Beginning in spring, I have thought the Mets should be looking big picture with Mejia and not over-emphasizing April victories in exchange for stunting his growth. To gain perspective, good organizations look at their teams from 10,000 feet and not up close. The Mets are always so darned worried about today that they put tomorrow in jeopardy.

But even if the Mets want to look at their problems only in the here and now, I would ask what is their current problem?

No team should make decisions based on one week of play, but if given a choice I would rather make a decision based on one week of actual data/results than guess in spring training that my bullpen is going to be bad and put my best starting prospect into that role on a hunch. And one week into the season, what do you trust less, John Maine/Oliver Perez or the set-up crew?

– Joel Sherman, N.Y. Post.

If you’ve been following along at home, Sherman has been just about the only newspaper columnist frequently — and rightfully — taking the Mets to task for rushing Jenrry Mejia to the Majors and into a bullpen role, potentially stunting the top prospect’s development in the name of some marginal upgrade to a very shaky-looking 2010 team.

In the linked piece, today’s 3UP column, Sherman hammers home every argument for why the Mets would do better in the end by sending Mejia to the Minors to be stretched out as a starter than by continuing to risk his longterm growth by using him as a reliever.

It’s spot-on, and definitely worth reading.

Is o’conner actually basing an entire post – for ESPN no less – on what he santana would say when under truth serum… truth serum… are you kidding me… is this fact or fiction… if it’s fiction, ESPN should have drawn an accompanying cartoon to go with it… maybe johan riding a unicorn… that’d be cool…

– Matt Cerrone, MetsBlog.com.

A few people have pointed me toward Ian O’Connor’s truth-serum column, but I’m trying not to indulge that type of stuff these days by responding to it or linking to it. I’m sure I will again someday soon, I don’t want to spend too much time fretting about nonsense when the Mets give me plenty to worry about on their own.

I just wanted to link to Matt’s post because I like the image of Johan Santana riding a unicorn. That could easily inspire the next great work of Awesomist art, following Vin Diesel and Usher Riding Into Battle on a Chariot Pulled by White Tigers.

For the second straight April, talk is developing that the Mets can’t hit in the clutch. They’re batting .189 with runners in scoring position, after all.

It’s Monday morning and I’m only one coffee deep into my workweek, so I’m not yet prepared to go to battle over whether the abstract concept of clutchness even really exists. I’ll say it’s a hotly contested issue, to be sure, and there’s little statistical evidence to show that, given a large enough sample size, players will perform significantly better or worse in clutch situations than they would in others.

And I’ll add that practicing group psychology on professional baseball players based only on what little of their emotions they choose to disclose to us seems a bit silly — if not downright foolish — especially when we’re doing it after only six games worth of evidence.

But I will ask this of anyone who is certain the Mets can’t hit in the clutch:

Have you considered the possibility that too many of the Mets simply can’t hit?

Not all of them, for sure. David Wright and Jason Bay and, right now, Jeff Francoeur can hit. No doubt about that.

But take a closer look at the RISP numbers, beyond just the obvious fact that they’ve come in a tiny sample: The Mets actually have a respectable .347 on-base percentage in The Situation, a bit better than the Major League average.

Yesterday, with a runner on second, Livan Hernandez threw four straight balls to Francoeur, then got Gary Matthews Jr. to pop out weakly to shortstop. Why give Francoeur anything decent to swing at when you can see Matthews looming on deck?

I’d venture to guess that’s mostly what’s happening here, combined with the whims of a small sample size. The Mets’ lineup has so many gaping holes in it that pitchers can pitch around or pitch carefully to the good hitters with runners in scoring position, driving up the team’s on-base percentage in the spot, but pushing down the team’s batting average.

The only good-hitting Met that’s been disappointing with runners in scoring position is Bay, and it has come across precisely eight plate appearances. Eight. 8. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8. That’s nothing. In his career, Bay has a lifetime .929 OPS with RISP and impressive numbers in just about every clutch situation. Give it time, give it time, give it time.

The return of Jose Reyes to the lineup should help, as it not only fills in one offensive black hole with a decent hitter, but will also likely create more opportunities with runners in scoring position for David Wright, who has only seen four so far this season.

A 2-4 start to the season isn’t easy to stomach coming off the 2009 campaign, and it certainly hasn’t been helped by the Mets’ team-wide failures to come through in big spots so far. But don’t isolate the whims of few games’ worth of stats to diagnose widespread unclutchitude when it’s way more likely that the men who actually failed to perform in the clutch were the ones compiling the roster and filling out the lineup card.

Whoa, alright. I woke up this morning and couldn’t see my bedroom floor. It was covered in my dirty laundry. I couldn’t see the surface of my desk, either, or the bottom of my sink.

This happens during baseball season, especially when the Mets are home, and especially in April when I’m still getting adjusted to a different schedule. I spent every night this week only watching baseball some place or another, and so this morning I needed to commit hours to unburying myself from the detritus of opening week: the laundry, the dirty dishes, the three-day old press notes strewn about my home office.

I don’t envy my wife, who’s trying to live and study to become a doctor amid this squalor.

The house is clean now, and so I’ve got a second to look around at what’s been happening here. And the Mets are 2-2. Here’s hoping all those WFAN callers jumping off bridges after Thursday night’s game swam safely to shore in time for Friday night’s win.

2-2. Fifty percent. Not bad, not great. Just so-so. But given the circumstances, not terrible at all.

And better yet, the Mets have outscored their opponents 22-13 in those four games. Sure, plenty of that is due to some downright miserable play by the Marlins, but a lot of it is thanks to surprisingly good play from elements of the Mets’ roster.

The bullpen, for example. Mets relievers have mustered a 1.93 ERA over their first 14 innings despite a pedestrian 8:5 K:BB ratio.

So that’s cool. Likely to continue? I hope so, but I’m a bit skeptical. Fernando Nieve, one of the most effective bullpen arms so far, has been used in all four of the Mets’ games, and Jerry Manuel seems to manage as if there’s a rule against using a reliever for more than one inning.

Last night, with the Mets up by four runs, Manuel turned to Nieve for the eighth inning, presumably because Nieve is settling in as the elusive “eighth-inning guy,” and maybe because the meat of the Nats’ lineup was coming up. But Hisanori Takahashi had only used 12 pitches to retire the side in order in the seventh. Overuse could become a problem if Manuel is not more careful with his bullpen arms.

Actually, the starting pitching hasn’t been all that terrible either, despite all the preseason hoopla. Though none of the individual performances has been exceptional, no starter has entirely crapped the bed, which is notable given their propensity for bed-crapping. Johan Santana’s start was predictably good, only John Maine’s start could reasonably be described as lousy, and Mike Pelfrey’s — even considering his four walks — might even qualify as pretty damn decent.

As for the offense, Jeff Francoeur is killing it. Killing it. So are Jason Bay and David Wright. Whoever the Mets trot out to center field has managed to get on base at a great clip. Rod Barajas has not, but he’s made up for it with his power. Mike Jacobs, Luis Castillo and Alex Cora have not been at all good.

What does this all mean? Not much. These were four games in a very long season. The good news is that the Mets managed to win two of these four games without Jose Reyes, who returns to the lineup today. So, you know, good.