Remember this?

It is, of course, almost perfectly fitting that each man photographed with Minaya there in June, 2007 as examples of his early success could now easily be cited as symbols of his downfall.

Minaya picked up Orlando Hernandez (top left) for only Jorge Julio during the 2006 campaign. Hernandez helped the Mets reach the playoffs that season and pitched well for the team again in 2007. But the 40+ year-old righty succumbed to injury in September of ’07 and again in Spring Training of 2008, exposing both the organization’s lack of depth and its nasty habit of relying on old players with lengthy injury histories.

Minaya acquired Oliver Perez (top right) as a throw-in with Roberto Hernandez in a deal for Xavier Nady after Duaner Sanchez’s fateful taxi-cab ride in 2006, and Perez wound up recovering his floundering career with the Mets and posting solid seasons in 2007 and 2008. When the Mets were unwilling to meet Derek Lowe’s contract demands the next offseason, Minaya — dead-set on acquiring a starting pitcher — ponied up three years and $36 million for Perez. You know what has happened since.

Willie Randolph (bottom right) was fired after a game in Anaheim, around midnight Pacific time or 3 a.m. in these parts. Most of the criticism Minaya received for his role in Randolph’s departure was probably unfair, perpetuated by East Coast newspaper reporters upset that the Mets acted after their print deadlines and some handsome devil on a blog broke the news to the world. But though Minaya maintained a good relationship with the media, his shaky public handling of embarrassing incidents — most notably Tony Bernazard’s firing — became a stain on his tenure.

Endy Chavez  (bottom middle) was picked up as a free agent before the 2006 season and proved a great find for Minaya, playing exceptional defense in his fourth outfielder role. But Chavez was one of multiple useful players sent packing in one of the worst deals Minaya made as Mets GM — the acquisition of then-injured and never-examined J.J. Putz (as well as Jeremy Reed and Sean Green).

Though the players the Mets dealt away in the trade have netted only about 4.4 WAR (per Fangraphs) for their new clubs, many are still young and under contract for a while. The three players the Mets received combined for -0.6 WAR, and only Green is still with the Mets.

John Maine (bottom left) probably isn’t as good an example of all that went wrong as the rest of the guys. Still, he was offered arbitration and eventually signed for $3.3 million last offseason coming off two straight injury-plagued years. And his injuries frequently appeared misdiagnosed, mishandled or at least mysterious.

Maine was counted on to be a member of the 2010 Mets’ rotation and made eight mostly ineffective starts before being lifted from a game after five pitches, feuding publicly with his manager and disappearing into the ether. So, actually, on second though, maybe Mainer’s a pretty good symbol of the way things went wrong.

Hat tip to Richard Deitsch for the reminder, via Tom Boorstein.

After starting his Major League career 1-for-33 with four walks, Lucas Duda is now 7-for-his-last-14 with three doubles and two home runs.

Neither subset of his tiny sample is particularly meaningful, nor is his .170/.264/.383 line over 53 plate appearances in the bigs.

Truth be told, we won’t see enough of Duda with the Major League Mets in 2010 to know if he should be a viable part of the 2011 team, either as a platoon starter or an everyday player or a bench bat or whatever. One month of playing time just isn’t enough to judge anything reasonably.

But the home runs are cool.

I’ve mentioned this a few times on Twitter, but Josh Thole is woodshedding a new bat with an angled-knob meant to protect players from hamate-bone injuries. I have no idea how it would help Thole, who chokes up on the bat and so doesn’t hold the knob anyway, but here’s what it looks like. It’s the one that isn’t shaped like the others.