Very Bad Things Are Coming

(For posterity: Mike Pelfrey was bad. Cory Sullivan was briefly good. Mets lost in Florida. None of this matters.) The Mets, I fear, are about to tumble into an abyss. I fear they are nearing a horrifying period, duration unknowable but probably not brief, that will damage the franchise and fray its ties with its fanbase. I'm not talking about 2009, that plague year of injuries that keep mounting when you don't they can any more. I'm not talking about Citi Field, a nice place to see a ballpark whose flaws are fixable and, indeed, gradually being fixed. I'm talking about things that are harder to fix, and will take longer to recover from. Yesterday afternoon, amid news of MRIs and trades and press conferences and conference calls, I felt a twinge of unease that had nothing to with Johan Santana's elbow and what value the Mets would get back for Billy Wagner. I couldn't quite figure out what it was until later -- and when I did figure it out, I wondered i...