In baseball stats and elsewhere, I abhor small samples in isolation. Too often they tempt otherwise reasonable people — myself included — to make rash judgments on insufficient evidence. It’s frustrating, and it makes for some pretty terrible baseball analysis.

One upside to fleeing town for the last week and a half is it allowed the Mets to play more games and accrue a bit more data upon which to base whatever the hell it is I write about here. We’re still dealing with only a fraction of the season, mind you. Livan Hernandez is second among Major League qualifiers with a 1.04 ERA. Smart money says that won’t last.

As a means of helping myself get up to speed with what the Mets have been doing, I’ll be sorting through some of the early returns here the next couple of days to try to determine which are real and which will ultimately go the way of Livan’s ERA.

I caught a few Mets games on my vacation, so I’m not completely out of the loop. I saw parts of the triumphant Rod Barajas win in a New Orleans bar, and heard parts of the triumphant Henry Blanco win while driving between Breaux Bridge, La. and Houston.

I also ate a ton. Perhaps literally. Holy lord; I should probably only eat vegetables for the next month or so. SPOILER ALERT: I probably won’t.

I think the most delicious of many delicious things was this gravy-smothered fried chicken from the Busy Bee Cafe in Atlanta:

I missed Johan Santana’s meltdown last night. I saw the David Wright and Rod Barajas home runs, and I watched the last five boring innings, after the game had already been decided. But the big blows — the unconscionable walk to Jamie Moyer with the bases loaded and the Shane Victorino — came while my friends and I were traveling from our hotel to an Atlanta bar to watch the rest of the game. And obviously I have no access to DVR or anything.

So I can’t answer for sure what happened to Johan Santana last night, as everyone seems to be asking this morning. He said he couldn’t command his fastball, and that seems a reasonable explanation. It happens.

His 2010 season lines, including last night’s brutal start, reflect some alarming trends: steadily increasing H/9 and BB/9 with a steadily declining K/9. Of course, that’s all in a very small sample, and Santana’s likely still building up strength off elbow surgery.

What I hope, though, — and the reason I’m writing this from a rainy Interstate between Atlanta and Birmingham — is that this one performance doesn’t give any Mets fan with a short memory enough fodder to wrongfully deem Santana “unclutch.”

It’s one game, for one thing. One regular season game. And yeah, it’s a rubber match of a series with the division rival when the Mets are playing well, but despite all the hype around it, one game just really doesn’t mean all that much. It doesn’t matter who’s in first place by a half game on May 3.

I’ve seen people write in various spots already that a performance like Santana’s last night simply is “not something an ace does.” My response? Apparently it is.

Because Santana is awesome, in all situations. Until we have more evidence that he’s anything but that, we must assume he still is. In the biggest game the Mets have ever asked Santana to pitch, he gave them a shutout on three days’ rest with a torn meniscus in his knee. One crappy start in early May shouldn’t make anyone forget about that, unless you think guys who are clutch can magically go unclutch.

He had a terrible start. It happens. It happened to happen at a bad time. Given how well Santana was pitching coming into the game, and given the fact that he’s Johan Santana, it’d be smart to wait until it happens again before deeming him anything but an ace.

The day Ike Davis came up, Jerry Manuel lauded his “easy power.” I liked that.

I don’t know if it matters a ton whether a guy’s power appears easy or hard-fought. Gary Sheffield’s power never looked like it came easy. Dude swung the hell out of the bat, but he sure made it work for him. And I remember watching Mark Johnson take batting practice, and seeing him park ball after ball into Shea Stadium’s mezzanine without looking like it took much work at all. But he only hit 38 Major League home runs in his career.

S0 for all I know it doesn’t make the tiniest bit of difference, in terms of ultimate results, how much apparent exertion goes into hitting a home run.

All I can say for certain is that when Wilmer Flores drove an 0-1 fastball at his knees about 350 feet and over the left field fence here in Savannah on Thursday night, it looked entirely effortless. Almost nonchalant. That such a skinny kid with such a smooth swing could drive a ball so far almost seemed an optical illusion, yet there was no doubt the ball would exit the yard as soon as he struck it. Easy power.

Flores swung at the first pitch he saw in his next at bat and lifted a lazy fly ball to center. He struck out on a wild pitch in the dirt in his third at-bat, and grounded out weakly on the first pitch he saw in his final at-bat.

He swings a lot. It’s hard to blame him, really, since swinging the bat has been such a massively rewarding activity for him so far this season. He was hitting .352 entering tonight’s game, with a .394 on-base percentage and a .580 slugging.

And he’s 18 years old. Who could fault a teenager for jumping at any sign of a fastball, knowing what he’s capable of doing to them?

I met Flores today. He told me he’s working on his defensive footwork, which he feels is his biggest weakness. He said the difference between how he hit last year and how he’s hitting this year is experience, and growing comfortable with the level. And he said the team’s long bus rides are tough, but worth it for the opportunity to improve as a baseball player.

Twice, actually. Due to some technical difficulties I failed to successfully record the audio of my first interview with Flores, but Flores happily repeated the entire conversation. Nice kid. Funny kid.

And kid, for sure. It feels like we’ve been hearing about Flores for so long that from afar it’s hard to believe he’s still so young, even if his youth is a huge part of what has made him so notable. But watch him take infield before a game or stand close to him and there’s no doubt. Knobby knees, gawky limbs, sparse hairs on his chin. He carries himself with confidence and his coaches rave about his makeup, but he looks his age.

Until he connects with one, of course.

In his first at-bat tonight, Flores worked a 3-1 count before smoking a line drive right at the Lexington shortstop. Not the greatest result, but a promising approach for certain. In his second plate appearance, he worked the count full, fouled a couple pitches off, then walked on a low fastball. Wilmer Flores is growing up.

In the half-hour window between games in the Mets’ doubleheader with the Dodgers on Tuesday, I stood in the Caesar’s Club talking with some friends who, like hundreds of other Mets fans, had retreated to the lounge to escape the chill.

After a meandering conversation that touched on just about every topic we might discuss besides baseball, one of the club’s televisions reminded us of the next game’s pitching matchup: Oliver Perez vs. Charlie Haeger. Perez, set to brave the Dodgers’ lineup without any semblance of accuracy or velocity, versus Haeger, an unfamiliar knuckleballer pitching on a windy night.

The Mets had just won their fifth straight game and their seventh in eight contests, but the outlook appeared dim.

“There’s just no way the Mets are going to win this game, is there?” one guy in the group asked.

No one answered. Even though everyone involved had just watched the team soundly beat the Dodgers to move a half game back of the Phillies for first place — first place! — in the division, and even though we had all seen Jason Bay finally homer and David Wright show signs of breaking out of his slump and Jeff Francoeur earn his first base on balls of the homestand, none of us dared suggest a way the Mets could win the nightcap.

Maybe no one wanted to jinx it. That’s perfectly plausible.

Or maybe these Mets, in the past few years, have bred in their fans a distinct variety of skepticism, a chronic paranoia. Maybe we’re jaded, and we know nothing can ever remain perfect for a team that has exposed itself as so thoroughly imperfect. Maybe being a Mets fan when they’re winning, these days, just feels like a perpetual state of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It didn’t Tuesday night. The Mets weathered a shaky performance from Perez and enjoyed a stellar one from Hisanori Takahashi, and the team’s offense exploded for 10 runs on 11 hits and took advantage of Haeger’s wildness and the Dodgers’ defensive miscues.

In the sixth inning Wright, booed so recently by the Citi Faithful, crushed a George Sherrill fastball to right-center field: a beautiful, slicing drive that split the Dodgers outfielders, cleared the loaded bases, and reminded everyone in the park what David Wright does when he’s hitting, which is more often than not.

He finished the night with three hits. The Mets finished the night atop the N.L. East.

For the moment, everything is good.

That won’t always be the case, of course. Teams can only endure so many games in which their starters walk a batter an inning, and at some point Jerry Manuel’s use of the bullpen will catch up to him, and probably the Mets will run into some teams that actually play good defense.

But that the Mets won eight of nine like they did, especially without much production from their two best hitters for most of that stretch, that’s plain awesome. Ugly wins, stolen wins, lucky wins and wins handed away by opponents all just look like wins in the standings in September.

And they provide hope in April. Granted, hope doesn’t help Oliver Perez throw strikes or prevent Jeff Francoeur from swinging at balls, but it makes being a Mets fan just a little more pleasant. Hope helps us — or at least me — forget some of the offseason outrage and early season vitriol and return to enjoying baseball games and simply rooting for the Mets to win, all the ancillary stuff be damned.

Hope brings out the naive little-kid Mets fan inside me that really believes they can keep going like this, and keep winning a ton — especially now with the lineup firing on all cylinders. To hell with PECOTA; Ollie and Maine will start performing or be replaced by someone who can, and Ike Davis will hit like this all season, and once Beltran gets back…

Amazing what a winning streak will do to a Mets fan, is all.

I had a long-sleeve shirt on. I’m a bike rider. I had taken a long bike ride before I went to the meeting, a 55-mile bike ride.

What happens when you exercise like that? Your body starts relieving that heat. I took the shirt off because I was hot. As simple as that. Maybe I took it off in the middle of the meeting. You’re upset, you get hot. All that s—, what is that? What a crime! I took my shirt off. By the way, I always wear a t-shirt.

– Tony Bernazard, as told to FoxSports.com.

OK, first of all, this is hilarious. No matter how hot I get in meetings here at the office, I never feel comfortable taking my shirt off.

That said, I think Bernazard makes a few reasonable points in the interview. For years, long before Bernazard’s firing, I heard Mets fans in media, on talk-radio, in comments sections and on message boards claiming Bernazard was at the root of every single one of the team’s problems. Bernazard, it seemed, became some sort of great big bugaboo, the mysterious embodiment of all that was wrong with the Mets.

People even bandy about terms like “evil” and “bad.” About a vice president of player development that they’ve never met.

I don’t know that I even believe in outright evil so much as some sort of sliding, fluctuating grayscale of human decency, and I really have no idea where Tony Bernazard falls on that. Maybe he’s a pretty mean guy. Maybe he’s just a serious baseball man who tends to be bristly with the media, and so he’s portrayed negatively, and fans run wild with it.

What I am certain of is that Tony Bernazard was not, is not, and never will be the source of every single one of the Mets’ problems. Even if he was truly a terrible jackass filled only with horrible ideas — which, again, I doubt — he was one cog in a very big wheel, and teams should obviously have checks and balances in place to prevent one errant cog from spinning out of control.

If the Mets continue winning, and by some chance succeed in 2010, someone will certainly point to the absence of Bernazard as a catalyst for change. And that will be, to me, almost as hilarious as a grown-ass man taking his shirt off in a meeting.

Sometimes I accuse David Wright of never saying anything terribly exciting. Other times, I think he just understands baseball, and his measured responses reflect an appropriately measured approach to a long season.

On his 1000th hit: “It’s great. Baseball is a game of numbers. And I’m glad I could finally contribute to a win.”

On his struggles at the plate: “I’ve realized that there’s going to be some ups and downs over the course of a year. And I’ve been through one of the downs. Today was great, but we’ve got another game in a few hours.”

On taking advantage of the Dodgers’ defensive miscues: “Part of playing good baseball over an extended period of time is catching some breaks…. Baseball’s a funny game where, when you put into it what you’re supposed to, some of them will go your way.”