In a post to NY Baseball Digest, Mike Silva asks, “Can Ike Davis change the offseason?”

That’s all well and good, but here’s what I want to know:

Can Ike Davis change… THE FUTURE!?

After reading this New York Times article, it has become abundantly clear to me that the events of the past four seasons preventing the Mets from winning a world championship have not been just an unfortunate series of coincidences.

Clearly, if these Mets were to win a world championship, something extraordinarily bad would follow, and so agents from the future have come back in time to ensure that the Mets do not win.

I mean, think about it: It’s marginally reasonable that one year, in one seven-game series, Jeff Suppan could allow only one earned run over 15 innings and Jeff Weaver could pitch like a competent Major Leaguer.

And I’d believe that a team could blow a seven-game lead with 17 to go, even if the odds were overwhelmingly stacked against that happening.

And maybe once a collection of otherwise reasonable-seeming Major League pitchers could all crumble at once and form the worst bullpen in human history.

And perhaps I could comprehend that a team could, in one season, suffer debilitating injuries to nearly all of its best players.

But c’mon. Four consecutive years? I’m all about the role of luck and randomness in baseball, but at some point — just like those dudes in the Times — even the most understanding and patient of baseball minds have to consider ideas that they might otherwise deem crazy to explain a series of events as unlikely as this one.

And I think it’s pretty clear: someone, or some group of people, from the future has been charged with coming back in time and making sure the Mets don’t win. I don’t pretend to understand how they’ve done this, either to get back to the past or, once they get here, to make sure the Mets don’t win. Don’t expect me to wrap my head around future technologies.

How, you might ask, could they know that the Mets’ success would bring doom if clearly by the time the future comes it hasn’t? It’s a time paradox, stupid. It will always be this way. They are always charged with making sure the Mets don’t win. It’s just how it works.

So the Mets are not only battling the Phillies and the Marlins and a wholesale lack of organizational depth. They’re up against destiny, the entire plotted course of human events, and maybe the universe itself. That’s a whole lot of adversity, even for Carlos Beltran.

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If you missed it earlier this week, I added my five most-trafficked SNY.tv columns to the right column of this page, mostly just so I could have something there. But I promised to add my five favorite SNY.tv columns, and so here’s that.

Most of them are from this year, which I suppose makes sense if I’m theoretically improving with practice.

One alarming trend I noticed was that most of my favorite columns came within a month-long period from April 21 to May 21 of this season, so maybe I’ve already peaked.

Anyway, in no particular order:

Other things Steve Phillips said, May 21, 2009.
The less-read companion piece to “Things Steve Phillips said.” Way too long, but it summed up a lot of how I feel about baseball in general. It narrowly beat out a similar article from the previous May.

Moving out, moving on, Feb. 2, 2009.
This is my recap of the fan-organized funeral for Shea Stadium over the winter. It was sad, and I was sad, and I had to spend a ton of time de-wimpifying the column. Still turned out quite wimpy, though.

Mind games, April 30, 2009.
A call to stop speculating on players’ mental states based on what we see of them on the field and through the media. Basically a rehashing of what I always write, which is basically that I know nothing and probably neither do you.

Gone to market, Jan. 15, 2009.
I was trashed for this one in message boards by people asking how I expected Omar Minaya to tell the future, but it’s a solid summary of what have been my main criticisms of Minaya.

Abraham Nunez?, June 6, 2008.
Honestly, I have no idea how I didn’t win a Pulitzer for this epic. This one cracks me up, because it’s a clear case of what happens when I remove my mask of sanity. Chris Carlin bashed it on Loud Mouths, and maybe rightfully so, because it’s about Abraham Nunez. But the Mets’ bench really did suck that year.

Those have been added to the sidebar. I have also added, as per Anit’s suggestion, a link to the embarrassing photos of Cole Hamels post for anytime anyone needs a pick-me-up. Being a Mets fan is tough, and New York City can be a cold place, but neither is anything that a picture of Cole Hamels with his dog in a backpack can’t cure.

Lastly, I’ve added two videos to the “About Ted” page. One of them got me in trouble for drinking on camera, and then got me an Emmy nomination (!?). The other one allowed me to just go mess with people in Shea Stadium.

Marty Noble, in a mailbag for Mets.com, says the Mets are “boxed in” with Carlos Beltran and probably could not trade him even if they wanted to because of the money he’s owed.

That’s probably true. As great as Beltran is, it’s tough to imagine a team wanting to give up much of value for a guy coming off an injury-plagued season with two years remaining on a huge contract.

Beyond that, trading Beltran, one of the very best players in the game from 2006-2008, would likely amount to selling low for the Mets.

I don’t think it’s even really worth discussing, and, since Beltran is my favorite Met to watch, I would never advocate trading the guy. But there are couple of red flags on Beltran that make me a little nervous about his next two years.

According to Bill James’ Plus/Minus, Beltran went from being one of the top center fielders in baseball in 2007 and 2008 to just slightly above average in 2009. Obviously he was injured, plus defensive stats tend to fluctuate pretty wildly anyway, but that big a dropoff can’t be a good sign.

More alarmingly, and sticking with the BillJamesOnline theme, Beltran went from being consistently one of the best baserunners in baseball (averaging a net gain of about 42 bases a year from 2002-2008) to being a -3 in 2009. That’s a pretty tremendous downfall, and not something that can be explained by a couple of failures to slide.

Naturally, both of these are speed-related problems and so, if Beltran is healthy, we should expect the numbers to head back toward his mean. But his injury was a vague one and I’m a paranoid Mets fan. I can imagine nothing worse than seeing Beltran become an injury-plagued or ineffective albatross in his last couple of seasons with the team, somehow empowering all the misguided fans who have forever felt he was overpaid and apathetic.

Of course, all that said, he did hit .325/.415/.500 in 2009. So, you know, even if he’s not quite Carlos Beltran in 2010 and 2011, smart money says he’ll still be really awesome.