I missed most of the goings-on in the Mets world last week, but it seems like the team is still playing around .500 baseball, the media is still producing a ton of speculative trade and contract nonsense with which bloggers and fans are running wild, and Jose Reyes is still awesome. So status quo.

And it sounds like there’s a growing, backlashy sentiment in some corners that says something along the lines of, “Well if the Mets are in fourth place with Jose Reyes, they could easily be in fourth place without him.”

Since plenty of it has come from reasonable Mets fans, let’s assume for the sake of this post that it is not the Blame-Beltran dreck obnoxiously attached to star players so frequently in the recent past. I don’t think it is — no one with even a mild feel for the rules of baseball could possibly argue that Reyes’ contributions have not massively improved the Mets’ chances of winning games in 2011.

I’m pretty sure the idea is more something like this: If the Mets can’t consistently play above .500 ball with Reyes in the midst of an MVP-caliber season, then they’ll need to do more than just bring back Reyes to compete in 2012 and beyond. And since Reyes appears likely to net a massive contract that would render the Mets incapable of bringing on many more players (assuming they can even afford him), they should consider trading him before the deadline because we see now that it will take more than Jose Reyes playing at his most awesome to make them a competitive team.

I think that’s generally it, at least. Is that generally it?

OK. Well first off, the Mets are also playing .500 ball without David Wright and Ike Davis. Players are always going to be hurt, but probably not always two of the team’s four best hitters. Who could say where the Mets would be in the standings today if they had enjoyed full health from their corner infielders? And so maybe an optimistic blogger could argue that with Reyes back next year, Davis and Wright playing every day, improvements from some of the young guys already contributing, some luck, some good roster management and a little bit of help from the farm system, the Mets might not be as far from contending as they currently seem.

But that’s besides the point. The point is, it has never been about Trade Reyes or Sign Reyes. The Mets’ front office is only one player in any scenario involving Reyes’ future, and Sandy Alderson’s best approach to the decision must be dictated by at least one other actor. If the Dodgers want to trade Clayton Kershaw — locked up under team control through 2014 — for the next three months of Jose Reyes, well then duh.

They don’t, obviously, but you see what I’m saying. Reyes has value to the Mets now and until the end of the season, both in terms of helping them win games and in helping them fill seats and put eyeballs on screens. He offers them some value in compensatory draft picks if he walks as a free agent, and — though I can’t say this for certain — he may be less likely to re-sign with the Mets in the offseason if they trade him beforehand. And he presents value to whatever team inks him to his next contract.

We don’t know how much. We don’t know what Reyes will return in a trade, we don’t know what he’ll get in free agency, and we don’t know what he’ll wind up being worth to the team that signs him. We can only guess. And there are tons of variables involved.

It’s something to talk about, I suppose, and maybe it’s fun to speculate about possible deals or a possible future with Reyes lighting up the Mets’ all-time record books. But with the money Reyes is going to cost, there’s no real obvious solution for the Mets, only a front office charged with an incredibly tough decision.

The way I see it, elite free-agent shortstops don’t often hit the open market at 28 years old. And since the Mets are still a big-market club that will always have a big payroll, if they’re going to open up the coffers for anyone, he’s the dude. Sure they’re only playing .500 ball with him at his best, but that’s hardly his fault, and he’s young enough and they’ve got enough decent pieces that they can reasonably hope to build a contending club while he’s well within his prime.

But there has got to be a limit, of course. If some GM wants to blow the Mets away with a deadline deal that could bring them a package of prospects Alderson believes will make up the core of a perennial pennant-winner, or if another team wants to offer Reyes a contract that makes Carl Crawford blush, then we might have to face the possibility of a future without Reyes. And truth is, we probably won’t know for years if whatever decision the Mets’ front office makes is the right one.

Until then, though, we can sit here and yell about it a lot.

The owners of the Long Island Ducks and the New York Mets have pitched competing proposals to build a minor-league baseball field in Nassau County.

Oh, man. I should mention for those who don’t know that I grew up about ten minutes south of Mitchel Field, the proposed site of this Minor League baseball field. I worked close by at Nassau Community College for a while, and I used to go to the batting cages at Eisenhower Park all the time. It’s well within my frame of reference, I guess I’m saying.

And it’d be sweet to have Mets prospects playing full-season ball someplace so accessible. I don’t know if it makes any sense economically, and I imagine there might be plenty of pissed-off taxpayers if the proposal goes through. Plus the article makes the Mets’ proposal sound more like a last-minute counter to the Ducks’ than anything else.

But it’s fun to think about. The South Atlantic League now stretches as far north as Lakewood, New Jersey, so I suppose it’s possible the Mets could try to convince that league to let them move a club to Long Island. That club’s road trips would be brutal, though.

It seems like a Double-A Eastern League team would make more sense logistically, since the Eastern League has teams in Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. The Mets have been affiliated with Binghamton since 1991.

Also: Full-season Minor League clubs start playing in early April, and this stadium would be practically next door to Nassau Coliseum. If the Islanders were ever to advance deep into the NHL Playoffs, any night both clubs were home the traffic would be unreal. But then… well, easy punchline.

I’m on vacation. I meant to have more cued up for this week before I left, but time did that pesky thing it often does. There will be posts all week, but it will be slow. I’ll be back in a week, rested and (I hope) with several new sandwich experiences to share.

Man, that sucked.

I think I’d put that loss more on Lucas Duda and Francisco Rodriguez than I would on D.J. Carrasco, even if Carrasco’s the obvious goat for balking in the winning run. I haven’t seen it yet, but I imagine on some corner of the Internet someone’s getting all worked up about Carrasco’s lack of focus or discipline or something, but I don’t think that’s what that was. Just a weird fluky hiccup. These things happen.

“Only to the Mets,” you’ll say, but the graphic on the MLB Network this morning showed five other walk-off balks that have happened in the past few years, one of which I happened to witness in person. It’s a rough way to lose a game, especially when your team fought back from down four runs early in the game and held the lead going into the ninth with the closer on the mound.

No segue: You might have noticed things have slowed down here a bit the past couple of days. I’m taking next week off, so I’m scrambling to tie up some loose ends around the office.

I’m hoping to spend parts of today and tomorrow cuing up some posts that will roll out next week while I’m gone, but I could use your help. Have you stumbled upon anything awesome on the Internet lately? Anything thought provoking that isn’t particularly timely? Any outrageously silly video? Sent it my way, via email or the contact box above.

A baseball roster has many authors, and while Sandy Alderson is developing a thoughtful plan for this and future seasons, it is also worth noting that nearly every player contributing right now, firing up the fan base and keeping the season interesting, is a product of the Omar Minaya regime.

Minaya’s legacy will always be defined in part by regrettable contracts, most notably the ones given to Oliver Perez and Luis Castillo (the view from here is that Carlos Beltran and Francisco Rodriguez were largely fruitful signings), and for historic divisional collapses in 2007 and 2008; still, his stamp on the organization was, like most things that acquire a conventional-wisdom narrative, more complex.

– Andy Martino, N.Y. Daily News.

There has been a lot of apologizing for Omar Minaya around the Internet lately, prompting a minor Twitter meltdown from this guy on Saturday morning. And look: The Mets are at .500 now, playing solid baseball with a bunch of players Minaya acquired in his six-season tenure with the club. That’s great, and some of it certainly looks good on Minaya.

But let us not forget that all GMs acquire a ton of players, and there’s a hell of a lot more to the job than just picking them up. Take Turner, for example. We can cite Turner as an example of Minaya’s success, but that would be ignoring the fact that last season, while Turner was mashing in Triple-A Buffalo, the Mets had Luis Hernandez started games at second base. It’s also on the GM to identify which players can help the Major League club win, and last year, Minaya apparently thought Hernandez was a better bet to do that then Turner.

And then there’s the issue of those contracts, which Martino mentions. There’s a reason we’re now celebrating that the Mets, with their $140 million payroll, have reached .500 on the season. There’s a reason so many guys that now seem like Minaya’s shrewd scrap-heap acquisitions have been forced into duty. Hell, there’s a reason people are actually talking as if the Mets will have to choose between keeping Jose Reyes or keeping David Wright — whether or not that’s true — and it’s not all thanks to ownership.

Minaya’s haphazard spending hamstrung the club, forcing Sandy Alderson and his crew to work with limited resources this offseason. People can shout all they want about how few of Alderson’s pickups have contributed to the 2011 team, but the truth is that Minaya’s myopic approach left the current front office with few options beyond what little they could afford and the players Minaya left behind.

I’m as thrilled as anyone about how good players like Turner, Dillon Gee and Ruben Tejada have looked across small samples this season. But before we cite them as examples of Omar Minaya’s aptitude, let’s remember that if he were still around, there’s a good chance all three would currently be buried in the Minors while Ramon Martinez started at second and Paul Byrd started every fifth night.