MLB teamThe Mets' MLB team season could still end as awfully as it did last year when this final weekend at Shea Stadium is through. But Jerry Manuel's managing future shouldn't depend on what happens over the next three days. If the Mets again miss a postseason spot, it won't be because of some fatal lack of MLB team character or something Manuel didn't do or comprehend. The bottom line will be these Mets just weren't good enough. Period. That should be their epitaph. Last night was just another reminder that there's no need to go digging any deeper than that.

The Mets were playing their 158th game, and once again Manuel had no idea what he'd get from the grab bag lineup he had to run out for their most important game of the year. Until a couple of old standbys, Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran, conspired to put together the winning rally in the ninth, with Beltran smacking a winning single off the glove of Cubs first baseman Micah Hoffpauir, giving the Mets a dogged, come-from-behind 7-6 win that left just a flicker of hope alive that maybe this year's ending really will be different.

All team sports information reports that Manuel's starting catcher was supposed to be Brian Schneider, but he was a last-minute scratch with a bad back. So rookie Robinson Cancel started and wound up stroking a tying single to left in the eighth.

Manuel's starting second baseman last night? That was 35-year-old career utility man Ramon Martinez, hardly the safe choice. Before signing with the Mets, he hadn't been in the big leagues this season and was idle for three weeks after being cut by the Dodgers' Triple-A MLB team. But Manuel, playing a hunch rather than behaving like a guy trying to lock up a job for next year, gave Martinez a chance over Luis Castillo because he liked Martinez's two at-bats late in Wednesday's gut-wrenching loss.

The wind was swirling at Shea, the stands were more than one-third empty, as if all the people who bought tickets but stayed away simply couldn't put themselves through this heartache again after last year. Wednesday's horrific loss of a game the Mets MLB team led 5-1 could have changed the look and feel of everything had the Mets only held on to win. Philly had lost and Milwaukee ended up winning and pulling into a dead heat with the Mets in the wild-card race.

But the Mets did lose, and Manuel came back yesterday with the clear thought, in his mind, that last night was one of those nights in the year when a manager's mood and confidence and temperament has to make a difference. And there he was in one of his longest pre-game talks of the season about his MLB team, insisting still having faith in one of his struggling hitters, Ryan Church, though he knew no one else still had much. And sure enough, there was Church last night, still in the lineup, scoring the tying run in the eighth on a hooking, belly-flopping slide after the throw from rightfielder Kosuke Fukudome beat him to the plate.

Manuel showed some guts, too, to send out the grab-bag lineup he did not knowing what he could expect from Pedro Martinez, either. Martinez has been a shadow of his past self for most of this season, and if the Mets don't make the postseason he might very well have pitched his last career big-league game last night at Shea -- a fact the 36-year-old Martinez seemed to acknowledge when he waved to the fans who gave him a standing ovation as he left the game after allowing the first two Cubs he faced to reach base in the seventh.

After some early struggles, Martinez settled in and gave the Mets a season-high nine strikeouts against Cubs manager Lou Piniella's parting gift to New Yorkers -- a getaway-day Cubs lineup that was missing five regulars, including sluggers Derrek Lee, Alfonso Soriano, and Aramis Ramirez. It was still a 3-3 game when Martinez left.

Then in from the bullpen to face Hoffpauir came lefthander Ricardo Rincon, whom the Mets rescued from an exile in the Mexican League. Hoffpauir hit the first pitch Rincon threw over the rightfield wall for a three-run homer for his MLB team.

The Mets MLB team could've folded right then. With Manuel coaxing and cajoling them along, showing more confidence in some of them than they have a right to have in themselves, they didn't. The sight of Beltran's game-winner dribbling off that Hoffpauir's glove, scoring Reyes, made Manuel look like a hell of a prophet -- or a poker player -- for at least one more night.