Well, the Eddy Curry Redemption didn’t last long. The papers are back to burying him today, after he left the Knicks first scrimmage with a strained right calf.  “As predictable as Saratoga being the Mecca of horse racing every August,” read the Post lead; the Daily News went with the blander hed: “Same Old Story.”

In fact, the story had a slightly different twist yesterday, because Curry associate William Wesley--of whom GQ once asked "Is This the Most Powerful Man in Sports?"--made an appearance at the first practice. Wesley, ostensibly a mortgage broker, is a shadowy rainmaker in the world of sports, a guy who makes a habit of befriending young high schoolers who happen to be good at sports and then staying in their inner circle as they blossom into professional success.

One of his closest "friends" happens to be LeBron James, though Wesley insisted that his visit to Saratoga had nothing to do with the team's intense interest in signing James to a mammoth contract next summer. And apparently, "Worldwide Wes" is a very funny man.  But Frank Isola isn't buying it:

Of course, everything the Knicks do is about LeBron. Sometimes they go overboard; one of Walsh's assistants, Jamie Matthews, didn't let Wesley out of his sight and was almost sitting on his lap during yesterday's practice. If Wesley cracks a joke, everyone seated within five feet of him, as if on cue, begins to laugh. Wesley may be funny. But he's not that funny.

Knicks Coach Mike D'Antoni did something funny yesterday by opening training camp with defensive drills. Isola said reporters were "nearly floored." But seriously, what does this have to do with LeBron? Isolda is on it:

Coincidentally, during LeBron's first visit to the Garden last season he stressed that defense is the key to winning a championship.

All roads lead to LeBron.

Meanwhile, Bobby Valentine is headed back stateside for an ESPN gig, after a seven-year exile in Japan. On a conference call with reporters, the former Mets manager said this lost Mets season has been a tragedy. "I followed it from afar, and I have some friends there that I've shared tears with because I think it's been a tragedy," Valentine said. Later in the Post story, Valentine admits he "wasn't a day-by-day follower."

The papers played it up as if Bobby V. might come back to manage the Mets even though his quotes on the matter are decidedly neutral. But it's an easy angle when the team just lost to the very worst team in baseball because of a throwing error in the 8th inning.

Also: "The Yankees are set to announce Wednesday they will sponsor a postseason college bowl to be played at the new Yankee Stadium with a seating capacity of 47,000 beginning in the 2010 season, the Daily News has learned." Now, I'm not sure how the Daily News learned it, but I know Eliot Brown got this press release sometime in the afternoon yesterday, because I went over to his desk to look at it. In any case, we should all learn a little more about who's playing in this game when they have a press conference later this morning.

Explaining that it was “time for the New York Yankees to move forward,” team President Randy Levine announced in an Oct. 18 conference call Thursday that Torre had rejected a one-year deal with a base salary of $5 million to pilot the Yankees in 2008.

Under the terms of the offer the team says it made to him, Torre, who made a base salary of $7.5 million in 2007, would have received a $1 million bonus for each round of the playoffs he won in 2008, bringing the potential total of the deal to $8 million. Had the Yankees reached the World Series, an option for Torre to pilot New York in 2009 would have vested.

While the deal offered by the Yankees was large enough to be presented by the team as generous, they must have known it would be difficult for Torre to accept. To put it in context, it included a base pay cut of 33 percent, which is well beyond the maximum allowable pay cut of 20 percent for a major league player in arbitration. In addition, the extent to which Torre's pay would have been incentive-based is virtually unprecedented, even for far less accomplished managers.

The ten-day process to determine Torre’s fate after the Yankees’ elimination in the first round of the playoffs this year was odd right until the end. On Thursday, Torre flew down to Tampa with team General Manager Brian Cashman and Chief Operating Officer Lonn Trost, leading to rampant speculation that an agreement was imminent. The three then flew back to New York that afternoon together, despite the failure to reach a deal.

According to Cashman, the Yankees did not know what Torre’s decision would be as late as the morning of the meeting.

"Based on my conversations with him the last few days, he understood essentially the arena that we were in," Cashman said during the conference call. "I asked him on the plane down, I asked him last night on the phone, where his mind was at. He honestly didn't know."

Ultimately, Torre did know that a one-year contract would put him, in all likelihood, in the same situation next October as this one—assuming management even kept him around to finish the season. He’s scheduled a 2 p.m. Friday news conference to address the situation.

Even if Torre never manages another game, he’s been one of the finest managers in baseball history. His 2,067 victories rank eighth among all managers all-time. Torre took the Yankees to the playoffs during all twelve of his seasons at the helm. The team won 90 games in 11 of those seasons, and took the American League East crown ten times. His 1,173-767 record with the Yankees, a .605 winning percentage, is a standard of excellence any successor would be hard-pressed to match.

That winning percentage improved to .613 in the postseason, but mostly on the back of his record from 1996-2000, a period that included four World Series titles in five years. The Yankees have won just four postseason games since losing to the Red Sox in the 2004 ALCS.

Speculation over Torre’s successor will be intense in the coming days. Two in-house candidates, bench coach Don Mattingly and former Marlins’ skipper and current YES announcer Joe Girardi, figure to get a shot, while fashionable outside names like Tony La Russa and even former Mets manager Bobby Valentine have also been floated.

Over the past week, the Steinbrenners took their time—excruciatingly--deciding the fate of the manager’s job. It’s fitting, somehow, that it was Torre who ended up making the call.

UPDATE: A live report from Torre's news conference today is here.

Meanwhile, in another borough that might as well be galaxies away from Yankee Stadium, there is another manager in this baseball town, the Goofus to Mr. Torre's Gallant-ladies and gentlemen, Bobby V.! In his 1999 season, New York Mets manager Bobby Valentine has seen fit to tell the world, once in June and once again in September, that he should be fired if his team does not perform up to expectations; along the way, after the umpires threw him out of a game soon after three Mets coaches were fired, Mr. Valentine disguised himself in a fake mustache and goofy glasses and poked his head back into the dugout, thereby earning himself some major air time on the sports-highlight shows and a two-game suspension. Now the Mets find themselves on the verge of one of the most dramatic collapses in baseball history.

"Joe Torre seems to be almost laconic, and you see a Valentine, and he appears to be a lip biter," said former minor league ballplayer Mario Cuomo.

Dr. Stephen Greyser, a Harvard Business School professor, was asked to assess both men as bosses: "Bobby Valentine is more overtly intense than Torre," he said. "With that intense style of management, either players will get more tense themselves or be energized by it."

Political columnist and sometime baseball writer George Will took a darker view: "Looking at Torre in the dugout, he's comfortable in there. Valentine looks like a caged animal. The hardest thing for people who are not in uniform to understand is how the rhythm of 162 games during the season contributes to a team's success. Torre knows this. I think having to live with Valentine for 162 games is a testing experience."

Tim McCarver, former announcer with the Mets and now an announcer for the Yankees, believes the main difference between the two men has not less to do with character than with experience: "The thing about Joe is that 20 years ago he was a good manager, and everyone else knew it, but he didn't know it. Now he knows it, and he has that confidence. With Bobby, because of his not being in the postseason, I think you have to do it first to gain that confidence, to get that serenity. Bobby is a very good manager between the lines, but he hasn't done it in the postseason. Once he does, he will change as a manager."

For much of the season, Mr. Valentine was playing it cool. The lineup was fairly constant. Despite the disguise stunt, he seemed different, changed, calmer. The team looked steadier than the '98 Mets-a team that lost its last six games and with them their shot at the postseason-with the acquisition of veteran free agents Rickey Henderson and Robin Ventura. The team had grit, too. In the ninth inning of one game early on, they scored five runs against one of the best pitchers in the league-Curt Schilling of the Philadelphia Phillies-for an unlikely win. This odd collection of superstars (Mike Piazza), kooks (Rey Ordonez, Turk Wendell, Armando Benitez), quiet types (John Olerud, Mr. Ventura) and quatrogenarians (Orel Hershiser, Mr. Henderson) seemed like they could get it done, maybe even prove worthy of facing the Yankees in a dream World Series. Then came the September swoon, with the Mets, incredibly, losing three games to the mighty Atlanta Braves and three more to the not-so-mighty Philadelphia Phillies. And there was Mr. Valentine in the middle of it all: "If we don't go to the playoffs, I shouldn't be back next year," he told reporters.

Mets co-owner Fred Wilpon begged to differ with his manager, saying his man would be back next season no matter what. At the same time, crazed Mets fans and at least one radio host were calling for Mr. Valentine's ouster on WFAN-AM, the sports radio station. Mr. Valentine was bleeding and baseball columnist Tom Keegan of the New York Post moved in for the kill, writing a piece bluntly titled: "Why Wait? Can the Phony Now!" Which brings to mind another difference between Mr. Torre and Mr. Valentine: one knows how to stroke the media, the other doesn't.

Mr. Torre has managed to be affable and friendly with the beat reporters who follow his team's every move while at the same time not giving them the kind of fodder they really need for juicy stories. Mr. Valentine, on the other hand, goes about things differently, offering himself up to the media wolves.

This goes against the Torre theory of management as laid out in his new book, Joe Torre's Ground Rules for Winners . "In the New York sports world," writes Mr. Torre, "a team controversy is an opportunity for a media free-for-all. I could avoid trouble for myself and my team by being careful not to react rashly to event or stories in the press. My advice to managers: You can reduce tensions for your employees by maintaining your own serenity and control to the best of your ability. This, in turn, reduces outside pressures on your team, whether from other departments in the company, upper management, clients or the media. As a result, your employees will have the breathing room they need to achieve peak performance."

Paul Pupo, a longtime friend who played minor league ball with Mr. Valentine and manages his restaurants, wasn't surprised by the Mets manager's offering to put his own head on the chopping block. "Bobby always takes the heat," he said. "Bobby would rather have the wrong happen to him rather than his players or his friends, and I guarantee you there are people that would step in front of a train for him. And he would do that for other people. He goes to social and mental extremes that you could never ask a friend to do, and he has friends in every city who feel he is their best friend and the best friend they will ever have."

Tom Grieve, former general manager of the Texas Rangers, where the Mets manager worked for eight years, is a friend and neighbor of Mr. Valentine's. "This guy has never sat still for a minute of his life," he said. "There are times where I'll jog right by his house in the morning, and he'll tell me to jog around one more time, and he'll be out there in front waiting to go jogging. If he has nothing do, he'll say, 'Let's go on a skiing vacation.' Or 'Let's go build a deck.' Then he'll go build a deck. And he will tackle the job without knowing how to nail a piece of wood. And this is not a plain old deck he's building; he's got these winding stairs and elaborate fences. He'll try anything. That's why the guy's so much fun to be around."

With the Mets sliding far below peak performance in recent weeks, Mr. Valentine has made some try-anything managerial moves, suggesting that a nervousness has crept into the way he runs the ball club the later it gets in the season. This is certainly not the man who, a bit cavalierly, early in the season rested his No. 3 and No. 4 hitters (Mr. Olerud and Mr. Piazza) on the same day (they lost); this is not the man who seemed to have a devil-may-care attitude early on in allowing the hobbled Bobby Bonilla to patrol the outfield with always disastrous results.

Whether it's because he craves the spotlight, as his critics claim, or because he'll do anything to end this ugly swan dive, he has lately become even more active than usual. He's pinch-hitting more, pulling his pitchers more, using more pinch-runners. In the six-game losing streak, Mr. Valentine made 49 substitutions, compared to 32 by the opposing managers.

On Sept. 26, his players entered the visitors' locker room at Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium in a dour mood. On a plastic lineup board pasted near the entrance, Edgardo Alfonzo's name, written in black marker, and normally the second name down, occupied the sixth slot. This was the latest Valentine innovation. It made some sense, strategically-Mr. Alfonzo, who bats right-handed, is slumping at the plate, so why not stick Roger Cedeno, the speedy switch-hitting outfielder who bats better from the left side, in his slot?-but the move may have seemed panicky.

"D-E-A-D," said one beat reporter hanging around the lineup board, running his finger under Mr. Alfonzo's name. "That's what this means."

Like nearly every move Mr. Valentine makes these days, this one held a faint air of conspiracy: Did Mr. Alfonzo really come up to Mr. Valentine before the game and suggest that he be moved down in the order, as the manager later claimed? Anyone who saw Mr. Alfonzo enter the locker room, his face flushed, his mouth in a frown, and kick aside a laundry basket on the way to his locker might have thought otherwise.

A small group of Mets clustered around a large-screen TV. On it, the U.S. Ryder Cup golf team was beginning its improbable comeback, the kind of comeback the Mets will need if they are to make it into the playoffs.

"Mandatory chapel, 11:15!" Mr. Hershiser shouted across the room.

A few of his teammates laughed. The veteran relief pitcher, Brooklyn-born John Franco, began humming the tune to that Burt Bacharach song, "I Say a Little Prayer for You."

In the center of the locker room, Mr. Cedeno and fellow outfielder Darryl Hamilton silently stared at the plates of bacon and eggs in front of them.

Mr. Franco looked up at the TV screen. "Yeah, let's watch this golf," he muttered to no one in particular. "That's going to get us to that place we've got to go."

Beneath the lineup card, Mr. Henderson and Mr. Bonilla, comrades in complaint, sat in silence. Mr. Valentine walked by and put his hand meaningfully on Mr. Henderson's shoulder, then moved on. Mr. Henderson and Mr. Bonilla exchanged "what's-up-with-that?" looks.

"Are we nervous?" Mr. Franco asked rhetorically.

Back to the business-school experts. Richard Freedman, a professor of management at the New York University's Stern School of Business, assessed both Mr. Valentine and Mr. Torre: "Torre has been incredibly successful in getting inside the heads of his players, understanding them, and my impression is that Bobby Valentine has not," he said.

"Torre is what I would call a 'servant leader,'" said Ken Blanchard, a management expert and author of One Minute Manager and Everyone's a Coach . "He sublimated his ego to the team; he even seems to be able to handle Steinbrenner. Steinbrenner doesn't scare him because he knows who he is. Torre seems to be very peaceful with who he is as a human being, and therefore he doesn't have to win. Valentine seems to like to win with his interactions with people. For a collapsing team, the question you ask is, what's he doing to calm them down?"

There are a few games to go. The Mets can still pull ahead of either the upstart, low-salary Cincinnati Reds or the Houston Astros for the wild-card playoff berth. Mario Cuomo believes that, for all their surface differences, Bobby V. might have that inner resolve necessary to get that job done.

"I suspect a guy like Joe Torre is tough," said Mr. Cuomo. "He seems-listen, my name is Mario Cuomo, I know Joe Torre. He's a guy from Brooklyn who played stickball in the street, he has a sister who's a nun. He's a real human being who's tough, and he's not about to be pushed around. Bobby Valentine is a similar type. They may behave differently, but Bobby Valentine was not born with a silver bat in his mouth. He's tough, too."

According to Ms. Goldberg, she and Mr. Isikoff fell out over an Aug. 10 Newsweek article entitled "Lewinsky vs. Clinton," which Ms. Goldberg says portrayed her and her friend and client, Linda Tripp, in an unflattering light. "He made Linda and I out like the two witches of Macbeth , sort of plotting and scheming, which I didn't like," Ms. Goldberg said. (She didn't say what happened to the third witch.) "I didn't like the way they interviewed Linda," she said. "His magazine just has to be a little bit more fair when they deal with truth-tellers."

The falling-out could not have come at a worse time for Mr. Isikoff. It was back in October 1997 that Ms. Goldberg invited Mr. Isikoff to the Washington home of her son Jonah to hear Ms. Tripp's allegations against the President, a fateful meeting that helped expand the scandal to its current dimensions. Since then, Ms. Goldberg has been dispensing bits of information to favored reporters the way a zookeeper flips fish to seals. As the scandal rushes toward what may be its calamitous finale, Ms. Goldberg could be a conduit to the mother lode of scoops: Ms. Tripp's tape recordings of her phone conversations with Ms. Lewinsky.

So when Mr. Isikoff learned that Ms. Goldberg was angry, he tried to make nice. According to Ms. Goldberg, in the days after she recorded her answering machine message, Mr. Isikoff called repeatedly, asking for her forgiveness and arguing that in TV appearances he'd given Ms. Goldberg's side of the story. Still, the agent could not be appeased.

"I said, 'I'll let you grovel, but if you'll hold on a minute, I want to get this on tape because it'll be a collectors item,'" Ms. Goldberg told Off the Record. "So I put a tape in and he said, 'Fine, tape me groveling, I don't mind.' And he groveled some more. And he groveled and groveled . And I let him grovel."

Mr. Isikoff characterized the conversations somewhat differently.

"I did not retract anything or correct anything," he said. "What I apologized for was that, given that she was quoted in the article, I probably could have given her a better heads-up on what was said. The article is accurate, and we have no regrets about the article."

Answering machine warfare is nothing new for Ms. Goldberg. After receiving calls from an aggressive CNN producer in January, she recorded a message that told CNN reporters: "Lose my number." That one got played by Tom Brokaw on NBC Nightly News . "[Matt] Drudge has a Web site and I have an answering machine," Ms. Goldberg said.

Mr. Isikoff's groveling seems to have placed him back in Ms. Goldberg's good graces. The literary agent praised Mr. Isikoff, both as a reporter and as a physical specimen. "I find him small and perfectly formed," Ms. Goldberg said, before going on to laud Mr. Isikoff's reporting on the Lewinsky story. "Mike never gave up, and he deserves high praise."

"If I didn't like him so much personally, I simply wouldn't speak to him again," she added. "But he's a very interesting young man, and he deserves to live."

-William Berlind

When Charles Gibson took his seat in the anchor's chair on the set of ABC's World News Tonight the evening of Aug. 6, everything was going fine. The producer cued the bombastic musical intro, the cameras rolled, and Mr. Gibson, filling in for Peter Jennings, started delivering the 6:30 news. But then, about halfway into the live newscast, he was interrupted by a chorus of shrieking alarms and flashing strobe lights. Mr. Gibson calmly informed viewers that there was a fire in the building and cut to a taped news report as technicians figured out a way to shut off the alarm. Soon, smoke began to fill the hallways outside World News Tonight 's third-floor studio, and employees on the fourth and fifth floors were ordered to evacuate. Not long after that, the building was overrun by New York City firemen.

According to one ABC News producer, the fire originated in a wastebasket in the office of correspondent Bill Redeker, who is known to flaunt the office no-smoking policy regularly. "Everyone assumes it was a cigarette in the wastebasket," said another ABC source.

ABC News spokesman Eileen Murphy said the network had no plans to change the building's alarm system so that it would not interfere with live newscasts. "The reason we have a fire alarm is to alert people of a fire," she said. "I don't think that will be reconfigured." Ms. Murphy added that a memo had been circulated to the staff "to remind them of the company policy and city policy against smoking in the office." Mr. Redeker did not return calls for comment.

Advance Publications chairman S.I. (Si) Newhouse Jr. is trying to make amends with outgoing Glamour editor Ruth Whitney, despite Ms. Whitney's harsh public criticisms of Mr. Newhouse's pick to succeed her, former Cosmopolitan editor Bonnie Fuller. After her forced exit was announced on Aug. 10, Ms. Whitney told the New York Post , "I'm very disappointed with the replacement" and complained to Newsweek that she feared Ms. Fuller would cheapen her magazine. Then Ms. Whitney declined to accompany Mr. Newhouse when he addressed anxious Glamour staff members a day after the announcement.

But 30 years at Condé Nast's most profitable magazine has earned Ms. Whitney a certain amount of deference from her superiors even as they shuffle her out the door. (In a rare moment of candor, Condé Nast president Steve Florio last year told The New York Times , "Without Glamour , I don't even want to think about what the bottom line of this company would look like.") A source at Glamour reports that Mr. Newhouse recently called on Ms. Whitney and persuaded her to allow him to host a reception in her honor. "They are giving me a reception," Ms. Whitney told Off the Record. "Si came down to my office to talk me into it."

"There's nothing wrong with the retirement bit," she added. "I just wish I had been consulted in some way about possible successors." Ms. Whitney said she is concerned about the fate of her staff, which she described as "very anxious." Ms. Fuller has already had breakfast and lunch meetings with a number of Glamour editors, and will begin her new duties at Condé Nast on Sept. 14.

Meanwhile, over at Hearst Magazines, Ms. Fuller's successor, Kate White, is negotiating the cultural divide between the square middle-American ethos of Redbook and her new post as editor of the gleefully trashy Cosmopolitan . One Cosmo source reports that when Ms. White was introduced to her new staff by Hearst Magazines president Cathleen Black, only an hour after Ms. Fuller announced her departure, Ms. White was wearing a pink dress-a definite Cosmo no-no. To compensate for the fashion faux pas, Ms. White assured her staff that she would be wearing more black.

Sometimes newspaper writers who cover professional sports teams attempt to transcend the daily drudgery of locker-room quote collection by playing at being powerful. Sometimes their gambits backfire.

Earlier this summer, Marty Noble, who covers the New York Mets for Newsda y, was eager to swing for the fences. Mr. Noble, the senior man on the beat, told some of his colleagues in the Shea Stadium press box that he could get the Mets' manager, Bobby Valentine, fired if only he could confirm that Mr. Valentine had said a certain "seven words." Mr. Valentine caught wind of this, and the relationship between the two men, which was already a little strained-they hadn't spoken to each other since last season-deteriorated further.

After The Observer reported this state of affairs, Mr. Noble's editors at Newsday asked their man to repair his relationship with the manager. Even though they had detected no signs of an agenda in his coverage, they were concerned, according to a source, that the appearance of one might hurt the newspaper.

"We all agreed, including Marty, that it was a good time to clear the air," said Steve Ruinsky, Newsday 's assistant managing editor for sports. "But Marty was not told to do it. He didn't need to be. He had an interest in doing it as well."

So, on July 28, out at Shea, Mr. Noble buttonholed Mr. Valentine and attempted to make peace. According to sources in the press box who claim to have knowledge of the conversation, the exchange went something like this:

Mr. Noble: Let's try to put this behind us .

Mr. Valentine: You've got to be kidding. You go around telling people you have seven words to get me fired. You are trying to cause me to not have a job, and now you want to be my friend? What do you want to do, go to the movies? See a Broadway show? Get the fuck away from me .

Clubhouse versions being what they are-that is, a cross between Rashomon and Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first?" routine-it's not surprising that both men confirm they had a conversation, but deny that particular account of it.

"That's fascinating," Mr. Noble said. "It was nothing like that at all. What I told him is that there was no agenda. We discussed it and had an amicable discussion."

Mr. Valentine wasn't so sure about the amicable part. "We talked," he said. "It was brief. It was without much substance, but I was all ears. I was willing to listen to a guy who I've known for a long time to see what his story was. But the problem is, he didn't tell me his whole story. He was just doing something he was told to do."

After their little summit, Mr. Noble stopped coming out to the ball park, and his byline disappeared from Newsday 's sports pages, giving rise to speculation among baseball writers that he was ducking Mr. Valentine to avoid getting in trouble with his editors over his failure to kiss and make up with the manager. But his editors say that's not so. "He's been in the hospital getting some tests," said Bill Eichenberger, Newsday 's deputy sports editor. "This had nothing to do with his relationship with Valentine."

Mr. Noble got the O.K. from his doctors, so by Aug. 17, he was back on the beat, though not necessarily back in the good graces of Bobby Valentine.

-Nick Paumgarten

You can reach Off the Record by e–mail at

wstjohn@observer.com.

Call him paranoid–and many people do–but then again, even paranoids have enemies.

For example, Newsday 's Marty Noble, the senior writer on the Mets beat, has been telling colleagues: "I have seven words. If I can verify Bobby Valentine said them, I can get Bobby Valentine fired."

"Isn't that incredible?" Mr. Valentine said the other day, an hour before a game against the Philadelphia Phillies. He was sitting behind a desk in his office at Shea Stadium, picking at a piece of coffee cake. The office walls bore the trappings of managerial power: On his right there was a display of photographs of himself with various Presidents, and on his left an erasable board with the names of all his players listed in Magic Marker.

Years ago, he was nicknamed Top Step for his habit of standing on the dugout's top step, in view of the fans. But now that he's in full view of the raucous New York sports world, he has learned that attention comes with a price. (When he was told The Observer was examining the relationship between the media and the team, he crossed himself.) "When I hear crap in this market that is nothing more than things that were said about me or concluded 10 years ago, about me wanting to be the star or any of that bullshit, or controlling people in the clubhouse …" He smirked and shook his head. "I used to do all that stuff. But I've changed. I've learned."

However much he may have changed, there's no question that Mr. Valentine finds himself a central figure in what is developing into a nifty soap opera in Flushing Meadows. Unlike the bland and infallible Yankees, the Mets are a study in idiosyncrasy and conflict. Last year's overachieving crew of nobodies has evolved into an underachieving band of misfits struggling to stay in the playoff hunt amid some mild but entertaining controversy in the clubhouse, the front office and the press box.

Much of the drama revolves around the team's two catchers: Mike Piazza and Todd Hundley. Mr. Piazza is the glamour boy and run producer who came to the Mets in a late-May trade. He's a rich kid angling to become the highest-paid player in baseball.

Todd Hundley is the beloved homegrown Met, a pitcher's catcher who surprised everyone in 1996 by hitting 41 home runs, the most ever by a catcher. This year, however, Mr. Hundley found himself out of commission until early July because of elbow surgery. But when he returned to the lineup, he found himself in left field. Mr. Piazza had taken Mr. Hundley's place.

During the Mets' recent home stand, the precarious situation soured on both men, even as they continued to be gracious toward each other. On July 16, Mr. Hundley had a horrendous outing in left field, making a series of game-breaking gaffes. Mr. Piazza heard a cascade of boos from the fans when he failed to drive in runs in key situations.

The presence of two genuine stars who play the same position has called attention to divisions that may not quite match the famously quarrelsome Yankees of the late 1970's, but threaten to bust open if the team–and the two catchers–fail to live up to expectations. The unexpected arrival of Mr. Piazza was hailed as a gift from the baseball gods two months ago. Now, however, with the team in a severe tailspin, the team and its chroniclers are debating the effects on the Mets' team chemistry.

"The natural reaction is, a human will take a side," Mr. Valentine said. He looked over his shoulder at his roster, then out the door into the clubhouse, where some players were horsing around. "They are all humans out there. If a reporter asks, 'What do you think about Piazza–would you rather have Todd?' or 'What do you think of Todd coming back–would you rather have Mike?' they will take a side. And that's not even an option today. It's a future issue. But it does affect them."

High-Wire Act

The two men certainly have different personas, and they were on display at Shea during the Phillies series in mid-July. There was Mr. Hundley pausing to sign autographs for a pack of kids, letting a cigarette dangle from his lips to free up both hands. And there was Mr. Piazza, lounging on a couch in the clubhouse in his Nike slippers, ignoring a tape of Braves-Mets pitching sequences to watch a bootleg human-calamity video (rampaging horses, high-speed motorcycle crashes, etc.) with his new teammates. At one point, when the video showed a suicidal man falling hundreds of feet from a giant radio tower, Mr. Piazza said, earnestly, "Life can't be that bad. Can it?"

Not yet. But if the two catchers are the leading men in a Shea Stadium melodrama, there's an assortment of supporting players–the team's owners, less celebrated players and beat writers–who are warming to their respective roles. It's easy to believe that if the Mets continue to disappoint, if Mr. Piazza doesn't start piling on the R.B.I.'s, and if Mr. Hundley doesn't stop muffing line drives, Shea Stadium will quickly become the Flushing Zoo. Mr. Valentine, who squeezed 88 wins out of a less talented group last year, will get to find out who his allies are, and how much juice they have. And Marty Noble may not have to call upon his seven words.

The Mets' co-owners, Nelson Doubleday and Fred Wilpon, seem to have established themselves on either side of the Hundley-Piazza divide. Mr. Doubleday, the white-shoe scion of the Doubleday publishing family who splits his time among Florida, Nantucket and Locust Valley, L.I., is a Piazza man. And Mr. Wilpon, the self-made real estate developer from Brooklyn, is a Hundley man.

It was Mr. Doubleday who ordered the Mets' general manager, Steve Phillips, to make the trade for Mr. Piazza in response to the team's anemic performance at the plate and at the turnstiles. After distancing himself from the day-to-day running of the team, Mr. Doubleday has, over the past 12 months, reasserted himself as an executive in charge.

Meanwhile, Mr. Wilpon wasted little time positioning himself as a Hundley partisan. A few days after the trade, Mr. Wilpon invited Mr. Hundley to his home in Glen Cove, L.I., and gave him his 1986 World Series ring. The gesture said a lot–said more, really, than Mr. Wilpon's subsequent attempts to claim partial credit for the Piazza trade in the press.

At the end of the current season, Mr. Piazza can be a free agent, meaning he can sign with whichever team he chooses. In order to keep him in Queens, the Mets probably will have to offer him a contract at least as lucrative as the one Mr. Piazza turned down earlier this year in his last days as a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers: six years for $85 million, which would make him baseball's highest-paid player. And if the Mets shell out that kind of money, they'll have to figure out what to do with Todd Hundley.

Unlike their crosstown rivals in the Bronx, the Mets are an interesting bunch: John Olerud, the steady veteran who rarely speaks, hits for average and wears his modified batting helmet in the field (he had brain surgery nine years ago); Brian McRae, who spends an inordinate amount of time strutting around the clubhouse naked and wants to retire early to start a career as a broadcaster; Rey Ordonez, the Cuban émigré and dazzling shortstop who deems mere grounders an affront to his glove. There's pitcher Rick Reed, who defied skeptics by becoming an All-Star pitcher at age 33, pitcher Bill Pulsipher, the once-glittering prospect who's on Prozac, and outfielder Bernard Gilkey, who refuses to wear glasses or contact lenses even as his batting average wilts.

Choosing Sides

It was into this gashouse gang that Mr. Piazza, a bona fide big league star, landed, and the team's dynamics changed. The humans started picking sides.

Days after the Piazza trade, a mysterious story emerged: Someone in the Mets' front office was said to be concerned about Mr. Hundley's drinking habits, though no one was quoted saying so.

Three writers–Mr. Noble, Larry Rocca of The Star-Ledger and David Waldstein of the New York Post –learned of this concern at the same time, but held off until they could raise the issue with Mr. Hundley himself, given the sensitive nature of the information and the cynical timing of the leak (just after Mr. Piazza was brought in to fill Mr. Hundley's position).

Somehow, though, Mr. Noble contacted Mr. Hundley first. On Memorial Day, he let the catcher and his agent know that a story about the Mets' worries over his drinking, written by someone other than Mr. Noble, would be coming out the following day. Mr. Noble was giving Mr. Hundley a chance to respond.

Seth Levinson, the agent, confirmed that it was his and Mr. Hundley's understanding that somebody was going to publish a Hundley drinking story. "I was advised by Marty Noble that … there was going to be an article written by a New York writer or a story out of Los Angeles that would reveal the information provided by [an] anonymous Met," Mr. Levinson said.

Mr. Noble replied that "it would be an inaccurate choice of words to say I led him to believe another story was coming out. I knew other people knew. That's as much as I'm going to say."

In any case, Mr. Hundley gave Mr. Noble an interview. He angrily denied he had a problem. The other two reporters learned that Mr. Noble was moving ahead with his story, and went with reaction stories of their own. So on May 26, three newspapers published stories reacting to an initial story that actually never appeared, and may even have never existed.

Appalled and embarrassed by the reports, Mr. Phillips, the Mets' general manager, vowed to find the leaker, but many Met-watchers suspected it was an empty vow. Joel Sherman, the New York Post 's baseball columnist, asserted in a column that Mr. Phillips had "neither the spine nor the juice" to finger the source, essentially because the information probably came from a top executive in the Mets' management. Mr. Sherman also described an unnamed reporter as "unethical pond scum."

Everyone close to the Mets knew that Mr. Sherman was referring to Mr. Noble and the way in which Mr. Noble had pursued the Hundley story. (When questioned by The Observer , Mr. Sherman would not identify the pond scum to whom he was referring.)

Hey, What Are You Looking At?

"Motherfucking" is the baseball term for back-stabbing, and for beat reporters, motherfucking means bad-mouthing other reporters to those reporters' sources. It is one of the profession's cardinal sins, along with "cock-watching and looking at other writers' screens," as one writer put it. (Also forbidden: cheering in the press box and giving off any appearance that you actually enjoy what you do.)

This wasn't quite motherfucking, but it was close enough to touch off a nice little war in the press box. In a letter to the president of the Baseball Writers Association of America, Mr. Noble accused Mr. Sherman of threatening the Mets' general manager with bad press during an earlier conversation over sources. Presumably, he found out about these threats from the G.M. himself, who most likely saw Mr. Sherman's critique of the hunt for the Hundley leak as a delivery on the threat. It all became public, and the humans started picking sides.

And now, many of Mr. Noble's peers seem to have it out for him. And it's easy to believe that Mr. Valentine may be fanning the flames.

"After you're here awhile," Mr. Valentine said, "you, or at least I, get a feel for the people who have an agenda and for the people who have a job. If someone has a job, I don't ever keep them from doing it as well as they can, but when people have agendas, I try to keep them from fulfilling their prophecies–about my players, about me, about my team."

"There are these little wars on the beat all the time," said one writer. "What's unique about the Mets is, Valentine is an original. He changes things. He's bright and manipulative and suffers fools poorly."

And he does not get along with Mr. Noble. The two men don't speak to each other. This is not entirely unusual for Mr. Valentine, who has historically chosen to befriend some reporters while making enemies out of others. But it is unusual for Mr. Noble, who has always had solid working relationships with the Mets' managers, and who, after covering baseball in New York for 24 years, has such close contacts inside the organization that other Mets writers gleefully recall how in spring training this year, during a basketball game between the media and the Mets' management, he showed up and rooted loudly for the team brass.

Mr. Noble insisted he is not out to get Mr. Valentine. "You can't find one piece I've written that is out to get him," Mr. Noble said. "My stories are objective."

But he still has his seven words. What might they be?

"Like I'm gonna tell you?" Mr. Noble said.

If Mr. Valentine knows, he's not telling, either.