Remember when people were only half-ironically predicting the Mets to challenge the 1962 club’s worst-record-ever record? That happened. Remember that?

It was silly. With the meats of our Memorial Day barbecues in digestion, we know now that the Mets were never nearly that bad a club. They played pitifully over a pitifully small sample, and some of the club’s fans, beat reporters and owners let their imaginations run wild. These things happen.

So what have we got, for real?

Well, we still don’t really know because it’s baseball, and Memorial Day is not in fact some magical date that clears up all small-sample size murkiness and reveals the true postseason contenders.

The Mets appear to be pretty close to the club we — by we I mean me, I should say — expected before the season: They can hit a bit, thanks to a deep lineup capable of sustaining rallies. Their pitching isn’t very good, but it is often good enough to keep the team in games.

Some players are overachieving, of course: Justin Turner probably won’t drive in 3000 runs this year and Dillon Gee probably won’t finish the season undefeated. But David Wright, Josh Thole and Angel Pagan have not played as well as they are capable of playing. Wright, Ike Davis and Angel Pagan have missed big stretches of the season with injuries, but Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran (knocking wood right now) have remained healthy.

I think I started out with some sort of larger point in mind and now that I’m here I’m not sure I have one. I kept saying I’d take stock of the team come Memorial Day, and now, well, here we are. The Mets are 25-28. They’re not great but they’re not that bad.

But you knew that. Carry on.

The Mets took a Pyrrhic victory last night. They won the game, improving their record to 25-28, but Francisco Rodriguez finished it, his 20th finished game on the season. He is well on his way to finishing 55 games, the benchmark at which the $17.5-million option on his contract becomes guaranteed for 2012.

Of course, you know all this. You know because The Great Games Finished Scourge is the most compelling reason to tune into the Mets every night. Every night, scores of Mets fans tune in with bated breath to see if Terry Collins will have the gall to turn to his best reliever in the last inning, knowing what he does about that reliever’s contract situation and the way it could financially hamstring his already financially hamstrung club next season. And once Rodriguez enters the game, we sit on the edge of our seats, fingers crossed, hoping — of course — he will allow the opposition to tie the game so he can exit without it ending.

I kid, obviously. And the vesting option does matter. Hell, if the $14 million difference between paying Rodriguez for 2012 and paying the buyout on his contract somehow means the Mets can’t keep Jose Reyes, it matters a hell of a lot. And sometimes it seems like Terry Collins is straight-up trolling the Mets’ front office, bringing in his closer to finish games like the six-run loss on Thursday in Chicago.

In the grand scheme of closers-with-awful-vesting-options-misuse, though, Collins should get a pass for Rodriguez’s appearance in last night’s game. The Mets’ bullpen has been overworked and shaky lately, and Jason Isringhausen was already lifted for a pinch-hitter in the bottom of the eighth when the Mets scored their sixth and seventh runs — giving them a three- and then four-run cushion.

So those robbling on Twitter over using Rodriguez in a non-save situation would have presumably sat the closer down — dry-humped him, in bullpen parlance — to turn the game over to some other, not-yet-warmed-up reliever in a recently overworked bullpen that very well might be needed tonight with an ailing R.A. Dickey set to start.

And really, that argument assumes managers should be managing to the reasonably arbitrary save stat, pitching guys labeled closers with three-run leads but not four-run leads and everything. Silly.

Over at Gelf Magazine, I conducted an interview with Alan Hirsch, co-author of the new book The Beauty of Short Hops. Check it out.

Though Hirsch demonstrates a reasonably firm grasp of sabermetrics throughout the book, he argues that the numbers obscure the beauty of the sport. I don’t see it that way. It has never been clear to me why appreciating the beauty of the game and the tools used to attempt to quantify it need to be mutually exclusive.

I love baseball. I know that, and I spend enough of my waking hours watching, playing and thinking about baseball that I feel no need to defend my appreciation of the sport. And I love the whole thing. I love all the messy things that play out on a baseball field over a 162-game season and the way that 162-game season seems to wrap up so tidily on a baseball-reference page when it’s over. It’s damn-near perfect.

What I don’t love — and forgive me for a heavy-handed segue — is business.

Actually, I’m not sure “don’t love” is the right term. I don’t get it. It doesn’t happen for me. I’m not business-savvy.

I’m generally curious about stuff, so sometimes I’ll ask my friends with business jobs some specifics about what they do, and it’s like the part of my brain dedicated to processing it short-circuits. I’m decent at math and I can usually grasp economic principles, but someone at a party starts talking to me about the futures market and I start giggling like a lunatic or just sort of wander off toward the drinks.

Being a Mets fan the past few days — or at least trying to read anything about the Mets on the Internet — has required plunging through buckets of unsubstantiated and entirely speculative business nonsense to try to winnow out any real, meaningful baseball information. Even putting aside the irritating details that the Wilpons and David Einhorn haven’t even reached a deal yet, that the actual terms of the not-yet reached deal have not been disclosed, and that no one’s ever going to hold anyone accountable for some horribly irresponsible journalism, it’s not really about baseball anymore.

It’s about a complicated multi-million-dollar business deal between billionaires, and that — to me at least — just isn’t really all that compelling.

Bottom line is the Mets are going to be playing National League baseball in New York for the foreseeable future, and most of the time they’re going to spend a hell of a lot of money on payroll no matter who’s at the helm. Many Mets fans are rightfully upset over what Fred Wilpon said to the New Yorker about three of the Mets’ best players, but that’s a different issue, and very different from arguing over six steps of speculation past a haphazardly reported deal that hasn’t been made yet.

I work here at SNY, so you’re going to question my motivations. That’s fine. You can’t see me shrugging, but I’m shrugging.

David Einhorn and the Wilpons are negotiating the partial sale of a perfectly interesting baseball team that seems to be winning a few games in spite of a rash of injuries and some bizarre managerial decisions, and I find that way more interesting. More on that in a bit.

Just because I’m curious.

I don’t want to say too much to skew the voting one way or the other, but keep in mind that elite free agents don’t often hit the open market in their 20s.

And the question is not what you’d like the Mets to offer Reyes or what you think is fair for his services. I’m asking the value and length of the biggest contract you would be willing to give Reyes if you were, for whatever reason, the Mets’ general manager.

[poll id=”24″]

That doesn’t make a bit of difference. It doesn’t matter where he hits, he still has to face the pitcher.

– Keith Hernandez, on Jason Bay’s spot in the batting order.

In 3897 plate appearances before joining the Mets, Jason Bay had a .519 slugging percentage. In 522 plate appearances since, it’s .386.

He is older and he’s playing in a bigger park. But… man.