OK, that’s not a rhetorical question and it’s not one I’m fully prepared to answer yet. Allow a braindump of sorts — I’m trying to figure it out.

I’m thinking about about Bob Klapisch’s column today and a couple of things I wrote this offseason, most notably this piece that pissed a lot of people off.

Klapisch strongly suggests that Jerry Manuel and Omar Minaya will be canned after the season. I thought that should have and would have happened last year, so I’ll believe it when I see it. And obviously a lot of the Mets’ future hinges on whether it does.

The fanbase is angry right now, pitchforks and torches. The Mets are no fun to watch, and for some crazy reason we don’t even get to see the kids play every day. We watch Luis Castillo hobble and Jeff Francoeur hack instead, and we get mad. I’m with you.

But thinking about the future, are you more or less optimistic about 2011 and 2012 than you were last year at this time?

Last year we weren’t sure Jose Reyes would ever be decent or healthy again. He hasn’t had a great year, sure, and now his contract status is up in the air, but he has been pretty damn good since mid-May, once he (presumably) got up to speed.

David Wright, though, has had another weird year. Still a good year, but, like 2009, not as good as his years from 2005 through 2008. That’s an investigation for another post.

Johan Santana has been healthy and effective. It appeared he may have been getting exceptionally lucky — or something — at the beginning of the season, but he now appears to be striking out batters like he used to.

Oh, I could go on and on. You know the rest. The Mets are a year closer to getting out from under some big, bad contracts. Angel Pagan is awesome. Jon Niese looks pretty good. Josh Thole might be a serviceable Major League regular. Ike Davis has been pretty bad stats-wise as far as first basemen go, but he hasn’t entirely embarrassed himself — a decent sign for a 23-year-old rushed through the Minors.

They added the Jason Bay contract, which looks pretty terrible right about now. Bay looks like a pretty safe bet to bounce back a bit next year, but obviously that deal, with the vesting option and everything, looks like something of an albatross after the season Bay put up in Flushing.

And then there are the guys in the system. Fernando Martinez has yet to demonstrate he’s a hitting machine and shouldn’t be in the Majors, though he’s still quite young. Kirk Nieuwenhuis appears to have taken big steps forward, as has Wilmer Flores. But Reese Havens has struggled with injury and the crop of pitchers in High A ball has struggled.

I’m recapping lots of stuff you already know. So what do you think? Do the Mets, as a franchise, appear better or worse prepared to compete in the future than they did a year ago?

Most days I don’t miss writing The Nooner. It was a bear, and we ran out of material. The K-Rod saga makes me miss writing for The Nooner. Here are some jokes. Many of these wouldn’t have made the show. They can’t all be zingers. Some of them are reprinted here from Twitter, in case you’re not on there:

Francisco Rodriguez underwent an operation on his thumb at the Hospital for Special Surgery yesterday. The doctor struggled and almost blew it completely, but eked it out in the end then celebrated like he won the damn Nobel Prize or something.

The Mets announced that they disqualified K-Rod’s contract, presumably because it grounded its club in a sand trap.

The disqualification allows the Mets to avoid paying Rodriguez for the services he will not render for the remainder of the season. Unfortunately they have no legal grounds to disqualify Luis Castillo, Jason Bay, Oliver Perez, Jeff Francoeur, John Maine, Alex Cora or Bobby Bonilla.

The MLB players association said it will contest the move if it can muster up the energy to defend a guy who’s so obviously a jackass.

If the disqualification holds, the Mets will be able to cut K-Rod in Spring Training at the cost of only 30 days’ termination pay, or, alternately, trade him to the Oakland Raiders, where he’ll fit right in.

Meanwhile, Rodriguez faces legal trouble for hitting his girlfriend’s father, Carlos Pena. Experts agree that given Pena’s .213 batting average this year, K-Rod probably should’ve just put one over the plate. But then, he’s never had much control.

Rodriguez has been charged with third-degree assault, second-degree harassment and first-degree neckbeard.

In K-Rod’s absence, Hisanori Takahashi takes over as the guy Jerry Manuel refuses to use in tie games and critical but non-save situations. But hey, that’s baseball!

I hope the ultimate fallout from this whole Frankie Rodriguez saga is that people start using the term “krod” as an expletive. Not K-Rod, krod. One syllable.

As in: “Krod! He’s bringing in Dessens again!” Or: “Man, he beat the krod out of that old guy!” Or: “Holy krod, why in krod’s name did they give a vesting option to a pitcher with such kroddy peripherals?”

Anyway, now Rodriguez is presumably done for the year. He gets thumb surgery, the Mets get Hisanori Takahashi closing games, and the girlfriend’s father gets to say, “you should see the other guy” when people ask him about his bruises.

The small glimmering scrap of upside — beyond the krod stuff, of course — is the hope that the Mets will be able to void the rest Rodriguez’s contract, though it seems unlikely. That would free up some money for the team to pursue free agents this offseason, though I wonder if those celebrating the possibility are giving the team too much credit.

Does anyone really think the Mets have, in a year and a half, gotten over the need for a ninth-inning reliever with the “closer” brand? It seems way more likely the Mets spend any money allotted to K-Rod on another silly contract to another closer, and quite likely one not as good as Rodriguez — albeit one less likely to fight in the family room.

I’ll allow that Takahashi could prove good enough in this audition to convince the Mets he has the elusive closer mentality and earn himself an extension — should they successfully part ways with K-Rod, of course. That’s about the best way this could play out.

Most likely, the Mets won’t be able to void K-Rod’s contract and they’ll end up with the reliever back for a super awkward year in their bullpen in 2011. I imagine that unless they’re right in the thick of a pennant race they’ll bend over backwards to make sure his ridiculous 2012 option doesn’t vest. But since they struggle to part ways with sunk cost, since K-Rod still brings actual value to the team despite his off-field problems, and since they’re almost certain to believe they need someone labeled “closer” for 2011,  he’ll probably be back.

So we’ll deal with that krod when we get there.

Seriously:

SS – Jose Reyes
LF – Angel Pagan
3B – David Wright
CF – Carlos Beltran
RF – Jeff Francoeur
1B – Mike Hessman
C – Henry Blanco
2B – Luis Castillo
P – Jon Niese

OK, look: I know the Mets are facing a lefty. And I know Ike Davis, Josh Thole and Fernando Martinez don’t hit lefties well. But you want them to someday, right? I mean, that’s the idea, I think.

Resting Thole is fine because he started the last couple of days and he’s a catcher. He should play like a starting catcher from here on out — not strictly like the left-handed part of the platoon — even with Rod Barajas’ impending return. Not only should the Mets want to audition Thole for the full-time job in 2011, but it’s becoming pretty clear he’s their best option for the role anyway.

Resting Davis, Martinez and Ruben Tejada makes almost no sense. The only possibility that would make it excusable is if Davis is hurting and no one’s saying anything. Otherwise, it’s awful. Ike Davis is supposed to be a huge cog in the Mets’ future. And now you’re platooning him with Mike Hessman? What? I like Hessman as much as the next day, but you’ve got to give Ike chances to learn against lefties, especially in what’s looking like a lost season.

And if Martinez and Tejada are going to be here, they should be playing. Neither is really ready to be in the big leagues. You can’t rush players up to sit on the bench. That’s terrible.

What this looks like — and I have no inside information whatsoever, this is just guesswork — is Jerry Manuel making a last ditch effort to hold onto his job, to hell with the front-office’s effort at a youth movement. Because yeah, against lefties it’s possible Hessman, Francoeur, Castillo and Blanco actually do give the Mets a better chance at winning. It just doesn’t help them win anything in 2011.

So my completely uninformed guess would be that Manuel’s thinking he can’t get canned if the team is winning, so he’s trying everything he can do to eek out some wins. But you’d think the front office could pretty easily take care of that problem by either instructing him to play the rookies, assuring him that his job is safe, or firing him and getting it over with.

The word “consistent” gets thrown around way too often in baseball discussions, almost always as a stand in for “good.” Instead of saying a player is average or something less, we say, “he just needs to be more consistent.”

There’s enough random fluctuation in baseball that total scrubs can perform like Hall of Famers for a week. We’ve seen it countless times. And so then people say, “oh, if Jeff Francoeur could consistently hit like he did in April, he’d be an All-Star,” even though Jeff Francoeur is, in truth, about as consistent as the sun. He’s just not consistently good.

These Mets, you’ll read, are inconsistent. I mean hell, they haven’t hit in weeks. And if it isn’t one thing, it’s the other. When the pitching’s good, they don’t hit. When the hitting’s good, the bullpen melts down. When the bullpen holds it together, the defense lapses.

But I wonder if this is an instance of inconsistency or merely the way a consistently .500 ballclub appears when viewed under the microscope over the 162-game season. Sure, there have been ups and downs, hot streaks and rough stretches. More than there would be if I flipped a coin 117 times? I don’t know. I tend to doubt it.

And are these Mets not consistent with what we expected before the season? Maybe some of the individual performances aren’t, but few reasonable observers expected much more than a .500 season out of the team as a whole. I guessed 84 wins. By their Pythagorean winning percentage — based on runs scored and runs allowed — they’re on pace for 83. By their actual winning percentage they’re on pace for 80.