Yellow tape surrounding Shea Stadium

It could be worse, the Mets could be the only team in baseball history to blow a 3-0 series lead and lose like the 2004 Yankees did to Boston in the ALCS.

This, and another year of re-running the Mookie Wilson Game 6 1986 World Series highlights, is all I can cling to for another year as a Mets fan. Now I know what it must have felt like as a Sox fan to watch Bill Buckner limp off the field after gaffing that infamous little roller up along first.

If you know me and are planning on interacting with me in the next few days, here's a heads-up: a nod of approval, a pat on the back, and a 'let me buy you a drink' suggestion are probably the only things to start and/or finish a conversation with me about this week. Don't suggest anything else in a conversation, because trust me, I will very quickly find a way to turn any such conversation into a rant about how a team can blow a 7 game lead in the NL East with 17 to play. Better to just hand me a piece of paper with a suicide hot line number on it and quickly walk in the other direction.

Give the Phillies credit, by the way: they won games these last 3 weeks that they had to in order to put themselves in position to take advantage of the situation. Now we'll see if these Phils are able to be the Philadelphia sports team that finally rids their town of the dreaded Curse of Billy Penn. For Phillies fans that have seen their franchise become the first in pro sports to lose 10,000 career games, the first pitch of their post-season will at least do one thing: make it so that the memory of Mitch Williams giving up the 1993 World Series ending homer to Joe Carter get removed as the last post-season baseball moment in Cheese Steak Land.

And it wouldn't even be so bad to endure this collapse if the Mets were the only New York team. Not only do I have to endure a post-season without the Metropolitans, but I have to endure it knowing that "The Evil Empire", who were left for dead in July as being out of the playoffs, have once again emerged as one of the post-season participants.

So who's to blame? Well, that's easy enough - ME! Yeah, the first year I live in California for an entire baseball season, the first year I live the entire season in a time zone other than Eastern, the first year I admit to watching more (dare I say it) Dodger games than Mets games (I mean, how do you not want to watch games called by Vin Scully?), and the Mets respond to the first season since 1993 that I don't attend a game at Shea (a.k.a. The House that Mookie Built) by having it drip down the back of their collective legs.

Not that I don't lack for company in the blame department. I agree with GM Omar Minaya that Willie Randolph did a great job managing this team this year. He did, and that's because Minaya gave him a flawed team with which to manage. After all, if you starting pitching staff consists of: Tom Glavine, a 40+ year old lefty who can't go more than 6 innings; Pedro Martinez, a guy there was no guarantee you'd get back at all this year, and who you couldn't count on to pitch deep into games even if he did come back; Roberto Hernandez, a 50+ year old pitcher; and two unproven guys in John Maine and Oliver Perez, who them Mets squeezed every ounce of ability this year; then you better have a bullpen as good or better than last year's pen.

Last year, a late-inning Game 7 homer away from the World Series, the strength of the Mets was their bullpen. This year, it was their weakness, which was never more evident than down the stretch of the monumental collapse. It stands to reason that if you don't go out to acquire starters than can eat up innings, the bully better be able to put out fires. This year's group can only be described as the "Fahrenheit 451 Gang". Not even John Franco choked away games this badly.

Not the regulars are exempt from blame. Reyes, Beltran, Delgado, Wright - they all struggled at times during the year, never seeming to be in sync at all. I'm willing to give Reyes, my favorite player, a pass for hitting just .205 in September, because he and Wright were the reason they played well the first 5 months.

So what to do now? Well the panicky move would be to fire Randolph and/or Minaya. But one of the reasons I have always loathed the Yankees is because of the pant load that owns the team and his penchant for overreacting about everything concerning managers and players. So it would be hypocritical to expect the same of the Turtlenecks, -er, Wilpons.

That said, here's my Mets Advocate Moment: first, rebuild the bullpen - I'd start by seeing if they can pry away Jonathan Broxton from the Dodgers; second, trade Lastings Milledge (who played well when given the chance) and whatever else it takes to get the unhappy Johan Santana from Minnesota; third, get another starting pitcher that can eat up innings by the boat load (maybe Harang from Cincy or God forbid trying to get Kazmir back from Tampa). After all, like location is with real estate, baseball still comes down to pitching, pitching, pitching.

Thank goodness Springsteen's new album comes out Tuesday. I'll need a significant amount of Bruce Juice to wash down the taste of the Mets choke.