He launched batting practice bombs into the left field stands, several landing in similar spots to the two home runs he hit in last season’s second-to-last game. Then he raced to the dugout, grabbed his glove, and shagged fly balls. When few fly balls came his way, he asked a Nationals coach to hit him ground balls, then pop-ups.

His preparation paid off. But though Milledge doubled and walked, his teammates provided little support.

He said after the 6-0 loss to the Mets that it felt like “nothing different” as he faced the small group of reporters. Washington is 4-10 after losing 10 of 11 games due to pitching, not Milledge—just like the September collapse of the 2007 Mets.

“Not really different—we want to win, man,” Milledge said in a voice both calm but clearly frustrated. “We’re not caught up in making people look bad.”

And while the 4-10 start has a number of Washington players looking bad, Milledge has been a standout, excelling in his expanded role of everyday center fielder. On the heels of his early success, even Shea’s fans, who adored Milledge, now booed him—he was a dangerous player for the enemy.

Milledge has hit for the Nationals—his season line stood at .308/.351/.442 coming into Tuesday night’s action. And unlike his time in New York, Milledge has earned praise from Washington’s manager, front office, and even his Nationals teammates.

“I like what I’ve seen so far,” an upbeat Manny Acta said, despite the score, as he reclined behind his desk in the visiting manager’s office following the game. “He’s been one of the bright spots for us.”

Milledge wasted no time reminding the Mets why they took him in the first round of the 2003 draft, getting ahead of pitcher Mike Pelfrey and then lacing a double to left field. For Milledge, it was a simple question of knowing.

“It’s understandable. I know him, I know his tendencies,” Milledge said of starter Mike Pelfrey. “I knew what he was coming with, and that was that.”

Except that wasn’t that—a few pitches later, he was called out trying to steal third. (Replays showed that he beat the throw.)

“I really wanted to get to third,” Milledge said. “We’ve been having trouble getting people in from second.”

Unlike the way Willie Randolph might have reacted, Manny Acta did not criticize his young player for ill-advised aggressiveness.

“He set the tone early,” Acta said of Milledge. “At least he didn’t go early in the count—he gave [slumping third baseman Ryan] Zimmerman a chance to drive him in. I would rather he be aggressive than not aggressive.”

Milledge’s development also manifested itself in the third inning, with Washington trailing 2-0 and two runners on. After his hard-hit ball in the first inning, Pelfrey was shy about throwing Milledge a strike. But rather than force the issue, chasing a pitch out of the zone, Milledge drew a walk to load the bases. It was the at-bat of a veteran—one of only two walks Pelfrey allowed all night.

Pelfrey did get the better of Milledge in the fifth inning, striking him out on two of the best sliders he threw all night. By the eighth inning, with Washington well behind, Milledge chased an Aaron Heilman fastball out of the zone.

It marked one of the few times Milledge has let his expanded role force him into a bad decision. It was the first multi-strikeout game Milledge had all year—he’d struck out just five times in his first 52 at-bats, a remarkably low total for a hitter with power.

He is clearly as happy to be an important part of the Nationals as his new team is to have stolen him from the Mets.

“Last year, I wasn’t in a position to really do anything, to carry a team,” Milledge said. “That wasn’t my role last year—there were a lot of guys who did carry that team. This year, I’m playing a lot more important role here. I’m a catalyst—I may not carry the team, Zimmerman will carry the team—but I’m the catalyst for this team.”

And while spring training results are often skewed, the evidence so far is making the Mets look more and more like victims.

“He’s had a very good spring,” Bowden said as he made his way down the visitor’s clubhouse tunnel. “He’s impressed with small things, too—he hits the cutoff man, he runs the bases well. He’s been a good fit.”

Milledge, who Bowden said will be Washington’s Opening Day center fielder, is hitting .333 with a .404 on base percentage and a .529 slugging percentage. And these numbers are no fluke—Milledge has hit at every turn. He hit well over .300 last spring for the Mets, and followed with an above-average offensive season as a 22-year-old.

Milledge got the day off yesterday, but the Nationals already know what they’ve got.

“He’s been a favorite of mine going back to high school,” Bowden said. “Some of the bumps he went through as the youngest player in the National League—if a veteran had gotten excited and high-fived the fans after hitting a home run, it would have been taken very differently.”

Bowden was also complimentary of Brian Schneider and Ryan Church, calling the trade “a good short-term deal for the Mets, though we think we greatly improved our team now and in the future.”

The short-term impact has been limited so far, though injuries have certainly played a role. Schneider, brought in to catch regularly, has played in just three of the Mets’ first 24 exhibition games. He was expected to play Friday, but his hamstring kept him out once again. With much of his value tied up in his handling of pitchers, it remains to be seen how much has been lost by his inability to learn the staff first-hand.

The Mets did get to see Schneider’s predecessor, Paul Lo Duca, who made the trip to Port St. Lucie. Lo Duca seemed determined to show the Mets that they erred by failing to make him a contract offer this winter. He had one hit in three at bats, and threw Jose Reyes out at third base, displaying a defensive prowess missing for much of his time in New York.

“Paulie’s worked really hard for us,” Bowden said. “He’s started hitting, and he threw out two runners yesterday. When you’re a starting catcher, and every year your teams win, there’s a reason for it.”

Schneider is likely an upgrade over Lo Duca, due to his age—he is nearly five years younger than Lo Duca, and the difference between 31 and 36 is enormous in catcher years—his defense, and even his secondary offensive skills, which don’t require a high batting average to contribute to the lineup. But for that edge to assert itself, Schneider will have to take the field.

As for Ryan Church, his nightmare spring continued. There is ample evidence that he will provide a solid lefty bat plus defense in right field for the Mets, though his talent is much more limited than Milledge’s. But even his modest upside has yet to show itself, with a concussion and then the birth of his child limiting his performance.

Church went 0-for-2 Friday, dropping his spring average to .152. He struck out for the seventh time in 33 at-bats. And despite a history of power hitting (his lifetime slugging percentage is .462), he has yet to provide even one extra base hit.

Again, small-sample-size warnings apply to all spring performances. But the Lastings Milledge trade was a questionable baseball move and a highly unpopular one with the fans. All signs suggest that Milledge is ready for a huge year in Washington. Church and Schneider have yet to do anything to make the Mets feel any better about that fact.

To the Editor:

Shortly before the start of the 2005 baseball season, after the New York Mets had endured three consecutive dismal seasons, David Brooks declared his readiness to "switch my allegiance from the beloved Mets to the new team of my adopted town." He wrote, "I will become a fan of the Washington Nationals" ("Whose Team Am I On?," column, March 29, 2005).

Now that the Nationals have completed an awful season and the Mets are in the playoffs, Mr. Brooks has thrown a changeup, writing of the tortured life of an angst-ridden Mets fan.

Mr. Brooks now writes of the "true Mets fan." But he can't be "a true Mets fan." For true Mets fans, wherever we are in the world, and wherever the Mets are in the standings, during times of misery and times of euphoria, our allegiance is unconditional and eternal.

Joseph Schick
Flushing, Queens, Oct. 8, 2006

Pedro Martinez, portrayed by the local media in recent days as brooding and cranky, was yelling in Spanish and acting out a B-movie shower scene playing on a suspended TV behind him. David Wright and Paul Lo Duca were in stitches.

More often than not, if the clubhouse is in a giddy mood like this, Cliff Floyd—the towering, emotive 33-year-old left-fielder who is one of the team’s undisputed clubhouse leaders—is at the center of it.

But on this morning, Floyd was uncharacteristically quiet.

The few things he had to say were the kind of remarks generally reserved for people in desperate need of a conversation-starter. “Starting to get chilly outside,” he said to Ricky Ledee, who sits next to him. “Shit, here it comes.”

After clinching a division title and the best record in the National League last week, the Mets are priming for their first October play in six years.

These are boom times for young regulars like David Wright and Jose Reyes, for whom this will be their first postseason, and for veterans like Pedro Martinez, Tom Glavine and Orlando Hernandez, who will be looking to add to their record of past playoff glories.

But it’s a grim time for Floyd. He suffered a personal tragedy last month when his 21-year-old sister unexpectedly died of cancer. (He told the Daily News at the time that no one in the family saw it coming.)

He has struggled all season with injuries and an aging body. He was placed on the disabled list twice this year and will have off-season surgery that will shave off a section of bone near his Achilles tendon.

It has taken a heavy toll. After knocking 34 homers and nearly 100 R.B.I.’s last season, he now is having one of the worst stretches of his career—just in time for what is to be his first appearance as a starter in the postseason. He is hitting .242 for the year, and just .212 since the beginning of August, and has a scrappy much-improved j ourneyman named Endy Chavez nipping at his heels for a place in the starting lineup.

The question for Floyd and the Mets now turns on whether he can defy his corporeal slide and produce Kirk Gibson–like heroics this October, or whether he will quietly fade away.

“I’m going to be able to help the team as much as my body and my bat allow me to,” he told reporters after a recent start. He was shirtless, showing off shoulders about as broad as the Shea Stadium outfield. “Other than that, I’m just going to play.”

Floyd’s locker, which had three Louis Vuitton bags stashed inside, is situated at a pivotal point in the clubhouse, between the Mets’ white players and Spanish speakers. It is also next to a framed blown-up copy of Sports Illustrated with the headline “Welcome to Rip City,” with Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, Paul Lo Duca, David Wright and Carlos Delgado on the cover. Floyd is not in the photo.

Being injured is nothing new to Floyd—he’s had only four 500 at-bat seasons in his 14-year career—but years of damage to his wrist, knees and ankle might finally be catching up with him. When he described his future, he sounded fatalistic.

“If I get a job next year, great,” he said. “If I don’t, I won’t have any feel-sorry-for-Cliff-type moments. No, don’t feel sorry, because I’m going to go home and relax and chill out. That’s how it’s going to be.”

The team seems to be doing its best to be supportive. Manager Willie Randolph struggled to find kind words recently when a reporter asked him to evaluate Floyd’s play.

“He’s swinging the bat O.K.,” Randolph said before Monday’s game against the Nationals. “I don’t really go by numbers and stats. He said he’s feeling well physically; he’s had a few good at-bats and moved pretty well defensively. That’s pretty good.”

Randolph paused.

“I give him a B—something like that. Is that good?” he said. “I don’t know.”

The one topic on which Randolph and every other Met gushed about Floyd is his role in the clubhouse, which almost seems to overshadow what he does on the field.

“Cliff has been such an influence on this team with how he shows up and keeps the team loose,” said Billy Wagner. “You know, I just love him.”

“He’s not only well respected, but also one of the favorites in this clubhouse,” said David Wright. “He had a great year for us last year, and even if his numbers aren’t where they were, he’s more than just a guy in order of this lineup—he’s a big part of the heart of this team. Fans don’t see that and numbers don’t show that, but it is very important.”

But is that important enough for Floyd to secure himself a starting spot for the playoffs?

The Mets have brought hobbled team leaders to the playoffs before, but with mixed results.

In 1988, for example, Hall of Fame catcher Gary Carter hit .242 with 11 homers—literally identical stats to Floyd—but then managed only a .222 batting average in a losing effort in the National League Championship series against Kirk Gibson’s Dodgers.

Carter, by then, had fallen victim to what Mickey Mantle once described as the inevitable lot of the aging player: The ability to hit home runs gives way to warning-track power.

Floyd understands perfectly well what’s at stake. He played with the 1997 World Series Champion Florida Marlins but never got a chance to start a playoff game. He said starting this year will be “a dream.”

And he said he knows he still has a swing, especially after what he did last year, and what he did for a few strong weeks in the beginning of this one.

“I just want to do well,” he said. “I want to concentrate on working on my swing in the next week and a half. You never know what can happen. It’s not like I can’t play; it’s not like I can’t hit. I know I can hit. It’s a matter of getting a good pitch and hitting it hard.”

In a game on Monday night against the Washington Nationals, he got such a pitch.

With runners at first and third and two outs in the first inning, he was up at bat against a rookie making his second career start. With three balls and one strike, a prime hitter’s count, Floyd swung late on a meaty fastball and fouled it away.

With the count full, Floyd got his pitch: an 86-m.p.h. hanging slider down the middle of the plate.

He hit the pitch off heart of the bat and sent a soaring fly ball deep into the Queens night. He trotted slowly down the first-base line as Mets base runners David Wright and Carlos Beltran and eight Washington Nationals stared straight in the air. Shea exploded in anticipation.

Standing on the right-field warning track, Nationals right-fielder Ryan Church caught the ball for the last out of the inning.

Pedro Martinez, portrayed by the local media in recent days as brooding and cranky, was yelling in Spanish and acting out a B-movie shower scene playing on a suspended TV behind him. David Wright and Paul Lo Duca were in stitches.

More often than not, if the clubhouse is in a giddy mood like this, Cliff Floyd—the towering, emotive 33-year-old left-fielder who is one of the team’s undisputed clubhouse leaders—is at the center of it.

But on this morning, Floyd was uncharacteristically quiet.

The few things he had to say were the kind of remarks generally reserved for people in desperate need of a conversation-starter. “Starting to get chilly outside,” he said to Ricky Ledee, who sits next to him. “Shit, here it comes.”

After clinching a division title and the best record in the National League last week, the Mets are priming for their first October play in six years.

These are boom times for young regulars like David Wright and Jose Reyes, for whom this will be their first postseason, and for veterans like Pedro Martinez, Tom Glavine and Orlando Hernandez, who will be looking to add to their record of past playoff glories.

But it’s a grim time for Floyd. He suffered a personal tragedy last month when his 21-year-old sister unexpectedly died of cancer. (He told the Daily News at the time that no one in the family saw it coming.)

He has struggled all season with injuries and an aging body. He was placed on the disabled list twice this year and will have off-season surgery that will shave off a section of bone near his Achilles tendon.

It has taken a heavy toll. After knocking 34 homers and nearly 100 R.B.I.’s last season, he now is having one of the worst stretches of his career—just in time for what is to be his first appearance as a starter in the postseason. He is hitting .242 for the year, and just .212 since the beginning of August, and has a scrappy much-improved j ourneyman named Endy Chavez nipping at his heels for a place in the starting lineup.

The question for Floyd and the Mets now turns on whether he can defy his corporeal slide and produce Kirk Gibson–like heroics this October, or whether he will quietly fade away.

“I’m going to be able to help the team as much as my body and my bat allow me to,” he told reporters after a recent start. He was shirtless, showing off shoulders about as broad as the Shea Stadium outfield. “Other than that, I’m just going to play.”

Floyd’s locker, which had three Louis Vuitton bags stashed inside, is situated at a pivotal point in the clubhouse, between the Mets’ white players and Spanish speakers. It is also next to a framed blown-up copy of Sports Illustrated with the headline “Welcome to Rip City,” with Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, Paul Lo Duca, David Wright and Carlos Delgado on the cover. Floyd is not in the photo.

Being injured is nothing new to Floyd—he’s had only four 500 at-bat seasons in his 14-year career—but years of damage to his wrist, knees and ankle might finally be catching up with him. When he described his future, he sounded fatalistic.

“If I get a job next year, great,” he said. “If I don’t, I won’t have any feel-sorry-for-Cliff-type moments. No, don’t feel sorry, because I’m going to go home and relax and chill out. That’s how it’s going to be.”

The team seems to be doing its best to be supportive. Manager Willie Randolph struggled to find kind words recently when a reporter asked him to evaluate Floyd’s play.

“He’s swinging the bat O.K.,” Randolph said before Monday’s game against the Nationals. “I don’t really go by numbers and stats. He said he’s feeling well physically; he’s had a few good at-bats and moved pretty well defensively. That’s pretty good.”

Randolph paused.

“I give him a B—something like that. Is that good?” he said. “I don’t know.”

The one topic on which Randolph and every other Met gushed about Floyd is his role in the clubhouse, which almost seems to overshadow what he does on the field.

“Cliff has been such an influence on this team with how he shows up and keeps the team loose,” said Billy Wagner. “You know, I just love him.”

“He’s not only well respected, but also one of the favorites in this clubhouse,” said David Wright. “He had a great year for us last year, and even if his numbers aren’t where they were, he’s more than just a guy in order of this lineup—he’s a big part of the heart of this team. Fans don’t see that and numbers don’t show that, but it is very important.”

But is that important enough for Floyd to secure himself a starting spot for the playoffs?

The Mets have brought hobbled team leaders to the playoffs before, but with mixed results.

In 1988, for example, Hall of Fame catcher Gary Carter hit .242 with 11 homers—literally identical stats to Floyd—but then managed only a .222 batting average in a losing effort in the National League Championship series against Kirk Gibson’s Dodgers.

Carter, by then, had fallen victim to what Mickey Mantle once described as the inevitable lot of the aging player: The ability to hit home runs gives way to warning-track power.

Floyd understands perfectly well what’s at stake. He played with the 1997 World Series Champion Florida Marlins but never got a chance to start a playoff game. He said starting this year will be “a dream.”

And he said he knows he still has a swing, especially after what he did last year, and what he did for a few strong weeks in the beginning of this one.

“I just want to do well,” he said. “I want to concentrate on working on my swing in the next week and a half. You never know what can happen. It’s not like I can’t play; it’s not like I can’t hit. I know I can hit. It’s a matter of getting a good pitch and hitting it hard.”

In a game on Monday night against the Washington Nationals, he got such a pitch.

With runners at first and third and two outs in the first inning, he was up at bat against a rookie making his second career start. With three balls and one strike, a prime hitter’s count, Floyd swung late on a meaty fastball and fouled it away.

With the count full, Floyd got his pitch: an 86-m.p.h. hanging slider down the middle of the plate.

He hit the pitch off heart of the bat and sent a soaring fly ball deep into the Queens night. He trotted slowly down the first-base line as Mets base runners David Wright and Carlos Beltran and eight Washington Nationals stared straight in the air. Shea exploded in anticipation.

Standing on the right-field warning track, Nationals right-fielder Ryan Church caught the ball for the last out of the inning.

“It’s a great book, you know what I mean?” said Harvey Weinstein. “Rob Weisbach”—the honcho of Miramax Books—“brought it into the company, with Jonathan Burnham”—Mr. Weisbach’s predecessor, who is also the man-friend of Star editor Joe Dolce—“and I read it. Actually, we didn’t even read it! We just interviewed Kathy. She’s so great. We read her other book. It’s a really smart read, and I think it’s what’s on people’s minds.”

“It’s my second book, but I gotta tell you, this one really meant a lot to me,” said Kathy Freston of the book in question, The One: Finding Soul Mate Love and Making It Last. “Now to be kind of out of my pajamas, you know, and kind of climbing out of my cage to be out and about is really exciting …. ”

It was last Thursday at a reception in celebration of Ms. Freston’s sophomore literary achievement at the Core Club in midtown. (The establishment, which began operations last fall in an elevator building on East 55th Street, takes Soho House’s members-only concept and bumps it up a few notches on the exclusivity index. Price of membership: upward of $100,000.)

“ … so, in the book, I try to get people to understand that it’s really within us; that if we work on ourselves and shift our energy, everything around us shifts. You know, whether you’re single or whether you’re married or whether you’re dating someone, when you work on yourself and you change your magnetism, everything around you shifts and changes.”

Ms. Freston is appreciably tall and svelte, and the palazzo style of pant she wore further accentuated her lines. As “spiritual influences,” she named Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra and Carl Jung. “But,” she quickly pointed out, “I get inspiration everywhere. I get inspiration from cab drivers, or waiters. Everybody has that wisdom inside of them, and that’s the thing—there are soul mates all around us.”

“You kidding?” said Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, in response to the question of whether he thought it difficult to find and keep a mate in New York. “Yah, I think so.”

Brian Grazer, whose latest film production, The Da Vinci Code, premieres this month, showed his ring finger. “I’m still wearing my wedding ring,” he said, despite his very recent separation from wife Gigi Levangie Grazer.

“Find relationships?” said a pinstriped Calvin Klein. “Oh my God, then I’ve gotta read this book really fast. Maybe I’ll learn something.”

“But it’s really not about just one person,” Ms. Freston said. “It’s about taking the potential between people when you have an attraction, where there is physical chemistry or shared lifestyle ideals or whatever it is, and then taking that plane and really sort of feeding it so that it becomes this thing that runs throughout your life.

“Tom’s kids, my stepchildren, are definitely soul mates of a different sort,” she said.

Gil Fres­ton, a son of Viacom shot-caller Tom Freston—Ms. Freston’s husband of eight years—was in attendance. He sported a teen-chic outfit: an untucked white shirt with a loosely knotted tie and Vans.

His MySpace page said that he is 16 years old, attends the Dwight School and has 341 friends, one of whom recently left him a message that read, “If Damon Dash keeps following in you [sic] older brother’s footsteps (re: Page Six), how long will we have to wait until Dash starts dressing up in drag, walking the streets of Chelsea at 3am?”

Oh, but 16 is such a tough age.

“Vodka and water, please,” said Freston père to the bartender. He looked handsome and relaxed in muted grays. “It’s a lonely job, I can tell you—it’s a lonely profession, being a writer. You see it really firsthand, someone trying to work on a book and go through endless amounts of rewrites. She”—Ms. Freston—“requires a lot of solitude, not disturbance.”

Barbara Guggenheim, the party’s co-hostess, approached him.

“Hi, Barbara, thank you for this,” Mr. Freston said. A big kiss. “How are you? You didn’t have to do this. This is lovely.”

Ms. Guggenheim gripped his hand assuringly.

“We all have The One!” said MTV dev dude John Sykes. His wife, Laurie, wore a black-and-white ensemble with pearls. Beside him was Jane Buffett, wife of Jimmy. “I’ve been married to a rock star for 35 years,” she said. “I got the one.”

“Really, what I would say, to make things work: no expectations,” Ms. Buffett said. “Because every expectation is a predestined resentment.”

The couple was separated for nine years, but reconciled in 1991 and remain happily married.

“I think all the art on the wall are owned by the members,” Ms. Freston said to Ahmet Ertegun. “Isn’t it amazing?!” she said, admiring an outsized Basquiat, to which someone else had drawn her attention.

“It’s very claustrophobic, too” Graydon Carter, tucked into one corner of the room, was heard saying to his wife, Anna Scott, and another attractive blonde.

“Never had more compliments on an issue,” he said of Vanity Fair’s current “Green Issue.” “I’ve always been an environmentalist, and this is the great time to do it. It’s the biggest issue of our age.” (In this instance, by “issue,” he meant a matter of concern, not that actual periodical.)

Carole Daly hopped onto a chair to thank everyone for coming, “on behalf of Rupert and Wendi, Burt and Barbara, and Bob and myself.”

“Neil Simon once said, when I married Bob, that ‘Carole Bayer Sager Bacharach Daly’ could have been a great law firm,” she said. “I want to say that if Kathy had written this book in her early teens and I had a chance to read it, I think I’d be standing here with a few less names.”

“I’m so completely humbled,” Ms. Freston said. “It’s so amazing to be among all of you people who are such bright lights. So much talent, so much creativity, so much accomplishment, such interesting people. Especially Harvey Weinstein—I am so honored to be a part of your house,” she said, extending both her hands to Mr. Weinstein, who was standing beyond her grasp. “Harvey’s a real miracle worker, it’s true. He takes any creative project and he adds his magic and things happen beyond your wildest dreams and I am, I’m the lucky one.”

After she’d thanked everyone—nearly—and the guests were returning to their conversations, Ms. Freston swung around to discover her husband.

“Oh, my husband!” she shrieked. “Tom! I want to thank him! Tom!”

“The old Hilary Swank and Chad Lowe case,” joked a man nearby.

—Nicholas Boston

The Mets’ Costume Gala

The Transom sought high and low for a reporter who had attended the always-glamorous Metropolitan Museum’s annual Costume Institute Gala on Monday, hosted by Vogue editor Anna Wintour. (This year’s theme: Anglomania!) At last, it found one; and here is his report.

The most notable innovation at the Mets’ costume gala May 1 was in the headgear: Now that batting helmets have become ridged and indented, rather than smoothly curved, their decoration has become more than a rounded, gleaming replica of an ordinary baseball cap.

The Mets favor a two-tone look, with blue on the higher elevations in front and black on the sunken parts in the rear. The effect is subtle and eye-confusing; some batters looked as if their helmets were filthy with pine tar, while others, showing blue or black at different angles, suggested the color-shifting prismatic paint on auto-show concept cars. (It is past time for that technology to reach the consumer market—not in the flashy blue-to-pink form of some custom cars, but in, perhaps, iron gray to silver, or deep blue to black, as the final touch on, say, a Lincoln Continental.)

The visiting Washington Nationals, meanwhile, wore grim navy hats and socks with their gray road uniforms. They looked like a completely different team than the one that had posed in jaunty red caps for the individual portraits that showed on the giant video screen. Alfonso Soriano—newly converted to the outfield this year—wore his socks high, the way he’d done as the Yankees’ second baseman, back when the Yankees started losing the World Series instead of winning it. In left field, he had moments of utter staggering confusion; at the plate, he struck out with his old confident, sweeping swing. The crowd jeered either way. Nick Johnson, his fellow ex-Yankee, wore his socks high too, but nobody cared.

In the stands, Mets blankets were the accessory of choice, and layers were abundant. There was a cold wind blowing straight in from center field. It untied one end of a Venezuelan flag draped over the loge railing in honor of Mets pitcher Víctor Zambrano—the old reactionary flag, with the horse on the coat of arms running rightward, not the newly redesigned Hugo Chávez flag with the horse galloping boldly left. But the wind did Zambrano a favor, knocking down the Nationals’ hardest-hit drive of the night for an easy fly out.

Other costuming notes: Mr. Met wore his usual baseball head, lovable and a tiny bit disquieting. The prize patrol bombarded the stands with their T-shirt guns, launching at least one bundled T-shirt clear into the top deck. The designated theme of the evening, Anglomania, was not immediately evident.

But what is the essence of Anglophile style, if not bearing and endurance? Julio Franco, age 47, pinch-hit for the Mets in the bottom of the ninth and stood gracefully still. The score was 1-1. He was batting for closer Billy Wagner, who had pitched without the lead, against the book, overpowering the Nationals to keep the game tied. Mr. Franco watched ball one, ball two, ball three. A gimme strike one. And then ball four. A pinch runner took his place at first base. Two batters later, with the pinch runner on second, the Nationals’ pitcher fielded a tailor-made double-play ball and threw it wildly into center field. Franco’s runner sprinted home with the victory.

—Tom Scocca