BLUENATIC

You can blame all the injuries if you really want to. It's certainly not easy to win baseball games when three of your four best position players are on the disabled list for an extended period of time.

You can blame the pitching, too. Santana and K-Rod notwithstanding, Mets pitchers have been inconsistent at their best, atrocious at their worst. The injuries to Maine and Putz (and now Nieve) don't help.

You can blame management as well. Or the training/medical staff. Or Jerry Manuel and his coaches. Cases can be made to support blaming all of them.

But it doesn't take a Silver Slugger or Cy Young candidate to catch a pop fly, or to touch third base. It doesn't take an All-Star to make a routine play. It doesn't take a brilliant GM or astute game manager to field a team that looks like it cares out there.

But as Coach Norman Dale so eloquently pointed out in Hoosiers, "This is your team," Mets fans. And unlike the 1952 Hickory Huskers, it doesn't look like Jimmy Chitwood is going to come to the rescue. Beltran, Reyes, and Delgado may not return this season at all. If they do, who knows how effective they'll be? Or how far out of the playoff race the team will have fallen by that point.

After dropping two out of three to the worst team in baseball, today, mercifully, is an off day for the New York Metropolitans. That means, theoretically, that they can't humiliate themselves again until tomorrow.

I guess that's a start.