The Respective Returns of Pedro & Billy

The poets tell how Pancho fell Lefty's livin' in a cheap hotel The desert's quiet and Cleveland's cold So the story ends we're told Forgive the following hackneyed cinematic conceit, but let's say it's 1999. A voice whispers in your ear that in the relatively early years of the next millennium, the greatest starting pitcher in baseball and one of its finest relievers will be Mets, together. Would you not have salivated or perhaps fainted from joy? But because thrillers set in the "not-too-distant" future never make much sense when you start to deconstruct their premise (scenarios intended to jar us as moviegoers in the present would unfold gradually in real time and thus probably seem not all that shocking upon arrival) — or perhaps because it's the Mets — you learn that the dreamscape you've been promised is not of some 20-win/40-save utopia but a post-apocalyptic barren wasteland whose end result leaves our heroes groping abou...