Citi Field is a damn joke.

– Jeff Francoeur.

OK, Jeff Francoeur, I don’t want to come off as mean-spirited here or anything so please, don’t take this the wrong way. But here’s the thing, bro: You’re a terrible hitter.

Not terrible by regular human being standards. You’re definitely a better hitter than I am; I could never drive a 95-mph fastball 370 feet, something you’ve accomplished on numerous occasions. But by Major League standards, and the standards generally set for Major League corner outfielders, you’re just straight-up bad, dude.

Like, awful. Out of 26 qualifying right fielders in 2010, your wRC+ — probably the best offensive stat we have, even if it’s not on the scoreboard — was dead last. And by a lot. Actually, if we tally up all the stats from 2006 when you came into the league, you’re still at the very bottom of the list. Way below Kosuke Fukudome, way below Randy Winn, way below the pathetic shell of Shawn Green that the Mets trotted out in 2006 and 2007. You are baseball’s worst-hitting right fielder, by far.

That stat, I should add, is adjusted for the park in which you play your home games. Your struggles had nothing to do with Citi Field, and everything to do with you. You swing too much, and every pitcher in the league knows it. You’re doing it wrong, sir.

You can blame your struggles on any exterior source you want. And indeed, the Mets’ home park appears to be a difficult one in which to succeed offensively. But if the stadium’s dimensions were the source of your offensive inadequacy, why, I wonder, were nearly all of your teammates much better than you at hitting?

You can say anything you want about Citi Field, but — and again, I’m not trying to be mean because I understand you’re a really nice guy — you are the joke.

Honestly. At this site and many others, we laugh at your expense because you’re so bad at hitting and so good at somehow staying in the Major Leagues. Start thinking of factors you can blame in Kansas City — I don’t know, too much barbecue, maybe — because you’ll almost certainly need to explain why you don’t hit in 2011 either.

Excuse me for not caring much one way or the other that Terry Collins named Mike Pelfrey his Opening Day starter, something that sparked at least a little bit of bluster in the blog- and Twitter-sphere yesterday.

I suppose, yes, it’s early to do so, but then pitchers are creatures of schedule and they’ll need to start mapping out the Spring Training rotation to line up with the regular season soon enough.

And Pelfrey is at the very least the most proven of the starters likely to be in the Mets’ rotation, since R.A. Dickey and Jon Niese have only a year apiece of Major League success and Chris Capuano and Chris Young are coming off injury. I don’t think anyone’s expecting to pitch like Johan Santana just because he’s technically the No. 1 guy in the Mets’ rotation.

Again, like so many annoying arguments in baseball analysis, it comes down to silly and meaningless labels. Pelfrey shouldn’t be handed the Opening Day starter’s job because that’s for True No. 1s and Pelfrey is not a True No. 1. What is that? As long as he’s healthy coming out of Spring Training, he’s going to be in the rotation, right? So what difference does it make if he starts Friday, April 1 or Sunday, April 3?

Jerry Manuel would say — and did a bunch of times last year — that because of schedules the No. 1 pitcher will often match up with the opponent’s best. Problem is, that’s not really true.

The Mets’ Opening Day starter last year, Johan Santana, matched up with opponents’ Opening Day starters eight times in 29 starts in 2010. Take out Opening Day — when it is inevitable — and it happened once in every four of his starts. And one of them was Vicente Padilla and another was Zach Duke.

You’re hardly condemning Pelfrey to run a gauntlet of Hall of Famers by starting him on Opening Day. And it’s not like they have any pitcher that’s obviously better suited than Pelfrey to run a gauntlet of Hall of Famers anyway.

If the Mets are going to compete in 2011, it’s very likely they’ll have to do so with depth in the rotation but without a brand-name capital-letter True Ace Starter, at least not before Johan Santana returns from surgery. And since Pelfrey has proven himself durable and capable of pitching deep into games, he’s as good a choice as any to pitch the opener.

On Friday afternoon in the batting cages at the Mets’ Minor League facility in Port St. Lucie, Fla., Tim Teufel pitches to a righty-hitting college-aged kid in blue mesh shorts and a t-shirt.

A clutch of guys in Mets jerseys looks on, but none among them can peg down the identity of the kid. They know his name is Mike and that he’s not among their ranks at Fantasy Camp. They think the kid knows Teufel. One says he’s Teufel’s son. Another suggests he’s Teufel’s son-in-law. A third says he’s Teufel’s son’s friend. No one is certain.

But they see that he is awesome. He lashes line drive after line drive, every ball darting off his bat toward left-center field, slicing into the cage’s net and pulling it taut against its supports, then ricocheting back near where Teufel is throwing.

His contact produces a Major League sound. It is something different than the clichéd “crack of the bat.” That familiar sound, at stadiums, is filtered by distance and crowd rumble, limiting the spectrum of noise that hits the eardrum.

Here, up close, you can hear the sizzle and whoosh as the kid’s hands and bat and the ball all speed into the zone at the same time, then an oaky baritone report when they all come together. Thwock, thwock, thwock. It is magnificent.

“You know what’s wrong with this kid’s swing?” one camper asks another.

“What?”

“Nothin’.”

Only Lenny Harris sees something amiss. The familiar pinch-hitter extraordinaire, fresh off his own BP session in the next cage over, stops Teufel and jumps in the cage. The kid, he says, is cheating forward with his lower half before he swings, costing him balance — presumably passable in batting practice but the type of thing good pitchers will eventually exploit.

“You see it, Teuf?” Harris asks. Teufel nods and steps over to the batter’s box. He explains the importance of keeping flexible through the hips, swiveling his own as he does so. A few of the Fantasy Camp group chuckle; they have enjoyed a brief, exaggerated version of the Teufel Shuffle.

Harris pulls over a tee to teach the kid — and Teufel — a drill to help hitters stay back in the box. The kid hits more line drives toward left-center, shots that look and sound a lot like the earlier ones. Harris, a Minor League hitting coach these days, can see the adjustment, and he seems satisfied.

In the next cage over, one of the camp-goers takes his cuts off Pete Schourek. Long and lean and probably in his early 30s — one of the youngest in attendance — his swing appears steady, if lacking power. But he is missing the ball, swinging over it. The few he connects with veer straight down into the artificial turf.

Jim McAndrew walks into the area from one of the back fields. He watches the hitter struggling, then speaks up.

“Put your bat on your shoulder,” he says.

The guy looks confused, and a bit tentative. Little League coaches everywhere earn their pay reminding hitters to take the bat off their shoulder. Now, a member of the 1969 Mets — a pitcher, no less — is telling him otherwise. He pulls his hands in uncomfortably close to his body, elbows bent so tight his forearms almost graze his biceps, then swings and misses again.

“No, no. Just place the bat on your shoulder. Relax,” McAndrew says. The guy heeds his advice. Line drive.

The people at Mets Fantasy Camp are dentists and lawyers and doctors and teachers in real life. They range in age from about 30 to 70. Most of them are men, but there are a few women peppered throughout. Most come alone, but there are some kids and wives and parents milling about. They have in common only a love of baseball and a learned understanding that Major League Baseball players are really, really, really good at it.

The former players, too, seem to delight in the sport as much as the campers do, and the place becomes like a weeklong mid-Winter celebration of its grandeur. It’s January, and you’ve missed baseball. Here, you watch baseball, you play baseball, you talk baseball, you revere it.

“After October, you just kind of sit around,” says Al Jackson, a veteran of some 50 years in various positions in professional baseball. “This gets you ready for Spring Training. It breaks up the monotony.”