The man himself.

The right fielders in April: Carlos Beltran, Scott Hairston, Lucas Duda

Overview: I want Carlos Beltran to hit 100 home runs this year.

I would gladly withstand the inevitable obnoxious cries of “contract year” to watch that unfold. Beltran is aging — has aged — before our eyes, and seeing him struggle to stay on the field and productive over the past couple of years strikes me as a terrifying reminder of our universal mortality. Carlos Beltran, despite what we may have once believed, is human. And the baseball lifespan of a baseball player is depressingly short. Beltran is 33 — just a few years older than me — and for him to even enjoy a season anything like the ones he put up in his “prime” years would amount to triumphing over the effects of time.

Can you imagine how frightening it must be to have the same body that made you an exceptional professional athlete begin to break down by the time you’re 32? And I know Carlos Beltran makes a gajillion dollars are year and we shouldn’t pity him. But do you really think it’s all about money for most Major Leaguers? Do you think only the allure of riches drives Beltran to endure surgeries and train tirelessly and shoulder the ridiculous never-ending cavalcade of nonsense?

I find that hard to believe.

So I want Carlos Beltran to hit 100 home runs this season. I want that because I’m a Mets fan who loves home runs and spectacle, and because I am also not immune to aging. It’d be nice to get a reminder that despite the odds, despite the pain, despite the awful things we all will inevitably withstand as part and parcel of being a human on planet Earth, we still have time to be great.

Naturally I don’t think it’ll happen, what with it being hyperbole and all. But though all the talk this spring has focused on Beltran’s conversion to right field and knee troubles and cortisone shots and everything else, he has quietly looked awesome at the plate. As I write this he is crushing bombs over the deep left-center field fence in Sun Life Stadium.

Today, Beltran told me the knee issues don’t affect him at the plate. I asked him if he thought his offseason workout program — designed to strengthen the muscles around his knee to keep the knee healthy — might also benefit his power. He said he generates most of his power from his legs, so he thought that it could.

100 home run power? Well, Beltran reminded me that “power doesn’t just mean home runs.” Plus it would be 27 home runs more than anyone has ever hit in a 162-game season, and Beltran’s going to get a lot of days off. But it’s Opening Day, so why not dream a little?

The right fielders in September:

I can’t say it. I know there are all sorts of rational reasons to expect Beltran might not be in the lineup come the end of the season. If he stays healthy and some of the Mets’ prospects succeed in Triple-A, Beltran could be dangled at the trade deadline in the last year of his contract. And at this point it’s hard to imagine he’ll stay healthy.

But a couple of days ago someone asked me my favorite player on the Mets. I instinctively said “Beltran,” and I realized that he might be my last “favorite” player for the foreseeable future. Though I have no trouble rooting for the Mets as passionately as I always have, one of the sad realities of this job is that as I get to talk to and spend more time around the players, it becomes way more awkward and difficult to lionize them the way I could before being credentialed. And though I’m happy to sacrifice that for the utter awesomeness of being able to watch baseball for a living, it’s not something I’m all that eager to let go of.

How they stack up: Jason Heyward is an absolute stud. People who can hit like did at 20 years old usually end up in the Hall of Fame. Mike Stanton, similarly young but without an approach as advanced as Heyward’s, should hit a bunch of home runs if the whiffing doesn’t catch up with him. Jayson Werth is pretty damn good too. Whenever he’s healthy, Beltran will be better than Ben Francisco. He’ll need to be classic Carlos Beltran to compare to the rest.

When a reporter asked Terry Collins why Willie Harris was starting in left field tomorrow, he said, “Just look at the numbers.”

Harris has 22 career plate appearances against Johnson. In them, he has four hits including a double and a homer, seven walks and six strikeouts: a .267/.500/.533 line.

Problem is, 22 plate appearances is a critically small sample. Josh Johnson is an awesome pitcher and Willie Harris is not an awesome hitter, at least not by Major League standards. On paper, Lucas Duda, despite his inexperience, seems a better bet to get hits and big hits off anyone.

Of course — and bear with me here — just because something occurs over a tiny sample size doesn’t mean it cannot exist. I have no doubt that certain hitters do fare better against certain pitchers, due to that pitcher’s particular arsenal, the way the hitter can pick up the ball out of his hand, everything. My favorite example is Howard Johnson against Tim Worrell, incidentally.

So, because Opening Day is a time for optimism, I will hope that Collins cited Harris’ 22-plate-appearance dominance over Josh Johnson because it’s a quick-and-dirty explanation but not the sole justification for the decision. I will consider that Collins might have had several reasons unknown to us. The manager denied that it had anything to do with starting the veteran over a rookie on Opening Day, but for all we know that’s the type of thing Collins says so Duda doesn’t doubt his manager’s confidence in him.

All the Duda day.

The left fielders in April: Willie Harris, Lucas Duda and eventually Jason Bay.

Overview: Though injuries like Jason Bay’s strained intercostal muscle can nag hitters for a while, I don’t imagine he’ll really be out too long to start the year. Sandy Alderson said the team’s ability to backdate Bay was a factor in their decision to start him on the disabled list, seemingly implying that Bay’s injury would not require a full 15-day absence.

In the interim, we’ll enjoy some slap-happy fun from Harris, who can’t really hit like a Major League left fielder, and maybe a few moonshots from Duda, who seems destined to become either a baseball-smashing big-league folk hero or a baseball-smashing Quadruple-A folk hero. Duda is massive, with a sweet lefty swing that destroyed pitching at two Minor League levels last year. At 25, he is old for a prospect and defensively limited. I imagine, with Carlos Beltran pegged for the Mets’ other corner outfield spot this year, Duda will get plenty of big-league opportunities in 2011 to prove his breakout 2010 was no fluke.

As for Bay: Man was I wrong about Bay. I didn’t love the signing at the time — I preferred Matt Holliday, as many Mets fans did — but I said he’d hit home runs. And I thought it interesting that the Mets seemed to cite his tendency to pull the ball, something I thought would play well at Citi Field. Only none of that happened. His power disappeared even before he lost the end of his season to a concussion. He hit six home runs and only two to left field. Compare that to his 2009, when he hit 36, and all but four of them went to left. Did he find something comforting about the Green Monster? Did he adjust his approach for Citi Field’s dimensions? I don’t know. It was an alarming turn of events, no doubt.

Based on back-of-the-baseball card speculation alone, Bay seems an obvious candidate for a bounceback season, the guy you hope everyone forgets about in your fantasy draft and snag in a late round. He hit 25 or more home runs in five of his six big-league seasons before 2010, and though they were all spent in better hitting environments than Citi Field, it’s not like he was playing beer-league softball.

Still, the shellshocked and brutalized Mets fan in me struggles to imagine Bay returning to the form that earned him his huge contract. Even though I know rationally that there’s basically nothing to Spring Training stats, I see how he hit no home runs and only two doubles in the Grapefruit League and just assume his power is all sapped up. But I hope that’s just me being pessimistic.

The good news is that in Duda, not to mention Fernando Martinez and Kirk Nieuwenhuis, the Mets have promising potential in-house replacements playing at the Triple-A level. If Bay falters, his contract will appear an albatross to match that of Oliver Perez, but at least the Mets should be able to find someone to replace him without shelling out more money on another free agent. If he succeeds, then, well, good.

The left fielders in September: Bay and Duda.

Bay’s contract means he’s probably not going anywhere anytime soon. Even if he hits in 2011, he will be a difficult piece to move.

How they stack up: Hard to tell since Bay is something of a mystery. Martin Prado, in Atlanta, is a nice player, but a move to a full-time left field job takes away from his value. The Marlins’ Logan Morrison is reasonably new to left field but should develop into an excellent hitter. Raul Ibanez is starting to show his age and Mike Morse never really hit as well in the Minors as he did in the Majors at 28 last year. If Bay plays even close to his 2009 level, I’ll take him over all of them but Morrison. If he plays like he did in 2010, then the NL East has a weird glut of left fielders that get on base a bunch but have no power.

The beginning of the end?

The shortstops in April: Jose Reyes, Chin-Lung Hu.

Overview: Jose Reyes is exceptionally good at baseball. Last year, despite struggling with a thyroid condition that kept him out of Spring Training, an oblique injury and his team’s bizarre decision to allow him to hit exclusively from the right side while the oblique healed (Ed. Note: Holy f#@$ing hell, did that really happen? Who signed off on that? “Let’s allow this injured player to recover by asking him to do something he has never done in his Major League career.”), Reyes was still about the fourth-best hitting shortstop in all of baseball.

He enters 2011 fully healthy, off a complete Spring Training, in a contract year. He has worked with Dave Hudgens on rediscovering the patience that provided him an on-base percentage in the .355 range from 2006-08 and in the healthy parts of 2009. Reyes’ health issues in 2010 had nothing to do with his health issues in 2009, and he played over 150 games in every season from 2005-2008, so we can hope he will stay on the field in 2011. If he does, he’ll probably be completely awesome.

People seem certain the Mets will trade Jose Reyes. They say, for one thing, that he is not Sandy Alderson’s type of player.

That makes no sense. Is an extremely good player not Sandy Alderson’s type of player? Do you think that because Reyes is not Rickey Henderson — the greatest leadoff hitter of all-time — he is not cut out for the Moneyball Mets? He plays shortstop. Shortstop. No, Reyes doesn’t walk at Nick Johnsonian rates, but a .355 on-base percentage would have put him third last year among Major Leaguers at his position, behind only Troy Tulowitzki and Hanley Ramirez. And those guys aren’t going anywhere. They are signed to long-term contracts because their teams’ general managers know better than to let go of shortstops of their caliber.

The other half of the inevitable-trade talk is that the Mets will be out of contention by July and will want to cash in what they can get for Reyes rather than just lose him in free agency. Problem is, I don’t think the Mets will be that far out of contention in July. And I will believe that this team will be willing to trade important pieces of a possible pennant contender — however long the odds — when I see it. You think the Mets, if they’re a couple games over .500 and a few games back of the division lead by the deadline, are going to trade away all their good players? I’m not asking that rhetorically; I’m straight-up asking that. Do you think that would happen?

I know the Wilpons have financial troubles; I get that. I also know that the whole point of searching for a minority partner is to allow the club to maintain its payroll, and that just assuming that because the owners are struggling the team’s going to need a fire sale to cut salaries down to the Pirates’ level shows a wild disregard for the particulars of the Mets’ financial situation.

So again: I will believe the Mets will trade Jose Reyes when I see the Mets trade Jose Reyes. Until then, I don’t really want to hear about it. I want to enjoy seeing a healthy Jose Reyes play baseball, knowing that there is a chance he does leave the team via free agency after the season.

The shortstops in September: Reyes and Hu.

Overview: Reyes is better than Jimmy Rollins, Alex Gonzalez and Ian Desmond. Hanley Ramirez is a better hitter, though he endured a down year by his standards in 2010. He’s 27 and likely to bounce back, so Ramirez will probably be a more valuable player than Reyes in 2011 despite the Met’s superior defense.

Blaine Boyer sits at his locker in the Port St. Lucie clubhouse, tossing his possessions into a large cardboard box. The locker next to his, once belonging to Boof Bonser, is empty. Two lockers down, Tim Byrdak reads a newspaper. To Byrdak’s left, the locker once assigned to Mike O’Connor is empty.

A whiteboard on the wall reminds everyone shipping cars to New York to remove all personal items from their cars before they do so. A couple of players chat about lining up apartments in the city. Mike Nickeas arranges plans to crash on Ike Davis’ couch for a while. Jose Reyes sings in Spanish. Josh Thole jokes with reporters. Lucas Duda checks a travel schedule on a bulletin board.

A clubhouse attendant emerges from a back room with a light brown maple bat. “Hey Murph, what about this one?” he asks, handing the bat to Daniel Murphy. Murphy examines it for a second. “I’ll take this one on the road,” he says, handing it back.

The Mets are packing up. Nearly 60 players opened Major League camp with the club in mid-February. Now almost half of them are gone, sent to the Minor League side a couple hundred yards away or sent elsewhere entirely.

Wearing a golf shirt and jeans, Manny Acosta walks through the clubhouse carrying a loosely taped cardboard box under his arm. He stops at Pedro Beato’s locker. The pitchers share a brief conversation then a hug, and Acosta exits toward the parking lot.

People often ask reporters — this one, at least — to assess the mood in a team’s locker room, as if that’s something that can be measured.

I can say for certain that the clubhouse smells like sweat and suntan lotion, scents that indicate a combination of physical work and measured preparation — hallmarks of Spring Training.

Some players seem cheerful, enthusiastic. Davis struts down the row of lockers with a joke or a goofy grin for all his teammates. Beato insists Jay Horwitz learn how to dance. Others seem focused, anticipant of either the forthcoming season or the final Spring Training game. Brad Emaus eats breakfast and fills out a form, stopping to ask reporters Citi Field’s ZIP code. Chin-Lung Hu picks a few bats out of a large bin near the clubhouse exit and takes soft practice cuts with each.

Is it a good clubhouse or a bad clubhouse? Damned if I know. Maybe I don’t have enough data points for comparison. At times last year, the Mets’ locker room at Citi Field seemed about as cheery a place as you could find: Rod Barajas pumping tunes from his iPod through a boombox while Alex Cora giddily mock-soloed on a Guitar Hero controller. At other times, naturally, the mood was a bit darker.

The 2011 Mets appear ready. Players making the team know they’re making the team. Boxes and suitcases are packed and being loaded on to the truck outside. At 10 a.m. tomorrow, the Mets will board a bus for the two-hour trip to their hotel in Miami. They will work out at Sun Life Stadium in the afternoon, then play their first game Friday at 7:10 p.m.

From then on, I imagine, we’ll spend a lot more time concerning ourselves with the performance on the field than the mood in the clubhouse. No one doubts they are closely tied, but I suspect the former mostly determines the latter.