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METS ALL-TIME HIT LEADERS Through Games of 9/26/2012 1. DAVID WRIGHT 1,420 2. Ed Kranepool 1,418 3. Jose Reyes 1,300 4. Cleon Jones 1,188 5. Edgardo Alfonzo 1,136 6. Mookie Wilson 1,112 7. Bud Harrelson 1,029 8. Mike Piazza 1,028 9. Darryl Strawberry 1,025 10. Howard Johnson 997 COUNTUP: To Wrightfinity...and beyond!

Ruben Tejada � SS Daniel Murphy � 2B David Wright � 3B Scott Hairston � RF Ike Davis � 1B Kelly Shoppach � C Lucas Duda � LF Andres Torres � CF Jeremy Hefner � RHP

Wright 5.0 Hampson 1.0 Turner 1.0 Torres 0.5 Valdespin 0.5 Tejada 0.5 Parnell 0.5

METS ALL-TIME HIT LEADERS Through Games of 9/25/2012 T-1. Ed Kranepool 1,418 T-1. DAVID WRIGHT 1,418 COUNTDOWN: Krane Minus Zero/Wright Plus Zero 2012 GAMES REMAINING: 8 An honor to be among the dozens standing and applauding (among the hundreds sitting and respectfully contemplating in silence) at Citi Field when David achieved Kraneness.

Davis 4.5 Mejia 3.5 Wright 0.5 Lewis 0.5 Tejada 0.5 Murphy 0.5

METS ALL-TIME HIT LEADERS Through Games of 9/24/2012 1. Ed Kranepool 1,418 2. DAVID WRIGHT 1,416 COUNTDOWN: Krane Minus 2 2012 GAMES REMAINING: 9 Slow and steady Creeps up on Eddie

seawolf17 wrote: seawolf17 wrote: I'm more in the "Rick Reed was a Pirate?" camp. I find this reaction surprising less because Rick Reed was a Pirate for parts of four seasons (in which he never earned the trust of Jim Leyland) and more because Rick Reed's MLB debut came against the Mets on what they used to call national television. Pitched a helluva game on Monday Night Baseball, prompting some snide comments from Wally Backman about how we supposed to hit somebody who throws that kind of junk? Well, full disclosure. I knew he was Pirate FIRST, but that's a 2004 Topps Chrome card. I didn't know he went BACK there, but it looks like he didn't appear in MLB after 2003 with the Twins. Gotcha. He went back but was one of the last cuts that spring, which I remember because the Pirates were coming to Shea early in the season and I was hoping to see him pitch. Elster, though, I don't remember Buccing at all.

seawolf17 wrote: I'm more in the "Rick Reed was a Pirate?" camp. I find this reaction surprising less because Rick Reed was a Pirate for parts of four seasons (in which he never earned the trust of Jim Leyland) and more because Rick Reed's MLB debut came against the Mets on what they used to call national television. Pitched a helluva game on Monday Night Baseball, prompting some snide comments from Wally Backman about how we supposed to hit somebody who throws that kind of junk?

Lewis RF Murphy 2B Wright 3B Davis 1B Hairston CF Duda LF Tejada SS Thole C Mejia P

Holy Coogan's Bluff! That's Cannizzaro (or Canzozeri, if you will) in the Polo Grounds, six years after there were no more games there. Is that the oldest picture Topps ever used in a regular-issue card? Or did their 1969 designer have the same fondness for the PG that BG has for Shea when he's producing his Schaefer cards? At the very least, it must have set some record for time between a ballpark's end and its appearance in a regular issue card. This is the equivalent of some random player appearing at Shea in a 2014 set that doesn't have pretensions of being a ready-made curiosity. Makes this Mets card from the same set seem up-to-date: OE: Chris has a little company, apparently.

Faith and Fear, conceding the Mets' season at Yahoo! Big League Stew, once the math dictated 2012 = 0. Better things will come. Pitchers will recover from injury. Youngsters will earn promotions. Trades will be made, contracts will be negotiated and in no time at all we will stand on the precipice of another campaign, when maybe we CAN compete longer and maybe we CAN contend seriously and maybe...just maybe...we CAN win again. That day is not here. But it is coming. We are Mets fans. It is what we believe. And we shall always believe.

Box Tejada 3.0 Hairston 1.5 Wright 1.5 Young 1.5 Valdespin 0.5 Torres 0.5 Parnell 0.5 RRamirez 0.5 Acosta 0.5

METS ALL-TIME HIT LEADERS Through Games of 9/23/2012 1. Ed Kranepool 1,418 2. DAVID WRIGHT 1,415 COUNTDOWN: Krane Minus 3 2012 GAMES REMAINING: 10 My god he's taking forever. Then again, it took Eddie parts of 18 seasons to get three more hits.

R.A. joins a club that now includes 6 Met pitchers and encompasses 12 individual Met seasons. No Met who's ever won 19 games hasn't also won 20 games in his Met career. Mets 20-win seasons have all been clinched in one of two stadiums: Three Rivers twice (Seaver, 1972; Viola, 1990) or Shea (all the others). Seaver's four 20th wins were earned with 43 strikeouts (7, 13, 13, 10). They were all complete games (5-1, 6-1, 1-0, 3-0). Viola's 20th (7 IP) and Gooden's 20th (6 IP) were the only two of the eight Mets 20th wins to date that weren't CGs. Gooden had just come off a 16-K shutout of the Giants before his rather mundane effort against the Padres and Davey wanted to give him some rest once he had a big lead. Viola threw 96 pitches and was going on short rest on the season's final day. Seaver in '71, Cone and Viola all needed their final start of the season to attain No. 20. Gooden was the only Met to ascend to 20 in August (8/25/85). In the 19-win realm, Koosman in '68 and Seaver in '73 each got theirs in their final start, with Seaver's clinching the N.L. East title. Koosman's clinched the Mets' first non-90 loss season. Gooden's 19th kept the Mets afloat in '90 in his second-to-last start. His final start came on short rest (his only short-rest start all year) and was his first loss in a dozen starts, only his second in his last 23 starts of the year. Gooden was 3-5 on June 2, 16-2 thereafter. MUST BE 19 OR OVER TO BE ADMITTED 25 Seaver (25-7) 1969 24 Gooden (24-4) 1985 22 Seaver (22-9) 1975 21 Seaver (21-12) 1972 Koosman (21-10) 1976 20 Seaver (20-10) 1971 Cone (20-3) 1988 Viola (20-12) 1990 19 Koosman (19-12) 1968 Seaver (19-10) 1973 Gooden (19-7) 1990 DICKEY (19-6) 2012

Dickey 5.0 Bay 2.0 Hairston 1.5 Wright 0.5 Thole 0.5 Tejada 0.5

Do it for the kid who's speaking some strange language about footies and Bulldogs! Ruben Tejada � SS Daniel Murphy � 2B David Wright � 3B Scott Hairston � RF Lucas Duda � 1B Jason Bay � LF Andres Torres � CF Josh Thole � C R.A. Dickey � RHP

Michael Powell in the Times with as devastatingly accurate a portrait of what life is like at Citi Field in September 2012 as one could ever hope/dread to read/imagine. (Pictures pretty telling, too.) It is with no traditional autumnal sense of baseball anticipation that my son Nick and I ride the rumbling 7 train to Citi Field for a couple of games with the hated Phillies. We are father-and-son rubber-neckers drawn to the spectacular car wreck that is our team. We step through the turnstiles to find 22 ticket scalpers, lost souls all, clustering around us. I�ll give ya two $125 tickets for $70 apiece, one offers. I counter with $15. The scalper flashes a pained look. �I�m dying here.� �Aren�t we all?� I reply. We settle on $250 worth of tickets for $50. At the stadium doors, a bored guard pats us down without touching us. The ticket taker shrugs and points at the scanner. Scan yourself, he says. We walk in, a beaut of a stadium with fans scattered in so many nomadic clumps amid acres of green seats. We catch a dog and a brew and take a seat, any seat, really. Not for the first time in my lifetime of Mets rooting I wonder: What have we gotten ourselves into? Our left fielder, Jason Bay, steps to the plate. He was once a top slugger. That was a millennium ago. Now he�s batting .156, with 7 home runs and 18 runs batted in, a figure most left-field sluggers reach in early May. We are no longer in early May. He hits a Nerf-ball of a pop fly that the right fielder shags. Bay is one of three starters this September evening with batting averages under .200. In fact, our pitcher, R. A. Dickey, the 37-year-old knuckleballer, currently is outhitting Bay. To be a Mets fan this September, as in so many others, is to be a gourmand of loss. Some nights the losses taste like chewing on a Blue Smoke pulled pork sandwich laced with LSD � a 16-1 Thursday blowout featured six straight Phillie hits to open the game. Other nights, the steady drip of 2-1, 4-0, 3-2, 2-0 losses offers weirdly blissed-out exercises in lotus eating. Tug on a Bud, munch on a chicken quesadilla and que sera sera. Mets fans often frame our loyalty in terms a medieval monk would understand. Perseverance; suffering; pain: all good. I wander through a desert of empty left-field seats, sidle in next to Basher Najjar, 31, and pop the existential question: Why remain a Mets fan? He looks at me, shrugs, smiles. He came to the Mets in as random a fashion as fate could contrive � his father told him he could root for the first team he saw on television and he turned to Channel 5, 7, then 9. He saw catcher Mackey Sasser, a not-so-great catcher who in a very Met-like manner later forgot how to throw a ball back to the pitcher. Najjar was hooked for life. Like so many Mets fans here at the rump end of a burnt-down season, he waxes philosophic. �It�s all about loyalty and knowing what it means to lose,� he says. �We�re not like the Yankees; the expectation to win a championship isn�t always there. If you win 26, you just get greedy.� Ruben Tejada, our shortstop, steps to the plate. He�s a soft-bodied, sweet-fielding kid who is hitting .286, an average made up almost entirely of little tear-drop singles to all fields. He replaced Jose Reyes, our rangy and powerful All-Star shortstop whom the Mets, in their infinite wisdom, chose to let walk away without first trying to trade him. Tejada hits a lifeless fly to right. Najjar watches and sighs. �Too many more seasons like this, I think, would be excruciating.� I entered this Mets season, let it be said, shorn of illusion. We had a chance to be prosaically bad. But I figured if everything went wrong, if the Wilpons continued to turn their pockets inside-out and act like millionaire paupers, if General Manager Sandy Alderson continued to let prime talent just walk away, if our off-season acquisitions consisted of aging men desperate for one more major league paycheck � we had a genuine shot to be historically bad. My sons, younger and thankfully less infected with my cynicism, saw hope. Mike Pelfrey might harness his nasty sinker, Jon Niese might command his fastball, Bay might recover his stroke and Lucas Duda might stroke homer after homer deep into the periwinkle skies over Flushing Bay. Damned if by midseason, my sons� bet didn�t look good. I predictably went weak in the knees, mumbling about 80, even 85 wins, maybe Duda hits 30 homers, maybe a wild-card playoff spot beckons. We made plans to take in a game or three. At which point the Mets promptly and profoundly collapsed. This was not subtle. Roofs fell in, floors fell away. And now here we are in September. What�s our choice? To root for the triumphalist Yankees is to describe an impossibility, like walking through Manhattan chanting: �Goldman Sachs! Goldman Sachs!� Instead, we adopt the mien of Scottish highlanders facing the English army � loss is assured, but let�s go out with panache and a touch of humor. As it happens, this night and the next one, the Mets pitchers offer a glimmer of hope. Dickey�s pitches come out of his hand fluttering and dipping like drunken butterflies. If only someone on our team could hit. We walk upstairs to the mezzanine. There�s a Nathan�s Hot Dog stand with the green metal gate pulled tight, and a horseshoe bar with all the taps turned off. A season beyond drink is lost beyond calculation. Two stadium security guys are watching the Monday night football game on the overhead television. They jerk their thumbs toward another set of stairs. �You think this is bad? Check upstairs.� So we trudge upstairs to the top ring of Wilpon hell, the promenade. I came here that first year the stadium opened in 2009, stood in the long lines for Box Frites and the tacos at Mama�s of Corona. It was joyous, even if the Mets had in fact collapsed the previous two years and, in 2009, would implode utterly. (I�m realizing the good news part of this narrative is lacking). Now the promenade is Tombstone, Ariz., come to Flushing Bay. Mama must be home sleeping in Corona, because her place is shuttered. As is Box Frites, as is Blue Smoke, as is the fried-dough joint. I walk across the empty and windswept plaza and talk to a voluble young man working for one of the few open vendors. �Slow? The game of baseball is slow enough, and then you work here,� he says. �I�m a sports fan, but this is really depressing and I really don�t mind telling you that.� He�s warming to his subject. As with most New Yorkers, it�s as if he has waited all his life to give a quote. �Every year, this beautiful stadium, it�s like the same movie: We�re on the Titanic and you know we�re going to hit that iceberg.� We wander downstairs and find a grooved-out box-seat usher who is dancing and shimmying, although she has no headset and nothing is playing on the loudspeaker. Whatever. We slip by her and take our pick of 100 empty seats behind the first-base dugout. We�re just in time to watch the manager pull Dickey for a pinch-hitter. His chances of winning 20 games officially are on life support; you want to page Manager Terry Collins and point out that Dickey has a better chance to get a hit than any of the Ghandian hitters on the Mets� bench. The how and why of my Mets fandom is about bloodlines. My father was a Boston Braves fan, and he and my mother adopted the National League�s New York Giants when they moved here in the early 1950s. The Giants left, the Mets took birth. I passed these loyalties on to my sons, God help them. The �Game of Thrones� theme song starts throbbing on the loudspeaker and my son Nick starts hooting. What up, dude? �I�m the president and C.E.O. of the Mike Nickeas fan club and he�s at bat,� he tells me. My son�s excitement qualifies as disturbing, and I blame myself. When you raise boys in such sporting conditions � Mets, Jets, Knicks � you risk incalculable harm, not the least that they�ll end up hooting on a chill September night for a fourth-string catcher hitting .175. Nickeas does not get a hit. �I have a lot of faith in the Wilpons,� Commissioner Bud Selig told Newsday�s Marc Carig on Wednesday. �I have a lot of faith in Sandy Alderson.� He went on: �I�m very confident about the Mets. Very confident.� The Mets have, after a fashion, constructed a very 21st-century New York team. Crony capitalism by Flushing Bay, with Selig in the role of crony enabler. As Bob Murphy, the departed Mets play-by-play man might say, here�s the sad recap: The Wilpons entrusted massive piles of their boodle to Bernie Madoff, a great guy they would have trusted with their lives. Some of that money vaporizes and a lot of people eye the Wilpons suspiciously. Now the Wilpons, who wear sweaters and expensive sunglasses that sometimes remind me of Bebe Rebozo, claim they no longer have enough money to sign their own free agents, much less dangle a reasonable offer to a semi-reasonable player from another team. They could sell the team of course, as this is New York and there are approximately 1,789 hedge funders who would view owning the Mets as better than Viagra. But Selig insists that all is well with his friends the Wilpons and refuses to pressure them. Of late, management has crafted a fascinating sub-specialty in running down its players. Last year, Fred Wilpon gave an interview to The New Yorker and mocked David Wright, the team�s putative star. Then unnamed somebodies ran down Reyes, suggesting the shortstop could not play in pain after he had played in a lot of pain. They pulled the same kidney punch on Carlos Beltran, the slugging center fielder. This past week some unnamed somebody even ran down Ike Davis, the sweet-fielding, power-hitting hope of the Mets. He happens also to be Jewish, which in New York is like hitting the daily double. He could be gone next year. With all of this in mind, two nights later, we watch Daniel Murphy � one of the Mets� keepers � start back on a fly ball. He goes back, and back, and back, until the fly ball almost hits him on the back before plopping to the ground. No one boos. Murphy is like that overeager kid you�ve known since first grade; he just does that sort of thing. The next batter hits a grounder, giving Murphy a shot at redemption. Tejada shovels to Murphy, who pivots and ... releases the ball from somewhere behind his right ear, soaring a good couple feet over the top of Davis�s outstretched glove hand. Murphy shuffles back into position, head down. I motion to a vendor: Could I have another Bud Light? �Excuse me.� A big guy in a Jimmy Rollins Phillies jersey leans over toward us. Keith Collins is a Phillies fan, and in a real competitive ballpark, he might take some mild abuse for being decked out in Phillies red. Not here. �Explain this to me,� he asks, almost earnestly. �I used to hate this team when they were good. How could they be so bad?� Look, I can�t talk, we got to go. I just counted the upper deck, from the left-field foul pole to the end, thousands of seats, and I figured 108 fans, give or take one or two. I spotted three sitting as far from home plate as is possible while remaining in New York. We walk up there. Why? I say to the three fans, Tim Greene, his sister Eileen and Steve Fornatale. �Greatest seats in house, view of field and of the bay, and the beer guy even came up here for us,� Fornatale says. �We thought we�d have to send up smoke signals to get one.� You ever rethink your loyalties? I know the answer by now; they�re helpless. �I started up in the early 1980s, right after the Mets got Mookie,� says Tim Greene. �Then they got the Kid, and Hernandez and Dwight, and we were really good.� �Yeah, for a week at least,� adds a friend. Ladies and gentlemen, let�s hear it for America�s No. 1 mascot: Mr. Met! Only the happy talk makes me feel as if I�m going to lose my mind. The sense of inhabiting a lunatic asylum with like-minded lunatics, most of them sweet-tempered, is fine. I grew up here in the horrible, very bad losing days of the 1970s and the early 1980s, sitting high and high in general admission seats. By the seventh inning, Shea Stadium often acquired a nice glow. But the magic facts drive you slightly nuts. The baritone stadium announcer gives the �official� attendance figure, which is some obvious cubed multiple of reality. Let�s say 21,000 when there are perhaps 3,400 of us, counting the ushers and grounds crew. It�s the nightly late-game fantasy, and it occasions a sort of stadium-wide chuckle. On Wednesday night, it feels a little different, at least for a while. Pitcher Matt Harvey, the oh so intense young stud, tosses BBs and offers genuine hope for the future. (I�m a Mets fan; please at least humor me.) This time, I walk into the box seats behind third base, and find Sean Emery of Windsor Terrace and Alan Yau of Jackson Heights. They are true, chattering, knowledgeable and lifelong Mets fans. They know their OBP from their OPS. And the Mets are coming on. Two-hitting the Phillies until the ninth. Now manager Collins has brought in Josh Edgin, a big stocky left-handed relief pitcher with a heavy fastball. He puts down one, another, and then up comes Chase Utley, the Phillies� second baseman. �Edgin, man, I really like this guy, really,� says Yau. �He could be our closer next year,� says Emery. I�m there with them: how many nights, how many kids with big upsides in the dying days of another lost season, have given me hope? Absolutely, I like Edgin, I tell them. And I do. Utley walks. Ryan Howard steps to the plate. Edgin stares in, fearless, and hums a 93-mile-per-hour fastball. Howard, a massive man, unleashes his swing. Yau and Emery moan. Maybe I do, too. For just a moment I think: Do I root for the Mets, or do I root for my story�s losing narrative? Howard makes the question moot. The narrative lands high and deep in the right-field stands.

Niese 4.0 Hairston 3.0 Davis 2.0 Parnell 1.0

Miserable Mets have their fragile feelings hurt by briefly honest manager. Guys! Tweets: Terry Collins spoke individually with his players Friday afternoon and expressed for regret implying after the previous night's 16-1 loss that the team may have quit. "We know we're going through a tough time," Collins said. "I'm very proud of this team, the way they played all year. The one thing I will never, ever talk about is their effort. Their effort has always been there. If you saw, Dan Murphy last night hit two double-play balls and ran both of them as hard as he can to first. I've seen guys break up double plays, take extra bases. That's not the issue. The issue has been, as a manager you sit here and you try to fix it. You try to figure out how to fix it. And you pull out all your stops. No matter what you've done in the past, you try to find an answer to it. When you don't have the answers anymore, it's frustrating. "So, as I sat there on the bench last night, I was saying, 'What's my next move?' I thought maybe they need to know -- everybody's frustrated, but let's just see who's willing to rise up again and give it another shot. And so I probably did it the wrong way. But I believe in what we do here. We're going to grind it out on a daily basis. "I talked to each and every guy today. And I know they care. There's a lot of guys playing for a lot of things in there -- be it contracts, be it jobs, be it just pride alone. But everyone plays for something. And I know they are. We've just got to continue to battle through one of the worst times that any of us have ever been in in the game." Asked directly on Thursday night if the team had quit, Collins said: "You have to ask them." Pressed, the manager repeated: "You'll have to ask them. I have my own opinion. I'm not going to express it publicly." What precisely does Collins regret? "I don't want to ever challenge anybody's integrity," the manager said with a day to reflect. "That's wrong. My players are professionals. They didn't get here without being guys that played their hearts out all the time. Sometimes you say, 'What can I say that maybe will make them mad enough to say, 'You know, I'll show that little [jerk].'' That was maybe the way I tried to approach it last night. And I don't ever do that. So it might have been the wrong way. ... "In the ninth inning, had we turned a double play, the outcome isn't as ugly as it looks. There's a lot of factors that make it look worse than it really is. Even here today, I'm here at 11 o'clock -- 12:30 I've got players coming in here going in the weight room, getting ready. One o'clock there's guys going in the cages. So it's not work. It's not that they're not working hard or they're ignoring their responsibilities. The answer is we are just not getting it done." As for Friday's one-on-one conversations, Collins said: "I just wanted them to know that I still believed in them. We've got 13 games left -- let's play it hard as we always have. And they assured me that every one of them cared as much as I did. And I really wanted to let them know that I cared. Years ago I heard a story about some players who didn't think the manager cared during some tough times because he didn't seem like he was angry. I said, 'I don't want that ever said about me' -- that I do care, that I believe in accountability, and it starts with me. And I want them to know, look, I'll be the first one to stand up and be held accountable for what has gone on. But, by the same token, I want them to know that we set the bar high. We set expectations high. We're not living up to them. "I'm frustrated because I take great pride trying to create a positive atmosphere and maintain that atmosphere, and therefore I think it lifts the play of the players. And it's not working. So I got frustrated by it. Unfortunately you guys had to witness it."

Visions of Fred Lewis are the first symptom...

See that batting average that was compiled by a guy who was eligible in every game in which he batted? Forget it exists.

I think THIS is what you're looking for: Lewis 8 Murphy 4 Wright 5 Davis 3 Hairston 9 Duda 7 Tejada 6 Thole 2 Niese 1 Well, it's not really what anybody here is looking for, but let's pretend those numbers aren't their scorecard positions but how many hits each Met will collect tonight.

I'm all for punishing Hefner by making him pitch again so soon, but I'm not at all for punishing us by making us watch him.

Mets. Eliminated. But of course.

METS ALL-TIME HIT LEADERS Through Games of 9/20/2012 1. Ed Kranepool 1,418 2. DAVID WRIGHT 1,414 COUNTDOWN: Krane Minus 4 2012 GAMES REMAINING: 13 One Juan Pierre game away from owning the record. But no Met is that good.