So why, you might ask, don’t I care much about who the next manager of the Mets will be?

It isn’t because I think Jerry Manuel’s been an effective manager — I certainly don’t believe that. His penchant for bunting in ludicrous situations, either overusing or banishing relievers, and — his apparent going-away present — his refusal to make lineups that will best help the team get ready for 2011 are all infuriating.

But let’s face it: This Mets team wasn’t going to the playoffs, regardless of the manager. And without a comprehensive change in player evaluation — something accomplished above the manager’s pay grade — that will be true in 2011 and seasons to come.

– Howard Megdal, SNY.tv.

Tons and tons of discussion about the Mets’ next manager lately, some of which Howard participates in later in this column. But the crux of this excerpt is right: It doesn’t really matter much who’s managing the team if the team isn’t operated better from the top.

Look: It’s best to have a field manager who doesn’t actively cost his team wins, and at times in 2010 it wasn’t clear that the Mets could boast that. And it’s not easy to manage Major League egos, balance the roster, maximize the arms in the bullpen, everything. All that stuff is hard, and there’s a reason fans of nearly every team in the Majors are certain their manager sucks.

But the manager pales in importance to general manager, and pales in importance to the players on the field, too. Sure, he is charged with getting the most out of them, with trying to motivate them to perform their best. But Major Leaguers must be pretty good at motivating themselves to make the Major Leagues.

Maybe a good manager provides some extra spark or squeezes a little bit of extra juice out of his players by instilling more confidence or using them in precisely the right situations to maximize their potential, I’ll grant that for sure. I’m not saying you can just shove any chump on the bench and all things will be equal.

I just don’t think any manager’s going to make a difference of much more than a couple of wins either way.

So to Mets fans freaking out over the few tidbits of Joe Torre nonsense like word came down that the four horseman are galloping through Flushing, I say two things: 1) It’s probably not that big of a deal if it does happen and 2) It’s probably not going to happen anyway.

The talk all along has been that the Mets are going to be reluctant to pony up the cash for Bobby Valentine, but they’re going to gladly fork it over to Joe Torre, a much less popular figure among their fanbase? I doubt it.

Let’s give Jeff Wilpon the benefit of the doubt here for a moment.

Let’s say he is not short-tempered. Tone deaf. A credit seeker. An accountability deflector. A micro-manager. A second-guesser. A less-than-deep thinker. And bad at self-awareness.

Fine, he’s none of these things. But here is the problem: This is his perception in the industry as the Mets try yet again to fix their baseball operations department.

– Joel Sherman, N.Y. Post.

Look: I’m not here to write a whole post defending Jeff Wilpon because everyone would just question my motivations and I’d have to deal with that whole thing again, and I’m just not in the mood.

And the truth is, I have no idea how business goes down in the Mets’ front office. I see what happens — the decisions not to eat sunk cost or invest in the draft, the pervasive inefficiency and misallocation of resources — but I have no idea who is responsible. Actually, it baffles me how so many other writers and bloggers could have such a firm grip on the precise inner workings of the Mets’ bureaucracy while I’m out here in the dark.

What I’m certain of is this, though: The media and fanbase love a bugaboo. When things go wrong like things have gone wrong for the Mets these last couple of years, we tend to oversimplify and identify a single problem in place of the much more complicated truth. So instead of acknowledging that the Mets have been mismanaged at almost all levels for the past several years, we say, “Jeff Wilpon! This is Jeff Wilpon’s fault! We must somehow get rid of Jeff Wilpon!”

But I seem to remember not long ago that it was all Tony Bernazard’s fault. And now Tony Bernazard is gone, receding shirtless into the sunset, and yet the Mets are still 15 games out of first place, two games under .500, playing meaningless games in September. Tony Bernazard, it turned out, was not the problem.

Smart money says Jeff Wilpon is not the problem either. For all I know he may be part of the problem, and hell, as the Mets’ COO he is the one ultimately responsible for the problem, but it likely took a lot more than one man to put together back-to-back losing teams with payrolls over $125 million. And a smart, strong, savvy GM — should the Mets find one — should have the ability to stand up to a meddling owner and politely advise against poor decisions.

One other thing: I’ve seen it written multiple places that Mets’ ownership lacks the motivation to put out a winning team because of the profitability of this network. Think that through. That logic assumes that the Wilpons see the Mets and SNY as businesses for generating profit, but that they somehow don’t realize that a winning team would generate more profit through ticket sales, ad revenue and television ratings.

Even if you’re certain Mets’ ownership is just about making money, winning is the best way to make money. The Mets have just been going about winning in all the wrong ways.

R.A. Dickey, May-July: 7-4, 2.32 ERA, 14 GS, 93 IP, 62 K, 24 BB, 5 HR

R.A. Dickey, Aug.-Sept.: 4-3, 3.74 ERA, 10 GS, 67 1/3 IP, 33 K, 15 BB, 7 HR

OK, lots of things at play here. First of all, pretty arbitrary endpoints, and I don’t think anyone reasonably expected Dickey to be as good going forward as he was in the first two and a half months of his Mets career.

Plus since we’re dealing in 14- and 10-start samples, all the trappings of small sample size are in play. It’s really hard to draw any firm conclusions from any of the information above.

But it does look as though Dickey is regressing a bit with exposure, which probably could be expected. Again, it’s not a perfect comparison because they’re hardly identical knuckleballers, but Dickey’s initial run of enormous success bears some resemblance to Tim Wakefield’s in his first time through the National League in 1992 and then the American League in 1995.

Obviously Wakefield settled into a nice career as a solid Major League innings-eater, which Dickey certainly seems fit to become as long as he can control his knuckleball and yield a ton of groundballs.

Plus he has the funny pitching face and the love of literature and all that, which is cool.

You’ve probably already heard this by now, but the MRI on Jenrry Mejia revealed a rhomboid strain in his right shoulder, which — though I am no doctor — doesn’t seem to contain such awful harbingers as “labrum” or “tear” or “rotator cuff.”

According to SNY producer Carly Lindsay, Mejia spoke to reporters before the game today and said he still hopes to pitch in winter ball and the injury is not the same as the one he suffered in Binghamton.

It’s still not good, mind you, but I think given the wide array of possibilities that come to mind when a 20-year-old leaves the mound holding his shoulder, this doesn’t sound like the worst one.

But we shall see, then. Medical diagnoses are often hazy and difficult things.

We were shooting some interviews for the Baseball Show yesterday and we cornered Chris Carter to ask him about his at-bat music, Hulk Hogan’s old ring-approach song, “Real American.”

Carter was happy to oblige. He said he liked Hogan growing up and that the song got him pumped up. Nothing really groundbreaking.

But I’m a jackass and these pieces are supposed to be entertaining, so I pushed it. Playing off the lyrics, I asked him if he fought for what’s right and fought for his life or something stupid like that — I’m pretty sure I even botched the lyrics a bit and screwed up the joke.

Carter tensed up a bit and I soon realized why.

“I, ahh, I don’t know about that question,” he said, “but I really support what our troops do and, ahh…”

I stopped him and he looked relieved. I said I was just playing off the lyrics and that we wouldn’t use that part. He was cool about it and even said we could include it in the show for laughs — we won’t — but I think it’s an interesting example of how careful these guys have to be. The whole Walter Reed thing is apparently fresh in everyone’s mind but mine, and Carter was obviously being cautious — overly cautious, maybe — about walking into any traps.

And don’t get me wrong, knowing how to deal with stuff like that is part (albeit a small fraction) of what baseball players, as public figures, get paid to do.

But — and this won’t win me any favors with some of my colleagues — since there are certain members of the press ready to spin every word out of an athlete’s mouth into something shocking or sensational, you understand why some players clearly think it’s easier to clam up or turn into cliche machines than to actually say what they’re thinking.

I wasn’t out to make Carter look bad and he figured that out pretty quickly, but he doesn’t know me from any of the 30-odd reporters slouching around the clubhouse.

And so though it might have seemed a bit odd to me, he was probably right to protect himself when I asked him a stupid question about fighting for his life. For all he knew, I could have seized the opportunity to excoriate him for hating America, as is trendy these days. There’s Web traffic in that, I’m sure.