Originally posted June 15, 2011:

A white-haired couple got on the train yesterday and stepped toward the first pair of open seats while I fumbled with my headphones. The woman sat first, across from me, then grabbed her husband’s hand and steadied him down into the seat next to mine.

“It just hurts sometimes,” he said. Then he leaned toward me and smiled. “Never get old.”

“Hey, beats the alternative,” I said.

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My brother would have loved Jose Reyes. Who could blame him, really?

Hold up. I’m going to get to the personal part of this post in a minute, but I want to focus on Reyes first.

Let’s pretend for one moment that we could all manage to successfully tune out the constant speculative noise surrounding Reyes, and that we have the capacity to put everything else aside to just appreciate the things Jose Reyes is doing on baseball fields around the country.

Holy hell. Have you ever seen anything like this?

There’s Jose Reyes lashing a liner in the gap, bounding out of the box. Jose Reyes stealing second, stealing third. Jose Reyes diving to his left to stop a hard grounder, Jose Reyes firing the ball across the diamond from deep in the hole.

Jose Reyes is dancing off the base, in the corner of the pitcher’s eye and the front of his consciousness. He’s chasing down a pop-up near the foul line in left field. Jose Reyes is celebrating in the dugout and he’s looming on deck. Jose Reyes just smashed a frozen rope past your office window and now he’s sprinting through your backyard. Look to your left: It’s Jose Reyes. Now to the right: Jose Reyes. Jose Reyes, Jose Reyes, Jose Reyes.

This is your summer blockbuster: The Jose Reyes Spectacular.

Only they don’t often make movies this grand and this good, the type you can watch over and over again and still find new details to appreciate: minor plot points, aesthetic intricacies. It is a production massive in scope and so richly rendered in every particular, like the work of a great auteur afforded an unlimited budget and – oh dammit, there’s that money thing we’re avoiding.

My brother Chris loved triples, even more than most. He had what you might call the triples mentality, if not the requisite speed. The way Reyes aims for third base so brazenly on hits that seem certain to be doubles, the irrepressible gusto of it – that was the approach Chris took to pretty much everything.

And I know he was my big brother and I probably aggrandize him a bit, especially now that he’s been gone almost nine years. But when I run into his old friends, they practically tell Bill Brasky stories about the guy: about his exploits in sports, in frat-house shenanigans, even in school.

Apparently, he once took a class at MIT in which teams of students were charged with creating the best design for a machine to lift panels of sheetrock. At the course’s outset, the professor joked that any student who could lift the sheetrock on his own would be excused from the assignment. So Chris – according to the story – marched down to the front of the lecture hall, lifted the sheetrock above his head and carried it out of the room. He returned for the next class and his team ultimately won the contest.

I have no way of verifying if the story is real or apocryphal, and a quick Google search tells me panels of sheetrock weigh about 80 pounds – unwieldy, perhaps, but certainly well within the range of normal human strength. But regardless of its accuracy, the story sums up my brother pretty nicely. He was competitive, cocky, funny, brilliant, ox-strong and doorway-wide.

He was the type of dude it would have been easy to envy if he weren’t always so damn awesome to me. Other than his abject refusal to let me win at anything, Chris provided me everything an older brother could, from guidance and big-picture life lessons to mixtapes, and beer when I was underage (sorry, mom).

More than anything, though, he gave me baseball. He taught me the rules, players and teams. He bought me cards and taught me how to scale them. When he was old enough to drive, he took me to games. Tons of them. Though eventually Chris and I differed on certain finer points, he is responsible for the very fundamentals of how I watch and appreciate the game. After all, he’s responsible for me watching and appreciating the game.

Late in the summer of 2002, Chris moved from his home in Boston to my parents’ house, to a hospital bed set up in our living room. What started as melanoma on his shoulder had spread through his body and into his brain. We knew – though we never said it out loud – he was dying, and it became clear it was easiest for everyone to let him do it there. Weird time.

The best I can figure it was Saturday, Aug. 31, when I watched my last game with my brother. Baseball-reference tells me the Mets lost a 1-0 tilt to the Phillies, an unlikely pitchers’ duel between Randy Wolf and Steve Trachsel.

I can’t recall any of it. All I remember is that I was charged with carrying my brother from a wheelchair to the easy chair in the den where he would watch the game. And I remember how light he was, how frail he felt – this guy who weighed 230 pounds just a year earlier, the football stud with the broad shoulders, my big brother. And I could feel the cancer just under his skin, invasive little bumps. It was everywhere, and terrifying.

The next day I packed up my car, told my brother I loved him, and headed off for my senior year of college. He died two days later.

I skipped the Mets’ home opener in 2003, the first I missed in 16 years of being a Mets fan. Soon after I graduated and moved back home, the Mets called up their top prospect – the 19-year-old shortstop, you know the guy.

It is only now, eight years later, that I realize Chris never saw Reyes play. Or David Wright, for that matter, but he would have hated Wright – that’s a different story. A whole generation of Mets players have come up and grown up before me without him there to share it. And now, maybe, they’re going away. It’s… well, it’s strange to think about.

But he would have loved Reyes. Of that much I am sure. Hell, we all love Reyes.

We love him. We watched him develop, and we have seen so many of his trials and triumphs. We know the way he gets when he’s happy, when he’s sulky, when he’s angry, when he’s jubilant. He feels, well, almost like family.

Note that I say almost like family, which is very different than actually being family. We are not actually related to Jose Reyes and the love we feel for him as fans is not the love we have for our real-life loved ones. Obviously. And the prospect of losing Reyes, weighing so heavily on the minds of Mets fans these days, is not the same as losing a family member. You don’t have to remind me.

But it is, on the orderly plane that baseball provides for us to try to sort some of these things out, some distant, more palatable version of that. Here is someone you love. And now, due to circumstances beyond your control, you might lose him too soon.

So understandably, Mets fans gather on blogs, in the airwaves and out on the Shea Bridge on Friday nights desperate to show the world their love for this great player, underscoring the pain we will feel if he leaves for some other green pasture elsewhere.

I can’t say if Reyes will be a Met at the end of this season or the beginning of the next one. Few can. And while I’m not as resigned to his departure as many in the media and fanbase, I know this for certain: He’ll be gone someday. Everything goes away eventually. If not next year for Reyes, then five or seven or ten years down the road.

We can lament the hand Reyes – and all of us, really – has been dealt, with so many of his best years wasted by a subpar front office, bad players around him, crappy bullpens, mishandled injuries, everything. Not to mention his contract coming up now, with the Mets in financial flux and hamstrung by a slew of bad deals. That all sucks, no doubt.

But we should celebrate, too, that we have this right now. No matter what happens with Reyes later this year or after the season, the special things Reyes has done and is doing every night this season are some we can carry forever. It is an awesome spectacle, a confluence of immense talent and pure joy on the baseball field, with the churning legs and flying dreadlocks and beaming smile. This is ours to keep.

And I can sit here now regretting that my brother never got to see this, knowing how much he would have loved it. But that’s useless. Besides, I carry with me my brother’s love of baseball. I carry him every day, and it’s not traumatic; it’s awesome. He exists now as an inextricable part of me, a part I can celebrate.

We are alive and we get to enjoy Jose Reyes playing baseball. It beats the alternative.

This is the only greatest hit I’m including from the ol’ Flushing Fussing spot. Not sure why, except that I do still feel nostalgic for Shea. Super emo. Originally posted Feb. 2, 2009:

On Sept. 25, 2008, in the top of the 7th inning, I ducked out of the Shea Stadium press box, found a private spot on a less-trafficked ramp, sat down against a cement barrier, and cried.

I rarely cry, and I’m still not sure why I did that night. It might have been because I was working on this column, a difficult one to write. It might have been because there was some chance it was the last I’d ever see of one of my favorites, Pedro Martinez, and I knew he deserved better than to have Ricardo Rincon and the Mets’ miserable bullpen blow what could have been the swansong of a brilliant career. And the setting probably had something to do with it, too.

Most of the tears I’ve shed in the past 22 years have fallen on Shea Stadium’s concrete concourses. I have no idea why I meet the real, meaningful events in my life with a straight face and sarcastic comment and weep like a widow at baseball games. All I know is that Shea Stadium is to making me cry what Babe Ruth once was to hitting home runs.

(One notable outlier is the movie Finding Neverland starring Johnny Depp, which is very, very sad. Leave me alone.)

So knowing Shea’s unique ability to move me, and with no particular professional interest in mind, I headed out to pay my last respects to the stadium at the fan-organized gathering near what used to be Gate A on Saturday in Flushing.

I estimated that there were about 200 people there, though some said there were twice as many. It was hard to say. There was no formal agenda, no proper funeral service, no final tour of the grounds and no divvying up of the remaining scraps of salvageable keepsakes. It was just a swirling mass of bundled-up Mets fans, some reporters and cameramen covering the phenomenon, and cops on megaphones ushering traffic away from the construction site.

Somehow no one thought to capitalize on the event. Families gathered around breaks in the blue-sheathed chain-link fence and climbed up piles of dirt to take last looks and snap photos of the crumbling behemoth. A young man and an old man played catch with mitts and a tennis ball. Fans who knew each other from Internet message boards exchanged awkward comments about meeting each other in person and rued the blistering cold.

It was nice, but it was not particularly emotional. Only when prompted by camera crews did a group of fans sing a verse of “Meet the Mets.” The icy wind blowing off the Flushing Bay brought more tears than did any sense of mourning for the Mets’ old home.

“It’s bittersweet,” one woman said. “I’m sad to see it go, but Citi Field looks so much nicer.”

That seemed to be the order of the day — deflecting any attachment one might have felt for Shea toward the new, sterile ballpark that now appears ready for action out beyond what used to be center field. In fact, nearly everyone with whom I spoke echoed that sentiment.

That’s not how it went for me, although I wasn’t that sad. It was more like denial. I spent a while staring at the last remnants of Shea Stadium, and I could only think one thing:

This is so f@!#ing weird.

Make all the jokes you want: Shea is now inarguably a giant pile of trash. Only a section of upper deck still stands, with parts of the façade tagged by graffiti artists to add to the sense of urban decay. The rest is rubble, a mess of royal blue and grey being cleared by bulldozers that chugged along even as the fans huddled in memoriam.

In my 28 years, I’ve been lucky enough to see the Colosseum and Chichen Itza and the Great Wall of China, and after my visit to Flushing on Saturday, I couldn’t help but wonder why those relics got to stand the test of time and mine will be made into a parking lot.

I know that’s irrational. I know Shea Stadium is not a great architectural achievement or a lasting cultural landmark. Heck, it can only boast two world championships. But I’ve spent some 2,000 of the best hours of my life at Shea, watching, working, cheering, booing, praising, heckling, eating, drinking, dodging the old-man security detail, and of course, crying like a toddler. And I’m not sure I’m ready to let that all go.

I don’t know which memories I will amplify and exaggerate and which will fade, just like I don’t know if the tears I shed in September were for Pedro or my brother or the stadium or my youth, all of which felt very fleeting that evening. I don’t even know if I’ll ever cry again without Shea Stadium to bring it out of me.

I do know that it is fitting that city laws would not permit an implosion. That would have been too cathartic, too clean an ending for a stadium where too often, your heart was torn out one tiny piece at a time, where nearly every year you were left looking at a heaping pile of garbage and wondering what the hell happened.

So maybe it’s best that they’re getting a fresh start. Maybe a lot of Shea Stadium memories are better paved over. I don’t know.

Before I got back on the 7 Train to head home on Saturday, I noticed that a group of fans had climbed over a torn-down piece of fence and into the construction site for one closer, final look at the stadium. The men with the baseball gloves and tennis ball were among them.

As I considered joining their crew, a wind-whipped cop walked over, ordered them up against the fence along Roosevelt Avenue and reprimanded them.

“Now get out of here,” he said. “And don’t give me any more trouble.”

And so they did. And so did I. And so will Shea Stadium.

But as the train pulled out of the station and I stole one final glance at what used to be my favorite place in the world, I became overwhelmed with a feeling difficult to mask with sarcasm. It was a feeling that said the 22 years since my first baseball game, Opening Day at Shea in 1987, have passed way, way too quickly, and a feeling that knew that buried somewhere in that rubble, there is a whole lot of me.

Reader/commenter Non_banned_ryan passes along Gordon Edes’ list of potential managers for the Red Sox. Included:

JERRY MANUEL, 57
His nine years of managing experience with the White Sox and Mets include a division title in Chicago in 2000, when he was named AL Manager of the Year. But Manuel was never able to overcome the stigma of the Mets blowing a seven-game lead with 17 to play in 2007, and was fired in 2010 after two seasons in which the Mets were decimated by injuries. Cerebral and low-key, Manuel scores high in communication skills and would seem to fit the Sox profile of seeking a players’ manager.

As Ryan points out: “Cerebral” is code for “wears glasses.” “High in communication skills” means “impresses the media with his one-liners while he neglects to talk to players for weeks at a time.”

Also odd that he wouldn’t be able to shake the stigma of 2007, when Willie Randolph managed the Mets. But I suppose Manuel was the bench coach then.

I’m hearing that the Mets could trade David Wright for prospects or pitching or a proven veteran leader or a big-time power threat or a dirty-uniform guy or some combination thereof.

The Mets have considered and will again consider dealing Wright, even though it is extremely unlikely that they do so. Nearly every other front office in baseball has internally discussed acquiring Wright, regardless of if they have the requisite pieces to pull off such a trade or the money with which to pay Wright’s salary or even the need for a third baseman.

And though Wright could void the 2013 club option in his contract if he is dealt — making him more valuable to the Mets than any acquiring team — there remains some chance the Mets will flip him to a potential contender looking for a one-year rental at third base if that team can return a package that Sandy Alderson believes is worth more to the Mets than Wright’s next two seasons.

The Mets are interested in re-signing Jose Reyes, but not if his demands exceed what they’re willing to pay. If the Mets sign Reyes, they might trade Wright to free up salary or keep Wright in an effort to compete sooner rather than later. If the Mets don’t sign Reyes, they will consider both trading Wright and not trading Wright.

For the Mets to trade Wright, they will need to find a willing trade partner offering one or more players that could contribute to their future more than Wright will, then hammer out the details and fill out a bunch of paperwork. Though it is possible all of that could happen this winter, it is improbable.

If the Mets retain Wright, they could also trade him during the season or keep him for the length of his contract or sign him to an extension.

The plan, according to Viola, is to have Leathersich be a starter in Class A ball next year. If he thrives, so much the better. But the Mets just want him to gain as much experience as possible by throwing the extra innings.

“We’re going to have him build up his arm, but I see him as a closer or set-up man somewhere down the line because he’s overpowering for short periods of time,” Viola said.

– Chaz Scoggins, Lowell Sun.

Via Amazin’ Avenue comes this solid read on lefty Jack Leathersich, the Mets’ fifth-round pick in 2011.

If you read this site with any regularity you know how dismissive I normally am of both far-off prospects and small sample sizes. And Toby tells me to never read too much into NY-Penn League stats, which I suppose makes sense: A lot of guys in that league are adjusting to wood bats and the rigors of life in the Minors for the first time. And even a full (short) season there is a pretty small sample.

So it is with several grains of salt that I note Leathersich’s ridiculous rate of 18.5 strikeouts per nine with only six hits and three walks allowed in the 12 2/3 innings he pitched for the Cyclones. That’s about as dominant a line as you’ll find anywhere in the professional ranks. Given the tiny sample, it could mean little to nothing, but it’s certainly better than, you know, not striking out more than more than half of the batters you face.

And it’s interesting that the Mets are going to stretch Leathersich out next year for reasons that make a ton of sense. If they want him polishing his full arsenal of pitches, he’s best served getting as many reps as possible. Plus, if he succeeds as a starter, then, you know, sweet.

Also, and most importantly: The guy’s name is Jack Leathersich.