Ten games into the 2012 campaign, the Mets are 7-3. It’s the time of the season when tiny samples drive our irrational baseball-fan minds to crazy and wonderful places, no matter how often we remind ourselves that many ultimately crappy teams have started better or that 10 games into 2010 Jeff Francoeur had a .535 on-base percentage. And the backlash to the small-sample frenzy — in which I frequently participate — is often so obnoxious and vigorous that it seems unnecessarily grouchy at a time when many fans just want to enjoy their fantasies while they last.

So let’s look at it this way: These 7-3 Mets are the same team that entered the season to low expectations, sure, but those seven wins are banked. The gambler’s fallacy would suggest that the Mets are now more likely to endure a rough stretch after starting the season hot, but rolling three sixes in row doesn’t make the fourth any less likely.

Which is to say that if the Mets perform exactly like the 74.5-win team foreseen by Vegas from here on out — that is, they play to a .460 winning percentage starting now — they win 70 of their remaining 152 games (actually 69.9, but I’m rounding up) and finish the season 77-85. So still not great, but hey, the over.

If the Mets can just muster .500 ball for the rest of the season — you can probably do this math yourself — they finish 83-79 and stay on the fringes of contention until late in the year, and a lot of breathless haters full of authoritative preseason predictions have a lot of explaining to do.

And if these 2012 Mets can somehow manage just one more 7-3 stretch like this one at any point in the season while playing precisely .500 ball for the rest of it, they’re an 85-win team — good enough for postseason play in two of the past 10 seasons in the National League if the new two-Wild Card system were in place.

Maybe that’s a small payoff for what still seems something of a longshot, but then the on-the-field part of the Mets’ early success and our first exposure to their feared division rivals help it seem at least conceivable.

This is where our imaginations run wild: With the Phillies relying on old, injured players and burying their prospects behind veterans like a vintage late-aughts Mets team and the Braves and Nats peppering their offenses with out-machines, the Mets’ lineup appears to rival the Marlins’ for the division’s deepest. The Mets’ defense doesn’t look great, with some lousy defenders and some guys out of position, but the Marlins and Nationals have some lousy defenders and some guys out of position, too. And the Braves have Chipper Jones, Dan Uggla and Freddie Freeman starting in the same infield. (The Phillies’ defense is good.)

The Phillies clearly have the division’s best pitching staff. The Mets… well, they don’t. But they have a constitution some of their competitors lack, with two starters that seem safe bets to throw around 200 innings, two that have stayed mostly healthy for the past two years, one that is Johan Santana, and a nice blend of ceilings and floors at the high levels of their Minor League system.

That’s squinting at the 7-3 team and seeing the best, of course. And it’s the inevitable fallout of a hot start: What once seemed very unlikely now seems just unlikely.

And naturally, it’s that pesky way small fragments of seasons can mess with our heads. All of this could fall apart at any time.

But every day David Wright keeps hitting provides more evidence he could enjoy a rebound season, every double Ruben Tejada lashes in the gap suggests he’ll hit more of them, every game Kirk Nieuwenhuis plays like a Major Leaguer makes it more likely he is one, and every Santana start without incident means another.

It’s 10 games, less than 1/16th of the season, and precious little evidence with which to make any bold declarations about the rest of the Mets’ 2012 season. But little evidence is evidence nonetheless, and most of what we have so far is good.

So that’s cool.

In a Fanpost to Amazin’ Avenue, MookieTheCat lobbies the Mets to honor Ralph Kiner with a portion of Citi Field named for him. No arguments here. The TV broadcast booth at Citi Field is named for Kiner (as it was at Shea), but that’s not something fans regularly pass by.

This is a silly hypothetical, but say you were managing the Mets in a single-elimination relegation game — the very existence of the franchise depends on winning this one baseball game and for some reason you’re calling the shots, high-pressure stuff. Andres Torres is healthy and Kirk Nieuwenhuis was sent back down to Triple-A, so you’re basically working with the Mets’ Opening Day roster. Oh, and Lucas Duda already told you that it’s really important to him to play right field, so if you want his bat in the lineup he has got to be there.

Your opponent has a good but not spectacular rookie right-hander set to start. No one on your team has faced him before.

Who’s playing left?

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As of Saturday morning, it looked as if David Wright was heading to the disabled list with a broken pinkie and the Mets were going to shift Daniel Murphy to third base in his absence. That would mean, if you agree with the editorial thrust of this site, two items of bad news very early in a Mets season otherwise rife with unfamiliar positivity.

But then Wright, who couldn’t even grip a bat on Friday, showed up Saturday all like, “nah, I’m good,” and required exactly one pitch from Vance Worley to show the world he wasn’t kidding.

Wright is, at 29, the team’s all-time leader in offensive WAR and total bases. He is second in batting average, third in OPS, second in runs scored, second in RBI, third in hits and fourth in home runs.

Whenever Wright leaves, he will depart either arguably or definitely the best position player in Mets’ history. And he’s the type of dude who plays through broken backs and broken pinkies — the guy who, according to Terry Collins, was eager to pinch-run last week when he couldn’t do anything else with his swollen finger bandaged up. And he turns the other cheek when the owner of the team rips him in the New Yorker, and says nothing when the club opens up a park that seems expressly designed to sap him of his extra-base power.

Wright set an absurdly high standard in 2007 and 2008, failed to match it despite solid seasons in 2009 and 2010, then endured an injury-riddled and merely OK 2011.

But, though every small-sample-size caveat applies, Wright’s season-opening hot stretch provides the dwindling legion of Mets fans still rooting for the Face of the Franchise with some hope he can return (or has already returned!) to being the MVP-caliber player he was a few years ago.

And I could try to draw all sorts of big-picture conclusions about what that would mean for Wright’s rumored contract-extension talks and the team’s chances in 2012, but it all really boils down to this: That would be cool.

We talked about this on the podcast some but I wanted to hash it out here for those who don’t listen. And this post could be rendered useless as soon as this afternoon if the Mets determine that David Wright can play through his pinkie fracture. But if Wright needs a stint on the disabled list, Terry Collins should not move Daniel Murphy to third base in Wright’s absence, as he has suggested.

I write this realizing that Murphy has not looked good at second in most of the season’s first six games, and that keeping him there and using Ronny Cedeno or Justin Turner at third would mean playing two infielders at relatively unfamiliar positions when simply switching them would make both more comfortable and save the team runs in the short term.

And if the Mets were six games into a season in which they looked likely to compete for a division title or Wild Card berth, where they should be scrapping for wins every game, the move would make sense. But this is not that type of year, and if the team was content to open the season with Murphy at second, six games should not be enough evidence to change anyone’s mind.

Collins’ job is to make the most of the guys he has, so any inclination on his part to move Murphy to third makes sense. But since Wright’s injury does not seem to be (wood knocked, fingers crossed) a long-term thing, the Mets will need to find someplace to play Murphy when Wright returns. That most likely means a return to second base for Murph, only with a couple weeks away from the position and perhaps — for whatever it’s worth — some doubts about his team’s confidence in his ability to handle the position.

Even if it means sacrificing some runs in the short term, the Mets should make it clear to Murphy that he’s their second baseman no matter what happens. That means keeping him there while Wright’s out and using Turner or calling up Zach Lutz to play third, understanding that while it may not be the best thing for the Mets’ chances on April 13, it is almost certainly best for their chances in August, and in 2013.