Now, in midsummer, the bad old days of spring have been banished. The Mets are in first place in the National League East as of July 29. The Yankees are in third place, just three games behind this year’s surprise team, the Tampa Bay Rays, in the American League East.

This welcome turn of events didn’t just happen. It took some gutsy decisions in the Bronx and Queens, along with that invaluable but increasingly rare virtue, patience. Panic-stricken fans who demanded drastic changes have been proved wrong—both of these teams have been carefully constructed and built to win. Neither team had to trade their top prospects to rent a high-profile player for the season. All they needed was a spark.

The Yankee spark came from their current and future ace, Joba Chamberlain. When the Yankees moved him from his spot as a setup man for Yankee reliever Mariano Rivera, some saw desperation in the eyes of Yankee management. Instead, the move has turned out to be one of the shrewdest the team has made in some time. Mr. Chamberlain has excelled as a starting pitcher, adding much-needed depth to the Bombers’ rotation.

The Mets made their big change not on the field, but on the bench. After the team followed up last season’s catastrophic collapse in September with a spring of poor play, manager Willie Randolph was given his walking papers. It was not an easy call, because Mr. Randolph is a popular figure in New York. But the move seems to have paid dividends. Slugger Carlos Delgado has had a month to remember in July, and pitcher Mike Pelfrey is performing like the star the Mets always insisted he would be—even when fans were screaming that he be traded.

Both teams, then, embraced change but mixed in a little wisdom as well. The Yanks redesigned Mr. Chamberlain’s role, but they haven’t traded Mr. Hughes or Ian Kennedy, another promising pitcher, to obtain the services of a veteran. The Mets changed managers, but they, too, resisted calls to get rid of Mr. Pelfrey and Mr. Delgado. Credit both organizations for not responding to fans and commentators who demanded wholesale changes.

So now we get to watch significant baseball in the dog days of summer. And we hope, with fingers crossed, that the final seasons of Shea Stadium and Yankee Stadium will end not in September, but late October.

On June 15, at the end of a long, seven-hour day at a stadium that will be pulverized and paved into a parking lot later this year, the Mets announced their attendance for a Father’s Day double-header at 55,438. That was laughably deceptive.

Seats were empty all afternoon, and by the time the second game started—the Mets dropped the first half of the double-header to the Texas Rangers—it was quiet enough for the players to be able to hear the yelled suggestions of individual fans: “Carlos! Hit it to third base! They got a shift.” There were about 10,000 people in the stadium.

The delightfully crappy home run apple in right-center field that lights up after a Met hits a homer was broken all day due to “electrical failure.” At least half a dozen times, the Shea public address announcer broadcast: “Attention, kids, the Mr. Met Diamond Dash after today’s game has been canceled.” On the field, when something good happened, the clapping was polite and scattered, like at Wimbledon, or a jazz concert. When something bad happened, the fans were silent.

“It’s almost like the stages of mourning,” said Adam Rubin, the Mets beat reporter for the Daily News, speaking in the press box on Sunday afternoon. “At first it was kind of like denial: We have a great team! The best team in the National League! We just have an American League lineup, O.K.? Then it was just bitterness and there was lots of booing. Now it almost seems that the crowd is resigned to this being it. They don’t even really have the heart to boo anymore.”

Then, things got even uglier.

A little after 3 a.m. on June 17, hours after the Mets beat the Angels in Anaheim to notch their third win in four games, the Mets e-mailed reporters to inform them that Randolph had been fired. The decision wasn’t surprising—the Willie Watch had been going on for well over a week. But the timing of the move was profoundly bungled, guaranteeing that the news would be less about Willie Randolph than about the organizational ineptitude that led to such a tortured and undignified end.

“It’s how they fired him that will be his legacy,” said Bob Klapisch, a columnist for the Bergen Record and co-author of a book about the 1992 Mets titled “The Worst Team Money Could Buy.”

“Not that this team collapsed under him, or that they’re off to another .500 start under a $140 million payroll, and they’re playing like also-rans. The way we’ll remember him is how he was fired in the middle of the night.”

IT ALL LOOKED so bright early on. In February, there was a Sports Illustrated cover with a beaming Johan Santana—the Mets’ biggest off-season acquisition ever—standing on a pitcher’s mound, over an enormous headline: “Happy Days.” The Mets were going to get to the top this year, erasing that monumental meltdown where the team lost 12 out of its last 17 games and missed the playoffs. Willie Randolph, the team’s likable 53-year-old manager, was going to be redeemed.

Now, the Mets and their $140 million payroll—the highest in the National League—stand at 34-35, good for fourth place in their five-team division. Randolph is out the door, to be replaced by bench coach Jerry Manuel.

They have been stunning in their mediocrity.

There have been many teams in the past that were worse than this team, but which had redeeming qualities: the 1962 Mets of Casey Stengel and (Marvelous) Marve Throneberry, or even the 1994 Mets of Rico Brogna and Jason Jacome.

There were also teams that were bad, and detested. The 1992 Mets of Bonilla, Murray and Coleman are the most famous example.

But the 2008 team has been disappointing in a totally unfamiliar way. They are boring and unenthusiastic and, as far as their famously passionate fans are concerned, they don’t inspire much of any emotion at all.

“This year, I just don’t care if they win or lose,” said Greg Prince, the 45-year-old author of the Mets blog, Faith and Fear in Flushing. “This hasn’t happened to me before. You know what really bothers me? I think for so many Mets fans, the Mets are their identity. I’m not a religious person, and I’m not a God-and-country guy. So if I’m a Mets fan, and if I don’t care if they lose, I start thinking, ‘Am I doing this right anymore? Am I a bad fan for not caring?’”

On June 13, the Mets actually played a lovely game, reminiscent of the exuberant, fun-loving team of 2006. Take, for instance, the fifth inning: Jose Reyes led off with an infield hit. Then Luis Castillo worked an at-bat long enough to buy Reyes time to steal second, and then grounded out to second base, pushing Reyes to third. David Wright came up, and with two strikes, he shortened up his stroke and lifted a fly ball to right field that brought Reyes home.

It was vintage National League baseball, and it was a trademark Reyes-manufactured run—precisely the sort of thing that used to get Mets fans excited. But there was only a faint smattering of applause. The crowd barely noticed.

THE PROBLEM IS that the team hasn’t been capable of producing that sort of good play consistently. It’s as if after two spectacular unravelings of good teams on Randolph’s watch—a last-pitch defeat in the 2006 NLCS and the implosion of 2007—the Mets have finally lost the ability, or the will, to be exceptional.

“What we know about this team over the long haul is that they’ve been roughly, roughly, a .500 team since June 1 last year, and they’ve behaved exactly how .500 teams behave,” said Howie Rose, the WFAN play-by-play announcer and longtime Mets media fixture. “They’ll play well for a week, and then they’ll have a week full of disappointments.”

“They don’t have the talent they think they have,” said Marty Noble, a Mets beat writer since 1971, currently writing for MLB.com. “They haven’t been a great team since they beat the Dodgers [in the playoffs, in October 2006].”

“Throughout Willie’s tenure, it seemed like it was building toward something,” said Rubin, the News reporter. “His first year [in 2005], I vividly remember they were flirting with the wild card before they had a miserable stretch in early September, and Willie was in St. Louis walking back to the hotel with David Wright. And Willie said to him, ‘You’re gonna learn from this moment.
When we get there in future years, you’re gonna build on this and you’re gonna know how to win.’”

That never happened.

“It wasn’t like a life cycle like the Yankees with four championships,” Rubin said. “It was a life cycle with one NLCS appearance in four years.”

THE TEAM'S BEAT writers—like its fans, really—have bounced back and forth between explanations for this year’s underperforming. First they blamed Willie; then the inexplicable decline of shortstop Jose Reyes; then it was Billy Wagner, the loudmouth closer who suddenly couldn’t close; and now, it’s the fault of the executives of the team, who built a fragile roster and unceremoniously dumped their victim manager after letting him twist in the wind for days and days.

The story of the weekend was all about Randolph, who was in the surreal position of a man attending his own funeral.

After a victory on June 13, he walked into the interview room and made the shape of a cross with his fingers and pointed it toward Sports Illustrated’s Jon Heyman, who reported earlier that day that Randolph was on the verge of getting fired.

Randolph sat down, and then suddenly PR director Jay Horwitz said he had to leave Willie alone for a moment—he would be right back.

“You sure, Jay? I’m hoping that’s not what I think it might be,” said Randolph, with the entire room erupting into laughter. “We won tonight, Jay!”

Suddenly, Heyman peeked out the door after Horwitz.

“Oh, shoot, there’s the grim reaper over there waiting!” said Randolph. “He’s making sure he’s the first one to know about it. Wow! Go-lly!”

Then he went all over the room, pointedly making note of each of the nonregulars in the larger-than-usual press contingent.

“We have the great Chris Cotter [of SNY] here tonight. Wow. Boy, who else we got? And we got Curly [Chris Carlin of SNY] back there. What’s Curly doing back here? Golly, I bring out the best. I feel all the love, I really feel it. And my favorite, Bart [Hubbuch, of the Post], over here, Bart’s my favorite. I’m glad to have him, too. I’m feeling lots of love tonight. Hey, Jay, hurry up! Let’s get it over with. God.”

Ben Shpigel, the beat reporter for The Times, smiled in a can-you-believe-what-he-just-said way. The next day reporters all wrote about the new and loose Willie. He’s funny!

Randolph kept it up all weekend, long after the shtick got weird and embarrassing. Was he really joking about his fate, still?

On June 14, in a pregame interview with reporters, he talked about seeing his “ugly mug” on the back pages of the tabloids and said he had been talking about it with his coaches. On June 15, he joked with reporters that maybe he didn’t even need to pack his luggage for a West Coast trip since he might not go.

“I don’t know what scenario has to happen today—if I have to win, split or win two,” Randolph said. “I might lose both and still might be on the flight, I don’t know.”

Just over a day later, he was out.

PERHAPS NO PLAYER represents the Randolph-era Mets better than Carlos Beltran. He has a beautiful swing—he hit 41 homers in 2006—and he’s an incredible defensive player, regularly sacrificing his body to catch balls. And yet he has unquestionably failed to live up to his $119 million contract. He hit 16 homers his first year and is on pace for 23 this year. The fans have never taken to him.

“You can go back a generation and clearly Carlos Beltran is Kevin McReynolds—in every sense, except he’s a switch hitter,” said Rose, the Mets radio announcer, referring to the talented, mercenary left fielder for the post-championship Mets of the late ’80s. “But same guy! Very talented. Dispassionate. Very well paid. And frustrating.”

And it was also a moment that involves Beltran that set the Mets on this negative track. In Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS, Carlos Beltran was hitting in the bottom of the ninth with the tying run at third, and the winning run at second. Adam Wainwright had no control of his fastball that night. He told me after the game that there was no pitch he could go to other than his curveball. And there came the curve on a 0-2 pitch, in for a called strike three.

“I really think so much of the negativism of the fans this year is easily traceable to September ’07, but it really began festering when Beltran took strike three,” said Rose. “That’s when it started.”

THIS WEEKEND—the end of the homestand before Randolph’s fatal swing out West—George Foster and Roberto Alomar, arguably the two biggest bust-acquisitions in team history, participated in pregame ceremonies where they unveiled signs indicating the number of games left to be played at Shea Stadium until its destruction later this year.

During a rain delay on Saturday, two fans were standing on the ramp just outside the mezzanine section debating whether Willie should get the ax. They concluded that it didn’t really matter.

“They’re so emotionless,” said Bill Durso, a 36-year-old from Parsippany. “They make you not care.”

“How many nights are you gonna invest watching them on the West Coast till 2 a.m.?” he continued. “I look at it and say, I have to go to bed. I gotta go to work tomorrow. I gotta go play with my son.”

His friend, George Moed, 63, from Long Island, agreed. Moed and Durso sit one row apart in Section 4 of the mezzanine, and they became friends after watching this team for years. Moed said he can’t even muster disappointment.

“That’s true, he doesn’t scream anymore,” said Judy Moed, his wife, standing nearby. “I usually hear him screaming from the other room, and I haven’t heard anything. Not lately.”

While they spoke, a burst of cheering came from inside of the stadium. During the rain delay, members of the Texas Rangers had gone out into the pouring rain and started sliding around on the soaked tarp covering the field. Moments after they started, hundreds of fans began chanting together: “Let’s Go Rangers!”

ON JUNE 18, the day Randolph’s firing was announced, he told reporters in the lobby of his California hotel that he was “stunned” by the development.

And for once, the press seemed to agree fully with his assessment.

“He deserved better than that,” Klapisch said. “I don’t think he was a good manager and he needs to be held accountable, but he didn’t deserve this. The flight out to the coast? Why did they do that to him? I know Willie asked [Omar Minaya, the general manager] point-blank on Sunday before he got on the bus, ‘Am I O.K.—are you making a move?’ Omar told him to his face, ‘You’re fine.’

“As far as I know, Omar knew with 99 percent certainty he was firing Willie at that moment, and he told him to get on that bus and that it’s O.K.”

jkoblin@observer.com

Randolph will be replaced by former White Sox manager Jerry Manuel; Dan Warthen, who had been the Mets’ pitching coach at AAA New Orleans, will assume Rick Peterson’s duties. AAA Manager Ken Oberkfell and AAA coach Luis Aguayo will also join the staff.

Randolph’s fate was the subject of speculation since the end of the 2007 season, one in which the Mets lost a seven-game lead in the National League East with 17 games left to play, one of the biggest collapses in baseball history. But after initially equivocating, the Mets announced a few days after the season that Randolph would return as Mets’ manager. It was the first of several press conferences held to reaffirm the status quo.

Randolph posted a record of 302-253 as manager of the Mets, good for fourth among the team’s managers in career victories, and second to only Davey Johnson, the manager of the 1986 Mets, in winning percentage.

However, it is likely that his tenure in New York will be defined historically by losses—from the 2007 collapse to the failure of a vastly superior Mets team to defeat the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2006 National League Championship Series, and a 2008 season that, as Randolph’s term ends, has more losses than victories.

While much of the blame for the 2008 team’s mediocre record belongs to the players, along with the roster constructor, General Manager Omar Minaya, some of Randolph’s managerial decisions served to highlight the shortcomings of his roster, from the way he used his shaky bullpen to the way he criticized some of his younger players for the very same actions his veterans escaped from unscathed. And as criticism mounted in the press – criticism which was answered by silence from the organization’s hierarchy – Randolph took on the air, very visibly, of a man who was thoroughly fed up with it all.

What appeared to seal his fate were comments he made to the Bergen Record’s Ian O’Connor for an article published on May 19 that criticized coverage of him by the media, including SNY, the team-owned network that televises the Mets.

Randolph publicly apologized—but ownership refused to take his call that week. The following Monday, May 26, another news conference was held to announce, once again, that Randolph was still the manager. But no guarantees on the length of his tenure were given, providing a continuing distraction each day since.

Three weeks later, after forcing Randolph to fly across the country to begin a West Coast trip, and with the Mets having won three of four games, only then did the Mets fire Randolph. It is the kind of treatment that has given even Randolph’s harshest critics reason to feel sympathy for him.

But the funny idea of the whole Torre-for-Randolph idea is that there’s no evidence that the aspects of Randolph’s managing that have come under fire most—his lack of demonstrated passion, his deference to veterans, and his problems managing his bullpen—would have altered with this particular regime change. After all, Randolph learned his style by Joe Torre’s side as a bench coach for much of Torre’s Yankee tenure.

While Willie Randolph has yet to be ejected from a game, there are some who have argued his failure to kick dirt on an umpire has led to an indifference from his team. But Joe Torre hardly qualifies as a Bobby Cox-level umpire agitator. Torre has only one ejection this season, and one all of last season. Clearly, the success Joe Torre had in leading the New York Yankees to 12 straight playoff appearances wasn’t based on his willingness to be a yeller.

In terms of in-game decisions, another area in which Randolph has come in for criticism this year, it’s hard to discern any pattern that differentiates him from Torre. Both men can be said to be suffering because of personnel limitations imposed on them by the decisions of their general managers.

While Willie Randolph has, until this week, continued to play Carlos Delgado every day despite loud calls for his benching, Joe Torre has done the same thing with the inept Juan Pierre, and also with his struggling center fielder, Andruw Jones, until an injury made the indecision moot.

But clearly, both managers have very little in the way of alternatives. When Delgado was benched for two games this week, he was replaced by Damion Easley, whose bat is only valuable as a fill-in at middle infield positions. (In fact, in 2008, Easley’s .209/.239/.279 line hasn’t even been valuable there.)

Torre has a similar problem in his outfield. While Pierre clearly isn’t helping the offense with his .271/.343/.305 batting line, Torre’s alternatives while Jones heals are the lightly regarded Delwyn Young and recent Mets minor league cast-off Terry Tiffee, a pair of uninspiring alternatives.

Randolph has also received criticism for continuing to pitch Aaron Heilman, a pitcher who excelled in the bullpen from 2005-2007, in critical situations despite his early-season struggles. As recently as Friday night, Randolph went to Heilman in the eighth inning, and Heilman responded by allowing four runs in the eighth inning to provide the 9-5 margin in a Los Angeles win.

But Joe Torre has a similar problem with setup man Jonathan Broxton, who posted ERAs of 2.59 and 2.85 in 2006 and 2007, but whose ERA has ballooned to 4.94 this season. Broxton was summoned Saturday to protect a 2-0 lead, and gave up three runs in what turned out to be a 3-2 New York victory.

There certainly are aspects to Willie Randolph’s managing that could improve—for instance, his use of Pedro Feliciano, his most versatile and effective reliever besides Billy Wagner, in primarily blowouts, or only as a lefty specialist, despite his ability to get righties out, and pitch multiple innings at a time. Feliciano has now pitched in 30 games—16 of them in games the Mets won or lost by 4 runs or more, and in 6 of the 14 close contests, he’s faced two batters or less. A change to a more optimal usage pattern would help every other member of the bullpen, Heilman included, to pitch in more comfortable roles.

But the reasons for New York’s 28-27 record, and Los Angeles’s 27-29 record, primarily have to do with the players on the field. And any change from Willie Randolph to Joe Torre, the man who trained Willie Randolph, likely wouldn’t have made much difference at all.

A good many Mets fans think they’ve identified the problem: His name is Willie Randolph, the team’s manager. Sports talk shows are filled with full-throated cries for Mr. Randolph’s dismissal, the sooner, the better. Fans at Shea Stadium have taken to chanting “Fire Willie!” as they watch the team struggle through one inexcusable loss after another.

Fortunately, the Wilpon family, which owns the Met franchise, hasn’t given into the fans’ demands. After a Memorial Day meeting with Mr. Randolph, management made it clear that Mr. Randolph would remain at the helm, at least for the time being.

Willie Randolph is a victim of circumstances beyond his control. It is his bad fortune to preside over a team plagued by underachievers like Carlos Delgado, Carlos Beltran, Aaron Heilman and Oliver Perez, and by faded, broken-down stars like Pedro Martinez and Orlando Hernandez.

Mr. Randolph did not put this team together. He was handed this roster by his immediate boss, GM Omar Minaya, a highly regarded executive whose judgment was said to be nearly impeccable. But nobody at Shea is screaming for Mr. Minaya’s dismissal. Nobody is demanding the head of Jose Reyes, the team’s talented but enigmatic shortstop. Third baseman David Wright still fields marriage proposals from adoring fans even though his vaunted clutch hitting has failed him this year.

Simply put, the team is a mess. Each day seems to bring evidence that the Mets just aren’t a very good team, and that Mr. Randolph has been saddled with a lot of high-priced players who lost their passion for the game somewhere en route to New York.

It’s commonplace in sports to note that owners cannot fire entire teams, so they fire managers in the hopes that somehow the message seeps through to players. That sort of thinking is behind the popular uprising against Mr. Randolph.

The Wilpons should continue to resist the idea that a managerial change will make everything better. Instead, they should make it clear to the fans and to the press that Mr. Randolph will be the Mets’ manager for the remainder of 2008. That’s the only way they can put an end to the chanting, the distractions, and to the occasional call from would-be manager Gary Carter, the Hall of Fame catcher who publicly lobbied for Mr. Randolph’s job last week in an breathtaking display of insensitivity.

Mr. Randolph may or may not be the solution to the Mets’ woes. If he is not, then the Wilpons have every right to look elsewhere once the season is over. If he is, he will deserve the accolades that will come his way.

When Randolph reached out to Mets ownership, his call was reportedly returned by General Manager Omar Minaya. And when Minaya, who traveled to Denver to be with the team this past weekend, was asked Friday if Randolph was in any imminent danger, he responded with a classic non-denial denial. Management is expected to meet with Willie Randolph Monday.

Randolph, 48 games into the season, can take no comfort from recent historical precedent.

The Mets have fired four managers in-season since Fred Wilpon purchased the team in 1980. Two of the four managed more than 48 games before getting the ax, while two managed fewer than 48. And Randolph’s situation is most similar to the latter pair.

The closest Randolph parallel is Davey Johnson, who was less than two seasons removed from managing the Mets to within one win of the World Series when he was fired in May of 1990. The Mets had lost to a Dodgers team that was a heavy underdog in the 1988 National League Championship Series. Then, despite most experts believing New York had the most talent in the National League, the Mets won less than 90 games in 1989, failing to win their division.

By 1990, questions about Johnson’s ability to motivate his team, a mixture of young talent and older veterans underachieving, made the Mets’ start unacceptable to ownership. Johnson was also blamed for failing to maximize the potential of Darryl Strawberry.

''I felt our ball club was underachieving,'' then General Manager Frank Cashen told The New York Times on May 30, 1990. ''The time came to head in a new direction. I talked to the team about underachieving and having fire in the belly. I want this team to focus on winning because winning is what it is all about.''

Change the names and years, and the template fits Randolph’s tenure with the Mets, with two major exceptions. First, Johnson never publicly accused the team of setting him up for failure. But when Randolph told the Bergen Record that the SNY Network wants “to show me when somebody gives up a home run or somebody makes an error, so they want to see me [using profanity],” he was accusing the Mets of sabotage.

Davey Johnson also had a reservoir of goodwill from managing the Mets to a World Series championship in 1986. While Randolph frequently touts his history of winning, that has come as second baseman or bench coach. As a manager, 2006 is all he’s got.

And despite those advantages, Johnson got less time in 1990 than Randolph has already gotten in 2008. New York’s record is 23-25 this season—it stood at 20-22 when Johnson was fired and replaced by Buddy Harrelson.

Two seasons after Johnson’s termination, the Mets had invested heavily in the free agent market, and many publications, including Street and Smith’s baseball annual, had picked them to win the National League East. But under manager Jeff Torborg, the Mets struggled in 1992, finishing with a 72-90 record. The team was just four games out of first place heading into August, but finished the season 23-38 to land 24 games off the pace. The team even inspired a book, The Worst Team Money Could Buy, by the Bergen Record’s Bob Klapisch.

When the team retained Torborg, it was expected to improve in 1993. But a disastrous 13-25 start moved New York to fire Torborg, and replace him with Dallas Green.

When the Mets changed from Johnson to Harrelson, the move paid off, as New York finished the season 71-49, just falling short of a division title at 91-71. The move from Torborg to Green did little—the Mets finished 46-78 to end up 59-103, good for last place, behind even the first-year Florida Marlins.

In both cases, the managers were expected to finish atop the National League East, and were given less time than Willie Randolph has already had to turn the team around. So it may be that shortly after Randolph meets with management, SNY won’t have him to kick around anymore.

Willie Randolph, the Mets manager whose team is now under .500, has made two mistakes this week, at a time when his job is looking more and more unsafe.

Randolph told the Bergen Record that he was getting a lot of heat from the media because he's black, and that SNY--which the Mets organization owns--delighted in catching him at unflattering moments in the dugout.

He asked to speak with the Mets' owners, the Wilpons, to apologize, and his offer was rebuffed (instead, he spoke to the team's GM, Omar Minaya).

Even the SNY analysts for Mets games, who are rarely critical of Randolph, lashed out. "In my 17 years of major-league baseball and 10-plus years of being up here in the booth, I've just never heard of a manager make those kinds of comments before, and I'm really quite surprised that Willie made those comments," said Keith Hernandez. Gary Cohen called it "another self-inflicted controversy."

Second mistake: He told WFAN that he thought that the Record interview was off the record. But other reporters who saw Randolph being interviewed said it looked pretty formal since Ian O'Connor, the Record reporter, had a tape recorder in his hand. Reporters tend to look out for one another on sports beats, and New York sports reporters are especially temperamental.

So, Willie: When your team sucks on the field, and the headline writers for the Post and the News are preparing to do their worst, spend your personal capital wisely. At the moment, you're just throwing it away.

Schoeneweis kept a sense of humor about the fan reaction. He claims never to hear plaudits, only criticism. Therefore, on Sunday, he heard only an absence of boos.

“It was kind of eerie,” said Schoeneweis as he dressed at his locker prior to New York’s 1-0 loss Thursday to the Washington Nationals. “You get used to it, I guess. It’s like people who live in the city and move to the country, how they can’t sleep nights.”

Schoeneweis lowered his ERA to 1.50 with a 1 2/3 inning, three-strikeout performance against Cincinnati on May 11. But his success—and last season’s failures—have little to do with his pitching, and everything to do with how he is used. Scott Schoeneweis is a terrific relief pitcher—against left-handed hitters only. Against lefties, Schoeneweis is Barack Obama in North Carolina. Against righties, he is Obama in West Virginia.

“That’s pretty much what my job is,” Schoeneweis said of pitching to left-handed hitters. “That’s what I was brought here to do.”

But after the Mets inked Schoeneweis to a three-year, $10.8 million contract prior to the 2007 season, Manager Willie Randolph didn’t use him as a lefty specialist—he deployed Schoeneweis time and again against right-handed hitters. There was ample evidence that supported keeping him in the specialty role—which Randolph ignored.

Schoeneweis has a career line of .226/.301/.297 against lefties, which is superb, and .293/.364/.466 against righties, which is not. Yet even in the first half of 2007, when the Mets had an effective Joe Smith from the right side, along with righty Aaron Heilman and lefty Pedro Feliciano, who are capable against both righties and lefties, Randolph used Schoeneweis against predominantly right-handed hitters.

The results shouldn’t have been surprising. Schoeneweis’ ERA was an unsightly 5.24 in the first half, largely on the strength of five home runs—all by right-handed hitters. From a three-run blast by Edgar Renteria that tied a game on April 22 (a game the Mets lost), to an extra-inning blast by Brendan Ryan on June 26 that cost New York another game, Schoeneweis became the public goat—all while pitching very well against lefties.

Coincidentally, all five home runs came at home, which helped Schoeneweis to a 6.91 ERA at Shea for the season, and helped fans to heap scorn upon him all year long.

To be sure, Schoeneweis was also battling a torn tendon in his leg, an injury that couldn’t be repaired with surgery. Instead, Schoeneweis needed to strengthen his leg in the weight room to compensate for the injury.

“I was not able to fine-tune myself physically as the season went along and pitch effectively,” Schoeneweis said.

But what is amazing about his pitching through injury in 2007 is that his success did not dramatically change against lefties, nor did his problems against righties. For the season, his line against lefties was .204/.308/.247—against righties, .316/.390/.574. But Randolph used Schoeneweis in 157 plate appearances by righties, and just 108 by lefties. Nearly 60 percent of the time, Schoeneweis faced hitters he’d proven for seven years that he couldn’t get out.

Randolph appears to have learned his lesson with Schoeneweis, who has faced more lefties (24) than righties (23) so far this season. He is holding lefties to a .095/.174/.238 mark, while righties are at .381/.391/.524.

But with Heilman continuing to struggle, Randolph may be tempted to expand Schoeneweis’ role, rather than use Feliciano, Matt Wise or, to a lesser extent, Duaner Sanchez, all of whom have shown the ability to get hitters out on both sides of the plate.

The night Schoeneweis got cheered, he entered a 6-3 game in the top of the seventh inning. A righty, David Ross, grounded out. But then righty Ryan Freel singled. He was caught stealing, and Schoeneweis then struck out Joey Votto, a lefty, to end the seventh.

Randolph stuck with him for the eighth—fortunately for him, the Mets had added a pair of runs, making the situation less tenuous. Schoeneweis struck out Ken Griffey Jr., a lefty. The next two hitters, Brandon Phillips and Edwin Encarnacion, both right-handed, singled. Schoeneweis came back to strike out Adam Dunn, a lefty, and Jeff Keppinger, a righty.

His totals? Lefties were 0-for-3 with 3 strikeouts. Righties were 3-for-5, for a .600 batting average.

Schoeneweis acknowledged that it would be easier to have a defined role, but said, “Certain guys struggle at times, and the roles change. If that guy’s not going well, you get a try.”

"I told my players this is a life lesson in baseball and in how to become champions," Randolph said to reporters afterwards. "And when you get to that road you have to seize it because you never know when it's going to come again."

The speech Randolph gave his team was a rare one. His attitude during a disastrous 5-12 run over the season's final 17 games was to reaffirm his faith in his players publicly, and to let them play without any undue managerial interference.

"For me, I don't want to change anything," he told the Observer last Sunday. "I just have to be myself, really. And that's really all I have."

Meanwhile, his players were describing themselves as complacent and bored.

The Mets had a 7 game lead with 17 games to play and their collapse stands with those of the 1951 Dodgers, the 1964 Phillies, the 1978 Red Sox and the 1995 Angels as baseball's all-time worst.

The managers for three of those teams—Chuck Dressen, Don Zimmer and Marcel Lachemann, respectively—were let go within two years of the respective meltdowns. The Phillies’ manager, Gene Mauch, never saw the playoffs again with that team.

General Manager Omar Minaya praised Randolph to reporters yesterday afternoon, but stopped short of saying that the manager’s job was safe. "I owe it to ownership to sit down and talk to them," Minaya said to ESPN.

A media relations official for the Mets said yesterday that the Mets would not issue a statement regarding Randolph's job status.

"Any time you have an opportunity to finish the deal and don't capitalize on it," said Randolph yesterday, "it will come back to haunt you."

I know this to be true because I was at Shea Stadium to see it. Otherwise, it would be difficult for me to believe that any professional baseball team—let alone one that spent nearly the entire season in first place—could end its year in such spectacularly poor fashion.

This particular game, against the last-place Florida Marlins and with the season on the line, was over before the end of the first inning. Veteran pitcher Tom Glavine, looking old but not crafty, allowed nearly every batter he faced to reach base. When he left the game—after a mere third of an inning, mind you—many of the fans booed. Others seemed too stunned to do anything at all.

By the time the Mets came up to bat, they were down 7-0.

At first, they responded with what looked like real determination, scoring a run in the bottom of the inning and forcing Marlins starter Dontrelle Willis to work his way out of jam.

Over the next two innings, the Mets mounted threats, putting multiple runners on base but failing to drive them in.

Then, against a succession of justly unheralded Florida relievers, nothing.

It’s easy, sitting in the stands, to ascribe motivation—or lack thereof—to underperforming athletes on the field. It must be said, though, that these 2007 Mets looked profoundly indifferent as they crashed and burned, surrendering the division title—and their playoff spot—to the Phillies.

They could at least have had the decency to humor the fans, who stuck around in large numbers, cheering every sniff of a revival, and rooting, pathetically, for the 1 on the scoreboard next to “WAS” to overtake the 3—then 5, then 6—next to “PHI.”

But the Mets looked as listless in the dugout as they did on the field.

Perhaps what was happening was simply unthinkable to them, too. It’s a possibility that is somewhat less unpleasant to consider than other, darker theories about their performance: that battle-tested Tom Glavine had already checked out mentally, mulling a valedictory 2008 season in Atlanta; that thrilling shortstop Jose Reyes, a cornerstone of the team’s plans for the next decade, turns out to be unable to function in the face of perceived adversity; that likeable manager Willie Randolph isn't actually that good at managing.

By the late innings, the crowd seemed unable to muster the energy to cheer, boo or do much of anything except sit glumly. It was a fitting response, somehow, to a team that didn’t seem to care either.