By Mike Vaccaro

ST. LOUIS — You’ll never know what this feels like. I’ll never know what it feels like. Tuesday night, Aaron Heilman got a chance to find out what this feels like, what it is like to walk into a baseball game at Busch Stadium, with 45,000 people on their feet, with two men on and two men out, with Albert Pujols, the tying run, waving his bat from 60 feet, six inches away.

This is what it feels like:

“The first thing you say to yourself is, ‘OK, this is Albert Pujols,’” Heilman said yesterday afternoon, fiddling with his MP3 player a few hours before the Mets would close out their openings series of the season against the Cardinals. “But you’d better not dwell on it. Because if you dwell on it, he’s a guy who knows what to do with a bad pitch. And quite a few good pitches, too.”

This is what it feels like to listen to all of those fans as they stand all the way through your warm-up pitches in the bottom of the eighth inning, after your manager has entrusted you to register an all-important “hold” (probably the least appreciated statistic in baseball’s vast statistical network), with Orlando Hernandez hoping you can help keep his first win of the season intact, with Scott Schoeneweis hoping you can spare him the wrath of talk radio.

“Your adrenaline is really flowing, for a lot of different reasons,” Heilman said. “It’s a big point in the game, and it’s your job to be effective in situations just like this. It’s Albert Pujols – did we mention that? – and so everyone in the park thinks he’s going to hit a home run in that spot because that’s what Albert Pujols does, right?”

I tell Heilman a story: yesterday, at lunchtime, the local Cardinals television station replayed the game. Right around the time the toasted ravioli arrived, the Cards mounted their two-out rally against Schoeneweis. David Eckstein walked. Chris Duncan lasered a single just over Jose Valentin’s glove. Suddenly, a safe 4-1 lead was now a tenuous one. Out went Schoeneweis. In came Heilman. And that’s when something funny happened.

During the Pujols at-bat, in addition to the usual camera shots – from centerfield, from high above home plate, the standards – there was one regular spot that they flashed to during each of the six pitches Heilman would throw. And that was a hand-held camera, the picture shaky from cold hands, located in the third deck of left-field, just above the “Big Mac Land” sign.

Clearly, someone was looking for a nice shot of a long fly ball heading right for the lens.

“I can see why they would do that, because that hitter is so good you’ve come to expect everything from him,” Heilman said. “But it can’t bother you. He doesn’t hit 1.000. The day we find a guy who hits 1.000, then we’re going to have problems as pitchers. Until then, you have to figure you have a good chance to get him.”

This is what it’s like to challenge the most dangerous hitter in the game, the way Heilman did on the fourth pitch of the at-bat, with the count 2-and-1.

“I have to get even there,” Heilman said. “The crowd is starting to get into it. You can see that Albert is locked in. I’m locked in. He swung hard, almost came out of his spikes. But I slipped it past him. Did the crowd gasp? I didn’t hear that. I was busy doing other things.”

This is what it’s like to have your entire workday summed up in 15 seconds, which is approximately how long it took from the moment Heilman went into the stretch on a 3-and-2 count, checked the runners, delivered, watched Pujols swing, saw that he hadn’t gotten all of it, then turned around to watch Carlos Beltran dash toward the ball and glove it easily.

“It’s different from most jobs, that’s for sure,” he said. “Most jobs, you have eight hours and maybe nothing much exciting happens. Hitters, they have nine innings to get their jobs done. Starting pitching the same thing. But this? It’s either instant gratification or … what would you call the opposite of that?”

“Instant misery?” I suggested.

“Instant misery,” he said. “I like that. And that’s exactly what it is. When it doesn’t work out the way it should.”

And when it does?

“Exhilaration,” he said. “Instant, and complete, exhilaration.”

-30-