Angel Pagan is set to come off the Disabled List on Saturday, meaning the Mets will have to make a roster move. This is a good thing. Something probably needs to change.

Chin-Lung Hu, Scott Hairston and Willie Harris — the three bench players who have been with the club all season — have a combined .184/.264/.289 line in 114 at-bats. So far, Mets pitchers have a slightly higher OPS than Mets pinch hitters on the season.

I’m going to repeat that for emphasis: Mets pitchers have a better OPS than Mets pinch-hitters.

Hairston, the primary right-handed bench bat, has a .405 OPS against lefties. Harris, the primary left-handed bench bat, has a .540 OPS against righties.

I guess what I’m saying is the Mets’ bench could use a shakeup. Or a shakedown. Something.

Let’s think about this: If you were only concerned with providing Terry Collins the very best 25-man roster and not at all worried about keeping young players regularly on the field, how would you put together the Mets’ bench, using only in-house options?

Figure the backup catcher would stay the same. A platoon of Josh Thole and Ronny Paulino appears to be the team’s best option behind the plate.

So you need guys who can capably back up all the other positions, and ideally a good righty bat and a good lefty bat.

I get that you need a guy that can back up shortstop, and finding one isn’t easy. But you know how many innings Chin-Lung Hu has played at shortstop this season? One. He came in to relieve Jose Reyes in the bottom of the eighth when the Mets were down 10-0 in Philadelphia on April 29. (The Mets actually scored three runs in the top of the ninth that evening, but Hu struck out to end the game. No bottom of the ninth was necessary. I was out eating a burrito while it all went down; it was delicious.)

Knocking wood extremely hard right now: Jose Reyes has played all but one inning at shortstop for the Mets in 2011. Considering that, would it be so terrible to call Justin Turner the backup shortstop? Turner played 22 games at shortstop in Triple-A last year. He can’t boast Hu’s range in the field, but given the amount of workload, you’ve got to figure Turner is up to the task. And when Reyes needs a day off, the Mets could use Turner at short on a day fly-ball machine Chris Young is starting.

The only hiccup there, I suppose, is that when Turner starts against a tough left-hander, the Mets can’t take him out of the game for a pinch-hitter lest they have no one to back up shortstop if they need to pull Reyes. But then how often are they going to want to pull Reyes? And if they’re forced to take Reyes out, they’ve probably got bigger problems than finding an emergency shortstop for a couple innings late in a game.

Now if we’re still talking fantasy-world best-roster stuff, you’d probably want Kirk Nieuwenhuis and Lucas Duda on the bench. Neither has done much to show he can be a solid Major League pinch-hitter yet, but they both hit left-handed with power and have hit righties very well in Triple-A. Because there are so many more righty relievers than lefty ones (obviously), ideally a team would have more lefties than righties on the bench.

You do need a righty bat though, and a case could be made for Hairston. Though he’s off to a brutal start, he’s not terribly old and he has hit lefties well in the past. Plus he appears apt to back up center field, no small feat.

Of course, carrying a bench of Paulino/Thole, Turner, Duda, Nieuwenhuis and Hairston would give a team three backup outfielders and only one backup infielder, not a great balance. Righty-hitting Nick Evans is off to a slow start in Triple-A, but he could replace Hairston and play the corner infield (and outfield) spots.

But that’s just an exercise. Young players should be given regular playing time, and Nieuwenhuis in particular needs to be in an everyday lineup.

But Duda and Evans are both 25, getting up past prospect age. Duda, as a lefty bat with way more power than Willie Harris, seems particularly apt to help the big club. Could Terry Collins get him enough playing time to justify keeping him around?

Harris certainly hasn’t been wanting for playing time, and though that’s mostly due to the injuries to Pagan and Jason Bay, a) there are always injuries and b) if Duda becomes the primary lefty bat off the bench and backup in left, right and at first, you have to figure there are 200+ at-bats for him somewhere. How much more valuable is playing every day in Triple-A than sporadic play in the Majors for a 25-year-old?

I don’t know. Just thinking out loud here. The Mets’ bench has been really bad, is all.

By the way, at what point is it not early…

– Matt Cerrone, MetsBlog.com.

I hate to defer to Mike and the Mad Dog on anything, but I always go with Memorial Day as the benchmark for when to start looking at baseball records and stats as things that might be actually happening and not just merely the whims of small sample size.

And yeah, two months of baseball isn’t really a very big sample size in the grand scheme of things either, especially when you’re talking about a player’s stats. But by then everyone’s so sick of qualifying everything that we all have to sort of agree to just talk about stuff as if it might be really happening and not as if there’s no way it lasts.

Anyway, the Mets still have 23 games to play before it stops being early.

When news broke yesterday that Pedro Beato was bound for the disabled list, many Mets fans and members of the media came out with woe-is-mes, here-we-go-agains and talk that the team is irrevocably cursed.

Here’s the thing though: The Mets have actually been (knock wood) reasonably healthy this season. After the events of 2009, we’re so jaded by injuries that we seem to assume the Mets are the only team that has them. But every team has them.

By this list, in fact, there are eight other teams with four players on the Disabled List and ten teams with more than four players on (or bound for) the Disabled List.

It seems like the team’s new front office has a quick trigger for placing players on the shelf, which should be welcome after the Omar Minaya Era. Both Beato and Angel Pagan said they didn’t think they needed the full 15 days and suggested that at a different point in the season they might have remained with the club. Sandy Alderson likely does not want to saddle Terry Collins with a short roster, although… well, I’ll get to that in another post soon.

Well that sucks. Again, probably better than trying to force him to pitch through it or giving him a couple of days off and rushing him back. Beato told SNY’s Matt Dunn that he was examined today and Dr. David Altcheck said he should be good in a week but that they’re taking 15 days as a precaution.

The bright side, I suppose, is we get to see if Mike O’Connor might make for a better lefty option than Tim Byrdak.

Can we all finally agree that “clutch” is a made up thing like ghosts and dinosaurs? #whithercarleverett?

– @ajdelb, via Twitter.

This Tweet came in response to something I wrote about David Wright the Unclutch doubling to lead off the bottom of the ninth with the game tied yesterday.

What the Tweeter in question is referring to, you may know, is that all the evidence we can gather so far discredits the idea that certain baseball players are inherently more “clutch” than others.

Because of a few particular moments, Derek Jeter is labeled clutch, and since he has that label we confirmation-bias the hell out of every hit he gets in a big spot. David Wright is labeled, by some, to be unclutch, and so many choose to overlook hits like the last night’s ninth-inning double.

I am preaching to the choir on this one, I think. But some quick info for those for whom this is new: The amazing website baseball-reference.com charts players’ stats in low-, medium- and high-leverage situations. They define leverage index as such:

Within a game, there are plays that are more pivotal than others. We attempt to quantify these plays with a stat called leverage index (LI). LI looks at the possible changes in win probability in a give situation and situations where dramatic swings in win probability are possible (runner on second late in a tie game) have higher LI’s than situations where there can be no large change in win probability (late innings of a 12-run blowout).

Across his career, David Wright can boast a stellar .303/.382/.514 batting line. In 954 plate appearances in high-leverage situations — the ones most important to the outcome of the game — he has a very similar .316/.388/.523 line.

Derek Jeter’s career line is .313/.384/.450. In high-leverage situations, it’s .315/.396/.428.

Click around baseball-reference.com and you’ll find that most players, with enough exposure to all situations, turn out to hit pretty much the same in clutch situations as they do in all others. It makes sense, too: If a player could willfully become better in certain spots, why would he not opt to be better in all spots? If the pressure in late-game situations compels him to focus harder and succeed more often, why is the pressure of playing televised professional baseball in front of thousands of screaming fans insufficient at all other times?

And that’s kind of the thing. A lot of people use this evidence to say that no player is clutch, but I think actually all players are clutch. To make the Major Leagues, you need to shoulder an enormous amount of pressure because baseball is, at its core, a game that demands individual success in the center of attention.

Plenty of people come up to bat with the game on the line in Little League, can’t handle the gravity of the situation, panic, strike out and cry. But they don’t make the bigs.

Certainly, players likely endure stretches when the game does get to their head, when they do “press” in big spots, when they do fail. But one of the mental requirements of Major League play is the ability to move past failure, since in baseball, as you know, that is inevitable.

So players wind up hitting about as well in clutch situations as they do in all others.