After the loss, some tensions surfaced in the clubhouse as a group a media members and one or two players stood talking loudly and laughing in a corner of the room. An irritated Alex Cora snapped, “Show some respect. They just stuck it up our (…)” on his way out of the room.

– Andy Martino, N.Y. Daily News.

Cora’s remark is everywhere this morning, but Martino’s report is the only one I’ve seen that noted the infielder snapping at “a group [of] media members and one or two players” and not just “the clubhouse” or something vague that sounds like he was lashing out at his teammates in general.

Look: Say what you will about Cora (or say what I’ve said about Cora), I don’t blame him. It sucks when your team loses and the last thing you want to see is people joking around afterward. And yeah, it’s a 162-game season and it’s important to keep cool heads, but the Mets have been playing miserably and Cora’s understandably frustrated. One time I punched a high-school football teammate on the sideline during a 41-6 loss. Losing is upsetting.

But does this incident reflect anything about the Mets’ clubhouse chemistry or sudden lack thereof? No. It’s something that happened after a brutal loss in a string of losses, and it’s a lot harder for baseball players — or anyone — to get along when things are not going well in the workplace.

People have chalked up the Mets’ recent stretch of losses to the changes in the clubhouse prompted by the return of Luis Castillo and Carlos Beltran. That’s nonsense. Those guys may be rightfully and/or nonsensically disliked among the fanbase, but find me evidence that they’re not good teammates. Why should any member of the Mets not like Luis Castillo, a good soldier who plays through as much pain as anyone in baseball?

Cora’s blowup is the type of thing that resonates right now because the team is losing and we’re desperate to find reasons beyond randomness. The Mets aren’t hitting. That’s bad. But that’s all.

If they start hitting tonight and win a bunch of games, people will chalk up the turnaround to Cora’s clubhouse explosion, even though I’d guess it was hardly that — just one frustrated quip as he walked out of the locker room.

Or, alternately, if the Mets start hitting tonight and win a few, folks will point to how the team kept loose and could still laugh after rough losses like last night’s. Just depends on which players were laughing and the whims of perception.

But what matters is that the Mets start hitting. And — and I know this is hard to believe given the way things have gone the past week — they will. They will. When Josh Thole plays, the Mets have one of the deepest lineups in the league. That they’re keeping Thole around is a good sign. If everyone stays healthy, eventually they’ll start putting enough hits together to score a bunch of runs.

And then, suddenly, they’ll be getting along great.

UPDATE: According to the N.Y. Post, the player joking with reporters was Mike Pelfrey. Oh, the intrigue.

Seems like people are lumping Blanco into the s*****ness that has become Rod Barajas, like they are a tandem.  The past week or so it’s ‘get rid of one of the righty catchers’ and ‘Blanco and Barajas are nothing more than automatic outs’ and yesterday on Metsblog they were both nothing more than glorified catching instructors, I believe.

– Chris M, via email.

I’m with Chris. Henry Blanco is pretty awesome for a variety of reasons. I don’t think he’s built to play every day at this point — especially since there were offseason concerns about his shoulder — but it certainly seems like he should be on the field more often, considering the way Barajas has played.

Blanco’s got a decent-for-a-catcher .727 OPS, and it’s not like that’s so terribly far off his past few years’ lines for us to assume he won’t keep it up.

Also, though Blanco is by all accounts a nice guy, he looks like a total badass. Really no way to put a value on that. He’s got ink everywhere and a sweet mullet. So few men can pull off the mullet these days.

Twitterer @RobertJamis and I, via a Twitter volley not too long ago, came to a pretty excellent idea: Someone should sell long-sleeved t-shirts in various skin-colored shades with images of Henry Blanco’s tattoos on the arms. Then you could wear that under a Henry Blanco jersey or player tee, to simulate the full Hank White experience. Tell me that wouldn’t be awesome.

But most of all, and maybe most importantly, Blanco is a stellar defensive catcher. He rates near the top of the league by objective and subjective measures. And he has a reputation as a good game-caller. Perfect guy to have around as a backup backstop.

So yeah, Blanco should not be lumped in with Barajas. It’s the Mets’ catcher’s struggles, not the Mets’ catchers’ struggles, if you will.

Actually, I kind of wonder if something’s up with Blanco that we don’t know about, considering how infrequently he has played this month. Blanco has only had seven at-bats in July and appeared in three games. Granted, part of that is due to the presence of Josh Thole, but you’d think the trusty backup would still see more at-bats, given the way Barajas has played.

No. Pelfrey wasn’t as good as he pitched earlier this season and he certainly isn’t as bad as he pitched last night. The Diamondbacks smacked him around, no doubt, but he didn’t get much help from his defense either. Keep in mind that’s always an issue with Pelfrey, who generally pitches to contact.

Pelfrey is the “head case” du jour on the Mets’ roster, so everyone will extrapolate and psychoanalyze and everything else. And yeah, pitching is both a physical and mental pursuit, and for all I know Pelfrey’s struggling with the latter half right now. But the hiccup, whatever it may be, more likely requires a mere adjustment and not any sort of massive overhaul. It’s hardly like he’s throwing every pitch to the backstop.

Pelfrey’s struggles have been examined in detail by Eno Sarris at Amazin’ Avenue and Joe Janish at Mets Today. No one’s crying doomsday. These things happen. Pelfrey has been bad, but will be good again.

The tone on the Internet and in the papers has turned to desperation and outright vitriol because the Mets have lost seven of their last nine. Deep breaths. Teams struggle. If you believed the Mets were good enough to contend last week, a few losses shouldn’t change anything.

Of course, there are roster moves all over the place the team could undertake to improve its chances of winning, and those are important.

Unless Rod Barajas proves he can hit anytime soon, Josh Thole should probably be catching until he proves he can’t.

Raul Valdes appears to be a better pitcher than Fernando Nieve and perhaps steathily one of the better pitchers in the Mets bullpen. Nieve, not Valdes, should be dispatched if the Mets can’t bring themselves to cut bait on Ollie Perez, which they inevitably won’t. Yes, it will leave them with three lefties in their bullpen, but Valdes has been better against righty hitters in his small sample.

But the whole Perez thing is a different issue for a different post, and a bridge we’ll cross when we come to it.

For the first time in over a year, the Mets have Carlos Beltran, Jose Reyes and David Wright in the same lineup. Jason Bay will eventually hit. Angel Pagan is still really good. Luis Castillo can at least get on base. Ike Davis will smash some more homers.

There’s just no way the Mets are as bad as they’ve looked for the past week. Starting pitching may prove to be the problem everyone thought it would be before the season started, but the offense should soon pick up some of the slack. The team might benefit by adding an arm, but again, that’s another blog post for a time when heads are a bit cooler.

Johan Santana doesn’t strike out hitters like he used to. Walks more of ’em, too. Judging by his peripherals, Santana is on a steep career decline, cruising toward a collapse into mediocrity. His FIP is a pedestrian 3.54, and is hugely benefited from an unsustainably low HR/FB rate. His xFIP is a weighty 4.65, Kevin Slowey category. He’s losing it, no doubt, or he has already lost it.

Just one issue, really: He’s still getting results. Santana boasts a 2.87 ERA, 10th in the National League. And he’s third in the league in innings pitched. When you only look at what Santana has done in 2010, without trying to use the numbers to extrapolate how he will do moving forward, Santana appears to be one of the best pitchers in the league. Still.

So what’s happening? Well, there are a few places to check when looking for indicators of good luck. Santana’s batting average on balls in play — .275 — is a bit lower than his career .286 rate, but not enough to account for his maintained success despite the drop in peripherals. His strand rate is right around where it has been his whole career, so no dice there either.

The big red flag is Santana’s HR/FB rate which, at 4.3%, is half of where it was last season and well below his career 9% mark. A big reason Santana’s xFIP is so high is because the stat normalizes HR/FB rate. It assumes Santana will allow homers at a rate aligned with the league average, and that pitchers don’t have a whole hell of a lot of control over the distance of the flies they induce.

But I wonder if there’s a relationship between Santana’s decreased strikeout rate and decreased HR/FB rate. Granted, if he’s inducing more weak contact, it’s not showing up in his percentage of line-drives or infield flies, both have which have held more or less steady with his career norms.

Still, Santana’s contact rate jumped from 73.2% in 2007 to 77% in 2008, his first with the Mets. And it has steadily climbed from there.

Is it conceivable that Santana consciously began inducing more contact upon switching to a more pitcher-friendly park, and to a league where a growing pitch count is more likely to get him yanked for a pinch hitter? Is it possible that Santana, with elbow issues affecting the velocity of his fastball, decided to begin approaching hitters differently as he realized he couldn’t blow pitches by them anymore?

I don’t know. I tend to have a lot of faith in the numbers, but I also have a lot of faith in Santana. And while I realize I’m biased in all sorts of ways — first and foremost as a Mets fan — I’m open to the possibility that something besides luck is guiding Santana’s excellence in 2010.

Simply put: I will believe Johan Santana sucks when I see him suck. Until then, I would rather try to figure out why he’s succeeding than dismiss him as fortunate.