Mr. Megdal—who has previously reported for The Observer—wrote under the headline "A Note On Access And The Mets" that while the ball club has not blackballed The Journal News, they have stripped him of his press credentials with the team. He explains that while he's been credentialed by every major sports team in the New York market, the Mets are no longer going to be giving him access because, as his editor explained to him, they don't like his reporting.

Despite being a full-time sportswriter, Mr. Megdal writes for various outlets, and can't qualify for membership in the Baseball Writers Association of America, which guarantees member writers access.

The spokesperson for the New York Mets who Mr. Megdal's editor spoke with, Jay Horwitz, declined comment to The Observer regarding what, exactly, they didn't like about Mr. Megdel's reporting. It would seem that there is a history here, however.

It's implied in the blog post that the December publication of his eBook about the financial state of the New York Mets and their post-Madoff troubles is significant in this timeline, especially given the Mets' statement to the New York Post regarding the book:

“The author’s desperate self-promotional campaign for relevance has led to perpetuating baseless speculation and complete inaccuracies.”

While plenty of sports teams are well-versed in their antagonists—there's one in every city—a direct acknowledgement of them like that aren't too common.

To be fair, unlike some other New York teams, the Mets aren't exactly dictatorial with regards to their press corps. What extraordinary piece of information (or practice) does it take, exactly, for a reporter to be so patently disliked by a sports team to the point of an exceptional banning?

Whatever it is, one writer now knows the magic words. But it's not going to stop him from writing. Like most reporters, this may only serve as validation for him to soldier on:

I’ll continue to write about the interesting trends and possibilities on the field as well. Next month, I’ll be at spring training, and will report all that I see. I’ll continue to speak to my contacts within the industry, attend many games, and keep you on top of everything relevant that is happening with the New York Mets.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The saga of ineptitude in Queens continues apace

Any Mets fan can tell you that things just have a way of ending ugly around the franchise. Whether they be a family day at the ballpark (see: former closer Francisco Rodriguez attacking his girlfriend's father in the family lounge after a game), to epic collapses on the field (see: 2007, 2008), to careers that looked bright (see: too many to mention in parenthetics), it just seems like the team and the organization behind it can snap defeat from the jaws of victory at any time.

This feeling has pervaded the franchise and its fan base for almost a quarter of a century and the mystery behind its cause has been philosophically chocked up to the ineffable, existential pain of being the "other baseball team" in town.

But in a conference call today with David Einhorn, the wunderkind billionaire hedge fund manager of Greenlight Capital, some light was potentially shed on a more concrete cause of what ails "The Amazins." After a very public courtship and semi-public negotiations that seemed all but wrapped up, Mr. Einhorn announced this morning that he had broken off negotiations with Mets ownership after being unpleasantly "surprised" by the behavior of Fred Wilpon and company during the final days and weeks over what seemed to him like a done deal.

In his press release this morning Mr. Einhorn stated,

“I am disappointed to announce that I will not be purchasing an ownership interest in the New York Mets baseball team at this time. It is clear that it will not be possible for me to consummate the transaction on the terms that the Sterling-Mets organization and I originally agreed to several months ago. The extensive nature of changes that were proposed to me at the last minute has made a successful transaction impossible."

And during a conference call with reporters late this morning, Mr. Einhorn elaborated on those changes by unveiling his take on recent events, a first person narrative that unleashed a litany of bad faith behavior on the part of Mr. Wilpon and his partners that, if true, demonstrate a disturbing picture of how business is done inside CitiField.

Mr. Einhorn is claiming that the deal he proposed in April and was tenuously accepted by Mets ownership in the form of an exclusive negotiation agreement, would have entitled him only to a role of “offering ideas and advice while [the team] offering financial security” in the wake of their role in the Bernie Madoff scandal.

To that end, Einhorn believed that “everything seemed done in May” but talks lagged on until July, when Mets lenders got involved and talks turned more problematic, causing Mr. Einhorn and his team to work more closely with Mets bankers on the finer details of the deal.

According to Mr. Einhorn (and also reported in press at the time), while he finished negotiations with the team's lenders and investment bankers, the Wilpons re-opened talks with at least one other former bidder (who is believed to be Gelncore oil trader Ray Bartoszek), despite the exclusivity agreement that Mr. Einhorn believed was still being honored by both parties.

While the rumors shook Mr. Einhorn’s confidence in the Wilpons' good faith, he decided to “look past it” and continue with negotiations but did propose a new clause in the agreement that would have allowed Mr. Einhorn an easier and earlier departure from the investment “if the partnership wasn’t working out down the line.” The new clause was met with some negativity by Mets ownership when Mr. Einhorn requested it be included in the language of the deal to be ratified by Major League Baseball and its ownership group.

Despite the Mets hesitancy, Mr. Einhorn recently met with Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig to explain his stance on the new clause. Mr. Einhorn said he left that meeting feeling assured that Mr. Selig and the other owners would back the inclusion of the clause in any approved agreement. Mr. Einhorn admitted to having been somewhat frustrated by how the Mets ownership group was handling negotiations, but did not decide to pull out of the deal until he very recently learned that the Wilpons and their group had been “lobbying M.L.B. in secret to reject the clause in the final agreement.”

So today, with all the bad faith becoming too much to take, Mr. Einhorn is taking his metaphorical ball of equity (believed to have been around $200 million) and gone home. "I'm pulling out of this deal at this time," Mr. Einhorn said. "There is no longer any deal in place.”

The Observer asked if Mr. Einhorn had ever experienced similar dealings in his other business ventures. "In my experience, most deals that fall apart, fall apart at the end," he said. When pressed as to the particulars of this deal, he responded, "I'll admit, I was surprised." For the manager of a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund, that is a striking admission.

If what Mr. Einhorn claims happened in his four-month long association with the team and its ownership is the modus operandi of the organization itself, it would seem to be that long suffering fans can expect more pain as the Wilpons' shouts of "play ball!" are met with a deafening silence by investors who don't believe that they play fair.

tmcenery@observer.com

Of course, Mr. Picard isn't seeking redress for the team's ignominious standing in major-league baseball. Instead, he's going after Mets owner Fred Wilpon, Sterling Equities and others as part of his effort to collect ill-gotten profits from investors in the Madoff fraud. The Mets' owners have gained about $48 million -- or about two and a half years' salary for center fielder Carlos Beltran -- from the Ponzi scheme.

The Mets owners are the latest to join Mr. Picard's ever-growing list of defendants. JPMorgan Chase and HSBC are also recent entrants.

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

I grew up thinking that the natural order of things dictated that the Yankees belonged in the World Series. But Derek Jeter and I have both learned the hard way that other teams get to play and win in the Series too. Still, watching the Yankees in this year’s World Series feels to me like the planet has been restored to its proper orbit. What is there about baseball and New York that puts them in sync? I suppose some of it is that baseball is a 19th century sport, with plenty of time for contemplation and beer between plays. In the rest of the country, if people want to see smashing, crashing and fast-moving action, they check out football games or NASCAR. In New York, we just walk down Broadway.

For many, but especially for New Yorkers, the search for calm and a sense of connection to the past leads to baseball. That’s why some of us were so moved when Derek Jeter broke Lou Gehrig’s Yankee base hit record this summer. It was wonderful to see that someone whom we admire so much can somehow be connected to the guy who made the famous “luckiest man in the world” speech, way back when the world was filmed in black and white. The importance of baseball has never been better expressed than by the “Terrance Mann” character in the great baseball movie Field of Dreams:

“The one constant through all the years… has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past… It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again….”

Baseball appears again and again in our culture as a unifying symbol and set of images. Baseball is Jackie Robinson and the fight against Jim Crow. Baseball is the growth of the global economy and players from Latin America and Asia sharing a field of dreams with guys from Kansas. And baseball is the Yankees and New York City—from the “Bronx is burning” Reggie Jackson images of 1977 to the post-9-11 World Series against Arizona that was emblematic of the tenacity and toughness of New York.

This year, the cultural touchstone for the World Series may very well end up being the rap star Jay-Z. I admit that most rap songs don’t move me, but ever since I heard Jay-Z and Alicia Keys sing “Empire State of Mind” a few weeks ago.  I have not been able to get those lyrics or melodies out of my head.  As with all great art, the song has captured the sound and feel of this place perfectly. Jay-Z has created an indelible image of New York City in 2009.  Watching his performance at Yankee Stadium before the second game of the World Series the other night, with the Yankees looking on, was simply amazing.

New York City has a reputation for being a cold and unforgiving place, but those of us who have been here a long time know that is simply not true. This place gives and receives great loyalty and heart, and one sign of that spirit is the number of Yankee caps and A-Rod t-shirts you see all over town these days. Jay-Z may be able to “make the Yankee hat more famous than a Yankee can,” but all he’s really pointing out is that the cap and the team are just a part of this place. The “streets that can make you feel brand new” are bigger than the Yankees and bigger than rap music. They are what David Dinkins once called a “gorgeous mosaic.” Each community in the city is distinct and identifiable, but when you step back and look at the whole, it provides an image of great beauty. This is a unique place where the entire world gathers to meet, learn, have fun, make a living and, of course, watch the game.

On Monday afternoon, Mets general manager Omar Minaya held a press conference to announce that the director of player development, Tony Bernazard, was being let go. This came days after Daily News Mets beat reporter Adam Rubin broke a story that Mr. Bernazard had taken his shirt off in front of a bunch of minor leaguers and told them to take a swing at him. When they didn’t, he called them a bunch of pussies.

At the press conference, Mr. Minaya spoke about the firing, and then, oddly, brought up Mr. Rubin.

At first, Mr. Rubin thought he was getting an awkward compliment for bringing the Bernazard fight story to the light of day, he told a reporter at SNY. Instead, most bizarrely, Mr. Minaya announced that Mr. Rubin was lobbying for a job in the Mets player-development department.

When a shaken Mr. Rubin grabbed a microphone to say he found the allegation “despicable,” he asked whether Mr. Minaya was implying that he’d written the shirt-lifting story because he wanted to take Mr. Bernazard’s job.

Mr. Minaya said no, but didn’t explain why he brought it up at all.

When the press conference ended, Mr. Rubin admitted that he had spoken with Mets owner Jeff Wilpon about getting a job in baseball—but not specifically with the Mets. The Mets did not produce incriminating emails.

Enough said. Mr. Rubin was pronounced innocent. And Mr. Minaya’s obituary was being prepared.

“How many more days are there until Omar Minaya is asked to step down as general manager of the Mets?” wrote Jay Schreiber on The Times’ baseball blog, Bats, Tuesday afternoon.

“On the subject of losing jobs, Minaya clearly is in the crosshairs now,” wrote the Post’s Joel Sherman.

“He will not survive this,” declared Buster Olney, the ESPN.com writer who used to cover the Mets for The Times.

Mr. Minaya might learn this lesson too late, but here it is anyway: Don’t blame the press. And, in New York, never, ever mess with sports reporters in front of other sports reporters.

“Sports reporting has a very unique atmosphere—it follows byzantine rules and standards,” said veteran PR man Ken Sunshine. “There is a lot of clannishness. They compete mightily, but there’s a different clannishness as opposed to entertainment reporters or political reporters. … A lot of these guy travel together—they’re together for a long time. There’s a special bond there.”

“I think you saw it—everyone stuck up for [Adam],” said Bob Klapisch, a columnist for the Record of Bergen County who back in the 1990s was threatened by Mets outfielder Bobby Bonilla in the clubhouse, in a moment that seemed to forever symbolize the lowly Mets of the early ’90s.

“There’s a better time and place for that,” said Harvey Araton, the veteran sports columnist for The Times who, next week, will start writing culture features. “You can talk to the reporter’s editor. You can sit the reporter down and talk to him about it. But to go public like that? It just seems like they were lashing back at the messenger, and to me that makes them look small.”

Instead of Day 2 stories on the Mets recent winning streak, everyone piled on Mr. Minaya. And those pesky sports reporters, meanwhile, wondered how they could ever trust him again.

“How do you talk to Omar now without thinking that something is gonna be on, off or whatever the record?” said Ron Darling, the Mets broadcaster on SNY, hours after the press conference. (Mr. Darling graced the cover of the Observer a few weeks back.)

“The Mets message is now this,” said Mr. Klapisch. “If you write the truth, we’re going to hurt you in the way that you hurt us. We’ll find a way to embarrass you. Everything you thought that was discussed privately, we’ll air it out and hurt you.”

But if that was the goal, the only thing they achieved was alienating New York sports reporters. The Daily News, however, is sanguine about the whole thing.

“Adam Rubin’s personal conversations about his career, while perhaps naïve, were not an ethical breach and have certainly never compromised his coverage of the Mets,” wrote News editor Martin Dunn to The Observer. “The bottom line is Adam uncovered a blockbuster sports story, which was very damaging to the Mets, and every other media organization in the city and beyond had to follow his exclusives. Adam will continue covering the Mets and we fully expect him to get the same co-operation and access he has always received from the team.”

jkoblin@observer.com

Late-night heroics didn’t appear to be anywhere on the horizon, but the Mets broadcasting triumvirate of Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling were on TV, and—as has often been this case during this disappointing season—were picking up the slack.

Keith: Ahh-chooo!

Gary: Bless you.

Keith: Did you hear that? I put on my cough button!

Gary: You were a little late.

Keith: I was tardy?

Ron: Were you tardy?

Gary: Your sneeze was in the catcher’s mitt.

Keith: It’s one of those sneezes that sneaks up on you!

A minute passed, and Mr. Cohen said, “Do you have something in your hand, Keith?”

The camera turned to the Mets broadcast booth above home plate. There was Mr. Hernandez, glasses pinched at his nose like a librarian, but still unmistakably the former star Mets first baseman from the 1980s—bushy mustache, a jock’s chest, dark hair, a head the size of a melon—holding a tiny silver box with a big red button in the middle.

The camera shot eventually turned back to the field. The announcers didn’t.

Keith: You know what happened to me once? I pressed the wrong button, and I thought I had the cough button on and I didn’t.

Ron: You pushed my button!

Gary: In other words, something went onto the air that wasn’t supposed to.

Keith: It wasn’t anything that got me into trouble.

Ron: On TV, Keith, you can say anything once.

Gary: Yeah, that’s true.

Keith: Are you sure?

Ron: Yeah, I’m sure!

Gary: You can say whatever you want right now! We just might not see you tomorrow.

The old adage for a good broadcast is that when things are going well, it’s like you’re having a conversation with the viewer at home.

Keith and Gary and Ron have done just that over the past four years, for 60 games a season, and about another 90 games using some combination of two of them. But the viewer they’re talking to is jaded, and cosmopolitan, and, not infrequently, a little bored with the Mets.

Keith and Gary and Ron don’t pull for their team. They remark, cruelly and accurately, on the Mets’ poor play. They voluntarily discuss the Mets’ horrific collapses of the last two Septembers. They digress.

This wouldn’t work in St. Louis, where approximately 100 percent of the supposed best fans in baseball wear red to the games, or on the North Side of Chicago, where there is a rich tradition of homerism in the booth. Nor would it work in the Bronx or in Boston, where the fans crave reinforcement of a smug certainty that their organization is different, and special, and superior.

What Keith and Gary and Ron do is something less obvious, and more difficult.

“They reflect the Mets fans’ mentality,” said Greg Prince, co-author of the excellent Mets fan blog Faith and Fear in Flushing. “Being a Mets fan is recognizing reality and accepting sometimes that things are too funny to be sad and sometimes too sad to be funny. It comes across in the three of them.”

Back in the booth, Mr. Cohen took a stab at returning to baseball.

“The Mets are trying to avoid being one-hit for the first time in nearly three years,” he said.

“We’re trying to avoid the highlight of this program being the audio-box display,” Mr. Darling responded.

IN MANY BOOTHS around the league, the announcers have clearly defined roles: The play-by-play man with a broadcast-ready voice stares at the field and describes what happens to the baseball. The ESPN (and former Mets) announcer Dave O’Brien is perhaps the model straight man: great, deep voice; no affect. Balls, strikes, hits, double plays.

The announcer next to him, almost always a retired player, explains why the baseball went where it went. Today’s color analysts are typified by ESPN’s Joe Morgan and (disastrously unsuccessful former Mets general manager) Steve Phillips. Too often, they are heavy on cliché and manufactured attitude, and light on original insight.

On the Yankee-owned YES Network, there is Michael Kay—a fast-talking, abrasive former newspaper reporter. He is usually put on air with people like David Cone and Al Leiter, former players who were beat-reporter favorites.

During a lull in a recent Yankees-Mets game, Mr. Kay, Mr. Cone and Mr. Leiter spent two minutes debating the designated hitter rule in earnest. It was nothing a 10-year-old fan wouldn’t have heard a dozen times.

On Sports Net New York, the four-year-old network started by the Mets, Gary, Ron and Keith were talking, intensely, about the aesthetics of their favorite out-of-town scoreboards. It was strange and funny.

ALL THREE MEN are instantly familiar to Mets fans. Mr. Cohen, 51, has been the sharp, intellectual and crisp-voiced announcer for the Mets radio station WFAN since 1989; Mr. Hernandez, 55, and Mr. Darling, 48, were the star first baseman and a star pitcher, respectively, on that ’80s team. Two-thirds of the booth attended Ivy League schools. (Mr. Cohen went to Columbia; Mr. Darling, a native of Hawaii, attended Yale until after his junior year, when he was drafted.) Mr. Hernandez was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals in 1971, when he was 18, but affects the sardonic air of an intellectual hippie. He is from San Francisco.

Gary is competent; Ron is incisive; Keith is subversive.

“The moment of revelation for me was when I realized that we are better as a threesome than any combination of the twosome,” said Mr. Cohen.

It was a few hours before the cough-button incident, and the Mets and Yankees were gearing up to take the field. We were inside the SNY broadcast booth at Citi Field, which is cramped, but right above home plate with an expansive, nearly perfect view of the field. Mr. Cohen was sitting behind a desk filling out the lineups on his scorecard; Mr. Darling was sitting to his right; and Mr. Hernandez was pacing around, quietly groaning about pain in his leg.

“Somehow it works,” Mr. Cohen said. “We don’t script any of it. There’s not one word for three hours we’re planning, but somehow it all works. It’s more … It’s more? What do you say? Free-form jazz?”

“Yeah, Yeah! It’s free-form jazz,” said Mr. Darling. “There are producers that will literally say, ‘Gary, I need you to get Keith right now.’ We don’t have that.”

Mr. Hernandez let the back of his head bounce gently against a wall.

“I had always been warned about traffic,” Mr. Darling continued. “Traffic, traffic, traffic. ‘In a three-man booth, there’s going to be all this noise and you gotta watch out never to talk over each other.’ That’s something that hasn’t happened here and it hasn’t happened since day one. I think that’s unusual.”

It is.

Tom Seaver, the Franchise, the Mets’ only Hall of Famer and maybe the most popular player in team history, took over the booth in the late ’90s, and it was a terrible bore. He was condescending, he talked down to players—you’d never get away with that in my day—and his ego dominated the broadcast.

The current team prides itself on being uncompetitive about airtime.

“To me, the game comes first, and everything else springs from there,” continued Mr. Cohen. “It’s not like I’m thinking, ‘I have to get an anecdote in or I have to talk about this.’ It’s not the way it works. Something happens in the game and Keith says something that makes Ronnie think of something that makes me think of something and then we get focused on the game and then we get back to where we were and then before you know it the inning is over.”

During the sixth inning of the game that night, Yankees pitcher A. J. Burnett was working on a no-hitter against the Mets until Alex Cora delivered the Mets lone single, a solid line drive that landed in center field.

Gary and Ron talked about how deflating it is for a pitcher when he’s working on a no-hitter and loses it. Inevitably, the conversation turned to the time the Mets—who have, amazingly, never had a no-hitter—came their closest to one: a game in July 1969, when Tom Seaver was two outs away only to surrender a left-center hit to the Cubs’ reserve man, Jimmy Qualls. 

“Seaver looked like he wanted to go and strangle Jimmy Qualls,” said Ron. “That’s the look he gave.”

Silence.

Keith: “He’s a winemaker now—Thomas.”

Ron: “Don’t forget Nancy Chardonnay.”

It was a reference to the wine Seaver named after his wife.

Keith: “It’s Nancy Fancy—it’s a red.”

Ron: “Oh, it is? I thought it was a char.”

Keith: “It’s like a petite sirah, almost.”

Gary: “Are you oenophiles done?”

Ron: “It’s a blend, right?”

They all laughed.

Keith: “Sorry, Gar.”

Gary: “It all tastes the same to me.”

More silence.

Keith: “I had a splendid Joseph Phelps the other night!”

Gary: “Reyes down swinging, and that’s seven strikeouts for Burnett.”

MR COHEN, a tall, balding, pencil-necked New York native who used to call soccer games with George Stephanopoulos at Columbia, is the passionately opinionated baseball historian. He was trained as a radio guy, only switching to television in 2006.

“From the beginning, I remember just looking at him and being like, ‘Oooooh! That’s pretty darn good,’” said Ron Darling. “His call is so strong.”

For years now, when a ball flies over the fence, Mr. Cohen won’t say “It’s gone!” or “It’s a homer!” or “Kiss that baby goodbye!” It is always, always—Mets or opponent—“And it’s OUTTA HERE.”

“There was a game in Flushing at Shea,” Mr. Darling said, “that Carlos Beltran ended a 16-inning game against the Phillies and it had been a long game, but a great game, and Gary’s call was ‘It’s outta here! And we’re going home.’ Was that the call, Gary?”

Mr. Cohen looked up from his scorecard and nodded.

Interestingly, Mr. Cohen does a number of things wrong when he calls games on TV. When you’re on the radio, you announce that the catcher is set up on the inside corner and the pitch is a back-door slider and the hitter is jammed and the ball goes down the third-base line and David Wright back-hands the ball and makes an off-balance throw that Daniel Murphy scoops on one hop to beat the runner by a step. On television, where the producers and the cameramen do the hard part for you, you probably should say nothing other than: “Grounder. Back-hand. Out.”

Mr. Cohen often forgets this.

“I still think in radio,” said Mr. Cohen. “I have to translate in TV, which means talking less and playing with others.”

MR. DARLING HAD a rough transition at first to the broadcast booth. After a stint with Fox Sports at the beginning of the decade, he called games for the Oakland A’s, and then for the Washington Nationals.

“When I watched that demo tape from Washington, I said, ‘Oooh! We gotta lot of work to do,’” said Gregg Picker, the producer of Mets games on SNY.

Mr. Darling is now invluable: a pitching specialist who has gotten very good at explaining the overall mechanics of the game to viewers. But he is still the most self-conscious of the three in the booth. During the Yankees game, he began a story with two outs—a no-no—and actually said, “Oh, I’m starting a story with two outs. O.K., well …”

Mr. Hernandez is the least predictable element. He was known for his intensity as a player, but his participation in the broadcast is … casual.

Consider this moment in 2006, preserved on Metsblog.com, when the Mets were playing the Rockies and leading 10-3 in the top of the ninth inning:

Hernandez: Are you getting hungry?

Cohen: No, actually, I had a pretty big dinner. You?

Hernandez: I’m starved.

Cohen: You’re always starved. … And there’s ball four.  … You know, they have really good food here at the ball park.

Hernandez: No …

Cohen: Would you like me to go out and get you something?

Hernandez: I’m gonna head over to the steakhouse after this …

Cohen: Because they have really good fajitas in the back.

Hernandez: … and I’m gonna order a bottle of wine, with my daughter, and my wife, and I’m gonna savor it, after this debacle of a game.

Cohen: Are you saying you haven’t enjoyed the quality of play tonight?

Hernandez: No, I have not … but I will enjoy the quality of the red wine.

Cohen: Would you like to have tonight’s winning pitcher pick it out for you?

Hernandez: No, no, I can pick it out myself.

Cohen: O.K., I just didn’t know if your wine-picking credentials were up to snuff. … Nothing and one to Jose Valentin … A red or a white?

Hernandez: Oh, a red, a big, hearty, heavy, spicy red, maybe a red zinfandel … My stomach is growling, I’m so hungry.

Cohen: Wow, that’s out there. … Zero-one to Valentin, who’s one for four on the night … Now, are you thinking rib-eye, or …

Hernandez: No, I never eat heavy at night. … I may drink heavy, but I never eat heavy at night.

Cohen: O.K., thanks for sharing. … See you in the morning. … One-two to Valentin … Maybe have some shrimp … The Mets looking to tack on, they lead in the ninth.

Hernandez: [sighing] Wait, there’s nobody out? [sighing]

Cohen: You just noticed that? Oh, boy.

Last month, late in a game that took place a week before the Mets’ 5-0 loss to their crosstown rivals, the Yankees were beating the Mets 15-0.

Mr. Cohen and Mr. Darling were talking about historic Mets blowouts in which the team, out of desperation, or indifference, brought position players in off the bench to pitch: Matt Franco in 1999 against the Braves; Derek Bell the following season. Mr. Darling revealed a secret about Darryl Strawberry having thrown 80 miles per hour from the mound before a game in Montreal and hurting his arm for a few days. Purposefully dorky stuff.

Gary: So there’s plenty of history on the line. You don’t want to tune away and miss something historic. Right?

Ron: It won’t be for our call of the game!

Gary: Besides, you never know what Keith might say.

Keith: I wasn’t paying attention.

[laughter]

Ron: Right answer!

Keith: You guys lost me a while ago.

jkoblin@observer.com

Memo to Major League Baseball: Next season, if you want to put the Yankees-Mets series center stage, don’t schedule the games immediately after the Yankees play the Red Sox and the Mets play the Phillies. No Yankees-Mets series could ever be meaningless, but the one that starts tonight comes as close to feeling anticlimactic as any series played in mid-June.

The Mets are in worse shape than the Yankees, but ought to feel better about themselves, having won at least one game against their main rivals even with a depleted lineup. At 31-27, they’re four games behind the Phillies, but many of those games have been played without their best (or at least most exciting) player, Jose Reyes, who has appeared in just 36 games, and without Carlos Delgado, who’s played in just 26. (Yesterday’s injury report says he’s “riding an exercise bike but won’t be swinging a bat for at least another three weeks.”)  Without these two in the batting order, the Mets aren’t exactly punchless, but they’re wearing 12-ounce gloves.

A little more than a third of the season may not be adequate for a precise sampling, but Citi Field might have completely done a jiu-jitsu on traditional analysis of the Mets. 

When they played their home games in Shea, they were performing in one of the two best pitchers’ parks in MLB (the other being Dodger Stadium). The Mets sometimes had one of the best hitting teams in the league, but you didn’t know it until you looked at their road numbers. Now, all that has turned around. At Citi Field, where they’re 18-11, they’ve hit .285 with 21 home runs for a slugging average of .428.  In all other National League parks, they’re only 13-16 with 16 home runs. a .272 BA. and a .390 SA. Their power numbers aren’t great at home, but they’re positively anemic on the road, and the road numbers are usually the best gauge of a team’s hitting ability.

The bad news for Mets fans is that the team has just two power sources, though they are outstanding. Carlos Beltran is hitting .341 with eight home runs and a .561 slugging percentage, and David Wright goes into the Yankees series at .362 with four home runs and .528 slugging.  In truth, Wright has been a puzzle: He may wind up with the highest single-season batting average in team history, but his four home runs are about half of what he should have hit at this point.

And here’s the real bad news: All Mets not named Wright or Beltran are batting just .259 with 25 home runs.

The Yankees, too, have a batting order that appears more potent than it is because of their new home park. Though their batting average is actually slightly better on the road (.279 to .270 at the new park), their power is much greater at home (57-38 and a slugging average of .497 at home, to .460 away).  The Yankee hitters are well suited to this ballpark, and it shows:  they’re 18-11 at home, just like the Mets at Citifield, and a mediocre 16-15 in other AL ballparks.

So, designated hitter or not, the Yankees are a much better hitting team than the Mets, even though the Mets are out-hitting them by three points, .278 to .275.  The difference is power. Speed, too:  The Yanks have stolen 42 bases in 51 tries for an excellent success rate of 82.4 percent while the Mets are 60-19—but without Reyes, who has stolen 11 of 13 so far, they are 49-17, for 74.2 precent.

But the real difference between the Mets and the Yankees isn’t power; it’s that the  Mets have aces in both the starting rotation and the bullpen and the Yankees don’t. It would be hard to overestimate Johan Santana’s value to the Mets.  Take away his 8-3 record and the rest of the staff is 23-24.  If you take him out of the rotation and replace him with the average NL starter, the Mets would be out of the pennant race.  Johan’s 79 innings pitched are 15.2 percent of the entire staff’s total, and his 91 strikeouts represent 23 percent.

With J. J. Putz now on the DL, Francisco Rodriguez has all 16 saves chalked up by the bullpen that will be facing the Yankees this weekend.  It’s a sobering thought that both Santana and Rodriguez were free-agent acquisitions. Within their own organization, the Mets have been virtually unable to produce a single first-rate pitcher, either starter or reliever.

How good are Santana and K-Rod?  With them, the Mets go into tonight’s game with the seventh best overall ERA in MLB.  Without them, they’d probably be as bad as the Yankees. 

During the offseason, the Yankees spent the GNP of a Central American nation to improve their pitching staff, and as they go into the first Subway Series, it’s substantially worse than it was last year.

The Yanks are 27th in the major leagues in ERA at 4.85 (they finished 2008 at 4.28). Much has been made of a couple of disastrous relief efforts from Mariano Rivera. What’s been overlooked is that even if Mo had been at the top of his form, the Yanks would have a lousy bullpen. After 58 games, the relievers have an ERA of 4.69, 25th overall and well behind the Red Sox (first at 2.88), the Mets (second at 2.98), the Tampa Bay Bucs (10th, 3.84), the Kansas City Royals (21st at 4.44) and even the Baltimore Orioles (24th, 4.67).  The bullpen has been the plague of the Yankees in this decade; the inability of the Steinbrenners’ farm system  to produce even a couple of competent relievers is essentially what cost Joe Torre his job, and it will probably be what costs Joe Girardi his.

As for the starters, no matter how you look at it, C. C. Sabathia has been a disappointment, just 5-4 so far with an ERA of 3.68 and only 67 strikeouts in 93 innings. You assume he’ll do better as the season goes on, but A. J. Burnett (4-3 with an ERA of 4.89) probably will not. If he pitches well tonight, Joba Chamberlain (3-1 with 55 strikeouts in 59.1 innings) could emerge as the ace of the staff.  With Chien-Ming Wang bafflingly ineffective, Andy Pettitte just a shade below mediocre (despite his 6-2 W-L record, he’s given up 82 hits in 74.2 innings), and Phil Hughes erratic despite flashes of brilliance, there doesn’t seem to be any other potential big-gamers on the roster.  

Essentially the Yankees’ season should come down to this: Either Wang will recover or Hughes will become the star the Yankees thought he would be three years ago. If neither happens, the Yanks have no chance to overtake the Red Sox.

No one playing ball in New York wants to lose a Yankee-Mets series, but this weekend, all the players with NY on their caps may be a little distracted.  Some of their attention may be directed to the scoreboard and the games at Citizens Bank Park, where the Red Sox are playing the Phillies. 

As in: 40 years ago, 1969. Richard Nixon had been elected president with bullet-headed, venom-spouting know-nothing Spiro Agnew as his vice president; the war in Vietnam was in full throttle; New York had lost its Senator Robert F. Kennedy; America’s cities were on the precipice of destruction; New York itself was churning as the white working class rose up, black communities roiled and city services creaked to a halt. The impossibly handsome mayor, blue-eyed, crooked-toothed WASP Republican John Lindsay, who had been elected as the white knight of urban politics in 1965, was running for reelection and had lost his primary to Senator John Marchi of Staten Island. He was suddenly a man without a party line.

The New York Yankees were playing without Mickey Mantle for the first time since 1950.

New York City, exhausted, filthy, hot, wheezing, broke and worn out, had gone from being the greatest city of winners in the world to looking like a grimy city of losers. The next mayor of New York was about to be an angry tough conservative Democrat with a pencil moustache named Mario Procaccino, who was pictured on the cover of Time leading the white working class as they stormed the Bastille of New York power.

And then history sneezed. For one weird, hot summer, events became a mad spasm in New York City.

There was, of course, the fact that man was about to drop his first boot on the moon. There was the massive, naked, muddy majesty of Woodstock, which was a cultural shock to the American consciousness.

But mostly the story of New York City in 1969 was the mysterious convergence of two weird partners: the scampy New York Mets and the aristocratic prep-schooled, Yale-educated, baseball-innocent mayor, John Lindsay. 

The New York Mets, managed by the former Brooklyn Dodgers all-star first baseman Gil Hodges, began winning games, led by their two young starting pitchers, Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman. And John V. Lindsay began to gain in the polls as the New York tradition of white limousine liberals, working-class voters and the black community began to assert itself.

“Locally, the city is being torn apart,” said Jay Kriegel, then a driven, black-spectacled aide to Mayor Lindsay in his City Hall Camelot. “Conflicts are raging. You go through a transit strike, three teachers’ strikes, the teamsters are opening up drawbridges so people can’t cross them by day. It was crazy!”

“I was chief of staff to Senator Jacob Javits and I knew John Lindsay from a few meetings at state caucuses,” said Richard Aurelio, Mr. Lindsay’s campaign manager that year. “He asked me, I guess, in the spring of ’69 to run his campaign. He showed me the polls, which had him at a very low margin.”

Mr. Aurelio immediately recommended that he forgo running from the Republican primary—he felt there wasn’t a chance he could win. But the base of Mr. Lindsay’s home district—the so-called Silk Stocking 17th Congressional District—insisted he run. He lost to John Marchi.

“Primary night when it was announced Marchi had won, it was one of the most dispiriting nights in my life,” said Sid Davidoff, the deputy campaign manager. “We had come in there as the first Republican mayor in forever and then we lost that primary.”

“The polls asked: What do you most dislike about John Lindsay?” said Mr. Aurelio. And the polls said “he was too preferential to the blacks, to minorities. That struck me as being just as something we could turn around. My experience in New York was that New Yorkers had a social conscience, and this to me seemed a little bit bizarre and atypical of the real New York that I knew. And so I agreed to take it on.”

“I thought there had to be three elements to our campaign:

“One he had to acknowledge mistakes in his first term in a way to humble himself; we had to bring him down to size,” he said. “You know, he was a huge in a kind of high-class elegant way and he was tall, handsome. We had to bring him down to size and show a little bit of humbleness.”

“One of the knocks on Lindsay was that he was an elitist and a tall guy in a suit who was out of touch with us,” said Ken Auletta, the New Yorker writer who was then a speechwriter for Democrat Howard Samuels. “Then he was in this ad where he appeared facing the camera, which was unusual then, with his sleeves rolled up, and he apologized and he was talking about the mistakes he made. It was a very compelling ad.”

“Two, his campaign had to be based on confronting the hostile neighborhoods, not his base,” said Mr. Aurelio. “We weren’t going to spend any time at rallies where he was going to be cheered. We were going to go to the boroughs where most of the hostility occurred. We were going to confront the people in Queens who were angry about the snowstorm and the Brooklyn Jewish neighborhoods that were angry about the decentralization ideas and his preference for the black neighborhoods. We needed to prick their conscience.

“Three, was his willingness to come out against Vietnam, which was unpopular in New York.”

But most of all, John Lindsay benefited from his competition.

There was Mario Procaccino, the Akim Tamiroff look-alike, a Bronx-native who was the city comptroller.

“The setup encouraged me the day after the primary,” said Mr. Aurelio. “We were essentially running against two conservatives. We had Procaccino and Marchi, two Italians, and they were kind of splitting the Italian-American vote and they were splitting the conservative vote, and splitting the anti-Lindsay vote. Procaccino … was linked to the old Democratic organizations and the so-called Democratic bosses, which were gradually losing their power. Marchi was a clear conservative and endorsed by Bill Buckley and that crowd.”

“Procaccino didn’t fit the occasion!” said Jimmy Breslin, the journalist who wrote New York magazine’s epochal piece “Is Lindsay Too Tall to Be Mayor?” that summer. “He’s your mayor? That fucking midget Procaccino would have said something crazy.”

“Procaccino was a funny-looking man and he was a total joke,” said Ronnie Eldridge, now married to Mr. Breslin, and a point person in recruiting Democrats to Mr. Lindsay’s campaign in the summer of 1969.

“Procaccino was a blustery guy and he had an attitude about other Democrats: fuck ’em,” said Mr. Auletta. “He didn’t reach out to Democrats. He was short, but he was also a very small man. Lindsay immediately had the sympathy of Democrats everywhere.”

One of those Democrats was Mr. Auletta’s boss, Howard Samuels. Mr. Samuels, along with a handful of others, like future Congresswoman Bella Abzug, defected to support Mr. Lindsay. Meanwhile, Mr. Aurielo secured Alex Rose, the man who ran the Liberal Party—the still-powerful vessel of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New York—to give their nomination to Mr. Lindsay.

“We had Democratic support, even though there weren’t a lot of them, and we scheduled their endorsements on almost a daily basis,” said Mr. Aurelio. “You got the impression that they were all supporting him even though there were 20 to 30 figures who backed him.”

“Somebody asked Frank Hogan”—the almost-permanent district attorney of New York—“at Gracie Mansion, at some freakin’ meeting, about John Lindsay,” said Jimmy Breslin, “and he said in the parking lot that Lindsay was the best mayor for the law enforcement we’ve had. Hogan’s name at that time was priceless. He was the big name in law enforcement in fucking America for crying out loud!

“It shut up a lot of people at once. Anybody that thought he was the limp-wristed John Lindsay, who won’t protect you from the blacks, the crimes, this and that, it shut everybody up.”

Then Golda Meir visited. The American-raised Israeli had become prime minister on St. Patrick’s Day and was a New York folk hero in the greatest Jewish city in the world. “The event that meant most to me was when Golda Meir came to New York City,” said Mr. Kriegel. “She is the pope for the Jewish community.”

Mr. Lindsay and his staff knew that she was set to come to the city. She would be coming in the early fall, right after Yom Kippur, and he wanted to plan a Sukkoth.

“Golda Meir is coming, we should build a sukkah and welcome Golda Meir to a state dinner run by John Lindsay,” said Mr. Davidoff. “So I’m looking at John Lindsay, this big WASP, and I’ve got to go and explain a sukkah to John and Mary Lindsay. Mary was very formal in a lot of ways, but when it came to stuff like that, she was like a diplomat’s wife. She understood that a state dinner should be at Lincoln Center.”

The Lindsay people understood that the Jewish middle-class Brooklyn and Queens base that felt so alienated by Mr. Lindsay, could be turned around. They would throw a lavish dinner for Golda Meir and it would be hosted by Mr. Lindsay. But Mr. Davidoff knew that if it were indoors at Lincoln Center, significant Jewish leaders wouldn’t come. So they planned a lavish affair in the parking lot behind the Brooklyn Museum.

“Every prominent and influential Jew from New York was there,” said Mr. Aurelio.

More than 2,000 people were invited to the event; Mr. Lindsay walked in wearing a yarmulke. He stood right next to her.

“There were thousands and thousands of people outside the Brooklyn Museum that night,” said Mr. Davidoff. “Afterwards, the sukkah was available for the public, and we put out a booklet explaining the sukkah … and we had John Lindsay write the prologue.” 

Ms. Meir was up on the dais and did everything but endorse John Lindsay. “They didn’t say it, but they didn’t have to say it,” said Mr. Davidoff.

A few days after she spoke, the Mets would play their first playoff game.

THE METS WERE born in 1962, the laughably disastrous team that tickled the broken heart of New York National League baseball after the Dodgers and Giants moved west in the late 1950s. They lost and lost and lost.

“Being traded to the Mets in those days was not a good option,” said Al Weis, a Mets utility infielder who became a hero of the ’69 series. “I was with the White Sox and we were always in contention. The Mets were a last-place club.”

“In ’69, I thought we would take the next step forward,” said Ron Swoboda, the Mets right-fielder. “I thought we’d be a little better than we were in ’68 … around .500, a little above, a little below.”

And for the most part that’s how the Mets played for most of the year, around the .500 mark. But on June 15, the Mets brought in a veteran first baseman.

“Donn Clendenon was a lawyer who engineered a deal that got him traded for the Mets,” said Ron Swoboda. “He physically engineered the deal. There weren’t many baseball players who were lawyers! The Pirates were trying to trade him to the Expos, and he told them that ‘I’ll give you a couple teams I’ll go to, but one of ’em ain’t the Expos; otherwise, I’ll go be a lawyer.’ And they believed him and traded him to us.

“When he walked in, everything changed,” said Mr. Swoboda. “He was a veteran thumper, a real hitter. He rode everyone in the clubhouse, he could get everyone in the clubhouse. … He was to me the missing link. When he came in here, everything changed.”

The Mets surged in the summer. They had Tom Seaver, the Mets Franchise, who had a career-high 25 wins; Jerry Koosman became one of the most sure-handed No. 2 men in baseball. And Gil Hodges, the manager, was a cool hand who, like Joe Torre  now, had universal respect.

“Gil was a very good manager, an honest manager, I’ll tell ya,” said Yogi Berra, who was the Mets first base coach in 1969. “When we started in spring training and we were doing signs, I said to Gil, ‘Want me to help them teach the signs?’ He said, ‘No, if they don’t know the signs by now, they get fined. And if you give them the signs, I’ll fine you.’ But everyone appreciated it, I’ll tell you. He did a great job and he was a good manager.”

When September rolled around, the Mets had a two-game series with the Cubs at Shea, and they were trailing by 2.5 games. People began to say that the Mets had magic.

“Everything didn’t come to a head until the latter part of the season,” said Al Weis. “We were plodding along winning a few ball games, and then all of a sudden we got into a hot streak.”

“The turning point was when we played the Cubs right there at the end,” said Wayne Garrett, the Mets red-headed rookie third baseman. “It was a series that really meant something. That’s when we really played well.”

They also had Black Magic. During one of the games, a black cat came out from the stands at Shea, circled the Cubs’ third baseman, Ron Santo, walked in front of the Cubs dugout, and then ran back underneath the stands. The Mets never looked back and took the division.

“There were cats all over that stadium,” said Mr. Garrett, the Mets rookie third baseman. “It was a freak accident. It happened to be a black cat, too! There were probably a few rats underneath that stadium, a few cats. They would come out on the field once in a while. They would come out momentarily and run back underneath he seats. It happened half a dozen times.”

The New York Mets clinched the division, swept the Braves and went to the World Series. The city was in disbelief.

Above all, there was the one magical moment that symbolized the Miracle Mets. In Game 4, with the Mets leading the heavily favored Orioles two games to one, the Mets had their ace in the hole: Tom Seaver. And, after a rough start in Game 1, he was brilliant again. Through eight innings, he was pitching a shutout. But there was trouble in the ninth.

There were runners at the corners. The Orioles’ superstar Frank Robinson was at third, and the Orioles tank of a man, Boog Powell, was at first. This was before the days of bringing in the closer; it was the era when the starter, an ace, was his own stopper. And the Mets were coming dangerously close to disaster. If the Orioles could bring home two runs, they would take the lead, the Mets momentum would be dead, and they wouldn’t be able to clinch the Series at Shea Stadium.

With late-afternoon shadows eating up home plate, Tom Seaver delivered a beautiful pitch to Brooks Robinson. It was a two-seam fastball, and it sank hard. But Robinson, always known for his glove, was a man who knew how to hit in the clutch. He hit a screaming liner to right center field. It was hit with such laser-beam precision, it looked like it could go into the gap, and if Mets center fielder Tommie Agee didn’t cut it off, it could score Boog Powell. 

Worse, it was going in the direction of Ron Swoboda, a solid hitter who was a mess in the outfield. He went in the wrong direction. Balls bounced over his head. He’d twist his body left and right, head pivoting and twirling like a screw top. Robinson hit his liner to right.

For years, Swoboda had been practicing fly balls. He was learning when a ball was hit and you couldn’t judge it, you waited a second. He learned which way to put out his glove, and which way to turn his head.

He cleared his mind, he conjured up nothing, he didn’t think, he reacted.

“I just broke immediately and I had a great jump on it,” said Mr. Swoboda. “When he hit it I said, ‘Oh shit! I got nothing to do but to run after this one.’ You want to intercept the ball at the earliest point. I realized I’m going to have to lunge at this sucker and it hit right in the web of the glove, which is the best place. I made a perfect break, I never stopped, I never faltered and I caught it back-end, fully laid out and kept rolling and I came up and threw into the infield.”

All who saw it agreed: one of the great catches ever. By the time Swoboda wound up, his cap fell off, and he got the ball into the infield, Frank Robinson tagged up and had scored the tying run. But it didn’t matter. Anyone who saw that play knew the Mets were going to win the game.

By the time the bottom of the 10th inning rolled around, the Mets had it won, and the next day, Cleon Jones fell to one knee and then bedlam broke loose. The New York Mets were the World Champions of baseball.

“I was running in clear space, and I was never sure I was going to get there,” said Mr. Swoboda. “I dove at it. It was clearly an example of your reach exceeding your normal capabilities—your reach exceeding your wildest dreams. Wasn’t that true of 1969 in every way?”

“I’ve seen replays of Cleon dancing up and down and all the players jumping up and down, but I got into that dugout and the clubhouse as fast I could,” said Al Weis. “Most of the players got off that field fast.”

“Anytime you win, boy, there’s commotion, I’ll tell you,” said Yogi Berra.

JOHN LINDSAY was dumbfounded.

“John Lindsay knew nothing about baseball, and he didn’t like it,” said Richard Reeves, the biographer and author of the forthcoming history of the Berlin Airlift, who was the New York Times City Hall bureau chief in 1969. “Literally at the end of each inning, he’d pop out of his seat and ask, ‘Is this over?’ And then he had to be pulled back down.”

“In one of those playoff games, he said, ‘If the game stays tied, then what happens? Who wins?’” said Shelly Brosoff, a member of the mayor’s staff who was sitting with him at Shea Stadium.

“He was crew in college, his twin brother was a boxer, and baseball was not his game of choice,” said Mr. Davidoff.

As Shea Stadium’s field was mobbed with delirious Mets fans, Mr. Brosoff guided Mr. Lindsay from their seats behind the dugout, onto the warning track, into the clubhouse.

Mr. Lindsay didn’t look much different from former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who was standing inside the Mets clubhouse with his arms crossed and a stoic, somewhat bewildered look on his face. Mayor Lindsay didn’t know what to do.

“Tom Seaver was sitting on a stool and guys were around all around him and Champagne was flying everywhere,” said Mr. Brosoff.

“I gave the mayor a bottle of Champagne and I said to him, ‘You see that guy on the stool?’—he didn’t know anybody, he wasn’t a baseball fan—and I said,  ‘See that guy over there? Go over there and pour this bottle of champagne on his head.’

“He looked at me and said, ‘Shelly are you crazy?’ I said, ‘No, no, go over there and pour on its head! Go and do it!’

Then Champagne was everywhere, and suddenly the tall dry mayor was in the middle of the wet Mets melee.

“It wasn’t something that was totally spontaneous,” said Mr. Aurelio, the campaign manager. “In the locker room, we kind of urged them to soak Lindsay. Here’s this patrician-type guy who some people, some of the ethnics, had turned against in the city, and now these white ethnics suddenly are seeing him being doused with Champagne over his face.”

Suddenly John V. Lindsay was a man of the people, a baseball fan, drenched in Queens, beloved in Brooklyn, the cross-cultural political phenomenon that he had been when elected in 1965. 

“I remember John Lindsay was in political trouble and he had this complete embrace of the team,” said Mr. Swoboda, the Mets right fielder. “He came in the clubhouse and he had himself doused in Champagne and he used all of it for the campaign: ‘The Mets can do it, I can do it! The Mets are an underdog, I am, too!’

“He even had guys on the team doing commercials and doing personal appearances for him. He totally used that whole event as a trigger for a campaign that was in big trouble.”

Then the Mets had a ticker-tape parade, the first time it happened for a World Series champion.

“It was touch-and-go until the last three or four weeks of the campaign,” said Mr. Aurelio. “In October, after the Mets victory, in the three weeks before the election, we felt the momentum going our way. Up until then, while I was hopeful and optimistic, I thought I was prepared to lose by a small margin.”

“I don’t know if he picks up a single vote for being at Shea and being in the locker room with Champagne,” said Mr. Kriegel. “This is a city that is very beaten down and just endlessly consumed in racial conflict and tension and recrimination. What the Mets do is create some sense across the city of a breath of fresh air, they feel good, a relaxer. It relieves the tension. It cuts it like a knife.”

“There was anger, a lot of anger,” said Mr. Davidoff. “The snowstorm, the teacher’s strike, the claim that Lindsay was giving away the city to minorities, there was decentralization—how many things do you have to go through! And with the Mets the city felt better, and when there’s a better feeling about the city, there’s a better feeling about the mayor.”

“The city went from being anti- this tall, handsome, WASP, debonair patrician,” said Mr. Aurelio, “into seeing him as a guy that was fighting the bosses and was attracting Democrats and fighting the radical right and who was fighting against the Nixon Vietnam policies and his insensitivity to the plight of the city,” said Mr. Aurelio. “And then with the Mets, it just was this dramatic change. A lot of it we were lucky to have happen to us, and a lot of if we inspired ourselves in clever ways. It was a lot of things coming together in a way that created the perfect comeback campaign.”

“Everything came together for that one shining moment,” said Mr. Reeves. “It was our Camelot. It all came together. And even with all that union and racial stuff, the Mets pulled those people together, and to a lesser extent, the Jets and the Knicks. It pulled together for that moment. The fact is Lindsay was a lousy mayor and the recession began in 1970, and Ford told the city to drop dead and then people abandoned the city. It was this kind of peak.”

So attention, Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Paterson, Fred Wilpon and the Steinbrenner Boys: Don’t worry about the banks and Tim Geithner, pay no attention to the subways and the Fed. Give us a little magic. It doesn’t need to last forever. Just a few innings. For this summer and for this fall, if you want to save your butts, give us a few wins.

We’ll love you for a month or two.

jkoblin@observer.com

The New York Post: Welcome back, holidaymakers! While we've been away the tabloids have been hard at it: there's been more swine flu and even a giant tiny scary terrorist plot! We will just have to see if we have the opportunity to talk about those Woods in the coming days. Looking at this morning's editions, though, I was reminded of something a big editor at one of the tabloids said to me a few years ago now. This editor was talking to a young person, not a "media type," about work. "Oh, so you do like yesterday's news?" the youngster said, apparently without any malice intended. It was just: that's what you are for! We talked about this for a while, but this morning's papers demonstrate the problem quite nicely.

The basic circumstances that may make a story impossible to put on the cover of your newspaper on a given morning are not in the control of the editors: How is the paper distributed? When does it have to reach trucks/planes to get that distribution? When does printing have to start for the paper to reach the trucks? If it happens past that time, there's not much you can do to get your big breaking story in print for another 24 hours. Of course, you can get stuff up on the Web. But does that help? I don't have this information, but would love to know what the crossover is between print and online readership for the News and the Post: if you've read either of them on the subway in the morning, how likely are you, when you want news, to check the same publications online? The fact is that the "paper" you'll see at either site (moreso at nydailynews.com than at nypost.com) often bears little or no resemblance to the paper edition printed that morning. But do readers understand that? What I am getting at is, how do the tabloids communicate to their existing readers that they are not in the business of "yesterday's news"? Not easy.

There is one thing that editors can do however, which is to change the basis of their cover decisions in deference to the facts of the 24-hour, television and internet-driven news environment. I'm going to take as an example the bomb blast at the Upper East Side Starbucks. This happened in the early-morning hours of Monday, too late by far to make yesterday's print editions. And unions and editorial staffs being what they are, the Post's Memorial Day staffing may well not have been everything the paper's news editors might have wished. It's a big story! A bomb, right in the central business district of the template New York Post reader. But this was a live event: further newsbreaks are all going to be leaks from the police. Not exactly much hope for a blockbuster advance on the story. And it wasn't a very dramatic explosion. So, if you're the editor of the Post, do you decide that this story is too big to have never appeared on the cover of your paper? Or do you decide to let it go from the front page and find something else a little fresher to sell the page? Today the Post made the sentimental choice. Is that decision about library archives, about posterity? Since when is that a motivator for tabloid newspapers? If it's not—if it's a real news decision about what readers need to see in the morning on the front of their newspaper—then it's the wrong one. Literally more than 24 hours of coverage on NY1 and even some of the major national cable networks, and online at nypost.com and nytimes.com has been available to anyone who cared to read beyond the headline on this story. It's, unfortunately for those of us with some sentimental attachments to newsprint, yesterday's news.

Not so the sad story of reemerged celebrity Mike Tyson's four-year-old daughter, who is fighting for her life after an accident on a treadmill. We've always admired the Post's willingness to do what Us Weekly always makes a big production of doing: shilling the idea that the stars are, in a way, just like us. Their personal tragedies are like the kinds of things your aunt's very unlucky circle of acquaintances always have happening to them. These are the "relatable moments" in the lives of the big stars. But at its worst moments, you hold up a copy of the Post with a story like this dominating the front page (typographically, at any rate) next to the "supermarket" tabloids that are still talking about Liz Taylor, and you have a hard time telling the difference. We're not being taste police on behalf of Mr. Tyson, but on behalf of the reader. Note to New York Post: This is to be avoided. Do the Tyson story. Just not like this.

Our regular readers know we have to go to friends to double check anything we say about sports and sports coverage; they're not around yet though! So we will just note the freaky fact that the Post this morning pumps up the Mets, while the Daily News...

Daily News:"High 5 for A-Rod!" screams the News, which is of late very warm toward the maligned slugger. "Perfect day at plate silences Texas boo birds," the paper continues. Observer.com will have more to say shortly about the massive operation that is working to recover Mr. Rodriguez's reputation after revelations he tested positive for human growth hormones while playing in Texas; but on its face we do wonder whether any of these accusations are really put to rest simply because A-Rod has some successes on the field? We also wonder, retrospectively, whether the little line "METS DOWN NATS" that's offered as a refer here, considering that the Post gave the Mets a big box and didn't mention A-Rod or the Yanks on its front page at all, constitute a sign of a coming realignment: the News has always been more of a "boroughs" paper, which would tend it toward coverage of the Mets, while the Post (Rupert Murdoch's working relationship with Howard Rubinstein, who also reps the Yankees notwithstanding), normally the elitist among the two, has always tended to give short shrift to the Mets compared to the Yankees. Is this changing?

"'A GRAVE THREAT.'" So did President Barack Obama characterize North Korea's "A-bomb test." "NUKE CRISIS SPECIAL REPORT - SEE PAGES 8-9" the News promises. Well, it's the big, big story so why not? We sometimes think a story is too big to be subjected to the analysis for the New York tabloids that will always favor local stories to national ones. The Post had a nice run writing scathing critiques of the U.N., depicting the security council in photomontage as weasels in suits. This is how the News goes national, and it's ... a bore. But, you know, isn't a bomb that sets off an explosion analogous to the one that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki bigger news than a few broken windows at an Upper East Side Starbucks?

General observations: We think this morning's front pages demonstrate the News' more sophisticated handling of the 24-hour news cycle, and the complicated matrix of local versus national news for city tabloids. They also demonstrate the News' inability to make a super important and interesting story seem, well, interesting or important. Still ...

Winner (updated): Daily News*. But, as with A-Rod's name in the hall of fame, today's win comes with an asterisk. An error I saw on a digital version of the paper, of the sort that usually gets corrected at the plant if no later than that, appears to have made it into print editions spotted in, at least, Eastern Queens and in the Flatiron District of Manhattan. The subheading on the A-Rod story seems to have been copied and pasted a half inch or so up and to the right of the original, marring the image. This is a big, big error, though one not attributable, I think, to the same people who are normally at war in this column. Still, the newsstand is what counts. And on the newsstand, the News looks like a big lemon this morning. Click here to see the error.

You'll know that the trial concerns charges that Mr. Marshall, acting as his mother's financial adviser, took advantage of her waning faculties late in life to divert massive amounts of money and property from her immense fortune to benefit himself—and, perhaps more importantly, his wife, Charlene Marshall, who is not charged with a crime but who has all along been promoted as the real villain of the saga. On Thursday morning in the courtroom, Ms. Marshall wept in her seat; it was her anniversary with the accused, her husband, and The New York Times had devoted a cover story to her status as the villain of the story even though she is not charged with a crime; less subtly, the Post made reference to comments attributed by witnesses to the late Brooke Astor that Charlene was a fortune-hunter with the headline "CHOKE ON THIS, CHARLENE," referring to a diamond necklace Ms. De la Renta said she was given expressly so that it would not go to Charlene Marshall after Brooke Astor's death. Today, the Post has something it's willing to blast off the front page: A reporter visited the East 79th Street apartment of Anthony and Charlene Marshall—and was let in. Ms. Marshall reportedly told the reporter that Mr. Marshall wasn't in, only to watch in horror as he appeared in his dressing gown and a dumb smile on his lips, at 2 in the afternoon. She ordered him back to his room, then put back on her own dumb smile, explained to the reporter that they could not talk to the press, and before sending the reporter off remarked on the weather and announced that she had planned a shopping trip for herself that afternoon. In the greater scheme of things, there is not much here. But the notion that Ms. Marshall is calling the shots, and possibly has been for some time, is reinforced here. The front page headline? "DISS ASTOR."

Wait. Why don't we get the joke? Was it a "dis" for Charlene Marshall to order her husband back to his room? That's what the subheading suggests: "Wife sends Brooke's boy to his room." And of course, if you put the two words together, it sounds like "Disaster." What's the disaster? If you've been following this case, the Post reporter's escapade is among the least interesting things to have happened yet. Far more damaging material spews from the witness stand each day than anything in the behavior of these two senior citizens at home on their day off. Some other display copy you can find inside the paper and on nypost.com looked better to us; we can see why "ASTOR & COMMANDER" didn't rate the front (the reference is too obscure and, possibly, highbrow, the movie version of the classic Patrick O'Brian novel notwithstanding); "CHARLENE'S IN CHARGE" is a little long, given the size and weight of the type they would have decided to give the story on the front. But both illustrate that the Post probably had not finished its brainstorming by the time they had to go to press with what they had, and DISS ASTOR is the result. We also are forced to point out that in the little teaser (under the heading "EXCLUSIVE") that accompanies the cover treatment, the late Astor matron's first name is misspelled "Brook," even though it appears correctly spelled in the headline, scant inches away.

There is no question that the diss-astor-ous headline on the Astor story is the lead, even though it's at the bottom of the page. Still, the Post gives significant real estate to Yankee hitter Johnny Damon: "Damon rescues reeling Yankees," reads the bold flesh-colored text (underlined, too, in very British-tabloid style) next to a pretty compelling shot of the ex-Red Sock at the plate. The Post has devoted considerably more real estate to this Yankees comeback story than it has to the losing streak Mr. Damon is credited with helping to end (on the front page, at least; the Sports pages are a different matter). Just saying.

Daily News: In the battle between the two big New York daily tabloids, one oft-cited advantage of the Daily News is their willingness to do "enterprise" journalism: They take themselves off the news treadmill long enough to investigate and report on things that become news because the newspaper covers them, instead of the other way around. This morning's cover story on the News only required them to find some lawsuits against two brain surgeons at North Shore University Hospital, where, last week, the paper reported that two neurosurgeons had gone AWOL while an anesthetized patient awaited them in the operating room. Since then, one of the surgeons has stepped down as chair of his department and pulled from the O.R.; but in that same time the News has stumbled upon four lawsuits against the two neurosurgeons and report that eight more suits are coming. Today's story focuses on one patient, a 4-year-old Washington girl whose parents claim was given an experimental surgery on the basis of a misdiagnosis, the results of which have forced their daughter into more surgeries and procedures, including brain surgery. Of course, we've only got the suit to go on—the hospital offered little concrete response to the charges—and we can't tell how frequently neurosurgeons, given their sensitive practice area, are sued when the results of their treatment are not good (which they must sometimes be). Still, the charges are pretty shocking, and they're bolstered by taped interviews with the neurosurgeon provided to the paper. The wood reads "BRAIN DOCS SCANDAL GROWS," then, in large type: "SURGEONS HURT MY BABY." Pictured is the mother in the case, April Bryant, with her daughter Katie and a teddy bear, photographed in April. "Suit: Doctors botched tot's 'unnecessary' spine surgery."

We're in full-on baseball season, and the News packages the home teams' recent performance neatly with two blue boxes, each with the circular team logo, accompanying the headlines "METS WIN 7TH STRAIGHT" and "JOKE'S ON O'S AS YANKS ROLL."

General observations: Given that there's been no courtroom drama since Thursday in the Astor trial, it seems odd that the bit of made-up news the Post found in the case should dominate Monday's front page. But if the paper is campaigning to get its readers' interest in the case up, they could be setting themselves up for a few nice covers this coming week as testimony resumes. Still, it compounds the central problem, that nothing material has happened in the case in this story, and the headline is a clunker and the paper doesn't seem to have absolute command over the spelling of the name of the main character in the drama. And while we're not sure whether Johnny Damon has really "rescued" the Yankees just yet, it's a nice grabby bit of display aimed at an audience that is probably much more Yankees than Mets to begin with.

While this News cover story on the two neurosurgeons is not Pulitzer material by a long stretch, the contrast it creates to the Post caused this reporter, for instance, to repeat the central brand message of the News—serious, investigative journalism beats sensationalistic Fleet Streetism. In this case, they're probably right. We would love the Astor story to be bigger than it is, but wishing doesn't make it so. We hope the Post's campaign to put the trial front-of-mind will make this trial as fascinating to New York's subway tabloid readers as it is to us.

Winner: Daily News.