AUGUST 26, 2001:. The regular season is over, and my beloved Mets are out of it. Spinning philosophical perspectives out of baseball has ruined better writers than myself, but a few ballgames in August, a close reading of Isaiah Berlin, and a few Budweisers led to the following epiphany.

FORTUNE AND METS' EYES © 2001 Roy Edroso A weekend night in August. The Mets are stinking up Dodger Stadium, and Tom Seaver, Gary Thorne, and Ralph Kiner are yukking it up in the broadcast booth. "Tomorrow at 4 pm on UPN," says Thorne, "a killer stalks San Francisco, and only one man can stop him -- Ralph's favorite sherriff, Dirty Harry." "Make my day," mutters Kiner. I remember Kiner from my childhood, when he ran the Mets' post game show, "Kiner's Corner." Kiner was always a boozy-looking old dog, and now he's acquired an ominous, grandfatherly hesitancy, ripe with the promise of an on-air senior moment. (Earlier in the game, Kiner referred to "the colored pitcher Satchel Paige." No discomfort in the booth -- don't worry, Gramps, no one is watching.) "He's always saying that," says Thorne. "Make my day." "He's always saying it to pitchers," says Seaver. "I can think one pitcher in particular he always says it to." Thorne and Seaver chortle; Kiner seems to be clearing his throat, or choking on a piece of steak. "Now come on, Ralph," says Seaver, "have you ever known a pitcher who you liked? Anyone you thought enough of to partake of an adult beverage with him after the game?" Meanwhile Todd Zeile takes a few strikes without comment. I don't have to tell you what a disappointing year this has been for those of us who live and die with the Mets. Game after game we have watched the Amazins' stand helpless at the plate as pitches whiz past, untouched, and often unthreatened, by their bats. The obvious unhappiness of the players, caught in close-up by the TV cameras, is disheartening to behold. Less than a year ago, they all seemed to have only two expressions: ferociously concentrated at the moment of battle, cheerful and relieved after the happy result -- a team-sport idyll of a whole lot of guys riding the same wave, sharing the same dips and elevations, all the way to the golden beach. The hard effort of the race to the League Championship, and the joy of pulling it off, made them as one. But defeat has alienated them, from each other and from themselves. They present a gallery of varying reactions to disaster that would serve to illustrate a 19th century book of physiognomological study, like The Faces of Madness: Zeile, pissed and tight of jaw; Alfonzo, confused by the betrayal of his own body; Piazza, sunk into a stony, bubble-blowing funk, an image sometimes immediately followed on TV by that Zyrtec commercial in which he shows the sunny self-regard of yore. Only Jay Payton has not changed. He still looks like he wants to kill someone, preferably a pitcher. This has not been my finest summer, either, and sometimes I have wondered if following the Mets has been some sick sort of self-punishment, a way of wallowing in my own failures vicariously through the failures of televised jocks. People laugh at me when I say I'm a Mets fan. Theirs is the worst post-Series collapse since the Marlins. They're losers, and by association, I am, too. Why stick with them? Why not just buy a Yankee cap (in my choice of trad midnight blue or lively day-glo variants) and join the winning team? These doubts I have considered carefully. When times are good, or even mediocre, a man will follow his stars, no matter how inefficiently and sporadically they guide him to happiness. He does what he does, he believes, because he is who he is. But when events shake him deeply enough, he may question his religion, his way of life, even his baseball team. He will be forced to heed, albeit briefly, the therapeutic voice that dominates our present day, which says that nothing that does not produce better results, a more toned body, or greater financial returns, is worth sticking with. You are what you are, it tells him, because you do what you do. The voice is especially tempting when nothing is going right, when you're tapped out, when you feel as rootless and as vulnerable as a kid, but you are a kid no longer, and the injuries are starting to take their toll and they're talking about putting you on waivers and you just aren't getting pitches to hit. But alternating with these moments of doubt are moments of a different kind, when you come in sudden and unexpected contact with, and recognize, yourself. These are usually quiet moments, spent alone: Strolling through a block party, smelling the fried chicken, seeing the little kids dancing spastically and joyfully in front of the giant, rented speakers. Riding a bike down Metropolitan Avenue as the flat light of the late afternoon sun presses hard against the faces of tenement buildings. Sitting at the edge of the East River, watching the sun dissolve on the horizon. I have been reading a book of essays by Isaiah Berlin. These essays are primarily concerned with the utopian impulse in philosophy, the notion that human happiness may be achievable and eternal. There are universal values, this view implies, toward which we would all work, and from the realization of which we would all benefit, if only our hearts and minds were set right -- that is, if some of us we did not persist in being such losers. Mr. Berlin does not buy it. "The notion of the perfect whole," he writes, "the ultimate solution, in which all good things coexist, seems to me not only unattainable -- that is a truism -- but conceptually incoherent... we are doomed to choose, and every choice must entail an irreparable loss. Happy are those that live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal, whose word is fully accepted as unbreakable law... I can only say that those who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of self-induced myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding what it is to be human." (emphasis mine) Last night the Mets pulled out an 11th-inning victory over the Giants. It was a helluva game, especially toward the end, with the Giants tying it up late, and threatening to go ahead with men on and Bonds at the plate till Armando Benitez, in fully unflappable tough-guy mode, got the Home Run King Presumptive to chase a slider for the third out. Even Thorne and Seaver (unaccompanied by Kiner, who seemed to have passed out) got interested. But it was the bottom of the 11th when the Mets observably rediscovered themselves. At the plate, against the League saves leader Nen, they fought for contact, to "manufacture" a run, as they say in that wonderfully apt baseball usage -- literally, to make it by hand. Jay Payton got on. Vance Wilson moved him to second. And little Rey Ordonez, who had too long been hitting a lot of "silly little ground balls," in Bobby Valentine's words, punched a solid hit into the gap in right field, and Payton flew around third and made a sitting slide into home, from which he immediately rose, as easily as if he were getting out of a kitchen chair, and received the cheers of the crowd. The Mets gathered, high-fived, butt-slapped -- Bobby V actually hugged Ordonez -- and their faces were happy and easy. They're still out of the pennant race, and certainly fate has more stinkbombs in store for them. (In the next day's New York Post, news of the victory was framed by standard-issue hit pieces by that paper's most unpleasant sportswriters, one of whom compared the Mets unfavorably to the Bronx Baby Bombers little-league team.) But that was far from their minds, and mine, as we savored a classic Mets victory in the classic Mets style, which was perhaps more precious to us because, of late, so rare. And the Shea sound system blasted a song that was popular years ago, by a band that has hardly been heard from since, but which in the breezy late Summer air sounded as fresh and persistent as the human spirit: "I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never gonna keep me down..."