It seems to me there is something to be admired in the way that Bonds has conducted himself lately under all this contempt. I don't mean the sulky withdrawn angry bizarre part, but his stoicism. His unflinching response when Houston Astros' pitcher Russ Springer threw inside on him three times before hitting him, nearly beaning him, and got a standing ovation from the Astros fans for it, the jerks. Barry Bonds has managed to tune out alot of rage, not to hear it, not to let it bother him, or to try not anyway. Won't you give him that?

That wasn't even the good part: Jose Reyes, batting next, laid down a sacrifice bunt. Yankee catcher Jorge Posada charged up the first-base line, grabbed the ball, and threw it to Tino Martinez at first base. Koo, advancing to third base, got an idea. "I just noticed," he said after the game, through an interpreter, "that the pitcher and catcher were actually closer to first base."

"All of a sudden," outfielder Mike Cameron marveled in the Mets locker room, reliving the moment, "he's sprinting to the house."

Martinez, incredulous, fired back to Posada, in full retreat. The catcher applied a sweeping tag as Koo slid into home, fading away, his fingertips stretching for the plate. Technically, on replay, the tag seemed to get him. The umpire saw otherwise. The Mets led 3-0, on their way to a 7-1 victory.

"If he said 'safe,'" Koo said, when asked if the call had been correct, "isn't the guy safe?"

What you get, in baseball, is what you get. In the past weekend's collision of the Yankees and the Mets, you got a split decision in favor of the Yankees. But not by much.

The Yankees, after Sunday, had won 12 of their last 14 games. They had scored the most runs in the majors. The Mets had done neither. Yet the Flushing team and the Bronx one had the same record, at 23 and 21.

And the larger question is, who would you rather be, on the edge of summer in 2005? The Mets are young and erratic and haven't been to the playoffs since 2000. The Yankees are old and erratic and have been to the playoffs every year-but they haven't won a World Series since they beat the Mets, in 2000.

"Two hundred million doesn't go as far as it used to," a fan in a Tom Seaver shirt crowed Sunday afternoon, after the Mets had taken an early lead. The key play had been Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees' $250 million shortstop-cum-third-baseman, booting a two-out ground ball off the bat of Pedro Martinez, the Mets $53 million starting pitcher. As the ball bounced away, a clamor of pure sarcastic noise rose from the stands, subsiding into chants of "A-Rod! A-Rod!"

Rodriguez leads the majors in home runs and R.B.I., including a record-breaking three-home-run, 10-R.B.I. night in the Bronx earlier this year. Still, somehow, he reeks of failure. This year, he has been the worst defensive third baseman in the majors. In the Saturday game at Shea, he leaned too far off first base on a pitch in the dirt and got picked off-a graceless, humiliating pickoff, his gait falling apart as he tried to run in two directions at once, knees pumping, with great staggering clown strides. Earlier this year, at Yankee Stadium, a home fan sang along with "Jumpin' Jack Flash": "It's allll-riiight / 'Cause A-Rod sucks a bigfatdick." Little-boy Met fans call him "Gay-Rod."

How can the richest-and still possibly the greatest-player in baseball be such a sad sack? He is essentially a piece of surplus. In exchange for the chance to be a World Champion Yankee, he broke off a career as the best shortstop ever. He settled for a lesser position, third base, yielding the toughest spot on the field to Derek Jeter. It was, on some fundamental level, a chump move.

And there has been something chumpy and clunky about the Yankees as a team this season. Their offense is built, under impeccable modern-baseball reasoning, around patience and slugging. They work the count, take walks and wear out pitchers. When they get going, they're a steamroller.

The Mets' offense, on the other hand, is defective in theory, and often in games. Their shortstop and leadoff man, Jose Reyes, is all but incapable of drawing a walk. Their principal second baseman, Kazuo Matsui, can't walk either, and is nearly an automatic out. They are not afraid to hack away, and they do.

But against the Yankees' Randy Johnson, the Mets' unsound aggression was exactly what worked. Reyes, leading off the game, lashed a ball off Johnson for an infield hit. The following hitters, swinging early, sprayed hits everywhere: lining the ball hard to all fields, blooping it, pounding it to the ground for a high-bouncing Baltimore chop. The Mets had 12 hits off Johnson and a 4-0 lead, while the Yankees still waited to score.

Part of the Yankees' troubles, too, is that walks and home runs are among the last skills that aging ballplayers lose. And the Yankees aren't really aging-the Yankees are aged.

When people say a team has holes in it, they're usually speaking figuratively. But the holes in the Yankees are visible physical spaces: the alleys in right- and left-center; the circles of no-man's land behind the infield; the faraway arc by the fence line in deep center field, where Dae-Sung Koo deposited his double.

The Yankees had a chance to shore up their defense in the off-season. Carlos Beltran, the Houston Astros' then-27-year-old star center fielder, was becoming a free agent. But they chose to spend their money on pitchers instead, and Beltran landed with the Mets.

The decision was a rare failure of Yankee ruthlessness: They passed up the available superstar to save center field for the veteran Bernie Williams and the money for Randy Johnson. But Williams, fading, is now on part-time duty anyway. Hideki Matsui, shifted from left field, is working center most days, with Tony Womack, at age 35, trying to learn to play left.

However the players are deployed, the average Yankee is 34 years old. Opposing teams have been merciless about the Yankees' shortcomings, particularly in the outfield. They hit the ball in the gap and assume the best, hitting second base in full stride, digging for a triple.

"It's exciting," Mets manager Willie Randolph said after Saturday's game, in which Reyes had hit one over Bernie Williams' head and sped around to third base. "He's beautiful to watch."

But youth has its limitations. On Sunday afternoon, with the Mets leading 3-1 and five outs from winning the series, 22-year-old third baseman David Wright-who had dived into the stands to catch a foul ball with the bases loaded earlier-allowed the Yankees' Tony Womack to reach on an error. The next batter hit a perfect double-play ball to second base. Miguel Cairo flipped it toward Reyes, and the 21-year-old acrobat made an awkward backward pirouette, ending with the ball bouncing away.

Error. The runners were safe. Three batters later, after a two-run single by Hideki Matsui and a double by Williams, the Yankees led.

Afterward, the Yankees hailed the game as a turning point. "That's why you play nine innings," Rodriguez said. " … The team showed a lot of heart today." So far, though, the Yankees season has been one turning point after another: the 13-run inning, after George Steinbrenner chewed them out; the 11-1 win over Texas, after Jeter chewed them out; Rodriguez's big night; Bernie Williams' grand slam. And all the Jason Giambi noise. With patience, everything will get better. By most accounts, everything does keep getting better.

And they're still right there with the Mets.

Western swing music was playing in the Thumbelina-sized kitchen. Ms. Braun hummed along as she applied yellow food coloring with a small brush to a gigantic, nine-layer Styrofoam cake bound for the window of Henri Bendel. Enveloped in a smudged apron, her hair screwed up in a blue bandanna, Ms. Braun is a brown-eyed, fine-boned brunette with freckles that look as if they'd been sprinkled from a nutmeg shaker. For her 39th birthday on Oct. 17, she said, she wants a country fiddle.

Ms. Braun's work space is part apothecary's shop, part curio museum: little green bottles filled with almond and rose oils, small paintings of Madonnas, a tub of Crisco-for molding purposes only-and perhaps two dozen models of the decorator's signature and somewhat psychedelic cakes, which cost from $1,200 to $20,000. "God, I hate saying that," she said.

A 10-year-old white-pawed tabby named Francis (after the saint) was winding its way underfoot. At that moment, Ms. Braun's life seemed ideally suited to the post–Sept. 11 haze that has New Yorkers pausing to reconsider their Type A, fast-track ambitions. She has no storefront, no staff save for the occasional intern ("they basically just scrape chocolate off the walls," she said), and no Web site. Her long but fairly humble résumé includes gigs at Veniero's, the Italian bakery on 11th Street, and a Zen monastery in Yonkers. To finance stretches of art school, she slung eggs, balled melons and filled cannoli.

She met her husband, a psychologist and photographer originally from Texas, in the building. They were neighborly first, then friends. "I remember he told me a 45-minute joke," she said. "It was an airplane joke. No racial overtones, but very inappropriate." They share another apartment on the first floor-when they have fights, Ms. Braun just scampers up a few flights to her studio, which still has a bed-and plan to try for a pregnancy next year.

In the meantime, she has her other "baby": an expensive, gilt-edged book called Cakewalk: Adventures in Sugar with Margaret Braun that purportedly reveals her sleight of hand to the kitchen commoner. But what it reveals more plainly is Ms. Braun's fanciful, slightly loopy character. "When I see something beautiful, I want to eat it," she begins. Later, somewhat Diana Vreeland–ishly: "When in doubt, use polka dots." At one point, Ms. Braun goes on a narrative magic-carpet ride from a Chaucerian table in a brocaded frock, "reaching over steamy bowls of porpoise pye and turnypes, dipping my tassels in kettles of hot wine," to the shores of Pylos, "eating tripe and gnawing on ham bones with Odysseus."

Back in the West Village kitchen, Ms. Braun pried off her wedding ring with her mouth and was now kneading sugar paste and gaily daubing gold leaf. She was asked about Sylvia Weinstock, the other big brand name in New York City cakes. "It's a very different thing," she said. "Bless her heart, but I have such a different take on it. She's really good, she put the cake designer on the map, she's an amazing businesswoman. But it's not the kind of business that I really want to have."

Ms. Weinstock and her somewhat shabbier competitor, the Cupcake Cafe on West 39th Street, are known for their flowers. Ms. Braun isn't really a flower girl. One of her cakes was inspired by the lurid rubber decals of her childhood bathroom in Levittown, N.Y.; another by a pink and orange Miu Miu shoe. She is partial to motifs of sacrifice and flagellation, like The Scarlet Letter and the legend of St. Ursula, which involves the slaughter of 11,000 virgins. Her next big gig is an astronomically themed sugar sculpture for a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke at the Playboy Mansion.

She doesn't like it when clients ask her for replicas of their beloved objects. "My feeling is, about making things literally like another thing-unless it's purely for the camp value, it's not going to look that good," she said. "I like to have things be not quite as literal; I like to make something that's a little bit challenging to the eye. I don't do vehicles, I don't do computers, and I don't do buildings." She doesn't do cupcakes, either.

A few years ago, Ms. Braun went on Oprah and people began calling in the middle of the night. "A little Oprah goes a long way," she said. "Things can get wacky. If I think it's a bad idea, I won't do it. I kind of work alone, and I think it's pretty much going to always be that way. It needs to be enjoyable, because it's my life."

-Alexandra Jacobs

Army of One

If you're standing on the little island in the middle of 43rd and Broadway, there's all kinds of stuff to do. You can watch the traffic go by on both sides, feel the subway rattling underneath and get off on the energy. You can go see Apocalypse Now Redux. You can buy tickets for the Butthole Surfers at the W.W.F. Cafe or get some makeup at Sephora. Or you can enlist in the military.

That's what Jack Kasy was doing the other day when I met him coming out of the U.S. Armed Forces Recruiting Station.

"I'm not afraid, you know," Mr. Kasy said. "It's a perfect time to go for me-I want the experience."

Mr. Kasy, who is 18 years old, was dressed like a hip-hop performer, with an oversized white long-sleeved jersey and a Houston Astros baseball cap. He had blue eyes and his head was shaved, and he bore a passing resemblance to Timothy McVeigh.

What branch did he want to be in?

"I want to go to Marines," Mr. Kasy said. "I want to be in there. I want to be right in the Middle East, man."

We walked over to a Pizza Hut to talk some more. Mr. Kasy said he'd always been interested in the military, but after high school, he went to college instead-briefly. After Sept. 11, he decided he had to enlist.

"Part of it, I just wanted to get away from home, you know?" he said. "Maybe, you know, get my mind clear over there. It'll be tough, but if you go through that, you can go through everything."

He didn't sound particularly bloodthirsty.

"I wouldn't like to kill anyone," he said. "I'd just want to see how it is over there, what people go through, how it is, how the families live. What kind of struggle they have over there. See both points of view-how's it over here, and how's it over there."

He said he wasn't terribly worried about getting killed.

"You can't think about dying; you can die any minute," Mr. Kasy said. "It doesn't worry me, not at all. When I picture it, I see bullets going through my body and bombs. You never know-I might be the one who saves the world. Who knows?"

What was the worst thing he thought could happen over there in Afghanistan? "My whole unit getting blown up," he said.

Mr. Kasy said he'd like to be a war hero. "I always dreamt of going into the Marines since I was a little kid," he said. "With that gun and a uniform-on the Desert Storm, something like that. Dropping out of a helicopter. Something different! I don't want to be walking around with a 9-to-5 job, on the train in New York City."

Mr. Kasy sounded like he needed an adventure. He said he didn't have much fun in high school, even when he was hanging out with his friends, or "boys," as he called them.

Mr. Kasy's boys apparently think he's "bananas" for wanting to join the military.

Was he enlisting because of anger?

"Not at all, not at all," Mr. Kasy said. "If I wanted to, I'd go crazy on the streets …. I want to actually see it over there. It's like a free plane ticket over there." He smiled, raised his eyebrows. "That's another thing, you know what I mean?

"I want the training, too. I want to learn all those things, you know? Be prepared for everything," Mr. Kasy said. "Once you come out of the Marines, it's like you're better than the other person-literally. Most people don't know how to put a gun together, this or that, or whatever, save another life … you learn things over there that could be useful."

Mr. Kasy said he had to take an entrance exam, but he'd taken it once before and passed, so he was pretty confident he'd do it a second time.

Where was he off to now?

"Nowhere, pretty much," he said. "Walk around, head home, I guess. Gotta wait for a phone call from the Marines, then I'm going to take that exam …. I'll pass it again. Then I sign the contract-and I'm off."

-George Gurley

A reporter approached him to ask a question, but Mr. Bell put his hand up and said, very politely, "I'll be with you all in a minute. I got to get my coordination right."

There, lined up before him, were five pairs of Mauri alligator-skin shoes:tan-and-olive, lime-olive-white, yellow-brown, gray-slate and light-blue, and solid dark blue. Nearby were five matching alligator-skin belts. Five suits hung in his locker next to five shirts. He stood before it all, deciding which shoes went with which suits. His suits are custom-made; he wears them only once, before giving them away to friends. So it was very important that he get his coordination right.

"Yo Vinny!" he called out suddenly to Vinny Greco, the assistant equipment manager. "I need some hanging bags!"

The clubhouse guys are not yet quite accustomed to Mr. Bell. In fact, he has taken everyone by surprise. He came to the Mets as a throw-in in its December trade with the Houston Astros, when they got pitcher Mike Hampton. The Astros basically forced the Mets to take Mr. Bell and his bloated$5-million-per-year contract. At 31, he wasn't supposed to be all that good. Plagued by rib cage and groin injuries, he batted a dismal .236 last season, and bottomed out with the Houston media and the Astros fans after he slammed manager Larry Dierker in the press the day Mr. Dierker returned from brain surgery. Mr. Dierker had merely moved him down in the batting order.

But in his first month with the Mets, Mr. Bell has thrived. His .370 average is seventh in the National League, and he leads the league in hits. On April 24, he was named National League Player of the Week. In a six-game stretch he batted over .600.

What's more, he has added a little life to a clubhouse that's more mature than those in Shea's past, what with a brooding Mike Piazza, a moody Rickey Henderson and an Edgardo Alfonzo so focused he could almost make it as a Yankee. Into that hushed atmosphere comes Mr. Bell, the sad-eyed, hyperactive clown of New York baseball, with the soul of a 13-year-old and the old-man face of Mr. Magoo.

"He's a breath of fresh air," said Keith Hernandez, who played at Shea back in the free-wheeling days of Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry and Lenny Dykstra. "There are a lot of serious guys on that team. There's too much seriousness. He's just a character, and there should be more personalities like him in baseball."

"He's got a big, ol' heart," said Gene Pemberton, the Astros' team chaplain, who developed a close friendship with Mr. Bell when he was in Houston. "But when people start getting on him, it can get to him. You all can really rattle people's cages up there, can't you? He says it doesn't bother him, but wait 'til he gets in a little slump."

Something About Derek

"Titties!" Mr. Bell called out. He has a habit of calling out random lyrics to whatever hip-hop or rap song happens to be playing on the clubhouse stereo. Then he launched into a little rap of his own.

"I'm just Derek Bell," Mr. Bell said. "I come to the ballpark every day, I go home, I walk the streets with all the crowds in New York. And in New York, if you have good rapport with the media, you talk to 'em when they wanna talk to you, you know what I'm saying? There ain't no problem. You gotta do your job, I gotta do mine. If I fuck up, you gotta do your job. You know, you read the paper, and it says, 'Derek Bell made an error, cost them the game.' They read it while they're eating breakfast, or while they're drinking their coffee, or while they're, you know, on the toilet taking a shit. And guess what? Next paper comes out the next day, and you did something good, you know what I'm saying, they're gonna get the next paper the next day, and they're gonna read that. If some guy's an asshole to reporters, and he don't relate to them, that's when you're gonna get on their bad side. You might write something bad, but that ain't gonna stop you from being my friend, you know what I'm saying? Why should I be an asshole to you guys when you write about how I did something wrong, if I did something wrong, and I admit it, you know? It doesn't bother me."

Much of the time, Mr. Bell lives on his 63-foot yacht, the Bell 14, which is docked between piers 59 and 60 at Chelsea Piers. It's a sleek, white Sea Ray with a Yamaha XL1200 jet ski strapped to the stern. As for other accessories: he wears a gold necklace with a giant gold pendant, studded with diamonds, shaped like home plate with a big, gold baseball jutting out from it.

He grew up in the tough Belmont Heights section of Tampa, Fla. He and Little League teammate Gary Sheffield-now a star for the Los Angeles Dodgers-worshipped Mr. Sheffield's uncle, ex-Mets pitching ace Dwight Gooden, who wore No. 16. Today, it's Mr. Bell's number. He came up with the Toronto Blue Jays, then played in San Diego before moving to Houston.

There are times, he said, when he finds himself walking around Manhattan, near the Doubletree hotel in Times Square where he lives when he's not on the Bell 14, when he forgets he's famous. He's tough to miss, with his baggy eyes and shaved head. When people turn to look at him, he turns, too, to see what everyone is looking at.

"You know, I step outside to go to McDonald's or something, go to Wendy's, and people look and say, 'Oh!'" he said, imitating someone doing a double take. "And then I turn around and look, and then I remember, 'Oh, damn!' Because, you know, I'm out there walking around right there with everyone, waiting for the light to change."

Back in the clubhouse, before the game, his teammates were trickling in. They saw him getting his coordination right and started getting in on the act. Pitcher Pat Mahomes grabbed one of Mr. Bell's suit jackets and tried it on over his T-shirt, and did a little dance. Outfielder Jon Nunnally joined in. Clutching a can of Mountain Dew, Mr. Bell danced across the clubhouse to pitcher John Franco's locker, where a knob on the wall controls the volume of the clubhouse music. He cranked it up and danced away. Mr. Franco turned it back down.

At his locker, Mr. Bell assembled his road-trip entertainment. Dressed in his uniform pants, spikes and no shirt, he sorted through his stack of electronic equipment: portable CD player, video game machines, battery recharger, headphones and dozens of double-A batteries.

"Don't fuck with me!" he sang out, in unison with the music.

He grabbed a stack of about two-dozen DVD movies, including There's Something About Mary , Bowfinger and The Thirteenth Floor . He shoved in a book of 200 CD's, about 150 Sony PlayStation video games and a stack of brand-new discs from the likes of R&B crooners Carl Thomas and Gerald Levert.

"This is just for the plane," he said, not looking up as he focused on fitting everything neatly into his suitcases.

Then it was time to get ready to play. In the game, a 12-inning heartbreaker that the Mets lost, 2-1, Mr. Bell walked four times, struck out once and grounded out to the shortstop. The clubhouse afterward was sober, but not glum. Mr. Bell sat in front of his locker massaging the alligator-skin shoes he had decided to wear on the plane.

"Everybody's upbeat," he said. "We're not disappointed at all, by no means. We couldn't have won all these games."

Then Mr. Bell stood up and prepared to hit the showers. "I gotta shave my head," he said.