Well that was fun.

The big takeaways, I’d say? David Wright smacking the crap out of the ball, for one thing. You had to know it’d happen eventually, but it’s always better it comes sooner than later. Here’s hoping Wright stays hot for a while, because with Beltran hitting the way he has been and Jason Bay back in the lineup, they might actually win, you know, more than one game.

Angel Pagan pulled a muscle Tim McCarver didn’t know existed until recently. Pagan says he’ll only need a few days, but teams rightfully like to be cautious with oblique injuries. (Hey here’s an idea: Make Pagan only bat from one side of the plate while he’s hurt! What could possibly go wrong?) Anyway, this is cockeyed optimism but maybe Pagan could use a few days out of the lineup to figure some things out.

A reality check for those convinced that Kirk Nieuwenhuis is going to get called up and Wally Pipp Pagan: Captain Kirk finished last year with a .327 on-base percentage across two Minor League levels and a bunch of strikeouts, so he likely still needs some work on his approach. Also, there’s almost no way he would cover as much ground in the outfield as Pagan does, even if Pagan has made a few glaring misplays of late. Nieuwenhuis is a big, athletic dude and sometimes everything just clicks for a guy, but I wouldn’t bet on him being better than Pagan anytime soon. He’s off to a hot start and Pagan isn’t, but these things have a way of balancing out in time.

The biggest thing about last night’s win, maybe, is that for the second straight night the Mets only needed to use one reliever. Good on Ken Oberkfell for using Taylor Buchholz for a second inning in the ninth; no sense tiring out another guy when you’re sitting on an eight-run lead. It was no secret that the Mets’ bullpen needed rest pretty desperately, and now that it’s back to a normal size it’s good that the starting pitchers are providing some length.

Also, thanks to the AP, here’s Justin Turner creepily photobombing David Wright:

A few minutes Terry Collins exhibited some Grade-A Backman-caliber buntsmanship last night and the Mets lost what felt like their 700th straight game, R.A. Dickey said this:

We have to find a way to be honest with ourselves about what kind of team we are. We can’t just keep telling ourselves, ‘Oh, we’re a better team than this.’ We may not be. And we’ve got to be honest about that, and identify what we’re doing wrong, and do it better. That’s the only way you have any real growth.

This. That is to say, that. What he said.

I’ve been bleating on all season about how the Mets are indeed a better than this, and rationally I believe they must be — partly because it’s almost impossible for a Major League Baseball team to be worse. So when Terry Collins insists the wins will come, it doesn’t sound insane to me because I recognize that randomness dominates almost everything that happens on a baseball field, that there are bizarre twists-and-turns to every year, and that every early-season outcome is amplified by the small sample size.

Frustrated Mets fans have told me in the past few days that if I can’t see that this is essentially the single worst team in the history of baseball, then I must not know anything about baseball. I don’t really feel the need to counter that argument — no one’s forcing anyone to read this site — but if I did, I’d probably say that my understanding of how a steaming pile of early-season awfulness can skew perceptions is actually the direct product of a 20-some year study of the sport. And I’d add that the most important things I’ve learned about baseball is that the whole Socratic knowing-that-you-know-not thing almost always applies, and that making sweeping declarative statements about anything happening in the game based on 18 games is a meandering road toward Looking-Like-A-Dunceville, a town in which I’ve certainly spent plenty of time.

The Mets’ lineup, starting tonight, features at least three excellent players, three decent players, and two guys who might very well prove decent and haven’t yet shown themselves to be terrible. It’s difficult to envision them hitting like one of the league’s worst offensive teams all year unless you really believe David Wright’s going to finish with the Alex Cora-like hitting line he’s rocking so far. Given the amount of history we have to show that David Wright is much, much, much, much, much, much better than Alex Cora, thinking he’s suddenly not would pretty much make you a crazy person.

The pitching could be an issue all season, but it, too, almost has to improve. The Mets currently have a collective 77 ERA+, and no team in the past 20 years has finished with a number that low. It might go back way further than that, too; I just got bored of clicking and sorting on baseball-reference.com. You can cobble together a staff of Pat Mischy guys and count on pitching better than the Mets have had so far, so once they settle on the best mix and some guys settle in, it will at least be better, if never good.

Back to Dickey. Even with all that said, the Mets, from the manager to the bench to the bullpen to the lineup to the rotation, have done themselves few favors in the early goings of the 2011 campaign, little to stack the odds in their favor. All teams make fundamental mistakes, and it’s easy to pick ’em out and pile on when a team is going poorly, but fundamental flaws in the approach to the gare — glaring, premeditated mental errors — are harder to excuse. And there have been some of those, too.

I can’t pretend to understand what motivates baseball players to shake themselves awake and start playing like men who reached the absurdly competitive heights of professional sport, so if Dickey says it’s time for them to step back, be honest and start trying to fix things, it’s hard for me to argue. I don’t know exactly how that process works, but with the team spending every evening digging itself deeper into a rut and further from playing even a single meaningful game this season, yeah, I’d say it’s probably about time it happens.

I mean, holy crap. Even if sacrifice bunting were guaranteed to be successful, you’d still be giving away an out, an offense’s most precious commodity. And it’s not guaranteed to be successful. Hell, with this particular Mets club, it actually seems to be a freaking longshot.

And let’s forget for now that Jose Reyes is one of the best basestealers in baseball, that he already had two steals in tonight’s game and that he was 8-for-8 stealing bases on the season when Terry Collins called for Josh Thole to bunt him to second. Say for the sake of argument that Reyes couldn’t have stolen a base there because, I don’t know, he couldn’t get a great read on Brandon Lyon or something. Why are you playing for one run anyway? The leadoff hitter was on with the middle of the order coming up, including a red-hot Carlos Beltran. Why not aim for a crooked number and a walk-off win?

So you can tie the game and put more innings in the hands of your powder keg of a bullpen, the same one that’s blown basically every lead for two weeks? Is that the plan? Tie it up and turn it over to Tim Byrdak?

C’mon. Just… c’mon.

Apparently Bobby Parnell is struggling with numbness in the middle finger of his throwing hand, which probably explains his struggles this season better than the old “not cut out for New York” argument that has somehow reared its head.

Terry Collins didn’t say what the Mets would do, but with Jason Bay going 4-for-4 with two home runs in his rehab start tonight, it seems like a safe bet the outfielder is ready to go. And since the Mets should be about as desperate for Jason Bay as any team ever has been, it wouldn’t be surprising if Parnell is placed on the DL and Bay activated before tomorrow’s game. Bay was initially supposed to be back Thursday.

The other thing: A bunch of Mets fans seem really eager to show Scott Hairston the door, and I certainly hear that. He has looked awful at the plate and underwhelming in the field. The last time I said a guy needed more time he got cut (specifically: today), but I have to figure the Mets will have a longer leash with Hairston. Unlike Brad Emaus, Hairston has years of experience to show he can be a capable if unspectacular part-time outfielder. Cutting him because of 28 miserable plate appearances (again) seems a bit rash.

Terry Collins suggested Hairston is trying too hard to hit home runs with the Mets struggling like this, and Hairston agreed that was probably the case. The first step is admitting you have a problem, so maybe he’ll snap out of it. Of course, he struggled for almost all of 2010 too. So there is that.

I am dumbstruck. I am rendered silent by astonishment. If these Mets sucked any harder, they would… I can’t even come up with anything clever. They sucked really hard tonight.

And look: No one needs to remind me it’s early, and 17 games, you know, whatever. 0-1 in an NFL season. A bunch of these players can’t perform this poorly all year. There’s a whole ton of randomness at play. I get all that. I still don’t believe in any rational part of my mind that the Mets are going to lose 120 games like so many nabobs only-half-jokingly say.

But man, they’re getting harder and harder to defend. Scott Hairston makes Jeff Francoeur look like, I don’t know, someone who can actually hit a little. Tim Byrdak makes Pedro Feliciano look like Lefty Grove. Chin-Lung Hu is getting pinch-hit at-bats with runners on base.

When they hit, they don’t pitch. When they pitch, they don’t hit. On the rare occasion they both hit and pitch, they don’t play defense or run the bases. It’s  miserable.

Hell, it’s one thing when you lose to a hot Rockies team while Troy Tulowitzki is homering every time he even looks at the ball. It’s one thing when you can say, “Oh, well Josh Johnson, that’s one of the best pitchers in baseball.” It’s quite another when you’re embarrassed at the hands of the Astros.

I’m overreacting, I know. But I’m about to go downstairs and hear Terry Collins try to rationalize this one, again, try to say the Mets are better than this and insist the Mets will eventually win games. And it’s just getting boring.

Not the baseball games themselves; those are never boring. Just the whole routine. I’m bored of trying to convince Mets fans that the team doesn’t suck when nearly everything it has done on the field so far suggests otherwise.

I probably won’t stop. I’m just not really up for it tonight. At least Carlos Beltran is still totally sweet.