You can count me among the tweetin’ Twitterers (or is that the Twitterin’ tweeters?) now: http://twitter.com/MikeVacc

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Antonio Pierce caught a break from the Manhattan grand jury yesterday, the kind of break every one of us would like to think we’d be in line for if we were ever in his position — and one we probably couldn’t count on, in truth. The DA called his behavior in the hours following Plaxico Burress‘ gun follies “first-degree bad judgment,” and that is probably what it was, but there are a lot of people who go through the system with a similar burden of proof whose legal woes wouldn’t be over. This isn’t about famous or obscure, rich or poor, just the luck of the draw. Pierce got lucky.

But with such munificence comes a cost, and this is it: Giants fans will no longer be quite as forgiving if what we saw of Pierce on the football field in the post-shooting portion of last year continues. Pierce wasn’t good; he was barely adequate, in fact, and then abandoned not only his role as the team’s most charismatic spokesman but the team itself by clamming up following the playoff loss to the Eagles last January.

Now, on a certain level, every one of us can understand it if his performance was a direct result of being scared out of his mind by the uncertainties awaiting him with this case. It’s well and good to talk about “compartmentalizing” and seeking solace in your work, but that only goes so far. At some point every day — if not several times an hour — the realities of this fiasco had to seep under his helmet, and it’s hard enough playing top-drawer football in the midst of 21 other men trying to make each other bleed without doing it with half your attention otherwise occupied.

The fact is the Giants’ season was sabotaged by the presence of a half-what-he-used-to-be Pierce every bit as much as it was by the absence of Burress. Now that this is behind him, the Giants need the high-energy, high-performance version of Pierce ahead of them. And then all will truly be forgiven.

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Nelson Figueroa did a lot of chirping about how unfair the Mets were to him in the days and weeks after his last call-up to the bigs. Now, Figueroa is a very, very good guy, and his complaints on a human level were certainly understandable, and he was awfully good for an awful Buffalo team in the interim. He’s still a good guy this morning. But, man, did the Mets ever need for him to be better than six runs in an inning and two-thirds last night.

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Not a bad baseball viewing night for pitching groupies: Andy Pettitte against Doc Halladay on one channel, Johan Santana against Joel Pineiro — a very good pitcher who looks like Christy Mathewson when he faces the Mets — on the other.

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I’m a sucker for newspaper books anyway, but Bob Greene‘s wistful and nostalgic “Final Edition” may well be the best treatise ever on why people ever got into this wonderful business, and why they still want to, despite it all.