Due to the rain Tuesday night, the line at Citi Field’s Shake Shack was short. I grabbed the opportunity to review the last remaining unreviewed Shake Shack sandwich.

It will set you back $6.50, if I recall correctly. Normally it will also cost you a couple innings of baseball, but not if you go a half hour before the game while they’re pulling the tarp off the field.

I think it’s even better than the Double Shack. While the single patty de-emphasizes the delicious, high-quality beef, it makes for a better balance of ingredients. Biting into it, you taste everything at once: crispy lettuce, sweet tomato, tangy shack sauce, creamy cheese, soft bun, juicy meat. It’s damn near elegant. No, screw that; it is elegant.

I’ve long since given up comparing sandwiches to baseball players but I think I’m prepared to make the following call. And this is not a distinction I would bestow upon a sandwich lightly: The Shake Shack burger is the Carlos Beltran of sandwiches. Deemed overrated by some but still appreciated by legions of Mets fans, every element of its game is excellent without being flashy. It will sometimes require a wait — diminishing its value, no doubt — but patient fans can recognize its greatness in center field at Mets games.

OK, at Shea it was in the right-field home-run territory in the Loge section. Not only were the blue seats the lowest you could easily sneak into with an upper-deck ticket, but I appreciated the perspective that amount of height provided. Higher up at Shea was kind of, well, high up.

The Loge was perfect. Plus in those right-field seats, you could reasonably hope a lefty would pull a home run your way, or lean over the rail and banter with John Franco. And they provided quick access to the closest thing Shea offered to Citi’s center-field dining concourse area, the ol’ right-field food court down the ramp. The only problem was you couldn’t see much of the main scoreboard from that angle.

But I had a long time and a lot of games at Shea to formulate that opinion, and I’m not sure I’m ready to commit to one location at Citi yet.

Sometimes when I want a break from my computer screen and the airport-lounge ambience of the press box, I grab a seat along the third-base line in the Excelsior level for a few innings. It’s a good angle and a good height for seeing the whole field. For now I’d say it’s there.

Last I checked the Mets still have like a 1 in 200 shot of making the playoffs this year, so you don’t really have to wait if you’re into unrealistic hopes. But if you’re talking slightly more realistic unrealistic World Series hopes, give it six months.

There’s no doubt the Mets’ front office has a lot of work to do this offseason, and it’d be foolish to assume all the things that went right for the club in 2011 go the same way in 2012. But a bunch of things went wrong for these Mets too, and it’s crazy to go writing off next season for a team that is to date above .500, features a bunch of decent to excellent players on the short side of 30, and boasts (and will continue to boast) one of the largest payrolls in the Majors.

Good teams can come together quickly, and if a bunch of things fall right for the Mets in 2012 they could certainly contend. Is it likely they’ll make the World Series? Hell no. But it’s not likely any team will make the World Series.

I promise come mid-March the optimists among us will all be looking at a glass half-overflowing, envisioning the ways in which the old-ass Phillies will certainly relinquish their stranglehold on the division and the Braves’ entire crop of promising young arms will turn to crap.

A couple of things: First, I’m not really qualified to comment on the general clubhouse attitude. Like some 90% of credentialed media covering the Mets, I do not travel with the team. I get out to cover maybe a third of their home games, meaning nearly all of my access to the players comes in the Citi Field clubhouse. And the facilities at Citi Field are expansive enough that it’s rare there are many players in the locker-room area at the same time.

Someone covering the team beat might be better suited to measure the clubhouse attitude, though beat writers, like all of us, are subject to biases. Anyone just covering home games able to speak with authority about team chemistry is either wildly speculating or a much better journalist than I am. Either scenario seems likely.

Anyway, the most important thing is I’m not sure any of it matters. When Ruben Tejada came up last night in the bottom of the eighth, was he thinking “I need to get on so we can make the playoffs,” or “I need to get on so I can start next year,” or simply, “I need to get on”? I’d guess the latter. As discussed here, it’s often difficult (and pointless) to distinguish selfishness from effort in baseball. In other words, I can’t say exactly why they’re trying to win, but I can say with some confidence that they’re trying very hard to win.

I would not subject any current Met to something like that. If you’re including historical Mets, I’d have to say Jeff Kent or Guillermo Mota.

One time I sat on the beach area outside the Jones Beach ampitheater during a Goo Goo Dolls concert. Luckily I couldn’t hear much. I don’t remember which high-school era love interest put me up to that.

I think going to a Goo Goo Dolls concert with Guillermo Mota might make for some pretty funny web video.

How are we defining “major” here? I’ll use this potentially accurate list, eliminating Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, which obviously don’t count, and Domino’s, which doesn’t seem like it should count. And I’ll say:

1. Taco Bell: Obviously. Best combination of value, taste and general hilarity.
2. Wendy’s: Best burger, best fast-food bacon, high standard of service.
3. KFC: Points for originality, the only fried-chicken place on the list.
4. McDonald’s: Good because it tastes like McDonald’s, not necessarily because it tastes good.
5. Pizza Hut: Bad even in China, elevated here only by breadsticks*, affiliation with Taco Bell.
6. Subway: Offensive to actual sandwich artists.
7. Burger King: It makes me queasy to even think of how to explain why I dislike Burger King.

*- In an absolute emergency situation, the sauce that accompanies Pizza Hut breadsticks makes an OK substitute for taco sauce if they didn’t put any packets in your bag.

Right now it’s the 2010 group and it’s not even really close. I wrote a lot last year about my coming to have faith in Mike Tannenbaum and Rex Ryan and their ability to evaluate and employ NFL talent, and to a large extent that’s still the case.

But here you’re talking about replacing Braylon Edwards, a guy who undoubtedly endured certain lapses but still a 28-year-old physically elite NFL receiver, with a fellow who has spent the last two years in prison. And Mason is 37. I don’t think either Burress or Mason is a bad pickup — Ryan and Tannenbaum have shown they can squeeze value out of older players — but there’s just no way to say they stack up to Edwards and Cotchery without having seen Burress play a down.

I don’t blame the Jets for doing so, of course. And I don’t really understand why it’s such a big story that Rex Ryan keeps hyping up his own players. That’s what Rex Ryan does, and it’s what coaches should do. Maybe Ryan does it with a bit more gusto than most, but the real news would be if he came out and said, “yeah, our receivers don’t look so hot this year.”

Patrick Flood investigates Lucas Duda’s decision to bunt with runners on first and second and no out in the bottom of the eighth inning last night and concludes that Duda made the right call. It’s a good read.

Teams should not often be in the business of giving away outs, especially with their cleanup hitters. But there were some mitigating factors, as Patrick notes: Duda does not seem to hit lefties all that well and Josh Spence has been devastating against lefty hitters. Plus Duda has been hitting lots of hard grounders lately, and a double play in that spot would have been a back-breaker.

I’m not sure the Mets should have been playing for one run in that spot, but a team’s chances of scoring with runners on second and third and one out are slightly better than with runners on first and second with none out.

For his part, Duda said he felt confident he could get the bunt down even if he doesn’t often bunt in games. He said he works on bunting a lot and thinks he is a good bunter. To his credit, his bunt was much, much better than most we have seen from Mets pitchers this season.

Of course, if Duda popped it up or fouled it off to go in an 0-1 hole then struck out, we’d be killing him for the decision today and destroying Terry Collins for not overriding him. Or at least I’d be. I’m willing to admit that hindsight is 20/20 here.