A few minutes Terry Collins exhibited some Grade-A Backman-caliber buntsmanship last night and the Mets lost what felt like their 700th straight game, R.A. Dickey said this:

We have to find a way to be honest with ourselves about what kind of team we are. We can’t just keep telling ourselves, ‘Oh, we’re a better team than this.’ We may not be. And we’ve got to be honest about that, and identify what we’re doing wrong, and do it better. That’s the only way you have any real growth.

This. That is to say, that. What he said.

I’ve been bleating on all season about how the Mets are indeed a better than this, and rationally I believe they must be — partly because it’s almost impossible for a Major League Baseball team to be worse. So when Terry Collins insists the wins will come, it doesn’t sound insane to me because I recognize that randomness dominates almost everything that happens on a baseball field, that there are bizarre twists-and-turns to every year, and that every early-season outcome is amplified by the small sample size.

Frustrated Mets fans have told me in the past few days that if I can’t see that this is essentially the single worst team in the history of baseball, then I must not know anything about baseball. I don’t really feel the need to counter that argument — no one’s forcing anyone to read this site — but if I did, I’d probably say that my understanding of how a steaming pile of early-season awfulness can skew perceptions is actually the direct product of a 20-some year study of the sport. And I’d add that the most important things I’ve learned about baseball is that the whole Socratic knowing-that-you-know-not thing almost always applies, and that making sweeping declarative statements about anything happening in the game based on 18 games is a meandering road toward Looking-Like-A-Dunceville, a town in which I’ve certainly spent plenty of time.

The Mets’ lineup, starting tonight, features at least three excellent players, three decent players, and two guys who might very well prove decent and haven’t yet shown themselves to be terrible. It’s difficult to envision them hitting like one of the league’s worst offensive teams all year unless you really believe David Wright’s going to finish with the Alex Cora-like hitting line he’s rocking so far. Given the amount of history we have to show that David Wright is much, much, much, much, much, much better than Alex Cora, thinking he’s suddenly not would pretty much make you a crazy person.

The pitching could be an issue all season, but it, too, almost has to improve. The Mets currently have a collective 77 ERA+, and no team in the past 20 years has finished with a number that low. It might go back way further than that, too; I just got bored of clicking and sorting on baseball-reference.com. You can cobble together a staff of Pat Mischy guys and count on pitching better than the Mets have had so far, so once they settle on the best mix and some guys settle in, it will at least be better, if never good.

Back to Dickey. Even with all that said, the Mets, from the manager to the bench to the bullpen to the lineup to the rotation, have done themselves few favors in the early goings of the 2011 campaign, little to stack the odds in their favor. All teams make fundamental mistakes, and it’s easy to pick ’em out and pile on when a team is going poorly, but fundamental flaws in the approach to the gare — glaring, premeditated mental errors — are harder to excuse. And there have been some of those, too.

I can’t pretend to understand what motivates baseball players to shake themselves awake and start playing like men who reached the absurdly competitive heights of professional sport, so if Dickey says it’s time for them to step back, be honest and start trying to fix things, it’s hard for me to argue. I don’t know exactly how that process works, but with the team spending every evening digging itself deeper into a rut and further from playing even a single meaningful game this season, yeah, I’d say it’s probably about time it happens.