My wife and I drove to Mohegan Sun on Saturday night out of curiosity and boredom. We blew five dollars, ate delicious burgers, and passed time walking around the endless rows of slot machines, mesmerized by the flashing lights and digital clanking and all the people gambling away their money.

They sit, in earnest, pumping cash into the same machine over and over, hitting the same button again and again, hoping they’ll finally hit the jackpot. A precious few actually do. Way more don’t.

But they keep trying because, presumably, they’ve already committed so much money to the damned bandit and believe the only way they’ll recoup their losses is to keep feeding the thing bills until their luck turns around.

And because just about everything makes me think about the Mets, it made me think about the Mets.

It’s not a perfect metaphor, of course, because the outcomes of baseball games — unlike slot machines — are not entirely random. They’re largely affected by randomness, but not wholly dictated by it.

But with the Mets’ pitchers and catchers set to report to Port St. Lucie on Thursday, and the deluge of newspaper stories previewing the team’s season already streaming in, I’m struck by how much the team’s fate is wrapped up in fortune.

This is nothing new, and not even anything atypical. All successful baseball teams benefit from some measure of luck. Look at what the 2009 Yankees got from so many older players, and what the 2008 Phillies got from their bullpen arms. Those squads shouldn’t be faulted for it, either; they were good teams, and good fortune catapulted them to greatness.

These Mets, though, appear to be shooting for something more like slot-machine luck. To win in 2010, they will need healthy performances from several players who were injured last year, rebound performances from several players who underachieved last year, and breakout performances from several players who stunk last year.

The odds are long. And if luck, as Branch Rickey suggested, is the residue of design, then it’s hard to argue there was much in the Mets’ offseason blueprint that significantly improved the Mets’ fortunes for 2010. Jason Bay will add power to the lineup. Beyond that, the Mets, paradoxically, refused to take many gambles while heading into a season that amounts to a massive gamble.

That’s it, really. That’s the official TedQuarters Spring Training-is-starting piece right there. I wish I could offer more, or something different than what I’ve been saying all winter. I can’t, though: For the Mets to compete and win in 2010, they’re going to need a whole lot of things to fall their way.

And it could happen. Jose Reyes could hit 30 triples this year and steal 80 bases and win the MVP, and Oliver Perez could stay in the best shape of his life long enough to be Good Ollie all season long and recapture his 2004 form.

Or maybe Hisanori Takahashi’s screwball will be so baffling that he’ll go all Fernando Valenzuela on the National League and carry the team on his able 35-year-old shoulders.

Or heck, maybe the Mets can just benefit from a whole lot of bad luck to the Phillies and Braves and slip into the playoffs with 83 wins like the Cardinals did in 2006, only to then slip by the far-superior Cardinals in the NLCS when Albert Pujols doesn’t swing at a 3-2 curveball.

It’s all possible now, with Spring Training just getting underway and a full season’s worth of highlights and lowlights yet to be determined. We can project and object like we have all offseason long, but in truth, we have no idea what happens next.

Sure, like all Mets fans, I wish the team I root for seemed more like the guy in the sunglasses behind the big stack of chips at the poker table, or even more like the seedy dude with the cigar scribbling furiously on his pad at the race book, and less like one of the hordes feeding dollars into the slots. That would be cool.

But still, there’s something very entertaining about playing the slot machines. Indeed, the 20 minutes my wife and I spent pushing the button and watching the wheels spin round were well worth the five dollars it cost us.

I guess the thrill is in all the possibilities, and in knowing that, with just the push of that button, and so little skill or foresight or planning on your part, the wheels could all land on sevens and make you much, much richer.

The Mets’ front office spent this offseason in front of the same slot machine it has been playing for a long time now. The cash has been entered and the button pushed, and finally, after four months of winter, the wheels are spinning.

Now, we wait to see where they land.

If you ask me, the Westchester in White Plains might be the world’s most obnoxious shopping mall. Its anchor stores are Nieman Marcus and Nordstrom, and its architects have pretty clearly taken measures to hide its food court from the rest of the shopping areas, so upscale consumers can shop undeterred by the smells of delicious Master Wok or the sight of disgusting plebes chowing down on chicken-in-goo, the specialty of every mall food court.

But, as a native Long Islander — as I’ve discussed before — I’m drawn to malls for reasons I don’t fully understand. Plus, it’s got an Anthropologie, a store that apparently understands my wife’s tastes far better than I do, and tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.

Anyway, that’s a lengthy setup for this picture of a t-shirt I spotted hanging in the window of The Athlete’s Foot on the third floor of The Westchester today:

Bold.

I suppose I should add, for those who don’t know the area, that Westchester is decidedly Yankee territory. In fact, this was the only Mets shirt selling in the store in question.

I went inside to check the front of the shirt to see if maybe it said something clever like, “It’s Opposite Day!”, but no. Just a plain white front, with this on the back.

There was no logo anywhere to be found, so I’m guessing there’s a very real possibility that one gung-ho and disgruntled Mets fan who works at The Athlete’s Foot in the Westchester got fed up spending so much time in a store that only sold Yankees gear, printed a bunch of these up and put them on the racks himself, throwing caution and grammar to the wind.

I really have to stress the juxtaposition here, again. This isn’t at some random shop on that weird stretch of storefronts on Broadway in the 20s or anything, this is in the fanciest mall imaginable, right next to a Teavana and a L’Occitane. And it’s proudly displayed in the window:

“I Predict, The METS Will Win The 2010 World Series !”

I can’t say who’s responsible, but I respect his optimism.

Of course, if you’re that bullish about the Mets’ chances this year, you could pretty much say the same thing with this gem, available for $19.97 from Mets.com:

According to Matt Cerrone’s spidey sense, the Mets might incorporate a New York-centric on-field race at Citi Field next season, like the Presidents Race in Washington or the much-lauded Sausage Race in Milwaukee.

Cerrone’s looking for suggestions for what the Mets should have race. Here are some:

The last four mayors of New York: Is it me, or do Gotham’s mayors really lend themselves to caricature? If the Mets are going to borrow the on-field race idea from other teams, they might as well go all the way and use politicians, as the Nats do. And what better than blown-up foam likenesses of Ed Koch, David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg? It’d be worth it to hear Koch constantly get booed, just like he used to whenever he showed up at Shea Stadium while he was still mayor.

(Incidentally, Ed Koch sat behind me at a showing of Synechdoche, New York a couple years ago. He appeared to be in really good shape for a man of his age, so maybe he could hold his own in the Citi Field Mayoral Race. Afterwards, Ed Koch looked like he needed some more time to process the movie, just like I did.)

Big apples: New York is the Big Apple, so why not? Milwaukee uses its local delicacy — the sausage — but New York has too many local delicacies to settle on any one for an on-field race. They could have Granny Smith as an old-lady apple, Macintosh as a Scotsman, Fuji as a Japanese person, and Gala as a fop.

And finally:

Copy machines: Think of the sponsorship opportunity for Xerox: Anthropomorphic copiers racing around the warning track. It’d be a great way for the company to promote its fastest models, plus, could anything be more meta? What better way to celebrate a copied idea than with, you know, copiers? Besides, New York has always been a commercial and marketing hub, and one that probably uses a whole ton of copy machines. It’s perfect. Do it.

In the comments section this week, someone brought up a potential batting order for the Mets this year and it got me thinking.

Specifically, it got me thinking: “Hey, I should run the Mets hitters through David Pinto’s Batting Order Optimizer and see what comes.”

Pinto’s tool, based on the work of Cyril Morong, Ken Arneson and Ryan Armbrust, uses players’ on-base and slugging percentages to generate the optimal lineup for each team, by runs per game. It’s fun to play with, though since it actually involves plugging player names and stats into a spreadsheet, it’s one of the nerdiest baseball-related pursuits you’ll ever enjoy.

Anyway, I probably should have considered platoon splits and all, but it’s Friday. I simply plugged in the Mets’ position players’ CHONE projections for 2010 and a .150/.150 line for “Pitcher McGee” and this is what it spit out, a lineup that would, it claims, score 4.78 runs per game:

1. David Wright .391 / .502
2. Jason Bay .376 / .514
3. Angel Pagan .334 / .428
4. Daniel Murphy .328 / .429
5. Jose Reyes .360 / .458
6. Jeff Francoeur .317 / .435
7. Omir Santos .296 / .359
8. Pitcher McGee .150 / .150
9. Luis Castillo .367 / .350

Before you freak out, I’m not saying that’s what should happen. Obviously it won’t, for one thing — there’s no way the Mets will hit Wright leadoff and Bay second — and it’s all based on the CHONE projections, which are only projections. It doesn’t account for handedness or egos or anything else. This is merely what would be optimal for that group of guys based on Morong’s assessment of how to best weight OBP vs. SLG with respect to batting-order positions. Wright bats first because he projects to have the highest OBP, simple as that.

I imagine the Mets’ actual lineup to start the season will look something more along the lines of:

1. Reyes
2. Castillo
3. Wright
4. Bay
5. Murphy
6. Francoeur
7. Pagan
8. Santos
9. McGee

I have no evidence that will be the order, plus there’s always a chance someone gets hurt. This was just my best guess at how it will shake out. Francoeur and Murphy are flip-floppable, but I figured hypothetical Jerry Manuel would want to use Murph to break up the righties in the order.

That lineup, according to the Baseball Musings tool, would average 4.536 runs per game if the players held to their CHONE projections, which they probably won’t.

Here’s something, though: All of the top suggested lineups for the 2010 Mets, according to the optimizer, include the pitcher batting eighth and Luis Castillo batting ninth.

I remember when Tony La Russa first started batting his pitchers eighth a couple of years ago. I ripped him apart for it. Not in print, thankfully, but man, I called him all sorts of nasty things to anyone who would listen. What kind of moron would voluntarily give his pitcher an at-bat earlier in the game than a position player, and more at-bats total?

But Tom Boorstein, in the midst of one of my rants, told me there was a lot of evidence that showed that, indeed, there was an advantage to batting the pitcher eighth and a high-OBP, low-SLG guy ninth. I don’t remember exactly what article he pointed me to online — it might have been this one — but I’ve since come to realize that the idea actually makes a lot of sense.

After all, a team tends to concentrate its very best hitters near the top of the order — as it should — to maximize their at-bats and increase its chances of scoring runs early in the game.

But after one time through the lineup, it’s no safe bet the batting order will reset with the leadoff hitter starting off the inning. Putting a hitter like Castillo in the ninth slot decreases the odds that the top of the Mets’ order — the best hitters — comes up with outs on the board and ups the chances they’ve got someone on base to drive in.

Since Jose Reyes has pretty decent power for a leadoff man, having Castillo hitting ahead of him the second turn through the order would give Reyes more opportunities to drive runs in, rather than forcing him to hit after Omir Santos and the pitcher, near-automatic outs.

Plus, part of my original argument — that moving the pitcher up in the order ultimately gives more at-bats to pitchers — is just silly. Starting pitchers rarely bat four times in a game, and when they do, they’re probably pitching well enough that it doesn’t really matter that they’re hitting so frequently.

More likely, a starting pitcher is being replaced in the lineup by a far superior hitter after his second or third at-bat, and every time his spot in the order comes up after that.

Going back to the Baseball Musings tool, I plugged in this lineup:

1. Reyes
2. Pagan
3. Wright
4. Bay
5. Murphy
6. Francoeur
7. Santos
8. McGee
9. Castillo

The outcome? 4.737 runs a game, .21 higher than the one I’m guessing the Mets will actually go with, and about 34 runs more over the course of a 162-game season.

That’s all just in theory, of course, and I’m just having fun with some nerdery on a Friday afternoon. So calm yourselves down.