The term “rebuilding” is thrown around a lot in some baseball discussions, if not often publicly by front-office types themselves. To some Mets fans, the team needs a rebuilding year to usher it back toward contention. To others, the idea of blowing up the club — trading all the best players for promising prospects and starting fresh — seems too rash.

What the Mets actually need likely falls somewhere between the two. And really the term “rebuilding,” in its professional sports connotation at least, is shorthand for an approach to a whole series of decisions facing a team. For a smaller market club, it may make sense to function like a Taco Bell franchise: operating with the structure it has until it’s no longer efficient to do so, then tearing down the building and suffering short-term losses while it erects something that works better.

But teams like the Mets, if running optimally and with the flexibility afforded by a big budget, should never really require such a drastic overhaul. A better approach — or metaphor, or whatever — for those clubs might be a state of perpetual renovation, the type required to maintain the value of a structure more stately than a suburban fast-food joint (however delicious).

Whatever. The point is, those Mets fans crying “rebuild” should consider that the team endured many of the aspects typically associated with a rebuilding in 2011.

Yes, they made pretenses toward contention before the season and for a time even teased us with a winning club. But the 2011 Mets entrusted a slew of big-league roles to young and unproven players, resisted the urge to trade prospects for help at the Major League level, and even traded a couple of proven veterans to benefit their future.

And considering all that, it went pretty well. We learned that Josh Thole, Daniel Murphy, Ruben Tejada, Justin Turner, Lucas Duda and Dillon Gee deserve spots on Major League rosters, if not necessarily everyday roles or the jobs they are penciled in for in 2012.

In the Minors, the Mets’ top pitching prospects progressed, which is good. Most of their top offensive prospects (outside of the ones who cracked the Majors) did not. And in a way that’s not all bad, either. The Mets will not likely bank on the success of Fernando Martinez now after another injury-plagued and underwhelming season in Buffalo. It’d no doubt be a lot better if he busted out in 2011, but a firmer sense of Martinez’s chances gives the team more information with which to move forward.

There’s obviously plenty of work to be done before the Mets can comfortably field a functioning 2012 baseball team, and further work still before the Mets can field a contending baseball team. And when I suggested earlier that a team with the Mets’ resources should never have to entirely rebuild, I said “if running optimally,” which the Mets certainly were not for the latter years of Omar Minaya’s tenure.

All I mean to say is that the process — whether you want to call it rebuilding or retooling or renovating — has long since begun. It’s never going to be as obvious or unsubtle as a wrecking ball to the side of a Taco Bell, nor is there any sort of detonator the team’s front office can or will push to blow the whole thing up. It’s fluid.

Really, to many fans it appears the question of whether or not to rebuild in 2012 is linked only to the way the club should approach the futures of its two biggest stars, Jose Reyes and David Wright.

But signing Reyes to a long-term free-agent contract this offseason should in no way imply that the Mets expect to contend in 2012 and will make every effort to do so; it should only say that the Mets expect to Reyes to stay healthy and productive for a long enough time to benefit their next contender, even if that’s a couple of seasons away.

And trading Wright right now, coming off a down year, makes no sense at all. Even if the club wanted to admit to a full “rebuilding” phase — likely sacrificing some of the ticket and ad sales that allow it to maintain a large payroll — it would be better served waiting to see if Wright rebounds in 2012 before shipping him elsewhere for prospects.

The Mets’ front office appears (and has behaved) as if it is interested in developing a sustainable winner by fostering depth from within and putting faith in promising young players. It doesn’t matter what you call the process, only that the process is already underway.