation guy in Benson and we're saddled with a real unsettling proposition in Julio, but you watch Maine, he's bound to pitch some big games for the Mets in the second half and probably the playoffs.”
13. Duaner Sanchez Tom Parsons for Jerry Grote. Robert Person for John Olerud. Jae Seo for Duaner Sanchez. Yeah, it was that good.
12. Orlando Hernandez In the Ageless Wonder Department, a crowded unit of Mets Inc., El Duque takes the cake. It's not a birthday cake because this guy really is ageless (unless you think he's the 37 he claims to be). And he was totally a wonder in 2006 in that you had to wonder how he was doing it, wonder how he could look so bad every five or so starts and then be so captivating for the other four. Ultimately we had to wonder when he was going to pitch again. If it had been in the World Series, it's tempting to wonder what would have happened.
11. Pedro Martinez Does it matter that he went 9-8? That his ERA careened past 4? That he didn't pitch for almost all of July, half of August and half of September? That he collected no wins in May? Not so much. Pedro Martinez may have posted the greatest presence-to-performance ratio in Mets history in 2006. What he did achieve when he was reasonably healthy was inspiring. What he didn't achieve…who cared? He was still Pedro. Better he's on our mound or on our bench than anybody else's. Every glance at MARTINEZ 45 always made everything just about OK. You tended to figure that sooner or later he'd get back out there and that he'd beat somebody. The later it got, the wronger you figured. Still, somehow, it doesn't matter. He's Pedro. He's a Met. He'll be back.
10. Endy Chavez Talk about a catch! What a play! What instincts! What ability! We're referring, of course, to Omar Minaya's world-class signing of a bargain-basement free agent, a light-hitting, fourth/fifth outfielder who was shipped out of Washington and let go by Philadelphia with no regrets by either team. Omar Minaya made Endy Chavez a Met. Endy took it from there. Endy took it from everywhere, Scott Rolen's bat only the last and most spectacular example.
9. Aaron Heilman Heilman rhymes with Smileman and I wish he would once in a while. Is it that bad having been the block of granite upon which a division winner built its biggest asset? Don't wallow, be happy. You were the eighth inning and the seventh inning at various stretches of 2006. You made many recaps happy, so show a little sanguinity already yet. Smile man.
8. Jose Valentin This is where Bob Newhart does one of his classic, one-sided telephone conversations. Hello, New York Mets…This is who?…Jose who?…We already have a Jose, a couple of 'em, actually…What's that?…You're a different Jose?…No, Valentine doesn't work here anymore…Oh, Valentin without the 'e'…You're Jose Valentin…Yeah, now that you mention it I think I've heard of you. What can I do for you, Jose Valentin?…You want to be the starting what?…I see. But we already have a second baseman. A bunch of 'em…What?…Not for long, you say?…Him either?…Oh. Well, what are your qualifications?…Nineteen games? You've played 19 games in the Majors at second?…That doesn't sound like a lot. How are you as a hitter?…Wow, Jose, that's a lot of strikeouts…What?…You plan to cut down?…And you're going to work on your defense at a position you've barely played in a career that dates to 1992?…And you're going to be 37 at the end of the season?…And you're going to start the season by not doing much of anything?…Not hitting and not playing. I see…Listen, Jose, you sound like quite a deal, but I really think we're going to have to go in another direction…What's that?…You won't take 'no' for answer? Well, if you've got a guaranteed contract, I guess we can't stop you from trying.
7. Billy Wagner Confession: I didn't know “Enter Sandman” was Billy Wagner's song when the Mets signed him. I was only vaguely aware it was Mariano Rivera's. And I wasn't really terribly familiar with it at all. I now know it and like it most nights and love it some nights. Once in a while, it's a little off-key, but it's been a long time since I heard anything in the ninth inning that sounds as good.
6. Tom Glavine If there's any baseball justice at all, Tom Glavine will win his 300th game as a New York Met. That I won't be washing my fingertips after typing that sentence tells you all you need to know about what he meant to this team in 2006.
That's 44 of 49. The remaining players deserve a little extra consideration, so please check back directly for The Five Greatest Mets of 2006.

In the spirit of woodchucks and how much wood they can chuck, the 2006 Mets were the best Mets to use as many Mets as a Mets team used.

They used 49. As a frame of reference, the 1962 Mets used four fewer. There was a whatever-it-takes quality to these particular Mets, so if it meant shuttling starters in and out as injuries necessitated, inserting relievers for day here and there, resuscitating third and fourth catchers or giving last shots to outfielders you'd all but forgotten about, they did whatever it took to win. And they won.

On Tuesday, a senator who famously invoked the wisdom that it takes a village to raise a child won resounding re-election from a constituency that couldn't help but notice it took all of Flushing to win a division. Coincidence? Perhaps.

In any event, if the 2006 Mets represented a team effort, it's fair to recognize every member of the team, 49 to 1.

49. Bartolome Fortunato Has never been seen with Juan Padilla and Jose Parra at Shea Stadium at the same time.

48. Victor Diaz Long may he run, and when he gets there, long may he find himself facing LaTroy Hawkins.

47. Jose Lima Only a few pitchers become landmarks for those who follow. Every fierce competitor is compared to Bob Gibson. Every unbeatable lefty can only hope to be mentioned with Sandy Koufax. For the rest of time, every rundown, over-the-hill, slightly absurd though nonetheless endearing starter the Mets conjure up despite his showing nothing anywhere of late will be the next Jose Lima.

46. Ricky Ledee When he was a rookie, I read he grew up watching the Mets on superstation WOR in Puerto Rico, so I always had the slightest of soft spots for him. It's not that soft anymore.

45. Jeremi Gonzalez Started the first Subway Series game of 2006 and the Mets won it dramatically. Scratch no further beneath the surface and it sounds pretty good.

44. Eli Marrero One great catch versus Baltimore. One necessary trade from Colorado.

43. Kelly Stinnett Threw out a runner in his first Mets start in 11 years. Can't wait to see what he's got in the tank come 2017.

42. Philip Humber Wasn't expecting a first glance this year. Got two of them, both encouraging.

41. Henry Owens Threw very hard. Then hardly at all.

40. Heath Bell The flights from New Orleans will be longer than from Norfolk, so I hope he finds a closer AAA-MLB route to travel next year.

39. Royce Ring Congratulations Mr. and Mrs. Ring. It's a lefthander!

38. Victor Zambrano The really sad part is he was awesome for those final four batters against Atlanta.

37. Jorge Julio Came along very nicely. Then went away even better.

36. Mike Pelfrey The future's so bright, it's gonna be tall.

35. Roberto Hernandez Didja miss me? Turns out, not as much as we thought.

34. Mike DiFelice 2005: Dead weight. 2006: Good guy to have around.

33. Ramon Castro 2005: Good guy to have around. 2006: Wasn't around enough.

32. Kaz Matsui Big hits, nice plays for a few weeks. Those counted, too.

31. Michael Tucker Not the only ex-enemy who made himself useful.

30. Chris Woodward From Super Joe upgrade to latter-day Super Joe. Next time get the labrum fixed sooner.

29. Alay Soler The pan was flashed by several Mets pitchers in 2006. This guy did it enough to make you think it was more than that.

28. Dave Williams Someone adjusted his mechanics. Or time on the DL gave him a chance to reconsider his motion. Or obscure southpaws are still southpaws. However it happened, he was just short of extremely reliable.

27. Brian Bannister Always pitched well enough not to lose. Hit far too well for his own good. Didn't see him coming, so it was all gravy.

26. Anderson Hernandez His batting average and fielding percentage combined probably barely topped a thousand, and if you saw him hit, you know that's a compliment to his glove. Made the best play of the year that didn't involve a fence or a plate.

25. Oliver Perez Threw the six innings heard 'round the world. All previous question marks irrelevant in hindsight if not going forward.

24. Lastings Milledge On a team that wasn't exactly sucking wind, he was a breath of fresh air. Alas, things grew rather stale rather quickly in his wake.

23. Shawn Green Contenders have a history of picking up scuffling vets who rejuvenate themselves in time for October. Shawn Green was almost that vet. A few key hits are inked to his account but so are too many awkward swings and two tough noncatches in right. Not his fault the ride ended where it did but he didn't do anything in particular to keep it going.

22. Xavier Nady The f-word here is fate. It was not Xavier Nady's fate to stick around for August and September and October, which was too bad for him and probably us. A very good supporting-cast member whose departure weakened little by little every other link in the chain.

21. Darren Oliver He was going to retire? Nobody else wanted him? More proof that the people running baseball teams don't actually know anything. Most of them, anyway. Omar Minaya knew Darren Oliver could eat a few innings, occasionally at critical junctures. Nice work, both of you.

20. Cliff Floyd 53 fewer games played. 23 fewer home runs. 54 fewer RBI. 29 points lower on his batting average. It was easy to forget Cliff Floyd was a part of the 2006 Mets who as a whole improved by 14 games and two playoff rounds over 2005, when Cliff was his Monsta self. His brief return to health in the NLDS reminded us what this team really could have been if Cliff Floyd had been well from start to finish. Unfortunately, the finish (his and everybody's) was rather grim. Sooner or later, it was going to catch up with us.

19. Pedro Feliciano Some years calling on a lefty to get out a lefty is a chore. Other years Pedro Feliciano is on the team.

18. Chad Bradford The reason his right arm comes down so low? To demonstrate how deep this bullpen's depth was with him as a specialist-plus. Runners on base when Chad came into games wound up doing most of their reading at The Strand.

17. Julio Franco Somewhere in his remarkable Met tenure to date was a pinch-hitter and occasional first baseman who did a respectable if eventually unsatisfactory job with the bat. But we all know Julio Franco wasn't here for his bat or his glove or anything else that had to do with playing. What he was here for, by all accounts, he did very well. The results didn't show up in the boxscore — not next to his name, anyway.

16. Steve Trachsel Waited his whole career to pitch in the postseason. He's still waiting. If the Mets have ever had a less impressive 15-game winner, he's not springing to mind. But 15 wins are 15 wins…or were 15 wins. His ineffectiveness in the NLDS was glossable but his absolute meltdown in the NLCS sealed his Met fate. Observed Emma Span of the Village Voice after Game Three, “To say that Steve Trachsel had nothing tonight is to insult the void.” The only thing unsurprising about his 45.00 ERA against the Cardinals is it wasn't all that surprising.

15. Guillermo Mota We can assume Guillermo Mota's revival was not a result of clean living. The revival, however, did occur and the Mets benefited from it when they needed a shot in the, uh, arm.

14. John Maine I have to check, but I don't recall many caveats making the rounds last January to the tune of “sure we got rid of a decent mid-rotation guy in Benson and we're saddled with a real unsettling proposition in Julio, but you watch Maine, he's bound to pitch some big games for the Mets in the second half and probably the playoffs.”

13. Duaner Sanchez Tom Parsons for Jerry Grote. Robert Person for John Olerud. Jae Seo for Duaner Sanchez. Yeah, it was that good.

12. Orlando Hernandez In the Ageless Wonder Department, a crowded unit of Mets Inc., El Duque takes the cake. It's not a birthday cake because this guy really is ageless (unless you think he's the 37 he claims to be). And he was totally a wonder in 2006 in that you had to wonder how he was doing it, wonder how he could look so bad every five or so starts and then be so captivating for the other four. Ultimately we had to wonder when he was going to pitch again. If it had been in the World Series, it's tempting to wonder what would have happened.

11. Pedro Martinez Does it matter that he went 9-8? That his ERA careened past 4? That he didn't pitch for almost all of July, half of August and half of September? That he collected no wins in May? Not so much. Pedro Martinez may have posted the greatest presence-to-performance ratio in Mets history in 2006. What he did achieve when he was reasonably healthy was inspiring. What he didn't achieve…who cared? He was still Pedro. Better he's on our mound or on our bench than anybody else's. Every glance at MARTINEZ 45 always made everything just about OK. You tended to figure that sooner or later he'd get back out there and that he'd beat somebody. The later it got, the wronger you figured. Still, somehow, it doesn't matter. He's Pedro. He's a Met. He'll be back.

10. Endy Chavez Talk about a catch! What a play! What instincts! What ability! We're referring, of course, to Omar Minaya's world-class signing of a bargain-basement free agent, a light-hitting, fourth/fifth outfielder who was shipped out of Washington and let go by Philadelphia with no regrets by either team. Omar Minaya made Endy Chavez a Met. Endy took it from there. Endy took it from everywhere, Scott Rolen's bat only the last and most spectacular example.

9. Aaron Heilman Heilman rhymes with Smileman and I wish he would once in a while. Is it that bad having been the block of granite upon which a division winner built its biggest asset? Don't wallow, be happy. You were the eighth inning and the seventh inning at various stretches of 2006. You made many recaps happy, so show a little sanguinity already yet. Smile man.

8. Jose Valentin This is where Bob Newhart does one of his classic, one-sided telephone conversations. Hello, New York Mets…This is who?…Jose who?…We already have a Jose, a couple of 'em, actually…What's that?…You're a different Jose?…No, Valentine doesn't work here anymore…Oh, Valentin without the 'e'…You're Jose Valentin…Yeah, now that you mention it I think I've heard of you. What can I do for you, Jose Valentin?…You want to be the starting what?…I see. But we already have a second baseman. A bunch of 'em…What?…Not for long, you say?…Him either?…Oh. Well, what are your qualifications?…Nineteen games? You've played 19 games in the Majors at second?…That doesn't sound like a lot. How are you as a hitter?…Wow, Jose, that's a lot of strikeouts…What?…You plan to cut down?…And you're going to work on your defense at a position you've barely played in a career that dates to 1992?…And you're going to be 37 at the end of the season?…And you're going to start the season by not doing much of anything?…Not hitting and not playing. I see…Listen, Jose, you sound like quite a deal, but I really think we're going to have to go in another direction…What's that?…You won't take 'no' for answer? Well, if you've got a guaranteed contract, I guess we can't stop you from trying.

7. Billy Wagner Confession: I didn't know “Enter Sandman” was Billy Wagner's song when the Mets signed him. I was only vaguely aware it was Mariano Rivera's. And I wasn't really terribly familiar with it at all. I now know it and like it most nights and love it some nights. Once in a while, it's a little off-key, but it's been a long time since I heard anything in the ninth inning that sounds as good.

6. Tom Glavine If there's any baseball justice at all, Tom Glavine will win his 300th game as a New York Met. That I won't be washing my fingertips after typing that sentence tells you all you need to know about what he meant to this team in 2006.

That's 44 of 49. The remaining players deserve a little extra consideration, so please check back directly for The Five Greatest Mets of 2006.

For the thrill of victory and the corresponding thrill of inflicting the agony of defeat, nothing beats a Mets walkoff win. You should definitely read about every one the Mets garnered in 2006 again at a blog that continues to amaze in its dedicated mission to investigate and celebrate Met minutiae (our blolleague's word for it — I'd call it core curriculum).
You should read about the 10 best Mets days of 2006 here, too, but if some of the last at-bat triumphs you lovingly remember aren't here, you should be able to revel in them again, and MWO is the site to provide the revel-ation. I present this advice not just as a public service for every Mets fan who should be reading Mets Walkoffs and Other Minutiae anyway, but to inoculate myself for not highlighting certain games you might be expecting to see on this particular list.
Yes, they were great. Yes, they stir wonderful memories. Yes, we want them on the DVD.
To offer a “but” would be to diminish them or their walkup-win (my pet phrase for when the Mets go on the road and prevail in the top of the final inning) counterparts. I don't want to dismiss that which was gloriously messy or messily glorious on any given Met day or night in 2006 just because that which nosed them out for one reason or another did, in fact, nose them out. Suffice it to say in constructing this segment of our retrospective and crafting a sum-of-its-parts narrative for the season, I relied on my idol Roger Angell's guidance as it applied to the final entry of the 1986 World Series:
We need not linger long on Game Seven, in which the Mets came back from a 3-0 second-inning deficit and won going away (as turf writers say), 8-5. It was another great game, I suppose, but even noble vintages can become a surfeit after enough bottles have been sampled.
Enough playing defense. On with the countdown.
10. August 19: Hands On The Torch
It started as a trickle. Then, one by one through sporadic raindrops and field level boxes, they poured. The damp August night lit up like a Christmas tree. On Niemann! On Elster! On Teufel and HoJo and Hearn! On Wally and Lenny and Danny and Aggie! Make room for Mitchell and El Sid, too.
Not all the 1986 Mets returned home on August 19. A few were unavailable or made themselves so. But the 20 former players who haunted Shea as eternal world champions on the night of their 20th reunion represented a closing of a ruptured loop in Met lore.
The Mets have been uncommonly considerate of their world titles. From 1970 through 1985, they gave 1969 room to breathe. There would be no confusing it with other championships. Hey, did Clendenon hit that homer in '69 or '71? Was Rod Gaspar in the '72 Series? Or was that '74? Man, they all blur together. When they finally deigned to crowd the crown, they allowed a decent interval of 17 years to pass. And once they added 1986 to the trophy case, they didn't cramp its style either. You couldn't mix up 1986 with 1987 or 1988 or any Met year in the ensuing decade or two. From a historical viewpoint, the Mets have kept it simple.
They were determined to abandon that policy in 2006. It wasn't a bad idea. No year felt more like 1986 since 1986 than 2006. It missed the mark by a bit, but the timing of the Mets acknowledging at last their spicy and successful past seemed like more than a coincidence of the calendar. The '86 Mets enjoyed a seven-month roll. The '06 Mets were in the fifth month of theirs. One edition taking bows as the other was taking names was as appropriate as it gets.
Mookie. Mex. Kid. Straw. The Rockies never stood a chance.
9. July 30: A Nice Place To Visit
Is everybody with us? Nobody on the tour got lost? Great. We're walking, we're walking…OK, everybody. Y'all can rest your feet for a moment while I show you our next stop, beautiful Turner Field in Atlanta. This very charming ballpark opened its gates in the summer of 2006. Let me show you some of the points of interest.
Here's the pitchers' mound. This is where Mets ace Pedro Martinez righted himself on a Friday night in 2006. He had been injured for a month and struggled for an inning, but then the future Hall of Famer really showed his stuff. The Mets won that night.
Here's the outfield fence. This is the wall that couldn't hold Carlos Beltran in the midst of an MVP-caliber season. On a Saturday afternoon, Mr. Beltran hit not one but two long home runs over it. The Mets won that day.
And here's second base. This is where the Braves' third baseman Willy Aybar was thrown out by Paul Lo Duca as Marcus Giles was striking out with one down in the ninth inning. With that unorthodox game-ending double play, the Mets swept the Braves for the weekend and the series.
Any questions from the group? Oh yes, you in the back…uh-huh, some people consider that the case…I'll repeat the question so everybody can hear it.
That gentlemen said he'd heard that Turner Field had actually opened in 1997. While that is a not an altogether inaccurate characterization, the Turner Field we enjoy today didn't come into existence until July 30, 2006 with the Met sweep I just described. What was here previously was kind of a gloomy, uninhabitable edifice that you wouldn't want to spend any time in. Therefore, serious ballpark scholars date beautiful Turner Field to that great weekend the Mets enjoyed here.
Y'all have been a great group.
8. July 16: All Aglow
It's not often first pitch is scheduled for 5:05 PM local in a baseball season, but when you're airing a baseball game as prelude to an awards show and you want that awards show to shine in prime time, you apparently start the game when you feel like it.
On July 16, ESPN demanded the Cubs begin their Sunday night game against the Mets in late afternoon so it could get the ESPYs up and running by 9:00 Eastern/8:00 Central. It turned out to be a most pleasing aesthetic decision. Wrigley Field is brilliant in daylight, but positively radiant by twilight.
As we watched on ESPN, we saw The Friendly Confines bask in the glow of both a Chicago sunset and a New York onslaught. Come the sixth inning, night fell on Wrigley…with a 2006 Metsian thud.
Sean Marshall and Roberto Novoa gave up the most runs any pitchers ever gave up to the Mets in any one inning. Marshall, leading by three through five, retired Chris Woodward for openers. And Will Ohman got Ramon Castro for the final out because somebody had to get somebody to end it. In between, the Mets sent 14 batters to the plate and 13 reached safely. The one who didn't reached on a fielder's choice, so if you think about it, for 14 consecutive plate appearances, Cubs pitchers were tormented without pause.
Cliff Floyd, the fourth batter after the first out, hit a grand slam. That means a guy (Beltran) got on, then another guy (Delgado) got on and yet another guy (Wright) got on. Then Floyd.
The next guy after them, Nady, walked. How depressing is that if you're Sean Marshall? And what are you still doing in the game if you've just given up a grand slam?
Marshall went out and Novoa came in. His second batter, Chavez, drove in the inning's fifth run. The inning's fifth batter, Beltran, hit the inning's second grand slam and scored its ninth run.
The next guy, Delgado, doubled. How depressing is that if you're Roberto Novoa? And what are you still doing in the game if you've just given up a grand slam?
Giving up a two-run homer to Wright is what. That made it 11 runs in the top of the sixth for the Mets. They had never done that. But they did it in July — without Reyes (recuperating) and without Lo Duca (resting). Two All-Stars sat on the bench and the Mets set a team record for offense.
Imagine if they'd played.
Novoa came out at last, giving way to Ohman who walked a couple more before escaping without further damage. As if there could have been further damage.
It was the Mets at their maulingest, but there was also a thing of beauty beside the numbers. You can recognize the highlights instantly. When you see Floyd or Beltran or Wright trotting home, it's from that camera on a cable that ESPN strings up for Sunday nights. And because it was a 5:05 start and the sun is only beginning to go the way of Marshall and Novoa, there is a distinct red aura about Wrigley Field. Maybe a little orange, too.
7. August 22: One Swing
How awesome is Gary Cohen? With the Mets (mostly Delgado) having fought back from a 7-1 deficit against the Cardinals (mostly Pujols), it was 7-6 in the bottom of the ninth. Lo Duca singled off Isringhausen. Beltran stepped in and Cohen announced he could end this game with one swing. Beltran proffered one swing. He ended the game.
Forget what you're thinking about Beltran, Cardinals and another ninth inning. Just remember this one swing. You'll feel better.
6. June 15: The Road Taken
They should've sold t-shirts. NEW YORK METS 2006 WORLD TOUR I would've bought one.
Welcome back my friends to the road that never ends, the trip that made the Mets impenetrable. The Road Trip. That's all you have to say. Anybody who witnessed it from afar will never forget it.
The Mets board an airplane and fly to Los Angeles. A fella you'd barely heard of, Alay Soler, gives up one earned in seven innings. A fella you'd all heard of, Jose Reyes, gets into the habit of getting on and scoring right away. A fella you were sure you were gonna hear more from, Lastings Milledge, salts away a rubber game.
The Mets board another plane and fly to Phoenix. El Duque throws a three-hitter. Beltran and Delgado go deep repeatedly. Wright bursts into flames. Soler adds a shutout. Everybody, including Eli Marrero (just acquired for Kaz Matsui), hits. Four games, four wins.
The Mets board one more plane and fly to Philadelphia. The first game requires excellent defense from our third baseman to seal it. He's Wright on time with his glove. The next game is less close, less stressful, more fun. Two games, two wins.
Now a third. Losing it won't inflict much damage, not in the standings, not in the psyches. But wouldn't it be great to sweep the Phillies, the last conceivable challenger for the N.L. East title, and wouldn't it be even better to end this road trip on the highest of high notes?
Yes it would. And yes it was. On the afternoon of June 15, the Mets started strong — four in the first — and after a brief Trachselian lag that allowed the Phillies to inch close, finished unbeatable. The club's calling card through mid-June may have been its zero-to-sixty offense (eight straight wins on this trip, each with at least one run before the third out was recorded), but its signature was the bullpen. Nine Phillies batted in the final three innings of the series finale. Heilman faced three. Sanchez faced three. Wagner faced three. Among these batters were the cream of their generation of Mets-killers and Mets-wounders: Victorino, Rollins, Utley, Abreu, Pat Fucking Burrell, the burgeoning menace that is Ryan Howard.
None of them touched the Mets' relievers. Nine up, nine down. Had the second-place Phillies swept, they would have been 3-1/2 out. Instead, they were swept and sat 9-1/2 behind on June 15.
The first-place Mets boarded a bus and headed for home. The road ahead was free and clear.
5. April 17: Early Admission
They marched through the Marlins. They knocked off the Nationals. They brushed aside the Brewers.
Here came Atlanta. Here came trouble…potentially.
The Mets began 2006 on a 9-2 roll, as good as they'd ever been out of the gate. It was noted by a few cynics they had played nobody in particular on their way to the top. The schedule is the schedule. You play who they put in front of you.
It didn't matter. Florida…Washington…Milwaukee…Atlanta. They were all the same. As of April 17, it was obvious. The National League belonged to New York.
Can you truly clinch a division title in the twelfth game of a 162-game season? Technically, no. Spiritually, absolutely. It was in the dozenth contest of 2006 that the Mets knocked the 14-time winners, the only champions the five-team National League East had ever known, back into another division. The second division. They were tossed on a heap of Marlins and Nationals and Brewers and would be joined eventually by Padres and Giants and Pirates and just about everyone else out there.
It was April 17. It was obvious.
It was Pedro. He struck out eight en route to his 200th win.
It was Nady, Delgado and Lo Duca, three heretofore strangers who collected eight of our nine hits.
It was Sanchez holding the fort and Wagner bolting the door.
It was Atlanta catcher Todd Pratt, a hallowed Met soldier of campaigns past swinging at the last strike as a Brave. It not only put away the Braves but said in some dimension that this year was going to be different from not just the well-short efforts of the past few seasons but even the relatively high times of Tank's time. Not that there was anything wrong with it, but these Mets weren't going to scratch and claw for fingernails' inclusion in anybody's Wild Card race.
It was final score Mets 4 Braves 3, the Mets 10 wins and 2 losses, the Mets 5 games up on the Braves and light years ahead of the league on April 17.
It was, heart of hearts, done.
4. October 4: Tag Body Spray
Major League Baseball began three division series on a Tuesday and the fourth on a Wednesday. We were in the fourth.
We had waited long enough.
Six years from 2000, the last time October showed up at Shea. Six months from April, when our autumnal participation could be reasonably imagined. And now an extra day, just long enough to learn that the playoffs would take place not just without Pedro Martinez but sans El Duque.
Before you could say “calf injury” three times fast, the tournament was under way. It's a shame, almost, that Fran Healy wasn't broadcasting these 2006 Mets this October because for the length of it, Shea Stadium was rocking. For Game One, every Dodger was genially harassed. Every Met was sincerely revered. Every Mets fan, in the long lost words of Fran, was on the verge of exploding — and that's not Healy hyperbole.
Just being in the NLDS with home-field advantage was enough to light the collective fuse. It took only until the second inning for 56,000 to detonate.
John Maine, nobody's choice but contingency's to start a series opener, was in a bit of trouble. There was no score but there were runners on second — Jeff Kent — and first — J.D. Drew. Russell Martin drove a Maine pitch to deep right. The runners were off if not running. They were definitely off. Kent thought it might be caught and didn't dart immediately toward third. Drew was burdened by no thoughts and shot past second. Third base coach Rich Donnelly later copped to thinking this:
“I was hoping they'd throw the ball away.”
No such luck, pal. Shawn Green played it off the base of the wall and fired to Jose Valentin. Valentin relayed to Paul Lo Duca. Lo Duca, a big-leaguer since 1998 and a postseason veteran of just over one inning, received Valentin's throw and tagged an onrushing Kent. Sensing another presence approaching over his left shoulder, he turned and tagged an onrushing Drew.
Two onrushing Dodgers out. No onrushing Dodgers scored. 56,000 volcanic Mets fans spurted happiness like it was lava.
The two tags at one plate for two outs on one ball set the tone. The joint never stopped rocking. Contributions from many Mets, particularly Carlos Delgado and the first four hits of his first-ever playoff game, ensured a positive result. Lo Duca's moment of deja tag made it something we'll relive over and over again.
3. October 7: Holy Saturday
What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?
—Tom Grunnick, “Broadcast News”
A little before 7:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time…
Tigers 8 Yankees 3
Detroit wins series three games to one.
Approximately five hours later…
Mets 9 Dodgers 5
New York wins series three games to one.
News like this you don't keep to yourself.
2. September 18: Redemption
This one was for a team that didn't require much in the way of redemption for 5-1/2 months but then squandered a three-day stay in Pittsburgh. It would redeem itself by doing at home what it failed to do on the road.
Tastes of redemption were evident everywhere on the third Monday night in September.
This one was for the starter, the guy who got here just after the last taste of glory. He had been sometimes good, more often lucky, not generally loved. He put in 6-1/3 innings of shutout ball.
This one was for a failed pinch-hitter turned ad hoc second baseman who was nowhere to be found on that position's depth chart in March and didn't take over his job until June. He hit two home runs.
This one was for a middle reliever whose only association with the club was negative. He came on board in August and earned a place by throwing hard and getting outs. He did that per usual in the seventh.
This one was for a setup man who had been zigged out of the rotation and zagged into the bullpen and stepped up into a role he didn't want. He made the eighth inning academic.
This one was for a closer who never enjoyed the mass confidence of his audience but proved a damn sight of an improvement over his immediate predecessors. He generated a popout to second and a flyout to center and then a fly to left.
This one was for a leftfielder whose on-field presence was fringe for large stretches of the year but one whose soul was too enormous to be discounted. The leftfielder was in left field awaiting one final fly ball. He caught it.
This one was for two fans who each answer to the name of diehard, who by chance bought tickets for this game weeks in advance because they would go to any game on any September 18 regardless of stakes or consequences.
This one was for 46,727 fans essentially exactly like them.
This one was for a franchise that had clinched its previous division title 6,570 days earlier.
This one was for 18 years of going without.
This one was for a night of getting in.
This one was for us. All of us.
1. October 18: Faith-Based Initiative
You can't always get what you want. And even if you try, sometimes you just might find you don't get what you need. As Mets fans, we know that.
Boy do we know that.
Oh but when it works, when you get what you want and what you need, it's wonderful. You were so right to believe for those few instances when it paid off that you were never wrong to believe those countless times it didn't. The odds were literally against you because it was so unusual that things went the way you wanted and needed them to go. But as long at it happened once in a while, you knew it could happen again. And if it could happen again…well, it could happen.
Shortly before midnight on October 17, Adam Wainwright struck out Jose Reyes, completing the St. Louis Cardinals' Game Five victory over the New York Mets in the 2006 National League Championship Series. The Cardinals took a three-games-to-two lead in the best-of-seven set.
As if you've forgotten.
Hence, the moment October 18 began, I had one task at hand.
Have faith.
It was not easy. My faith, like yours, had been tested by the events of the previous five days: four games, three losses. A one-oh lead had morphed suddenly and ineffectually into a stark deficit. Our Mets, our 2006 Mets, our best team in the National League Mets, were one game from elimination. Lose and go home.
The flip side? Win and keep playing. Logically, it wasn't tough to see it clicking. Game Six of this NLCS would be at Shea Stadium. So would Game Seven, but first Game Six. Game Six is all. Game Six is where my faith would have to focus.
So it did. On October 18, I thought and I calculated and I wrote and I wore and I did every faithful thing there was to think and to calculate and to write and to wear and to do. So did you.
I don't know that I believed every word and every action I undertook and I surely didn't know if any of it would make a difference. But I understood that having no faith was no answer. Every time I was tempted to not keep the faith, I just piled it higher. If I were carrying that much faith onto an airplane, they'd make me check it.
This wasn't a drill. It was the real thing. Perhaps the most faithful thing I did was answer a call from a friend. He had an angle on two tickets for Game Six. A little on the expensive side, but it was Game Six. Win and keep playing. Priceless. Lose and go home? No refunds.
Our respective faiths hesitated but then dug deep. See you there, the usual spot.
As I had almost 30 times before in 2006, I pushed myself out my front door and toward Shea Stadium. Actually, I almost never push myself to go to a Mets game. I require no nudge at all. I go to Mets games; it's what I do. But on October 18, I was going to a Mets game that would determine if there would be any more Mets games. That was heavy. I sat on my train and I hoped for the best. I recounted in my head all the reasons why tonight should work. It exhausted me. I didn't know if I could go through this sort of mental decathlon for a Game Seven.
But then I got off of the train and I realized something.
I did get what I needed and what I wanted. I got another game. I got another night of summer. Seriously, the weather was summer. The game was baseball. The crowd was…it was a crowd. A crowd of Mets fans. Everywhere I looked, I was among the faithful. I was among me. I was headed where I was supposed to headed.
What could be better than that?
I suppose we could have lost Game Six, but once I found my friend with my ticket and once we passed through security and the turnstile and up three escalators and over several sections and up three rows and sat down and stood up in equivalent amounts for the next three-plus hours while yelling and clapping and shouting and clapping and chanting and clapping, it didn't occur to me. OK, maybe when Billy Wagner extended the top of the ninth beyond all reasonable limits of tolerance, but otherwise, no. This was too good. This was the Mets one more time in 2006. This was, at the risk of sloganeering, the year we'd been waiting for, the month we'd been waiting for, the night we'd been waiting for.
Of course we won.
It was a night of Reyes and Green and Lo Duca and Maine. It was a night guaranteeing Game Seven and all that such an event implied. That was the want-to/need-to aspect on paper as we understood it when the day began. That I still understood. The goal remained winning the pennant. We wanted it and we needed it if we were going to fulfill our ultimate desire for a world championship.
We got what we wanted, at least the part we could reach on October 18, by winning Game Six. We got tomorrow. Yet the more I think about it, the more I think I got what I needed just by getting off of that train. I had brought my faith to Shea Stadium. What else could I possibly need?
Next up: The 49 Greatest Mets of 2006.

For the thrill of victory and the corresponding thrill of inflicting the agony of defeat, nothing beats a Mets walkoff win. You should definitely read about every one the Mets garnered in 2006 again at a blog that continues to amaze in its dedicated mission to investigate and celebrate Met minutiae (our blolleague's word for it — I'd call it core curriculum).

You should read about the 10 best Mets days of 2006 here, too, but if some of the last at-bat triumphs you lovingly remember aren't here, you should be able to revel in them again, and MWO is the site to provide the revel-ation. I present this advice not just as a public service for every Mets fan who should be reading Mets Walkoffs and Other Minutiae anyway, but to inoculate myself for not highlighting certain games you might be expecting to see on this particular list.

Yes, they were great. Yes, they stir wonderful memories. Yes, we want them on the DVD.

To offer a “but” would be to diminish them or their walkup-win (my pet phrase for when the Mets go on the road and prevail in the top of the final inning) counterparts. I don't want to dismiss that which was gloriously messy or messily glorious on any given Met day or night in 2006 just because that which nosed them out for one reason or another did, in fact, nose them out. Suffice it to say in constructing this segment of our retrospective and crafting a sum-of-its-parts narrative for the season, I relied on my idol Roger Angell's guidance as it applied to the final entry of the 1986 World Series:

We need not linger long on Game Seven, in which the Mets came back from a 3-0 second-inning deficit and won going away (as turf writers say), 8-5. It was another great game, I suppose, but even noble vintages can become a surfeit after enough bottles have been sampled.

Enough playing defense. On with the countdown.

10. August 19: Hands On The Torch

It started as a trickle. Then, one by one through sporadic raindrops and field level boxes, they poured. The damp August night lit up like a Christmas tree. On Niemann! On Elster! On Teufel and HoJo and Hearn! On Wally and Lenny and Danny and Aggie! Make room for Mitchell and El Sid, too.

Not all the 1986 Mets returned home on August 19. A few were unavailable or made themselves so. But the 20 former players who haunted Shea as eternal world champions on the night of their 20th reunion represented a closing of a ruptured loop in Met lore.

The Mets have been uncommonly considerate of their world titles. From 1970 through 1985, they gave 1969 room to breathe. There would be no confusing it with other championships. Hey, did Clendenon hit that homer in '69 or '71? Was Rod Gaspar in the '72 Series? Or was that '74? Man, they all blur together. When they finally deigned to crowd the crown, they allowed a decent interval of 17 years to pass. And once they added 1986 to the trophy case, they didn't cramp its style either. You couldn't mix up 1986 with 1987 or 1988 or any Met year in the ensuing decade or two. From a historical viewpoint, the Mets have kept it simple.

They were determined to abandon that policy in 2006. It wasn't a bad idea. No year felt more like 1986 since 1986 than 2006. It missed the mark by a bit, but the timing of the Mets acknowledging at last their spicy and successful past seemed like more than a coincidence of the calendar. The '86 Mets enjoyed a seven-month roll. The '06 Mets were in the fifth month of theirs. One edition taking bows as the other was taking names was as appropriate as it gets.

Mookie. Mex. Kid. Straw. The Rockies never stood a chance.

9. July 30: A Nice Place To Visit

Is everybody with us? Nobody on the tour got lost? Great. We're walking, we're walking…OK, everybody. Y'all can rest your feet for a moment while I show you our next stop, beautiful Turner Field in Atlanta. This very charming ballpark opened its gates in the summer of 2006. Let me show you some of the points of interest.

Here's the pitchers' mound. This is where Mets ace Pedro Martinez righted himself on a Friday night in 2006. He had been injured for a month and struggled for an inning, but then the future Hall of Famer really showed his stuff. The Mets won that night.

Here's the outfield fence. This is the wall that couldn't hold Carlos Beltran in the midst of an MVP-caliber season. On a Saturday afternoon, Mr. Beltran hit not one but two long home runs over it. The Mets won that day.

And here's second base. This is where the Braves' third baseman Willy Aybar was thrown out by Paul Lo Duca as Marcus Giles was striking out with one down in the ninth inning. With that unorthodox game-ending double play, the Mets swept the Braves for the weekend and the series.

Any questions from the group? Oh yes, you in the back…uh-huh, some people consider that the case…I'll repeat the question so everybody can hear it.

That gentlemen said he'd heard that Turner Field had actually opened in 1997. While that is a not an altogether inaccurate characterization, the Turner Field we enjoy today didn't come into existence until July 30, 2006 with the Met sweep I just described. What was here previously was kind of a gloomy, uninhabitable edifice that you wouldn't want to spend any time in. Therefore, serious ballpark scholars date beautiful Turner Field to that great weekend the Mets enjoyed here.

Y'all have been a great group.

8. July 16: All Aglow

It's not often first pitch is scheduled for 5:05 PM local in a baseball season, but when you're airing a baseball game as prelude to an awards show and you want that awards show to shine in prime time, you apparently start the game when you feel like it.

On July 16, ESPN demanded the Cubs begin their Sunday night game against the Mets in late afternoon so it could get the ESPYs up and running by 9:00 Eastern/8:00 Central. It turned out to be a most pleasing aesthetic decision. Wrigley Field is brilliant in daylight, but positively radiant by twilight.

As we watched on ESPN, we saw The Friendly Confines bask in the glow of both a Chicago sunset and a New York onslaught. Come the sixth inning, night fell on Wrigley…with a 2006 Metsian thud.

Sean Marshall and Roberto Novoa gave up the most runs any pitchers ever gave up to the Mets in any one inning. Marshall, leading by three through five, retired Chris Woodward for openers. And Will Ohman got Ramon Castro for the final out because somebody had to get somebody to end it. In between, the Mets sent 14 batters to the plate and 13 reached safely. The one who didn't reached on a fielder's choice, so if you think about it, for 14 consecutive plate appearances, Cubs pitchers were tormented without pause.

Cliff Floyd, the fourth batter after the first out, hit a grand slam. That means a guy (Beltran) got on, then another guy (Delgado) got on and yet another guy (Wright) got on. Then Floyd.

The next guy after them, Nady, walked. How depressing is that if you're Sean Marshall? And what are you still doing in the game if you've just given up a grand slam?

Marshall went out and Novoa came in. His second batter, Chavez, drove in the inning's fifth run. The inning's fifth batter, Beltran, hit the inning's second grand slam and scored its ninth run.

The next guy, Delgado, doubled. How depressing is that if you're Roberto Novoa? And what are you still doing in the game if you've just given up a grand slam?

Giving up a two-run homer to Wright is what. That made it 11 runs in the top of the sixth for the Mets. They had never done that. But they did it in July — without Reyes (recuperating) and without Lo Duca (resting). Two All-Stars sat on the bench and the Mets set a team record for offense.

Imagine if they'd played.

Novoa came out at last, giving way to Ohman who walked a couple more before escaping without further damage. As if there could have been further damage.

It was the Mets at their maulingest, but there was also a thing of beauty beside the numbers. You can recognize the highlights instantly. When you see Floyd or Beltran or Wright trotting home, it's from that camera on a cable that ESPN strings up for Sunday nights. And because it was a 5:05 start and the sun is only beginning to go the way of Marshall and Novoa, there is a distinct red aura about Wrigley Field. Maybe a little orange, too.

7. August 22: One Swing

How awesome is Gary Cohen? With the Mets (mostly Delgado) having fought back from a 7-1 deficit against the Cardinals (mostly Pujols), it was 7-6 in the bottom of the ninth. Lo Duca singled off Isringhausen. Beltran stepped in and Cohen announced he could end this game with one swing. Beltran proffered one swing. He ended the game.

Forget what you're thinking about Beltran, Cardinals and another ninth inning. Just remember this one swing. You'll feel better.

6. June 15: The Road Taken

They should've sold t-shirts. NEW YORK METS 2006 WORLD TOUR I would've bought one.

Welcome back my friends to the road that never ends, the trip that made the Mets impenetrable. The Road Trip. That's all you have to say. Anybody who witnessed it from afar will never forget it.

The Mets board an airplane and fly to Los Angeles. A fella you'd barely heard of, Alay Soler, gives up one earned in seven innings. A fella you'd all heard of, Jose Reyes, gets into the habit of getting on and scoring right away. A fella you were sure you were gonna hear more from, Lastings Milledge, salts away a rubber game.

The Mets board another plane and fly to Phoenix. El Duque throws a three-hitter. Beltran and Delgado go deep repeatedly. Wright bursts into flames. Soler adds a shutout. Everybody, including Eli Marrero (just acquired for Kaz Matsui), hits. Four games, four wins.

The Mets board one more plane and fly to Philadelphia. The first game requires excellent defense from our third baseman to seal it. He's Wright on time with his glove. The next game is less close, less stressful, more fun. Two games, two wins.

Now a third. Losing it won't inflict much damage, not in the standings, not in the psyches. But wouldn't it be great to sweep the Phillies, the last conceivable challenger for the N.L. East title, and wouldn't it be even better to end this road trip on the highest of high notes?

Yes it would. And yes it was. On the afternoon of June 15, the Mets started strong — four in the first — and after a brief Trachselian lag that allowed the Phillies to inch close, finished unbeatable. The club's calling card through mid-June may have been its zero-to-sixty offense (eight straight wins on this trip, each with at least one run before the third out was recorded), but its signature was the bullpen. Nine Phillies batted in the final three innings of the series finale. Heilman faced three. Sanchez faced three. Wagner faced three. Among these batters were the cream of their generation of Mets-killers and Mets-wounders: Victorino, Rollins, Utley, Abreu, Pat Fucking Burrell, the burgeoning menace that is Ryan Howard.

None of them touched the Mets' relievers. Nine up, nine down. Had the second-place Phillies swept, they would have been 3-1/2 out. Instead, they were swept and sat 9-1/2 behind on June 15.

The first-place Mets boarded a bus and headed for home. The road ahead was free and clear.

5. April 17: Early Admission

They marched through the Marlins. They knocked off the Nationals. They brushed aside the Brewers.

Here came Atlanta. Here came trouble…potentially.

The Mets began 2006 on a 9-2 roll, as good as they'd ever been out of the gate. It was noted by a few cynics they had played nobody in particular on their way to the top. The schedule is the schedule. You play who they put in front of you.

It didn't matter. Florida…Washington…Milwaukee…Atlanta. They were all the same. As of April 17, it was obvious. The National League belonged to New York.

Can you truly clinch a division title in the twelfth game of a 162-game season? Technically, no. Spiritually, absolutely. It was in the dozenth contest of 2006 that the Mets knocked the 14-time winners, the only champions the five-team National League East had ever known, back into another division. The second division. They were tossed on a heap of Marlins and Nationals and Brewers and would be joined eventually by Padres and Giants and Pirates and just about everyone else out there.

It was April 17. It was obvious.

It was Pedro. He struck out eight en route to his 200th win.

It was Nady, Delgado and Lo Duca, three heretofore strangers who collected eight of our nine hits.

It was Sanchez holding the fort and Wagner bolting the door.

It was Atlanta catcher Todd Pratt, a hallowed Met soldier of campaigns past swinging at the last strike as a Brave. It not only put away the Braves but said in some dimension that this year was going to be different from not just the well-short efforts of the past few seasons but even the relatively high times of Tank's time. Not that there was anything wrong with it, but these Mets weren't going to scratch and claw for fingernails' inclusion in anybody's Wild Card race.

It was final score Mets 4 Braves 3, the Mets 10 wins and 2 losses, the Mets 5 games up on the Braves and light years ahead of the league on April 17.

It was, heart of hearts, done.

4. October 4: Tag Body Spray

Major League Baseball began three division series on a Tuesday and the fourth on a Wednesday. We were in the fourth.

We had waited long enough.

Six years from 2000, the last time October showed up at Shea. Six months from April, when our autumnal participation could be reasonably imagined. And now an extra day, just long enough to learn that the playoffs would take place not just without Pedro Martinez but sans El Duque.

Before you could say “calf injury” three times fast, the tournament was under way. It's a shame, almost, that Fran Healy wasn't broadcasting these 2006 Mets this October because for the length of it, Shea Stadium was rocking. For Game One, every Dodger was genially harassed. Every Met was sincerely revered. Every Mets fan, in the long lost words of Fran, was on the verge of exploding — and that's not Healy hyperbole.

Just being in the NLDS with home-field advantage was enough to light the collective fuse. It took only until the second inning for 56,000 to detonate.

John Maine, nobody's choice but contingency's to start a series opener, was in a bit of trouble. There was no score but there were runners on second — Jeff Kent — and first — J.D. Drew. Russell Martin drove a Maine pitch to deep right. The runners were off if not running. They were definitely off. Kent thought it might be caught and didn't dart immediately toward third. Drew was burdened by no thoughts and shot past second. Third base coach Rich Donnelly later copped to thinking this:

“I was hoping they'd throw the ball away.”

No such luck, pal. Shawn Green played it off the base of the wall and fired to Jose Valentin. Valentin relayed to Paul Lo Duca. Lo Duca, a big-leaguer since 1998 and a postseason veteran of just over one inning, received Valentin's throw and tagged an onrushing Kent. Sensing another presence approaching over his left shoulder, he turned and tagged an onrushing Drew.

Two onrushing Dodgers out. No onrushing Dodgers scored. 56,000 volcanic Mets fans spurted happiness like it was lava.

The two tags at one plate for two outs on one ball set the tone. The joint never stopped rocking. Contributions from many Mets, particularly Carlos Delgado and the first four hits of his first-ever playoff game, ensured a positive result. Lo Duca's moment of deja tag made it something we'll relive over and over again.

3. October 7: Holy Saturday

What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?

—Tom Grunnick, “Broadcast News”

A little before 7:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time…

Tigers 8 Yankees 3

Detroit wins series three games to one.

Approximately five hours later…

Mets 9 Dodgers 5

New York wins series three games to one.

News like this you don't keep to yourself.

2. September 18: Redemption

This one was for a team that didn't require much in the way of redemption for 5-1/2 months but then squandered a three-day stay in Pittsburgh. It would redeem itself by doing at home what it failed to do on the road.

Tastes of redemption were evident everywhere on the third Monday night in September.

This one was for the starter, the guy who got here just after the last taste of glory. He had been sometimes good, more often lucky, not generally loved. He put in 6-1/3 innings of shutout ball.

This one was for a failed pinch-hitter turned ad hoc second baseman who was nowhere to be found on that position's depth chart in March and didn't take over his job until June. He hit two home runs.

This one was for a middle reliever whose only association with the club was negative. He came on board in August and earned a place by throwing hard and getting outs. He did that per usual in the seventh.

This one was for a setup man who had been zigged out of the rotation and zagged into the bullpen and stepped up into a role he didn't want. He made the eighth inning academic.

This one was for a closer who never enjoyed the mass confidence of his audience but proved a damn sight of an improvement over his immediate predecessors. He generated a popout to second and a flyout to center and then a fly to left.

This one was for a leftfielder whose on-field presence was fringe for large stretches of the year but one whose soul was too enormous to be discounted. The leftfielder was in left field awaiting one final fly ball. He caught it.

This one was for two fans who each answer to the name of diehard, who by chance bought tickets for this game weeks in advance because they would go to any game on any September 18 regardless of stakes or consequences.

This one was for 46,727 fans essentially exactly like them.

This one was for a franchise that had clinched its previous division title 6,570 days earlier.

This one was for 18 years of going without.

This one was for a night of getting in.

This one was for us. All of us.

1. October 18: Faith-Based Initiative

You can't always get what you want. And even if you try, sometimes you just might find you don't get what you need. As Mets fans, we know that.

Boy do we know that.

Oh but when it works, when you get what you want and what you need, it's wonderful. You were so right to believe for those few instances when it paid off that you were never wrong to believe those countless times it didn't. The odds were literally against you because it was so unusual that things went the way you wanted and needed them to go. But as long at it happened once in a while, you knew it could happen again. And if it could happen again…well, it could happen.

Shortly before midnight on October 17, Adam Wainwright struck out Jose Reyes, completing the St. Louis Cardinals' Game Five victory over the New York Mets in the 2006 National League Championship Series. The Cardinals took a three-games-to-two lead in the best-of-seven set.

As if you've forgotten.

Hence, the moment October 18 began, I had one task at hand.

Have faith.

It was not easy. My faith, like yours, had been tested by the events of the previous five days: four games, three losses. A one-oh lead had morphed suddenly and ineffectually into a stark deficit. Our Mets, our 2006 Mets, our best team in the National League Mets, were one game from elimination. Lose and go home.

The flip side? Win and keep playing. Logically, it wasn't tough to see it clicking. Game Six of this NLCS would be at Shea Stadium. So would Game Seven, but first Game Six. Game Six is all. Game Six is where my faith would have to focus.

So it did. On October 18, I thought and I calculated and I wrote and I wore and I did every faithful thing there was to think and to calculate and to write and to wear and to do. So did you.

I don't know that I believed every word and every action I undertook and I surely didn't know if any of it would make a difference. But I understood that having no faith was no answer. Every time I was tempted to not keep the faith, I just piled it higher. If I were carrying that much faith onto an airplane, they'd make me check it.

This wasn't a drill. It was the real thing. Perhaps the most faithful thing I did was answer a call from a friend. He had an angle on two tickets for Game Six. A little on the expensive side, but it was Game Six. Win and keep playing. Priceless. Lose and go home? No refunds.

Our respective faiths hesitated but then dug deep. See you there, the usual spot.

As I had almost 30 times before in 2006, I pushed myself out my front door and toward Shea Stadium. Actually, I almost never push myself to go to a Mets game. I require no nudge at all. I go to Mets games; it's what I do. But on October 18, I was going to a Mets game that would determine if there would be any more Mets games. That was heavy. I sat on my train and I hoped for the best. I recounted in my head all the reasons why tonight should work. It exhausted me. I didn't know if I could go through this sort of mental decathlon for a Game Seven.

But then I got off of the train and I realized something.

I did get what I needed and what I wanted. I got another game. I got another night of summer. Seriously, the weather was summer. The game was baseball. The crowd was…it was a crowd. A crowd of Mets fans. Everywhere I looked, I was among the faithful. I was among me. I was headed where I was supposed to headed.

What could be better than that?

I suppose we could have lost Game Six, but once I found my friend with my ticket and once we passed through security and the turnstile and up three escalators and over several sections and up three rows and sat down and stood up in equivalent amounts for the next three-plus hours while yelling and clapping and shouting and clapping and chanting and clapping, it didn't occur to me. OK, maybe when Billy Wagner extended the top of the ninth beyond all reasonable limits of tolerance, but otherwise, no. This was too good. This was the Mets one more time in 2006. This was, at the risk of sloganeering, the year we'd been waiting for, the month we'd been waiting for, the night we'd been waiting for.

Of course we won.

It was a night of Reyes and Green and Lo Duca and Maine. It was a night guaranteeing Game Seven and all that such an event implied. That was the want-to/need-to aspect on paper as we understood it when the day began. That I still understood. The goal remained winning the pennant. We wanted it and we needed it if we were going to fulfill our ultimate desire for a world championship.

We got what we wanted, at least the part we could reach on October 18, by winning Game Six. We got tomorrow. Yet the more I think about it, the more I think I got what I needed just by getting off of that train. I had brought my faith to Shea Stadium. What else could I possibly need?

Next up: The 49 Greatest Mets of 2006.

This won't be the last time I bring it up, but briefly, there is a great new book out. Buy two copies: one for yourself, one for somebody you care about. It's called The 100 Greatest Days in New York Sports and it's no ordinary list book. Author Stuart Miller has researched the hell out of his subject, something to which I can attest first-hand since I was one of his late and presumably insignificant sources, yet he indulged my arguments and assertions as if I were the The New York Times on microfiche. The result of such commitment is the New York sports history book you've been waiting your whole life for.
Stuart hits on just about every significant sporting event that took place in the five boroughs since before New York City became New York City. Your great Uncle Sol's game of Johnny on the Pony might be in there. You won't agree with every choice he's made — for example, I find his geographic contention that the Giants' two Super Bowl victories weren't New York championships a bit on the shaky side — but that's the beauty of this work. You read a page, you argue with it, you learn from it, you nod at it, you congratulate it and you read another page. It's a thorough and fair examination of milestone moments, which is code for don't worry, the Mets get their due.
Like I said, I want to explore this book further as we while away the hours to April 2, but right now I simply want to borrow his concept to highlight the 20 best Mets days of 2006.
This is a pretty straightforward operation: I pick 20 days that I believe defined this team and this season for the good. As with any list, no matter the objective criteria applied, you can debate what's in and what's out. You're certainly more than welcome to. I try to take the overarching historical view — that is, what should we remember about this season when we're asked why it was one of the Mets' greatest? I imagine my personal experiences as they intertwined with this game or that play colored a couple of these selections. So be it. As editor Jim Nelson writes in this month's GQ, an issue devoted to sports (otherwise I can't imagine I would have bought it):
Women always complain that men don't like to talk about their feelings, but they're sadly mistaken. Men would just rather talk about their feelings…about the Mets.
There were some terribly exciting and dramatic days in the life of our team in 2006 that didn't crack this particular Top 20. Better there's a surplus than a shortage. This was, Praise Minaya, a year of plenty.
20. October 19: There Must Be A Catch
Admittedly, this is a Mrs. Lincoln choice. The unavoidable reality is that this was involuntarily the final game the 2006 Mets would ever play, Game Seven of the National League Championship Series. Insisting something of enduring Met value arose from it may be akin to being the Red Sox fan who recalls October 25, 1986 as the night Dave Henderson went yard on Rick Aguilera.
Granted. Nevertheless, a day that includes what October 19 included can't be all bad. The good is simply too good to be ignored.
Correction: Too great.
We can say a game that ended a season on the wrong end of a 3-1 score and an 0-2 count has no business being on a list of greatest Mets anything, save for disappointment. We can also say a game that ends St. Louis 3 New York 1 even though the bases were loaded for our superstar slugger who mashed 44 home runs in 2006 — three of them against this opponent in this series — has no business being lost. Yet when we say those things, we must say two others:
1) We had no business riding the left arm of Oliver Perez as far as we did.
If we indulge the grumbling that the World Champion Cardinals' regular-year mark of 83-78 makes a mockery of the postseason, what do we say when a pitcher goes 3-13 for six months, gives up more than six runs for every nine innings he throws and then tosses a beauty at the team that would soon taste ticker-tape? Either every statistic is a damn lie or Oliver Perez was the most genius acquisition of Omar Minaya's very heady tenure.
The Oliver Perez trade had been the Roberto Hernandez trade on July 31, perhaps the Xavier Nady trade; the Cecil Wiggins trade would be most accurate. Talk about creating chicken salad from DUI. However Perez wound up a Met, whatever he showed or didn't show in sporadic auditions down the stretch, whoever couldn't pitch so he had to be relied upon with only a pennant in the balance, lefthander Oliver Perez was the right man on the right mound at the right moment. So what if before Game Seven (despite a decent effort in Game Four, when his offense mistook him for Steve Trachsel), it was fair to conclude Oliver Perez loomed as the most unlikely, most obscure, most unsettling playoff pitcher in Mets history?
Move over Masato Yoshii and tell John Maine the news. By the sixth inning of Game Seven, Oliver Perez was channeling every home-team big-game lefty from Koosman to Matlack to Ojeda to Leiter to Hampton. This was the Oliver Perez who accounted for that line in Pittsburgh a couple of years before when he was somebody everybody wanted. Gone was the obvious impostor whose southpaw stock sunk so low that a perpetually rebuilding franchise decided he wasn't worth keeping two weeks shy of his 25th birthday. Here was talent harnessed the way you kept hearing it could be but were warned it probably would not be. Here was Oliver Perez squirming then rolling through the Cardinal order, surrendering almost nothing.
His first baseman muffs a pop fly in the first, but Perez pitches out of it. He is littleballed for a run in the second, but nicked no more. Works around the terror that is Pujols in the third. Nothing. One-two-three in the fourth. Challenges Pujols with a runner on in the fifth and leaves clean.
Oliver Perez is keeping the Mets alive in the seventh game of the league championship series. He stays in to bat in the bottom of the fifth, leading off and striking out. By the bottom of the fifth, this isn't surprising. After all the forecasts of gloom, doom and Darren Oliver, Oliver Perez is pitching like a Game Seven pitcher. He's in a 1-1 pitchers' duel with Jeff Suppan. Why on earth would you take him out?
The top of the sixth. Gets Encarnacion. Walks Edmonds unintentionally. First legitimate free pass from a pitcher known for wild streaks. Scott Rolen is next. The manager who left him in trots out to the mound. Take him out? No way. Skip tells Perez something. Don't know what it is. The initial evidence is it wasn't helpful.
2) We had no business expecting Endy Chavez to be our leftfielder.
Not in the seventh game of the National League Championship Series, not when you dusted off the orange-and-blueprint as it was drawn up in St. Lucie in February. Our leftfielder was supposed to be Cliff Floyd. Made sense. Cliff was our best everyday player in 2005. 34 homers. 98 ribbies. Legs healthy enough at last to patrol left almost every day of the previous season. If the Mets were going to contend for a pennant, you'd have to assume Cliff Floyd would be right in the middle of it.
It wasn't Cliff's year. He ached. He slumped. He sat. He recovered. He hit in the first playoff series. But then he ached again. Couldn't run. Wishful thinking penciled him into the starting lineup for Game One against the Cardinals. Tangible Achilles pain removed him.
In came Endy. Familiar story in 2006. In came Endy when Carlos Beltran felt a tug here or there. In came Endy when Xavier Nady required an appendectomy. In came Endy when Lastings Milledge reverted to the future after flashing by as the fleeting present. As the season wound down, Endy Chavez was as in as any Met outfielder. He was going to play sooner or later. Might as well be from the first inning on.
So there he was, standing in left field in the top of the sixth inning as the Cardinals batted. Edmonds on first, Rolen at the plate, Randolph having whispered a piece of advice in Perez's ear. It was either bad advice or great advice executed poorly. Whatever Willie said to Ollie, Scott Rolen didn't care. He launched Perez's first pitch toward the left field bullpen.
I don't know exactly where Endy Chavez started from when he realized Rolen's ball was headed in his general direction. I do know he went back as far as he could. I do know he leaped. And I do know the ball cleared the fence.
The next thing I know is Rolen is out and Edmonds, reasonably rounding second, maybe third, is out and the Cardinals are out and Perez is out of the inning, having given up no runs in the sixth, and the Mets are not behind in this game. They are tied. I know all that because Endy Chavez wears springs for spikes, favors a net over a glove and owns a sense of direction not seen in Queens since Jay Gatsby knew enough to drive over and past Corona's valley of ashes.
Endy Chavez evoked Tommie Agee, Ron Swoboda and Willie Mays in one dash, leap, grab and fire. The next guy who does anything remotely like it will evoke Endy Chavez. If anybody who saw it had ever seen a greater catch in a tighter spot, they weren't saying. It set the new standard for Met defense. It saved two runs, produced two outs and preserved a two-team race for the flag. It was so stunning that your chronically loquacious, occasionally eloquent correspondent was reduced to sputtering a string of high-pitched gasps in its immediate dust. It was as if I swallowed all of 2006 without chewing and needed to be Heimliched if I hoped to watch the bottom of the sixth. Stephanie thought I sounded like a Warner Bros. cartoon.
Indeed. That catch was all, folks.
19. June 22: Face Time
Whatever figured to be left in Pedro Martinez's right arm once the four-year contract he signed in December 2004 expired was of minimal concern to those who agreed to pay him his millions. Pedro was courted and captured not for what he'd do long-term but for what he'd mean short-term.
Oh, he could pitch. In 2005, he electrified Shea Stadium, a facility notoriously short on megawatts just prior. A Pedro Martinez start for the Mets promised success (usually delivered) and excitement (a lock). It was almost impolite to notice Pedro faltered in a key game against the Phillies at the end of that August or note he begged off his final couple of starts once the Mets were eliminated. His toe wasn't quite right and his second-half numbers took their traditional dive, but he was Pedro Martinez and he was a Met. Who could ask for anything more?
By June 2006, Pedro's short reign as the Met of Mets, as the face of the franchise, had quietly and almost imperceptibly petered out. The great team success of the first two months of the season — much of it due to Pedro — removed an onus from the pitcher. The Mets didn't need him to attract fans and they probably wouldn't need him to attract free agents, the way he surely helped draw Carlos Beltran into the fold. Pedro was still Pedro, but the Mets were about winning as a whole. If anybody was going to front for them, it would be somebody else.
The Mets were David Wright's band as 2006 unfolded. It was a bloodless coup, but you couldn't miss it. David was just advancing beyond great Wright hope status when Pedro arrived. He undeniably acquitted himself well in 2005, his first full big-league season and the buzz behind him kept building. Come '06, the shirts in the stands seemed to have lost a digit. 45s had been in vogue but 5s were now de rigueur.
Why? Start with Wright's combination of average, power and accessibility. There was nothing not to like that a few on-target throws to first couldn't take care of. If not a completely complete player yet, he was as close as any young Met had ever been. He wasn't an enigma. He liked to play ball and said so in virtually every publication. Reyes was still learning. Delgado was still new. Beltran was still wary. Martinez was still Martinez, but Martinez wasn't Wright. He didn't play every day and he, unlike the precocious kid at third, wasn't getting any younger.
By June 22, Pedro Martinez wasn't quite the Pedro Martinez of the year before. Not even the month before. The Mets had been doing everything well, but Pedro hadn't done much for us lately. Hips don't lie, and one of his was on the fritz even if he didn't advertise it. All the naked eye saw was an ace who struggled in L.A., was adequate in Arizona and got outpitched by Kris Benson (for god's sake) at Shea. When Pedro Martinez started a Thursday afternoon game at home against the Reds, he was beginning to look, just a little too much, like the past.
The first was OK. But in the second, two singles and two sacrifices made it 1-0 Cincinnati. The fourth was tough to bear as Pedro walked Scott Hatteberg, then Austin Kearns, then Adam Dunn. Pedro does not walk the bases loaded to begin an inning. At least that's what we thought. From the right field mezzanine, he appeared uncomfortable. Pedro, it's never going to be 1999 for you again, but can it be 2005? How about April 2006?
Brandon Phillips, a Red menace throughout the week, brought home Hatteberg on a fly ball. But that was it. Pedro got out of it, down two-zip. David Wright, predictably, came to his rescue in the bottom of the frame, tying the score on a two-run bomb. The Mets presented Pedro with a lead for the fifth, 3-2 when Nady drove in Franco, but Pedro didn't appear up to the task of holding it. With two out, he walks Felipe Lopez, who steals. Then he walks Scott Hatteberg. Lopez steals third. This is nervy. This is discouraging. This is Pedro.
This is better: Martinez strikes out Kearns.
It's the middle of 2006. Sooner or later, the Mets are going to unhinge a mediocrity like Eric Milton. They do it in the bottom of the fifth, capping off another three-run rally when Wright deposits another two-run job in the bleachers. He's the MVP by our chants. He'll finish the day batting .338 for the runaway division leaders. Sounds plenty valuable to us.
But here's something that sounded even better. Top of the sixth. Pedro, staked to a four-run lead, finds it within him to be unadulterated Pedro.
Adam Dunn goes down swinging.
Brandon Phillips goes down swinging.
David Ross goes down swinging.
As Pedro leaves the mound, 46,000 roar. David Wright may be our MVP, but we are reminded that Pedro Martinez has been our savior.
His day is done and, except for what amount to cameos, so is his season. Pedro's return to Boston will be an artistic calamity. He'll go on the DL for most of July. The hip will heal but a calf will act up. He has exactly two more wins coming his way in 2006 and he's just a man with an arm in a sling by October. David Wright is still young and gifted and widely adored but his average never sees .340, his power production declines and, for whatever reason (wear, tear, exertion, exhaustion, internal competition), he's no longer our MVP by proclamation. He's a big part of the rest of 2006, and an integral component for 2007 and beyond, but like Pedro, David peaks at the very beginning of summer even if we don't quite realize it until hindsight kicks in.
While they're both on top of the world, though, the world is a very nice place to be.
18. September 2: Our Man In Houston
You really have to want to hate in order to hate Carlos Beltran. He's quiet, he's religious, he's charitable, he displays all five tools, he says not a disparaging thing about anything or anybody. Immaterial except that it's great news for his family, he's rich, very rich. That's just testament to the free market…and did I mention that he got rich in New York?
I guess that could be a problem in Houston.
With nothing in particular on the line for his team, Carlos Beltran went all-out against his old employers in early September. The Astros desperately needed to beat the Mets. They couldn't the night before and they wouldn't again thanks to Beltran, who risked his well-being by crashing into the Minute Maid Park outfield fence to swipe a ninth-inning, extra-base hit from Lance Berkman. He doesn't make the catch, the Astros tie the score and are in position to inflict psychic pain on Billy Wagner. Instead, Carlos takes one for the team. He goes down in what has to be agony. The Astro customers, those who profess eternal betrayal because their Rent-a-Beltran didn't stick around more than a few months, cheer when Beltran does not immediately rise.
Class tells, you know. Carlos limps out of the game, but he's not on a stretcher. This isn't 2005, not in the Petco Park sense (no Cameron) nor in terms of what it was like the first time Beltran came back to town. Then it was the lions devouring the Christian. This time the Mets won two of three, their centerfielder healed and Houston was left to stew in the Minute Maid juices of its manufactured resentment.
17. June 4: High-Five!
One and two pitch. Fly ball, driven to left field and it's GONE! Home run into the Giants' bullpen, Lastings Milledge, his first Major League home run and could it have come at a bigger time? He's tied the game at six in the bottom in the tenth inning!
Ed Coleman never sounded so excited, which only means something if you've heard Ed Coleman keep an even keel for nearly 20 years. On a Sunday against San Francisco, as fill-in voice over WFAN, he vocally chest-bumped the Mets' next superstar for touching up Armando Benitez and keeping the Mets' afternoon going at least a little longer.
Eddie wasn't the only one enthralled. Milledge had been up for less than a week. Everything he did or didn't do was a big deal in those first fresh days of his recall. He wore a wooden cross the size of the Keyspan sign. He gunned down a Diamondback at third from right. He scampered home with the walkoff win the night before as a meticulously inserted pinch-runner. But he hadn't hit one out yet.
Give him time. Give him until there were two outs in the tenth inning of an affair that the Mets wouldn't give up easily on the eve of a Western swing. Then Lastings shows off his muscles against no less than the closer who had tormented Mets fans for years (as a Met, mostly). Give him an ovation, he deserves it. Hell, make like Eddie Coleman. Give Lastings Milledge a high-five. The right field line crowd can't resist and offers 'em up. Lastings Milledge returns the favor as he jogs to his position for the eleventh. Slap! Slap! Slap! right down the line. Everybody's so excited about the Mets, that such an exchange seems natural.
That is so cool!
Or uncool if you check the unwritten rules. Lastings Milledge has raised a ruckus between innings. Either he's too wet behind the ears to have any idea that “you don't do that” or he knows exactly what he's doing. After the Mets have fought the good fight and lost, all anybody talks about is Lastings. First the hitting of the homer, then the slapping of the palms. Was he showing somebody up? Was he not knowing his place? Was he just having fun?
The Lastings Milledge who lit up Shea in early June didn't reappear very much. He settled into a recurring callup, a tentative freshman who was overmatched by pitchers and confused by the descent of baseballs. His constituency shrank. His status is as TBD as anybody's in the organization.
Moral: Don't turn down a high-five. You never know when your next one is coming.
16. October 12: Tom & Again
This is why you bring Tom Glavine onto your team. Never mind you ink him for four years and the first three range mostly from disastrous to indifferent. You're thinking long-term, the fourth year. Not even the fourth season, but its postseason. You know you're going to be scuffling for pitching. Your titular ace was already hurt. Your traditionally strong October weapon — October surprise! — goes down unexpectedly. You face baseball's seventh month, your first crack at it in six years, with the starting-rotation equivalent of paper clips, rubber bands and airplane glue. You don't know what you've got.
Except for Tom Glavine. You've got him and, at last, you and he are on the same page. He's pitching when it counts and you're counting on him to pitch. A week ago, he handily beat the Dodgers a Game Two. This is Game One, next series. This is Glavine Time all over again.
He does not disappoint. He takes down the Cardinals with ease, some nifty DP action and a long offensive assist from Carlos Beltran. Seven innings, no runs. He outlasts Jeff Weaver. He holds Albert Pujols in check. He does not impress Pujols, but that's not his or our problem. We've seen enough to be very impressed by Tom Glavine.
15. April 6: Meet These Mets
The 2006 Mets weren't the 2005 Mets…literally. Twelve of the 25 players who lined up and waved on Opening Day had never worn the uniform before. More than a few had strayed during Spring Training, choosing to wear the colors of their national team in the World Baseball Classic instead of their National League team in meaningless exhibitions.
Amazing, then, how quickly they became the 2006 Mets. In one three-game series against the Washington Nationals, they introduced themselves as something we hadn't seen in these parts in years.
There was the new catcher, Lo Duca, defending the plate with grit and improvisation in securing the opener. There was Nady, the right fielder who found Shea to be a hitter's park. There was Wagner, the cocky closer who marched to his own drummer (Lars Ulrich). There was Sanchez, who demanded a different kind of music — the sound of silence between third and home. There was Bannister, the rookie who forced his way to the hill on the second night and immediately gemmed it up. There was Delgado the slugger. He slugged.
The pieces new and old fit together beautifully. David Wright came out swinging. Anderson Hernandez took a dive…through the air…routinely. Jose Reyes was off and running. And Pedro Martinez wasn't giving up the inside of the plate to anybody, no matter how much anybody snarled.
Pedro took on Jose Guillen and won on April 6. A generation of Mets pitchers had failed to be proactive in this regard. But he was Pedro, we'd had him for a year, we knew he what he could do.
We had no idea about Julio Franco. No good idea anyway. He was 47, of course. You couldn't not know he was the oldest player in the Majors. It fascinated everyone but him. As the year progressed, his age would be an alternating source of wonder and concern, but in the third game of the year, it was his head and not his body that made all the difference.
First Julio came off the bench and threw himself between Guillen and chaos, defusing a could-be brawl into batter-take-your-base. Then, a couple of innings later, Julio sat on the bench when his teammate Carlos Beltran attempted to sit down. Julio didn't approve. Beltran had just homered, his first hit of the season in the third game of the year. The fans were appreciative of Beltran's performance, which struck him as unusual. Carlos B had heard it throughout 2005 and a little at the dawn of 2006. Beltran was the big-money signee of the year before. It wasn't a great year, it was a less than stellar reception. It was wrongheaded, but now the previously silent majority — the Mets fans who would never boo their own — tried to set the record straight.
They asked for a curtain call. Beltran wouldn't hear of it. The SNY cameras caught his discontent quite clearly. He wasn't going out there. Just as obvious was Julio Franco telling him in one language or another, get over it and get up. Julio wasn't around in 2005, but he knew what was required for 2006. He knew Jose Guillen was better off just going to first and shutting up and he knew Carlos Beltran and the Mets would be better off if he just stepped out and represented.
Delgado was already batting but the fans were still applauding, virtually unaware of the veritable Paris Peace Talks ensuing in the Met dugout. Ambassador Franco carried the day. Beltran acknowledged the fans. They were satisfied. For them, for Beltran, for the Mets, it was positively 2006. At night's end, we all moved into first place together and never looked back.
14. May 5: Rethrilliency
Even if the East was won in a cakewalk, there were times when it was practically brutal to observe the baking process. It wasn't quite a trip the sausage factory, but the foundation of the Mets' mighty May lead was built on some very long nights and some exceedingly hard wins.
Though it would be eclipsed in the popular imagination by later contests that resembled it in some form or fashion, there was no game in 2006 that was more draining or grueling to watch (never mind play) than the 14-inning war of attrition between the Mets and their old rivals the Braves at Shea on May 5. It was a game that very nearly refused to end.
The Braves led 1-0, 2-1, 3-2, 4-2, 5-2, 6-2 and 7-6. They lost.
The Mets drew 12 walks and recorded 15 hits in the first 13 innings. They never led.
The Mets left 19 runners on base.
The Mets' leadoff batters reached in the first, second, eighth, ninth and thirteenth. None of them scored.
David Wright had three hits and three walks. And no runs.
Cliff Floyd stranded 10 runners on his own. He also homered to lead off the home eleventh.
The Braves used nine different pitchers. Working with a 25-man roster. In May.
Brian McCann stole a base. Jose Reyes didn't.
Kaz Matsui tied it in the seventh. Jorge Julio got the win.
Wright drove in the deciding run in the bottom of the fourteenth on a ground-rule double that was first scored a single even though it plated Beltran from second and it bounced over the fence.
It lasted for four hours and forty-seven minutes. It was finished at 11:59 on a Friday night. There was a 1:10 start Saturday.
The division title was a cakewalk. But a lot of flour got spilled in the kitchen.
13. August 8: Have Our Mike And Beat Him Too
The San Diego Padres had been coming to Shea Stadium since 1969. They didn't become a hot ticket until 2006. I wonder why it happened so suddenly.
Yes, that's it! They were boarding Mike Piazza for a year, giving him something to do while waiting to re-emerge as a Met in Cooperstown in another half-decade or so. Darn nice of them to provide him shelter and a diversion.
If Piazza's first trip home to Shea proved anything, it's that you can take the ultimate Met out of the Met uniform but he's still a Met. In a manner befitting Tom Seaver and no one else, Mike was welcomed back with no regard for laundry. He was toasted on DiamondVision. He was serenaded at the plate by Jimi Hendrix. He was stood for like it was 1998 to 2005 and clapped on like he wasn't just dropping by. Even the high crime and misdemeanor of singling against Steve Trachsel was treated as precious. Our Mike, always and forever.
Mike would be a little too much Mike the next night, homering twice — nearly thrice — and Mets fans remembered who they are and what Piazza wasn't anymore, at least not on paper. They had to let him know beating us wasn't all right. He didn't, but he came close. So we were left with two resoundingly good memories of the Padres' only trip to Shea in 2006. We swept Mike Piazza's team. And we got swept up in Mike Piazza one more time.
12. August 28: Start The Clock
A day that wasn't supposed to have a game turned on a rule that didn't exist. By the time it was over, we were knee-deep in something we hadn't had in a generation. And we loved it.
It was a makeup game, us and the Phillies, an early Monday start. Few made it to Shea. The Phillies had to wish they were on a bus heading south. Queens was not their kind of place in 2006. Dispiriting stuff happened to them here. Relief pitchers went seven and lost in sixteen. Starters baffled hitters but couldn't toss to first. And in late August, as those unlikely Wild Card contenders lunged toward September, something probably unprecedented happened to them.
Reset the scene: Mets on first and third. Wright up. He either doubles down the line or hits one a bit foul. It glances off third base or it just missed. It takes a bounce of some sort. It's unclear. What's more, it's for naught. The umpire calls it foul. Can you really argue that?
Apparently you can. Goaded by Manny Acta, third base umpire Randy Marsh asked for help from the other blues. Angel Hernandez — avenging Angel himself — emerged and ruled the ball fair: a single even though it looked like a double. It was all interpretation and judgment. It made no sense on the surface, but it worked for us. Wright was credited with a hit. Beltran trotted home. Delgado moved up one bag. The next couple of batters made the single/double decision moot by driving in everybody. On the whole, Philadelphia would rather not have been in Flushing.
It's always nice to beat the Phillies. It's always nice to get a call, no matter how mangled or bizarre. But it's really nice to start counting off, in earnest, your magic number. With the Mets' inevitable win and the Phillies' unavoidable loss, we could do that. It was 18 at the close of business on August 28 and it was only going to dwindle from there.
11. September 7: Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now
He could have kept going, you know. Jose Reyes settled for a three-run inside-the-park homer because home is the fourth of four stops on the diamond. Bet he could have turned and run to first. At least. He probably could have made it a six-bagger or just paused at first before stealing second on the next pitch.
Jose must have read the rule book because he didn't do that. When Dodger centerfielder Matt Kemp couldn't properly track down his ball, Shea knew what was coming. Jose had done everything else all year. He was stealing and tripling the way other players take BP. He became a traditional home run threat as well. Nobody talked about a lack of walks or low OBP — though those were coming along nicely. I'm pretty sure I heard mention of Honus Wagner at some point. That's the kind of shortstop company Reyes kept all summer.
He'd cycled in June, but the Mets lost. He'd homered three times in August, but the Mets lost. At long last, Jose could accomplish one of those rare, exceedingly breathtaking feats fans talk about for years and do it in the service of a Met win. There was no chance the Dodgers would halt his forward progress, but he slid headfirst across the plate for emphasis. I swear I didn't think he was ever gonna stop.
Next from 2006: Best Mets Days Nos. 10 through 1.

This won't be the last time I bring it up, but briefly, there is a great new book out. Buy two copies: one for yourself, one for somebody you care about. It's called The 100 Greatest Days in New York Sports and it's no ordinary list book. Author Stuart Miller has researched the hell out of his subject, something to which I can attest first-hand since I was one of his late and presumably insignificant sources, yet he indulged my arguments and assertions as if I were the The New York Times on microfiche. The result of such commitment is the New York sports history book you've been waiting your whole life for.

Stuart hits on just about every significant sporting event that took place in the five boroughs since before New York City became New York City. Your great Uncle Sol's game of Johnny on the Pony might be in there. You won't agree with every choice he's made — for example, I find his geographic contention that the Giants' two Super Bowl victories weren't New York championships a bit on the shaky side — but that's the beauty of this work. You read a page, you argue with it, you learn from it, you nod at it, you congratulate it and you read another page. It's a thorough and fair examination of milestone moments, which is code for don't worry, the Mets get their due.

Like I said, I want to explore this book further as we while away the hours to April 2, but right now I simply want to borrow his concept to highlight the 20 best Mets days of 2006.

This is a pretty straightforward operation: I pick 20 days that I believe defined this team and this season for the good. As with any list, no matter the objective criteria applied, you can debate what's in and what's out. You're certainly more than welcome to. I try to take the overarching historical view — that is, what should we remember about this season when we're asked why it was one of the Mets' greatest? I imagine my personal experiences as they intertwined with this game or that play colored a couple of these selections. So be it. As editor Jim Nelson writes in this month's GQ, an issue devoted to sports (otherwise I can't imagine I would have bought it):

Women always complain that men don't like to talk about their feelings, but they're sadly mistaken. Men would just rather talk about their feelings…about the Mets.

There were some terribly exciting and dramatic days in the life of our team in 2006 that didn't crack this particular Top 20. Better there's a surplus than a shortage. This was, Praise Minaya, a year of plenty.

20. October 19: There Must Be A Catch

Admittedly, this is a Mrs. Lincoln choice. The unavoidable reality is that this was involuntarily the final game the 2006 Mets would ever play, Game Seven of the National League Championship Series. Insisting something of enduring Met value arose from it may be akin to being the Red Sox fan who recalls October 25, 1986 as the night Dave Henderson went yard on Rick Aguilera.

Granted. Nevertheless, a day that includes what October 19 included can't be all bad. The good is simply too good to be ignored.

Correction: Too great.

We can say a game that ended a season on the wrong end of a 3-1 score and an 0-2 count has no business being on a list of greatest Mets anything, save for disappointment. We can also say a game that ends St. Louis 3 New York 1 even though the bases were loaded for our superstar slugger who mashed 44 home runs in 2006 — three of them against this opponent in this series — has no business being lost. Yet when we say those things, we must say two others:

1) We had no business riding the left arm of Oliver Perez as far as we did.

If we indulge the grumbling that the World Champion Cardinals' regular-year mark of 83-78 makes a mockery of the postseason, what do we say when a pitcher goes 3-13 for six months, gives up more than six runs for every nine innings he throws and then tosses a beauty at the team that would soon taste ticker-tape? Either every statistic is a damn lie or Oliver Perez was the most genius acquisition of Omar Minaya's very heady tenure.

The Oliver Perez trade had been the Roberto Hernandez trade on July 31, perhaps the Xavier Nady trade; the Cecil Wiggins trade would be most accurate. Talk about creating chicken salad from DUI. However Perez wound up a Met, whatever he showed or didn't show in sporadic auditions down the stretch, whoever couldn't pitch so he had to be relied upon with only a pennant in the balance, lefthander Oliver Perez was the right man on the right mound at the right moment. So what if before Game Seven (despite a decent effort in Game Four, when his offense mistook him for Steve Trachsel), it was fair to conclude Oliver Perez loomed as the most unlikely, most obscure, most unsettling playoff pitcher in Mets history?

Move over Masato Yoshii and tell John Maine the news. By the sixth inning of Game Seven, Oliver Perez was channeling every home-team big-game lefty from Koosman to Matlack to Ojeda to Leiter to Hampton. This was the Oliver Perez who accounted for that line in Pittsburgh a couple of years before when he was somebody everybody wanted. Gone was the obvious impostor whose southpaw stock sunk so low that a perpetually rebuilding franchise decided he wasn't worth keeping two weeks shy of his 25th birthday. Here was talent harnessed the way you kept hearing it could be but were warned it probably would not be. Here was Oliver Perez squirming then rolling through the Cardinal order, surrendering almost nothing.

His first baseman muffs a pop fly in the first, but Perez pitches out of it. He is littleballed for a run in the second, but nicked no more. Works around the terror that is Pujols in the third. Nothing. One-two-three in the fourth. Challenges Pujols with a runner on in the fifth and leaves clean.

Oliver Perez is keeping the Mets alive in the seventh game of the league championship series. He stays in to bat in the bottom of the fifth, leading off and striking out. By the bottom of the fifth, this isn't surprising. After all the forecasts of gloom, doom and Darren Oliver, Oliver Perez is pitching like a Game Seven pitcher. He's in a 1-1 pitchers' duel with Jeff Suppan. Why on earth would you take him out?

The top of the sixth. Gets Encarnacion. Walks Edmonds unintentionally. First legitimate free pass from a pitcher known for wild streaks. Scott Rolen is next. The manager who left him in trots out to the mound. Take him out? No way. Skip tells Perez something. Don't know what it is. The initial evidence is it wasn't helpful.

2) We had no business expecting Endy Chavez to be our leftfielder.

Not in the seventh game of the National League Championship Series, not when you dusted off the orange-and-blueprint as it was drawn up in St. Lucie in February. Our leftfielder was supposed to be Cliff Floyd. Made sense. Cliff was our best everyday player in 2005. 34 homers. 98 ribbies. Legs healthy enough at last to patrol left almost every day of the previous season. If the Mets were going to contend for a pennant, you'd have to assume Cliff Floyd would be right in the middle of it.

It wasn't Cliff's year. He ached. He slumped. He sat. He recovered. He hit in the first playoff series. But then he ached again. Couldn't run. Wishful thinking penciled him into the starting lineup for Game One against the Cardinals. Tangible Achilles pain removed him.

In came Endy. Familiar story in 2006. In came Endy when Carlos Beltran felt a tug here or there. In came Endy when Xavier Nady required an appendectomy. In came Endy when Lastings Milledge reverted to the future after flashing by as the fleeting present. As the season wound down, Endy Chavez was as in as any Met outfielder. He was going to play sooner or later. Might as well be from the first inning on.

So there he was, standing in left field in the top of the sixth inning as the Cardinals batted. Edmonds on first, Rolen at the plate, Randolph having whispered a piece of advice in Perez's ear. It was either bad advice or great advice executed poorly. Whatever Willie said to Ollie, Scott Rolen didn't care. He launched Perez's first pitch toward the left field bullpen.

I don't know exactly where Endy Chavez started from when he realized Rolen's ball was headed in his general direction. I do know he went back as far as he could. I do know he leaped. And I do know the ball cleared the fence.

The next thing I know is Rolen is out and Edmonds, reasonably rounding second, maybe third, is out and the Cardinals are out and Perez is out of the inning, having given up no runs in the sixth, and the Mets are not behind in this game. They are tied. I know all that because Endy Chavez wears springs for spikes, favors a net over a glove and owns a sense of direction not seen in Queens since Jay Gatsby knew enough to drive over and past Corona's valley of ashes.

Endy Chavez evoked Tommie Agee, Ron Swoboda and Willie Mays in one dash, leap, grab and fire. The next guy who does anything remotely like it will evoke Endy Chavez. If anybody who saw it had ever seen a greater catch in a tighter spot, they weren't saying. It set the new standard for Met defense. It saved two runs, produced two outs and preserved a two-team race for the flag. It was so stunning that your chronically loquacious, occasionally eloquent correspondent was reduced to sputtering a string of high-pitched gasps in its immediate dust. It was as if I swallowed all of 2006 without chewing and needed to be Heimliched if I hoped to watch the bottom of the sixth. Stephanie thought I sounded like a Warner Bros. cartoon.

Indeed. That catch was all, folks.

19. June 22: Face Time

Whatever figured to be left in Pedro Martinez's right arm once the four-year contract he signed in December 2004 expired was of minimal concern to those who agreed to pay him his millions. Pedro was courted and captured not for what he'd do long-term but for what he'd mean short-term.

Oh, he could pitch. In 2005, he electrified Shea Stadium, a facility notoriously short on megawatts just prior. A Pedro Martinez start for the Mets promised success (usually delivered) and excitement (a lock). It was almost impolite to notice Pedro faltered in a key game against the Phillies at the end of that August or note he begged off his final couple of starts once the Mets were eliminated. His toe wasn't quite right and his second-half numbers took their traditional dive, but he was Pedro Martinez and he was a Met. Who could ask for anything more?

By June 2006, Pedro's short reign as the Met of Mets, as the face of the franchise, had quietly and almost imperceptibly petered out. The great team success of the first two months of the season — much of it due to Pedro — removed an onus from the pitcher. The Mets didn't need him to attract fans and they probably wouldn't need him to attract free agents, the way he surely helped draw Carlos Beltran into the fold. Pedro was still Pedro, but the Mets were about winning as a whole. If anybody was going to front for them, it would be somebody else.

The Mets were David Wright's band as 2006 unfolded. It was a bloodless coup, but you couldn't miss it. David was just advancing beyond great Wright hope status when Pedro arrived. He undeniably acquitted himself well in 2005, his first full big-league season and the buzz behind him kept building. Come '06, the shirts in the stands seemed to have lost a digit. 45s had been in vogue but 5s were now de rigueur.

Why? Start with Wright's combination of average, power and accessibility. There was nothing not to like that a few on-target throws to first couldn't take care of. If not a completely complete player yet, he was as close as any young Met had ever been. He wasn't an enigma. He liked to play ball and said so in virtually every publication. Reyes was still learning. Delgado was still new. Beltran was still wary. Martinez was still Martinez, but Martinez wasn't Wright. He didn't play every day and he, unlike the precocious kid at third, wasn't getting any younger.

By June 22, Pedro Martinez wasn't quite the Pedro Martinez of the year before. Not even the month before. The Mets had been doing everything well, but Pedro hadn't done much for us lately. Hips don't lie, and one of his was on the fritz even if he didn't advertise it. All the naked eye saw was an ace who struggled in L.A., was adequate in Arizona and got outpitched by Kris Benson (for god's sake) at Shea. When Pedro Martinez started a Thursday afternoon game at home against the Reds, he was beginning to look, just a little too much, like the past.

The first was OK. But in the second, two singles and two sacrifices made it 1-0 Cincinnati. The fourth was tough to bear as Pedro walked Scott Hatteberg, then Austin Kearns, then Adam Dunn. Pedro does not walk the bases loaded to begin an inning. At least that's what we thought. From the right field mezzanine, he appeared uncomfortable. Pedro, it's never going to be 1999 for you again, but can it be 2005? How about April 2006?

Brandon Phillips, a Red menace throughout the week, brought home Hatteberg on a fly ball. But that was it. Pedro got out of it, down two-zip. David Wright, predictably, came to his rescue in the bottom of the frame, tying the score on a two-run bomb. The Mets presented Pedro with a lead for the fifth, 3-2 when Nady drove in Franco, but Pedro didn't appear up to the task of holding it. With two out, he walks Felipe Lopez, who steals. Then he walks Scott Hatteberg. Lopez steals third. This is nervy. This is discouraging. This is Pedro.

This is better: Martinez strikes out Kearns.

It's the middle of 2006. Sooner or later, the Mets are going to unhinge a mediocrity like Eric Milton. They do it in the bottom of the fifth, capping off another three-run rally when Wright deposits another two-run job in the bleachers. He's the MVP by our chants. He'll finish the day batting .338 for the runaway division leaders. Sounds plenty valuable to us.

But here's something that sounded even better. Top of the sixth. Pedro, staked to a four-run lead, finds it within him to be unadulterated Pedro.

Adam Dunn goes down swinging.

Brandon Phillips goes down swinging.

David Ross goes down swinging.

As Pedro leaves the mound, 46,000 roar. David Wright may be our MVP, but we are reminded that Pedro Martinez has been our savior.

His day is done and, except for what amount to cameos, so is his season. Pedro's return to Boston will be an artistic calamity. He'll go on the DL for most of July. The hip will heal but a calf will act up. He has exactly two more wins coming his way in 2006 and he's just a man with an arm in a sling by October. David Wright is still young and gifted and widely adored but his average never sees .340, his power production declines and, for whatever reason (wear, tear, exertion, exhaustion, internal competition), he's no longer our MVP by proclamation. He's a big part of the rest of 2006, and an integral component for 2007 and beyond, but like Pedro, David peaks at the very beginning of summer even if we don't quite realize it until hindsight kicks in.

While they're both on top of the world, though, the world is a very nice place to be.

18. September 2: Our Man In Houston

You really have to want to hate in order to hate Carlos Beltran. He's quiet, he's religious, he's charitable, he displays all five tools, he says not a disparaging thing about anything or anybody. Immaterial except that it's great news for his family, he's rich, very rich. That's just testament to the free market…and did I mention that he got rich in New York?

I guess that could be a problem in Houston.

With nothing in particular on the line for his team, Carlos Beltran went all-out against his old employers in early September. The Astros desperately needed to beat the Mets. They couldn't the night before and they wouldn't again thanks to Beltran, who risked his well-being by crashing into the Minute Maid Park outfield fence to swipe a ninth-inning, extra-base hit from Lance Berkman. He doesn't make the catch, the Astros tie the score and are in position to inflict psychic pain on Billy Wagner. Instead, Carlos takes one for the team. He goes down in what has to be agony. The Astro customers, those who profess eternal betrayal because their Rent-a-Beltran didn't stick around more than a few months, cheer when Beltran does not immediately rise.

Class tells, you know. Carlos limps out of the game, but he's not on a stretcher. This isn't 2005, not in the Petco Park sense (no Cameron) nor in terms of what it was like the first time Beltran came back to town. Then it was the lions devouring the Christian. This time the Mets won two of three, their centerfielder healed and Houston was left to stew in the Minute Maid juices of its manufactured resentment.

17. June 4: High-Five!

One and two pitch. Fly ball, driven to left field and it's GONE! Home run into the Giants' bullpen, Lastings Milledge, his first Major League home run and could it have come at a bigger time? He's tied the game at six in the bottom in the tenth inning!

Ed Coleman never sounded so excited, which only means something if you've heard Ed Coleman keep an even keel for nearly 20 years. On a Sunday against San Francisco, as fill-in voice over WFAN, he vocally chest-bumped the Mets' next superstar for touching up Armando Benitez and keeping the Mets' afternoon going at least a little longer.

Eddie wasn't the only one enthralled. Milledge had been up for less than a week. Everything he did or didn't do was a big deal in those first fresh days of his recall. He wore a wooden cross the size of the Keyspan sign. He gunned down a Diamondback at third from right. He scampered home with the walkoff win the night before as a meticulously inserted pinch-runner. But he hadn't hit one out yet.

Give him time. Give him until there were two outs in the tenth inning of an affair that the Mets wouldn't give up easily on the eve of a Western swing. Then Lastings shows off his muscles against no less than the closer who had tormented Mets fans for years (as a Met, mostly). Give him an ovation, he deserves it. Hell, make like Eddie Coleman. Give Lastings Milledge a high-five. The right field line crowd can't resist and offers 'em up. Lastings Milledge returns the favor as he jogs to his position for the eleventh. Slap! Slap! Slap! right down the line. Everybody's so excited about the Mets, that such an exchange seems natural.

That is so cool!

Or uncool if you check the unwritten rules. Lastings Milledge has raised a ruckus between innings. Either he's too wet behind the ears to have any idea that “you don't do that” or he knows exactly what he's doing. After the Mets have fought the good fight and lost, all anybody talks about is Lastings. First the hitting of the homer, then the slapping of the palms. Was he showing somebody up? Was he not knowing his place? Was he just having fun?

The Lastings Milledge who lit up Shea in early June didn't reappear very much. He settled into a recurring callup, a tentative freshman who was overmatched by pitchers and confused by the descent of baseballs. His constituency shrank. His status is as TBD as anybody's in the organization.

Moral: Don't turn down a high-five. You never know when your next one is coming.

16. October 12: Tom & Again

This is why you bring Tom Glavine onto your team. Never mind you ink him for four years and the first three range mostly from disastrous to indifferent. You're thinking long-term, the fourth year. Not even the fourth season, but its postseason. You know you're going to be scuffling for pitching. Your titular ace was already hurt. Your traditionally strong October weapon — October surprise! — goes down unexpectedly. You face baseball's seventh month, your first crack at it in six years, with the starting-rotation equivalent of paper clips, rubber bands and airplane glue. You don't know what you've got.

Except for Tom Glavine. You've got him and, at last, you and he are on the same page. He's pitching when it counts and you're counting on him to pitch. A week ago, he handily beat the Dodgers a Game Two. This is Game One, next series. This is Glavine Time all over again.

He does not disappoint. He takes down the Cardinals with ease, some nifty DP action and a long offensive assist from Carlos Beltran. Seven innings, no runs. He outlasts Jeff Weaver. He holds Albert Pujols in check. He does not impress Pujols, but that's not his or our problem. We've seen enough to be very impressed by Tom Glavine.

15. April 6: Meet These Mets

The 2006 Mets weren't the 2005 Mets…literally. Twelve of the 25 players who lined up and waved on Opening Day had never worn the uniform before. More than a few had strayed during Spring Training, choosing to wear the colors of their national team in the World Baseball Classic instead of their National League team in meaningless exhibitions.

Amazing, then, how quickly they became the 2006 Mets. In one three-game series against the Washington Nationals, they introduced themselves as something we hadn't seen in these parts in years.

There was the new catcher, Lo Duca, defending the plate with grit and improvisation in securing the opener. There was Nady, the right fielder who found Shea to be a hitter's park. There was Wagner, the cocky closer who marched to his own drummer (Lars Ulrich). There was Sanchez, who demanded a different kind of music — the sound of silence between third and home. There was Bannister, the rookie who forced his way to the hill on the second night and immediately gemmed it up. There was Delgado the slugger. He slugged.

The pieces new and old fit together beautifully. David Wright came out swinging. Anderson Hernandez took a dive…through the air…routinely. Jose Reyes was off and running. And Pedro Martinez wasn't giving up the inside of the plate to anybody, no matter how much anybody snarled.

Pedro took on Jose Guillen and won on April 6. A generation of Mets pitchers had failed to be proactive in this regard. But he was Pedro, we'd had him for a year, we knew he what he could do.

We had no idea about Julio Franco. No good idea anyway. He was 47, of course. You couldn't not know he was the oldest player in the Majors. It fascinated everyone but him. As the year progressed, his age would be an alternating source of wonder and concern, but in the third game of the year, it was his head and not his body that made all the difference.

First Julio came off the bench and threw himself between Guillen and chaos, defusing a could-be brawl into batter-take-your-base. Then, a couple of innings later, Julio sat on the bench when his teammate Carlos Beltran attempted to sit down. Julio didn't approve. Beltran had just homered, his first hit of the season in the third game of the year. The fans were appreciative of Beltran's performance, which struck him as unusual. Carlos B had heard it throughout 2005 and a little at the dawn of 2006. Beltran was the big-money signee of the year before. It wasn't a great year, it was a less than stellar reception. It was wrongheaded, but now the previously silent majority — the Mets fans who would never boo their own — tried to set the record straight.

They asked for a curtain call. Beltran wouldn't hear of it. The SNY cameras caught his discontent quite clearly. He wasn't going out there. Just as obvious was Julio Franco telling him in one language or another, get over it and get up. Julio wasn't around in 2005, but he knew what was required for 2006. He knew Jose Guillen was better off just going to first and shutting up and he knew Carlos Beltran and the Mets would be better off if he just stepped out and represented.

Delgado was already batting but the fans were still applauding, virtually unaware of the veritable Paris Peace Talks ensuing in the Met dugout. Ambassador Franco carried the day. Beltran acknowledged the fans. They were satisfied. For them, for Beltran, for the Mets, it was positively 2006. At night's end, we all moved into first place together and never looked back.

14. May 5: Rethrilliency

Even if the East was won in a cakewalk, there were times when it was practically brutal to observe the baking process. It wasn't quite a trip the sausage factory, but the foundation of the Mets' mighty May lead was built on some very long nights and some exceedingly hard wins.

Though it would be eclipsed in the popular imagination by later contests that resembled it in some form or fashion, there was no game in 2006 that was more draining or grueling to watch (never mind play) than the 14-inning war of attrition between the Mets and their old rivals the Braves at Shea on May 5. It was a game that very nearly refused to end.

The Braves led 1-0, 2-1, 3-2, 4-2, 5-2, 6-2 and 7-6. They lost.

The Mets drew 12 walks and recorded 15 hits in the first 13 innings. They never led.

The Mets left 19 runners on base.

The Mets' leadoff batters reached in the first, second, eighth, ninth and thirteenth. None of them scored.

David Wright had three hits and three walks. And no runs.

Cliff Floyd stranded 10 runners on his own. He also homered to lead off the home eleventh.

The Braves used nine different pitchers. Working with a 25-man roster. In May.

Brian McCann stole a base. Jose Reyes didn't.

Kaz Matsui tied it in the seventh. Jorge Julio got the win.

Wright drove in the deciding run in the bottom of the fourteenth on a ground-rule double that was first scored a single even though it plated Beltran from second and it bounced over the fence.

It lasted for four hours and forty-seven minutes. It was finished at 11:59 on a Friday night. There was a 1:10 start Saturday.

The division title was a cakewalk. But a lot of flour got spilled in the kitchen.

13. August 8: Have Our Mike And Beat Him Too

The San Diego Padres had been coming to Shea Stadium since 1969. They didn't become a hot ticket until 2006. I wonder why it happened so suddenly.

Yes, that's it! They were boarding Mike Piazza for a year, giving him something to do while waiting to re-emerge as a Met in Cooperstown in another half-decade or so. Darn nice of them to provide him shelter and a diversion.

If Piazza's first trip home to Shea proved anything, it's that you can take the ultimate Met out of the Met uniform but he's still a Met. In a manner befitting Tom Seaver and no one else, Mike was welcomed back with no regard for laundry. He was toasted on DiamondVision. He was serenaded at the plate by Jimi Hendrix. He was stood for like it was 1998 to 2005 and clapped on like he wasn't just dropping by. Even the high crime and misdemeanor of singling against Steve Trachsel was treated as precious. Our Mike, always and forever.

Mike would be a little too much Mike the next night, homering twice — nearly thrice — and Mets fans remembered who they are and what Piazza wasn't anymore, at least not on paper. They had to let him know beating us wasn't all right. He didn't, but he came close. So we were left with two resoundingly good memories of the Padres' only trip to Shea in 2006. We swept Mike Piazza's team. And we got swept up in Mike Piazza one more time.

12. August 28: Start The Clock

A day that wasn't supposed to have a game turned on a rule that didn't exist. By the time it was over, we were knee-deep in something we hadn't had in a generation. And we loved it.

It was a makeup game, us and the Phillies, an early Monday start. Few made it to Shea. The Phillies had to wish they were on a bus heading south. Queens was not their kind of place in 2006. Dispiriting stuff happened to them here. Relief pitchers went seven and lost in sixteen. Starters baffled hitters but couldn't toss to first. And in late August, as those unlikely Wild Card contenders lunged toward September, something probably unprecedented happened to them.

Reset the scene: Mets on first and third. Wright up. He either doubles down the line or hits one a bit foul. It glances off third base or it just missed. It takes a bounce of some sort. It's unclear. What's more, it's for naught. The umpire calls it foul. Can you really argue that?

Apparently you can. Goaded by Manny Acta, third base umpire Randy Marsh asked for help from the other blues. Angel Hernandez — avenging Angel himself — emerged and ruled the ball fair: a single even though it looked like a double. It was all interpretation and judgment. It made no sense on the surface, but it worked for us. Wright was credited with a hit. Beltran trotted home. Delgado moved up one bag. The next couple of batters made the single/double decision moot by driving in everybody. On the whole, Philadelphia would rather not have been in Flushing.

It's always nice to beat the Phillies. It's always nice to get a call, no matter how mangled or bizarre. But it's really nice to start counting off, in earnest, your magic number. With the Mets' inevitable win and the Phillies' unavoidable loss, we could do that. It was 18 at the close of business on August 28 and it was only going to dwindle from there.

11. September 7: Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now

He could have kept going, you know. Jose Reyes settled for a three-run inside-the-park homer because home is the fourth of four stops on the diamond. Bet he could have turned and run to first. At least. He probably could have made it a six-bagger or just paused at first before stealing second on the next pitch.

Jose must have read the rule book because he didn't do that. When Dodger centerfielder Matt Kemp couldn't properly track down his ball, Shea knew what was coming. Jose had done everything else all year. He was stealing and tripling the way other players take BP. He became a traditional home run threat as well. Nobody talked about a lack of walks or low OBP — though those were coming along nicely. I'm pretty sure I heard mention of Honus Wagner at some point. That's the kind of shortstop company Reyes kept all summer.

He'd cycled in June, but the Mets lost. He'd homered three times in August, but the Mets lost. At long last, Jose could accomplish one of those rare, exceedingly breathtaking feats fans talk about for years and do it in the service of a Met win. There was no chance the Dodgers would halt his forward progress, but he slid headfirst across the plate for emphasis. I swear I didn't think he was ever gonna stop.

Next from 2006: Best Mets Days Nos. 10 through 1.