Jose Reyes’ Amazin’ Work Ethic Is Rubbing Off On Disappointed Citi Field Ironworkers

After a collapse so complete, so devastating, it’s understandable that you might start to question everything:

It wasn’t easy being a Mets fan yesterday, but it could not have been much harder on the fans than on those in hard hats building their laughingstock of a team a brand-spanking-new stadium in Flushing, Queens. In a city where the work can be hard and thankless, the combination of both was tough to beat here, backbreaking and heartbreaking all at once.

To hear Denis O’Neil, 36, an electrician, describe the mood at the construction site, one would think there had been a fatal on-the-job accident. “It’s just a somber day, you know?” he said. “There’s not really anything I could have done.”

But his feeling of helplessness quickly turned to anger. “What do you need a new stadium for?” he said, ignoring the fact that he was calling into question his own livelihood. “You can’t even win at the old stadium. What do you need a new one for?”

Location Scout: Citi Field.

Beat The Mets

The hubris of the Mets weighs heavily on those who are the least equipped to handle it:

Some cried at the end. Some laid blame. Some looked stunned and wretched. And the voices of Mets fans who had roared all summer for their no-bones champions were silent or subdued or outraged, with all bragging rights lost and grand dreams vanished on the last day of the season.

Around Shea Stadium as the stragglers filed out, on the Flushing trains bearing them away from the scene, in sports bars and homes where they had watched the debacle, Mets fans were a tragic lot: angry, betrayed, frustrated, baffled, crestfallen, as cheated and solemn as riders in a gallows cart.

. . .

The No. 7 train from Shea ran a bit slower into Manhattan, at least for the downtrodden in orange and blue. Little boys in Mets caps held the hands of fathers who had been crying. Couples rode silently, pensive and commiserating with head shakes and whispers.

But a man in a Mets jersey and salt-and-pepper hair shouted his disgust for all to hear. “I want an apology,” he demanded. “I want it in the newspaper, on TV and the radio.”

Dennis Higgins stormed off the train. “You want to know how I feel?” he asked a reporter. “I’m miserable, just miserable. I got hit with a double whammy. My girlfriend broke up with me last night, and then this.”

Katherine Hickey, a Mets follower for 40 years, said she watched distraught fans in the stands after the game. “Some people were crying,” she said. “They were in their seats with their heads in their hands, shaking. This is very difficult for all of us.”

After the pasta and meatballs dishes had been cleared from the dinner table, late afternoon at the Yonkers home of Carmela Olley, a 56-year-old widow and a Met fan for 30 years, was funereal. “It was like somebody died,” she said. “My nephew Joey kept repeating, ‘I’m so sorry, Aunt Carmela.’ My sister Theresa knows what this means to me every year, to watch and hope for the Mets.”

In Great Neck, Lenore Belzer, who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1950s, said she watched the Mets game alone, and was somehow reminded of the bygone Dodgers. “It was like reliving the past with the Dodgers,” she said. “And now I’m sick again.”

For Mets fans, the day began like a metaphor for New York itself — with confidence, hope and an armored determination. But after the first inning, with the Mets losing 7 to 1, most could glimpse the end like a distant dark cloud.

And let the recriminations begin . . . Billy Wagner in New York Magazine:

“We’ve been throwing four innings a night — for months!” he says. “Our pitching coach [Rick Peterson] has no experience talking to a bullpen. He can help you mechanically, but he can’t tell you the emotions. He has no idea what it feels like. And neither does Willie [Randolph]. They’re not a lot of help, put it that way.”

Things You Don’t Need A Psychic To Tell You Include . . .

Staten Island psychics conclude that the Mets are toast:

“It ain’t over till it’s over,” Yogi Berra famously quipped, but for one Staten Island psychic, it’s over even before it ain’t.

“They’re not going to come close to winning whatsoever,” seer Jim Weiss said yesterday. “I just don’t get a good feeling about this team.”

Zillions of pundits and fans have been getting bad vibes from this New York nine since they started tanking last month, and you don’t need a sixth sense to read the stats.

The Mets lost a comfortable seven-game lead over the Phillies and now stand a game behind after last night’s 7-4 loss.

Looking ahead to this tense weekend of baseball, which will likely decide whether the Mets will make the playoffs, the Advance consulted with Weiss in his Prince’s Bay office:

“I hope I’m wrong, but I wrote them off back in June,” he said. “It’s as if they’re out of step. They’re not coordinated as a team.”

. . .

Astrologer Tanya Milton of St. George said it would take several days’ work to run star charts for the bombing bullpen — five days for the whole team. But she did perform a tarot card reading for slumping shortstop Jose Reyes, using his date of birth to predict his fate:

“I’m sensing that he’s feeling very insecure about his fans, and that might put him in a tilt,” she said. “If he could block out negative energy and focus on the game, he will prove himself and it will be a good [series]. Geminis depend a lot on the approval of others. Their egos need to be stroked.”

Einstürzende Mets-Batting

A pre-9/11 take on the Mets’ ineptitude:

As mortified fans watch the Mets fritter away their once-commanding grip on first place in the National League East, dread infects the city that it might be witnessing a collapse of unprecedented proportions. Even those who far prefer the Yankees can’t escape the fact that such a nose dive would be downright humiliating to New York.

How could they? How dare they?

John Glendinning, 53, a retired laborer from Brooklyn who goes by Whitey, is so agitated he can’t watch the games without losing his sense of civility. “I get too nervous,” he said. “I start throwing things at the wall.”

But, hey, calm down. Collapses happen.

Indeed, where would the city be without its grandiose collapses? The all-out falls from grace or riches or first place, or even a simple upright position, are a familiar and infuriating and perhaps even necessary part of the New York experience. And while collapses smart, they can also be spellbinding.

These breakdowns, of course, aren’t confined to baseball teams that suddenly forget how to hit or pitch, not to mention catch fly balls. They materialize in every aspect of life.

Roads collapse, stores collapse, financial markets collapse, egos collapse. They’ve all happened throughout New York’s history, again and again. During the 1975 fiscal crisis, in fact, the entire city just about collapsed.

Collapses can be aberrant or telling. They can reveal something about larger societal verities. Or they can be vacant of meaning — simply perversely breathtaking to watch.

Part of what makes these sour episodes so intriguing is the velocity at which they can happen. Part of what makes them so frightening is that they can upend our world, even cause us to root for a different team. People and institutions that we thought we knew and trusted to always be there are — poof — gone just like that.

Then again, one of the worthwhile things about collapses is that they allow the often pleasing challenge of recovery, which isn’t always that hard.

. . .

Infrastructure Collapses are pretty common: Walls go, roads go, especially when no one takes care of them. Thus in May 2005, a 75-foot-high retaining wall collapsed onto the Henry Hudson Parkway in Upper Manhattan, burying parked cars in mounds of debris and dirt. The road, at least, held. Not so in 1973, when an 80-foot section of the West Side Highway fell onto West Street near Canal Street.

No one was seriously injured in these collapses, but many New Yorkers worry a lot about pieces of the city falling apart.

Is There Anyone Still At Their Desk At The End Of August?

When pressed for duty, New Yorkers find a way to call out sick:

On Wednesday morning, a pair of women in shorts and tank tops sat on the No. 7 train as it ran from Grand Central to Flushing. They were also AWOL, more or less, and they were planning to watch “a friend of a friend of mine from London who’s playing Rafael Nadal today,” said one of them, Jamie Lewis, 31.

“I sent an e-mail to my boss at midnight, said I’ll be out tomorrow and you can reach me on my cell, and turned my computer off. The markets are crazy and I work at a hedge fund, so I thought I’d escape.”

Ms. Lewis’s friend, who identified herself as Patricia, said she works for an Internet company and added, “I called in sick. Can’t you tell?” She held the back of her hand against her forehead. “I canceled some meetings.”

Others were at Flushing Meadows by dint of a range of alibis and measures, and a lot of these involved the notion that because they were using corporate seats, or accepting the tickets as a gift from clients, or bringing clients, it counted as work anyway.

One man in shorts and loafers gestured to the young woman beside him on the No. 7 train and said that they both worked for banks, “and she’s my client.” This explained his declaration that the Open “is a good corporate event,” but not the fact that he was hugging and kissing the woman throughout the train ride.

Colleen Channer and a friend, who were watching the Nathalie Dechy-Francesca Schiavone match from an upper row of Louis Armstrong Stadium, the better to simultaneously keep an eye on the match between David Nalbandian and Ivan Navarro-Pastor on the adjacent grandstand court, said that she had taken a vacation from her job at a law firm. “But I have a friend who’s an I.T. guy who told his boss last year that he was running a new program, and then he put the program up and came to the Open the rest of the day,” she said.