I’m bound for Citi Field to interview Don Mattingly, among others. I intend to ask him what’s up with not having a mustache anymore.

Then, two baseball games! Hooray.

For now, enjoy the rock stylings of Rocket from the Crypt:

Oliver Perez had many such interactions on his long walk. Mostly though, it was a solitary venture. When he had a revelation, he would pull out a baseball and throw it. Often it was the slider, sometimes the changeup, sometimes the fastball. When he needed nourishment he would reach into his other sack and pull out a young coconut. Often he would need his creativity as much as his strength to open it without losing the precious water inside. He would throw them, drop them, hit them with sticks- anything that worked. He subsisted largely on coconut water and meat for his sojourn. When he needed a little variety and a chair to sit on, he would stop somewhere such as the bar. He did not do this often, for the interactions he had were so often odd and distracting, but this was part of the journey as well.

– Owen Poindexter, Mets Fan Fiction.

There are a lot of strange and fascinating Mets blogs out there, but this might be the strangest and fascinatingest. Read the entries from earliest to most recent or else it’s a little like watching Memento.

Wilmer Flores extended his hitting streak to 10 games yesterday with an RBI single in the first inning in Savannah. Flores is now hitting .361 in his second season in the South Atlantic League with a .403 on-base percentage and a .569 slugging.

Cool. Flores took a perceived step backward last season when he posted unspectacular numbers as a 17-year-old in A ball, but of course it’s important to note he was a 17-year-old in A ball.

Toby Hyde’s offseason prospect rankings noted that, according to a Mets’ official, Flores had a “historically good” strikeout percentage for a teenager playing in the SAL.

Clicking around baseball-reference’s Sally League stats archive, it does appear Flores struck out particularly infrequently relative to his age. It’s hard to say, but I’d guess the Mets officially didn’t mean “historically good” so much as “good, historically.” And a big part of what makes it tough to compare is that so few players reach the Sally League at Flores’ age. Even now, in his second full season at the level, he’s the third-youngest player in the circuit.

In a small 77 plate-appearance sample this season, Flores has maintained — actually, lowered — his strikeout percentage. The 18-year-old has whiffed only six times. That’s got to be a good sign.

I’m no expert in analyzing Minor League stats, especially at so low a level, but based on the fact that Flores is neither striking out nor walking very frequently, I’d guess Sally League pitchers simply can’t get much past him. He’s hitting the ball in nearly every plate appearance, and based on his slugging percentage, it’s a safe bet he’s hitting it pretty hard.

So that’s cool. And it’s a meandering way of saying I’m excited to see it for myself on Thursday, when I’ll be in Savannah on the first leg of a baseball road trip.

Just before noon Saturday, Rod Barajas sat near his locker cradling a portable iPod dock. The speakers blared Biz Markie, then Snoop Dogg, then Pearl Jam. Some Mets lip synched Biz’s rhymes or nodded along to Dr. Dre’s beats, then sang with Eddie Vedder. Alex Cora emerged from a back room of the clubhouse with a Guitar Hero controller just in time to mimic Mike McCready’s solo on Yellow Ledbetter.

Done with their hitting, stretching and infield practice and still with more than an hour to go before their matchup with the Braves, the Mets were having fun.

Who could blame them? They arrived in the clubhouse the winners of four of their last five games, the latest a neat 5-2 victory on Friday in which Jason Bay finally showed signs of life and Ike Davis blasted his first Major League home run.

They went out and won that day, fueled by a few late runs and a series of missteps by their opponents. Then they won Sunday, too, a rain-shortened contest in which Mike Pelfrey tacked five more innings onto his career-best scoreless streak despite yielding, on average, two baserunners per frame.

So what happened? How did the 4-8 Mets, the lifeless, hapless crew with a near-riotous fanbase become the likable gang of winners that swept the Braves to move above .500 and into second place?

Maybe Barajas’ excellent taste in music catalyzed a clubhouse chemical reaction that synthesized a dominant ballclub. Maybe Mike Jacobs’ departure inspired his teammates to start winning for fear they, too, would be ticketed for Buffalo.

Or maybe we are once again wracked by the wrath of randomness, searching for reason where it does not exist.

What has changed in the Mets’ last seven games since they stopped being a 4-8 team and became a team that wins six of seven?

There’s Ike Davis, sure. And Davis inarguably represents an improvement over Jacobs on both sides of the ball. But Davis entered the lineup with Jeff Francoeur and David Wright — the team’s hottest hitters in the first two weeks of the season — enduring wretched slumps.

Angel Pagan, too, marks an upgrade over Gary Matthews Jr. But since securing the Mets’ starting center-field spot, Pagan has notched a downright Matthews-esque .558 OPS.

Over these seven games, the team’s pitching has been great, for certain. Mets hurlers have thrown 59 innings with a 1.98 ERA. But in that stretch, they’ve allowed 91 baserunners. They’ve let runners reach base at a higher rate than in their first 12 games, when they yielded a 3.77 ERA.

Perhaps sometime in the past two weeks Dan Warthen uncovered some ancient secret to allowing tons of baserunners without letting them score (not allowing home runs certainly helps), but it’s way more likely that Mets pitchers have been fortunate to withstand so much peril and emerge relatively unscathed.

It’s way more likely the Mets reaped the benefits of playing two consecutive series against struggling teams.

Lucky, you might say.

And that shouldn’t discredit their performances, at all. So much of baseball — and so much of what’s awesome about baseball — is comprised of luck, randomness and chance. It’s the reason one of the game’s oldest and most well-worked cliches states, “That’s the way the ball bounces.”

Though the Mets lost eight of their first 12 games, they were never a team bad enough to lose 66 percent of their games. And though the Mets won six of their last seven games, they are not a team good enough to win 86 percent of their games. That both those things happened likely demonstrates, more than anything, the dangers of reading too much into too small a sample.

Now the Mets stand at 10-9, and perhaps that record presents a better indication of their true talent level. Maybe the Mets are a team that can win a little more than half of their games. But 19 games are, like 12 games and 7 games, too few to really tell us anything.

Every win the Mets add to their total is inalienable, and so we should enjoy these stretches because we know the Mets will need every victory they can get across the 162-game season.

And winning makes baseball fun for everyone, from the guys bobbing and singing and guitar soloing in the clubhouse Saturday morning to all the Mets fans who braved the rain to enjoy the short victory Sunday night.

But to pretend the Mets have turned some corner in these seven games, and will by some magic continue winning without appreciable production from some of their best hitters and despite far too many opposing hitters reaching base, is silly.

The Mets will again suffer rough stretches, fans will again call for the heads of Jerry Manuel and Omar Minaya, and members of the media will again wonder how a team of professionals could play such mindless baseball.

Then it will get better again. And then worse. It’s baseball. That’s the way the ball bounces.

Three times now, while waiting to turn onto 126th St. to park in the media lot at Citi Field, someone has approached me, motioned to me to roll down my window, and offered to fix the dent in the front bumper of my crappy car.

I imagine these men are representatives of the much maligned auto-body shops in Willets Point, and though I have no interest in actually getting my car fixed — it’s not worth it, as the car won’t pass inspection in August regardless — I’m curious about this system.

It sure seems like the guys are specifically waiting there to offer body work to Mets fans, employees and media members, so I wonder if the agreement is that they’d knock out dents during the game. If so, that’s awfully convenient.

Just got tonight’s Mets lineup from our producer Carly:

Pagan
Castillo
Reyes
Bay
Wright
Davis
Francoeur
Barajas
Maine

I spent some time weighing in on batting orders before the season started, but it’s been such a hot-button topic lately that I’ve sort of soured on the subject. Bottom line is it just doesn’t make a huge difference.

Reyes will finally bat third, which means we can finally stop hearing about it, which will likely be the single best outcome from this lineup. To me, it doesn’t seem like a great plan to drop your best hitter down in the order, but the batting-order optimizer actually calls for the fifth hitter to be better than the third and fourth hitters, so you know, what do I know? Plus it’s not like Wright’s exactly destroying the ball lately.

And I don’t know if Jerry Manuel thinks there’s a rule in place stating that the second baseman must always bat second, but he’s done that in every game this year, including the ones when Cora started. Maybe I understand the logic in putting a batter there who could knock the leadoff hitter over, but that assumes the leadoff hitter got on base, of course, which won’t happen somewhere between 60 and 65 percent of the time.

And I’m not certain I love the idea of Barajas, who rarely takes pitches, batting eighth, where he’s likely to get pitched around. Yesterday’s walk notwithstanding, Rod Barajas has shown that he will not be pitched around.

Whatever, whatever. That’s already more thought than a lineup shakeup probably merits, especially for a team struggling to score runs. And if Jerry Manuel thinks batting Reyes in front of Jason Bay might get Bay out of his slump, then, well, cool.

Martin Gandy from TalkingChop.com helps me preview Mets-Braves:

Huge kudos to Shamik for pointing this out: Check out this highlight of Ike Davis’ ridiculous gymnastics catch yesterday. I’d embed it here but I think you need to see it in high quality. I recommend full-screen, actually.

When the ball — and Davis — come flying toward the dugout, a bunch of guys scatter and a few duck away. Then, when he makes the catch, Alex Cora celebrates appropriately and Jon Niese runs over to assist Davis.

But check out the 30-second mark in the video. John Maine sits there on the bench watching the whole thing and doesn’t react even a tiny bit. Stone faced. Is John Maine deep in some sort of Zen-like baseball trance, or is he just wholly unimpressed by Davis’ spectacular grab?