I feel like a little kid, honestly. I was smiling. I never smile a lot, but I was smiling. I was happy. It was great.

– Carlos Beltran.

Carlos Beltran hit three home runs last night.

Here’s what I wrote the day before the season opened:

I want Carlos Beltran to hit 100 home runs this year.

I would gladly withstand the inevitable obnoxious cries of “contract year” to watch that unfold. Beltran is aging — has aged — before our eyes, and seeing him struggle to stay on the field and productive over the past couple of years strikes me as a terrifying reminder of our universal mortality. Carlos Beltran, despite what we may have once believed, is human. And the baseball lifespan of a baseball player is depressingly short. Beltran is 33 — just a few years older than me — and for him to even enjoy a season anything like the ones he put up in his “prime” years would amount to triumphing over the effects of time.

Can you imagine how frightening it must be to have the same body that made you an exceptional professional athlete begin to break down by the time you’re 32? And I know Carlos Beltran makes a gajillion dollars are year and we shouldn’t pity him. But do you really think it’s all about money for most Major Leaguers? Do you think only the allure of riches drives Beltran to endure surgeries and train tirelessly and shoulder the ridiculous never-ending cavalcade of nonsense?

I find that hard to believe.

So I want Carlos Beltran to hit 100 home runs this season. I want that because I’m a Mets fan who loves home runs and spectacle, and because I am also not immune to aging. It’d be nice to get a reminder that despite the odds, despite the pain, despite the awful things we all will inevitably withstand as part and parcel of being a human on planet Earth, we still have time to be great.

He’s not quite on the 100 home-run pace, even after the thin-air outburst last night. But on the season Beltran has a .295/.388/.590 line, almost identical to the one he posted in his best offensive season in 2006, his MVP caliber year, when he was but 29 years old, the season he helped carry the Mets to the NL East pennant before… well, you know.

Isn’t it just the most beautiful thing?

Not the aesthetics of it, though those are plenty awesome to behold — Beltran’s elegant, understated swing, absent of excess movements, just a turn of the hips and a bat through the zone.

I mean the big-picture beauty: This man, still young in real-life years but getting up there in baseball age, obviously proud, once transcendentally great, after surrendering his position to a younger and now more athletic protege, coming out of the gate crushing the ball like he did before the surgeries and arthritis and the he-said-they-said dramas wore thin his cartilage and reputation.

Someone will spring up now and say: Trade him! Trade him while he’s healthy! Get prospects before he goes into the tank!

Whatever. Maybe they should. Who cares?

This isn’t about that. Look at what’s happening: This is triumphant stuff. Celebrate this.

Indulge me for a moment: I have whined several times in the past weeks here and elsewhere about some back pain. You might not know this about me, but I am not prone to complain about my health. I actually once played two weeks of middle-school football with a broken rib.

But this nagging ache, just to the right of my spine spreading out over my shoulder blade and bleeding down my right arm into my fingers — it’s a symptom of some pretty heavy health issues. And the combination of the pain itself and the drugs I take to combat it make it difficult to focus on just about anything except an awful spiral of self-pity and fruitless existential nonsense. And I’m not looking for sympathy or trying to burden you; this isn’t about that.

This is the opposite of that. Maybe I’m overreacting to a single performance by my favorite player or maybe I’m delirious from a couple weeks of limited sleep, and the last thing I want to do is drift into the type of motivational-speaker you-can-do-it dreck I normally despise.

But Carlos Beltran reminds me to keep pushing. We’ve all got problems, but, like I said before the season, we’ve all still got time.

Depending on what you read, rich guy Steve Cohen is either close to buying, very interested in buying, or not at all buying some share of the New York Mets.

You can’t see me shrugging. But I’m shrugging.

I’ve never brokered a $200 million deal, but I imagine these things are wonderfully complex even when one party isn’t mired in a massive billion-dollar lawsuit. So I figure the sale of the Mets is a pretty complicated thing, there’s little advantage to any party involved to be forthcoming to the press about any of it until it’s done, and there are hundreds of hungry sports and financial journalists desperate to take even the tiniest scrap of information and spin it into misleading or downright false conclusions.

So you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t believe a single thing I read about the partial sale of the Mets until the Mets are partially (or, for that matter, wholly) sold.

Just think back to that Reyes injury in LA a few years ago. They didn’t send him back to NY and instead had him see the Dodgers team doctor who said he had a calf injury. He then played and ended up having a torn tendon in his hamstring. After nonsense like that, you’re going to see guys flying back to NY when they have a runny nose.

– ChrisJM, comments section here.

This is a good point. I am pwned.

With doctors in New York determining Ike Davis needs DL time for his injured ankle, Fernando Martinez will join the Major League Mets in Colorado.

(I know this point has been made a number of times before, but I’ll bring it up again: Is there really no way to get Davis an MRI in Colorado in the year 2011? I get that the Mets want him handled by their own doctors, but with their resources, do you mean to tell me there’s no way they could find a Denver-area MRI tube into which to shove Davis’ leg, and no way to get those scans to Dr. David Altchek in some manner more timely than actually physically shipping Ike Davis to New York? What about that Philippon fellow that Carlos Beltran favors? Doesn’t he kinda owe the Mets one at this point?)

At first glance, Lucas Duda seems a more natural fit for the big club than the Fernanchise, since Duda can replace Davis at first base. But Duda has been out since Sunday with a sore back. Nick Evans, who also plays first base, is out of options and no longer on the 40-man roster.

Martinez is on the 40-man and was playing well at Triple-A. He homered in his last two games for Buffalo and has an .838 OPS in 65 at-bats on the season. He hits lefty, meaning the Mets finally gain a lefty bench bat better than Willie Harris.

But therein lies the rub. Martinez, no matter how long we’ve been hearing about him, is still only 22 — more than  a year younger than Kirk Nieuwenhuis, if you’re playing at home. Moreso than the 25-year-old Duda, Martinez needs to be playing regularly, picking up the much-needed Triple-A reps he has lost to injury the past several seasons, working to make good on his now-lost top-prospect status.

He should not be with the big club to ride the pine for long. I don’t think anyone wants Martinez playing center field regularly, and neither Jason Bay nor Carlos Beltran appears apt to relinquish reps in a corner to the unproven outfielder. It’s fine to call Martinez up for a few days in a pinch, but if Duda’s going to be on the shelf for a while, the Mets need to make another move.

Davis’ absence means Daniel Murphy will slide over to play first base on most days without an obvious backup. Josh Thole played first in the Minors and presumably Chin-Lung Hu could handle the position defensively (though that would be a Miguel Cairo type of embarrassment offensively), but in an ideal world you’d like to have a backup for Murphy at first to afford Martinez the opportunity to get regular at-bats in the Minors.

But who’s playing first base in Buffalo?

Oh… oh my.

Do it.

And lest you say the Mets don’t have room on the 40-man roster, remember that Jenrry Mejia can be put on the 60-man Disabled List, creating a space.

Do it. Do it.

It’s just possible the real Jason Bay — the guy who hit all those home runs for the Pirates and Red Sox — is stashed somewhere in Charlie Samuels’ basement.

That is about as good an explanation as any for Bay’s continued invisibility in the Mets lineup as Samuels, the team’s former clubhouse manager, faces charges he swiped $2.3 million worth of trinkets from the club over the years.

– Mike Puma, N.Y. Post.

No it’s not.

Better explanations, off the top of my head: Sample size, injuries, aging, park factor, massively diminished hr/fb rate, diminished strike-zone judgment.