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Al Leiter, as special guest talking head for Game No. 13 (an easy get since he works there), fell into his role as Florida Marlin a little too easily for my tastes. I think I'm still steamed at him for his nodding in another MLB Network segment when somebody referred to him growing up an MFY fan. Can't argue with an eleventh-inning resolution to the seventh game of the World Series, yet I recall the '97 Fall Classic as fairly uncompelling until Game Six. The weather had been miserable in Cleveland, the pitching was spotty for the first five games and I was rooting -- out of some combination of National League allegiance and consolation that if the Marlins won, we could say we finished a mere four games behind the eventual world champions -- for a team I'd been rooting against all summer. Revisiting those Marlins reminded me how much like a fantasy team they were constructed. Yet when they got to Renteria singling Counsell in with the winner, I found myself momentarily exhilarated all over again, just as I was (momentarily) in October 1997. Most interesting tidbit: Wayne Huizenga told Jim Leyland he could make a phone call and have Muhammad Ali fly in to wish the Marlins well before Game Seven. Leyland told Huizenga to not do that, we're trying to win a baseball game here.

Edgy DC wrote: Looks like a sexual assault from that angle. [racial rabblerousing]Man, if a black guy like Gant pulled that shit on a white guy like Hrbek, there'd be no bottom to the historical hole of infamy he would be consigned to.[/racial rabblerousing] I do have an issue with color here: The bill of Gant's cap should be red, not navy. That play drove me crazy when it happened. Big bandwagon Braves fan that September and October.

One thing I'll never get on Luis Castillo for is not spending enough time in a Mets uniform.

Benjamin Grimm wrote: Holy crap. I just realized that in three months I'll be as old as Gil Hodges was when he died. Damn. A rite of passage for all 48-year-old Mets fans, apparently.

batmagadanleadoff wrote: I think that Prince hates Castillo. "I'm waiting to hear Luis is gone so I can drive him to the airport in my little red Corvette."

The one-hitter (shared with two relievers) was about as sublime and as draining as one of those near-misses could be. The sucking it up and delivering quality innings to start Game One vs. the Dodgers and Game Six vs. the Cardinals were, to use Bob Murphy's vernacular, courageous. The five-pitch exit interview was tough to fathom. John Maine made Jerry Manuel look good, for crissake. His finest moment, literally, may have been the message pitch he threw Felipe Lopez to start the game in May 2008 the night after there had been some bad blood between Nelson Figueroa and the "softball girls" in the Nationals dugout. Some form of "retaliation" was in order and Maine calmly delivered it. At a fantasy camp or some such post-career engagement, Maine will bring it up the way Keith and Ron bring up "the way it was done in my day," even though Maine's day is when they rarely take care of business so smoothly. I'll also fondly recall Maine's utterly unlikely home run against the Pirates in July 2007. Talk about a shocker of the most delightful order.

I expect to wish he was playing second to start 2011 and expect to hope he's not playing short to start 2012.

At the risk of dimming Joe's accomplishments, Leo Foster and Roy Staiger each had major league experience (and Met experience) under other managers. Nice second-half surge -- or too-late salary drive from that '76 club. However it was crafted, there was a lovely 34-16 stretch in there that included a short-circuiting of the Pirates' mad dash to catch the Phillies. I remember Frazier being likened in the papers to Walter Alston in that nobody had heard of him from the minor leagues when he was promoted to Brooklyn. As it was, Frazier barely outlasted Alston in real time, by not quite a third of a season. To be fair to Joe, there wasn't a ton to work with for the long haul when he got his big break. The farm system was fairly barren and given the Grant-Seaver feud and post-Payson inertia, nobody was going to lead that team to much beyond 15-30 to start 1977. On a broader scale, 88 is quite impressive.

Never Met catcher Yorvit Torrealba loses his grievance against the team with whom he totally wanted to sign. [A]rbitrator Shyam Das ruled the Mets had the right to not complete a $14.4 million, three-year agreement with the catcher in November 2007. The agreement signed by the team and Torrealba's representative said the contract was subject to a physical that was satisfactory to the Mets. The team concluded it had concerns about his throwing shoulder, which caused him to miss three months of the 2006 season. "The physical turned up an issue,'' Mets executive vice president and general counsel David Cohen said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "It's one of those situations where different people might have different views of the likely prognosis, but there was clearly an issue. And based on that issue, the team just felt it was not worth taking the medical risk.'' Torrealba will, in the meantime, need to settle for catching for the defending American League champions.

Lakeland must be pretty boring if he was trolling St. Lucie for fun. Or is that what the Scotch is for?

Jerry Manuel's been sitting in on MLB Network's Hot Stove this week. Suit's baggy, laugh's haunting, manner's inviting if you hadn't just watched him manage your team into the ground for the previous 2-1/2 years.

Gino Cimoli, 81. He scored the final run at Ebbets Field and was the first major leaguer to bat on the West Coast when the Dodgers faced the Giants at Seals Stadium in 1958.

I expect you'll be hearing from Ed Wolfstein's lawyers before long. As for Josh Stinson, surely that's an ABC Movie of the Week ballplayer name.

Headline of the Day here. Stoner happy with progress Was he simply pleased to fall off the couch and find half a bag of Cheetos on the floor?

Izzy's greatest moment in Shea Stadium might have been the home run he served up to Beltran to end the Crash! Boom! Bang! 8-7 slugfest of August 22, 2006. Greatest for us, anyway. Of course if Izzy doesn't get hurt and Adam Wainwright isn't facing Beltran in the ninth inning two months later...

Benjamin Grimm wrote: I have a hard time finding the 1995 Mets fan in me. I can get the 1972 version, and the 1985 and 1999 versions, but 1995 is deeply buried. I have a quiet, abiding affection for the 1995 Mets, particularly the 1995 SHaMs (h/t JCL). 44-31 after the break; 34-18 at the end, sweeps of all three division champs down the stretch, clinching a second-place tie (albeit in another time zone from the Braves) on the final day -- I listened to the crackly broadcast of the Phillies-Marlins game when I got home from Shea to celebrate that particular 21 Games Out accomplishment. They were my refresh button after the strike and the miserable first-half realization that at 25-44, they really, really sucked. Izzy was definitely at the heart of all that. That second half kept my 0/5 streak alive. Starting in 1970 and running through 2005, I felt that every half-decade on the half-decade, I experienced some kind of elevation as a Mets fan, some sense of feeling my team in a new and deeper way. That streak, sad to say, ended in 2010.

It wasn't so much about snark than incidental Twitter groupthink that my blog partner wrote about in one of his other gigs. Reporters racing to post the lineup first are wasting their time for a couple of reasons. Not so long ago, �first� meant your competitors had to endure an agonizing day in which you had an exclusive. But the window of exclusivity has gone from a day in print to minutes on the web and seconds on Twitter and Facebook. More fundamentally, reporters playing by these rules are behaving like we still live in what I call The Or World � the vanished era in which I�d pause at the newsstand, scrutinize two front pages and buy one paper or the other. Today we live in The And World, in which I inhale all the news that interests me from as many sources as I want. [...] When it comes to basic information everybody�s going to have, all I care about is that it gets to me. Which individual source put that information into the combined news flow? The question is so unimportant that I�m unlikely to remember the answer five minutes later. Maybe not even five seconds later. When I think of the beat writers and Twitter, I think of the Sunday in L.A. last July when Anson Williams sang the national anthem and every damn one of them Tweeted the same Potsie reference at the same time. That's when I most severely questioned the value of following more than one of them. But if I had to follow just one, it would be Rubin, probably. He's on top of everything and he doesn't annoy me in the process.

Maybe players have gotten more sophisticated since the days a case of beer would do the trick. Izzy probably won't make the team but the 1995 Mets fan in me wants Bay to give him 44 immediately. Then again, I'd like to believe this is some kind of tribute to John Franco. Or Jerry DiPoto. Or whatever number was vacant.

Like Bay's being paid a lot more.

Izzy listed at 45.

He will be all but promised to us for late May, then mid-June, then the All-Star Break and we'll see him sometime In August, at which point it will be all about 2012. Or he'll be Johan and blow everybody away by showing up before Memorial Day and kicking ASS, bro.

Rubinesque take here. "We've got a history from Oakland, things like that," Isringhausen said, referring to his relationship with Ricciardi. "We've always been cordial friends. So I talked to my agent, my agent talked to J.P., and I just came down here and threw a little bit. All I need is a chance to throw in the spring somewhere." It always seems to boil down to who ya know.

When I think about the 1992 Mets, I often confuse/conflate Bill Pecota and Dave Gallagher. When I think of the 1993 Mets, I often conflate/confuse Dave Gallagher and Joe Orsulak. But I never associate Joe Orsulak with Bill Pecota.

Does Collins remind anyone else of a more-benevolent (so far) Hank's dad from King of the Hill? Terry Collins: The Shinless wonder.

How are the Generals doing these days?