All We Are Saying Is Give Mets a Chance The common wisdom is that the Mets" decline began when Carlos Beltran took that called third strike to conclude the 2006 National League Championship Series. But that's not the case. The downfall actually started nearly a year later, in September 2007, when Mets management made the foolish decision to install temporary field boxes at Shea Stadium for a postseason berth the Mets had not yet clinched. And never did clinch. Instead, jinxed by the very people who run the team, the Mets collapsed, blowing a seven-game lead with 17 games to play. For good measure, the Mets did it all over again in 2008, except they took it to another level, not only being eliminated on the final day of the season but also in the final game played at Shea. Which then forced 50,000 tortured fans to suck it up, dry their children's tears and stick around for another hour to give Shea its proper send-off. Their reward for such fortitude was a new stadium, Citi Field, with absurdly oversize dimensions that upended the Mets" best player, David Wright; the dropped pop-up by Luis Castillo that let the Yankees steal an interleague game; the injuries that would never heal; more injuries that would never heal; the ugly incident in which Francisco Rodriguez, a k a K-Rod, assaulted the father of his common-law wife in a Citi Field hallway; the utter fiasco in which Omar Minaya, the general manager then, implied that a reporter had written negative articles about the questionable conduct of one of his top aides because the reporter wanted the aide's job; the insults that the Mets owner Fred Wilpon heaped on some of his top players in a 2011 New Yorker article; and, of course, the long-running Madoff entanglement, which left the Mets a small-market team in a big-market city, searching for free-agent crumbs under the table. We could go on. And on. Four straight losing seasons, beginning in 2009. Four straight fourth-place finishes. A fifth one looming, with a 27-41 record that is currently the third worst in baseball. And yet, something more positive is clearly afoot. The dynamic doubleheader performance of Matt Harvey and Zack Wheeler on Tuesday, which lived up to the pregame hype, did mean something. So did still another strong performance by Dillon Gee the night before. You add in Jon Niese and you actually seem to have the makings of a strong, homegrown rotation that can become the anchor of - strange as it is to say these words - a good Mets team. A club that, like the best Mets teams of the past, would be built around pitching. Now all the Mets need are a couple of outfielders, a first baseman and maybe a shortstop, if Ruben Tejada doesn't get his head screwed on straight. And, of course, a bullpen. It may take awhile, but in the interim, Bats readers might even observe a cease-fire of sorts on the numerous comments deriding team ownership. Or at least be kinder. Better days seem to be ahead.