On the latest episode of the Mostly Mets podcast — which you should check out, by the way — one of my co-hosts (I forget which) mentioned that “if you squint,” you could see how Jason Bay might be coming out of the awful funk that plagued him for the early part of the season.

And that’s true. You can see that if you squint. Bay has his OPS up over the Ordonez Line to .656, a .241/.326/.330 split. That’s still way below standard for Bay, for players making as much money as Bay and for Major League corner outfielders in general, but hey, baby steps here.

If you want to toy with arbitrary endpoints — and I don’t, but I will because it’s Friday and I’m off to a slow start this morning — Bay is hitting .340 with an .887 OPS over his past 13 games. He even has two homers in that span, which feels like a revelation for him.

The last time we watched a once-strong hitter struggle (nearly) as mightily as Bay did these past couple of months, Carlos Delgado busted out with a two home-run game in Yankee Stadium and then proceeded to carry the Mets into an unlikely and ultimately ill-fated Wild Card chase in 2008. I don’t know why I assumed that if Bay broke out there would be something like that, some tidy moment to identify as the turning point where he returned to hitting like the guy who averaged 30 home runs a year from 2004 to 2009.

Maybe Bay’s return to form will be a bit more polite. Maybe it has already started, and only the squinters have noticed.

Still hard to tell. To these untrained eyes, it appears he’s making contact more frequently but remains vulnerable to breaking pitches on the outside half of the plate. But then I never saw quite enough of Bay in his heyday to know exactly what he looks like when he’s going well. I imagine few Mets fans have. So I think our squinting, in this case, amounts mostly to hoping.

But, you know, baby steps.