Well that was fun.

The big takeaways, I’d say? David Wright smacking the crap out of the ball, for one thing. You had to know it’d happen eventually, but it’s always better it comes sooner than later. Here’s hoping Wright stays hot for a while, because with Beltran hitting the way he has been and Jason Bay back in the lineup, they might actually win, you know, more than one game.

Angel Pagan pulled a muscle Tim McCarver didn’t know existed until recently. Pagan says he’ll only need a few days, but teams rightfully like to be cautious with oblique injuries. (Hey here’s an idea: Make Pagan only bat from one side of the plate while he’s hurt! What could possibly go wrong?) Anyway, this is cockeyed optimism but maybe Pagan could use a few days out of the lineup to figure some things out.

A reality check for those convinced that Kirk Nieuwenhuis is going to get called up and Wally Pipp Pagan: Captain Kirk finished last year with a .327 on-base percentage across two Minor League levels and a bunch of strikeouts, so he likely still needs some work on his approach. Also, there’s almost no way he would cover as much ground in the outfield as Pagan does, even if Pagan has made a few glaring misplays of late. Nieuwenhuis is a big, athletic dude and sometimes everything just clicks for a guy, but I wouldn’t bet on him being better than Pagan anytime soon. He’s off to a hot start and Pagan isn’t, but these things have a way of balancing out in time.

The biggest thing about last night’s win, maybe, is that for the second straight night the Mets only needed to use one reliever. Good on Ken Oberkfell for using Taylor Buchholz for a second inning in the ninth; no sense tiring out another guy when you’re sitting on an eight-run lead. It was no secret that the Mets’ bullpen needed rest pretty desperately, and now that it’s back to a normal size it’s good that the starting pitchers are providing some length.

Also, thanks to the AP, here’s Justin Turner creepily photobombing David Wright:

A few minutes Terry Collins exhibited some Grade-A Backman-caliber buntsmanship last night and the Mets lost what felt like their 700th straight game, R.A. Dickey said this:

We have to find a way to be honest with ourselves about what kind of team we are. We can’t just keep telling ourselves, ‘Oh, we’re a better team than this.’ We may not be. And we’ve got to be honest about that, and identify what we’re doing wrong, and do it better. That’s the only way you have any real growth.

This. That is to say, that. What he said.

I’ve been bleating on all season about how the Mets are indeed a better than this, and rationally I believe they must be — partly because it’s almost impossible for a Major League Baseball team to be worse. So when Terry Collins insists the wins will come, it doesn’t sound insane to me because I recognize that randomness dominates almost everything that happens on a baseball field, that there are bizarre twists-and-turns to every year, and that every early-season outcome is amplified by the small sample size.

Frustrated Mets fans have told me in the past few days that if I can’t see that this is essentially the single worst team in the history of baseball, then I must not know anything about baseball. I don’t really feel the need to counter that argument — no one’s forcing anyone to read this site — but if I did, I’d probably say that my understanding of how a steaming pile of early-season awfulness can skew perceptions is actually the direct product of a 20-some year study of the sport. And I’d add that the most important things I’ve learned about baseball is that the whole Socratic knowing-that-you-know-not thing almost always applies, and that making sweeping declarative statements about anything happening in the game based on 18 games is a meandering road toward Looking-Like-A-Dunceville, a town in which I’ve certainly spent plenty of time.

The Mets’ lineup, starting tonight, features at least three excellent players, three decent players, and two guys who might very well prove decent and haven’t yet shown themselves to be terrible. It’s difficult to envision them hitting like one of the league’s worst offensive teams all year unless you really believe David Wright’s going to finish with the Alex Cora-like hitting line he’s rocking so far. Given the amount of history we have to show that David Wright is much, much, much, much, much, much better than Alex Cora, thinking he’s suddenly not would pretty much make you a crazy person.

The pitching could be an issue all season, but it, too, almost has to improve. The Mets currently have a collective 77 ERA+, and no team in the past 20 years has finished with a number that low. It might go back way further than that, too; I just got bored of clicking and sorting on baseball-reference.com. You can cobble together a staff of Pat Mischy guys and count on pitching better than the Mets have had so far, so once they settle on the best mix and some guys settle in, it will at least be better, if never good.

Back to Dickey. Even with all that said, the Mets, from the manager to the bench to the bullpen to the lineup to the rotation, have done themselves few favors in the early goings of the 2011 campaign, little to stack the odds in their favor. All teams make fundamental mistakes, and it’s easy to pick ’em out and pile on when a team is going poorly, but fundamental flaws in the approach to the gare — glaring, premeditated mental errors — are harder to excuse. And there have been some of those, too.

I can’t pretend to understand what motivates baseball players to shake themselves awake and start playing like men who reached the absurdly competitive heights of professional sport, so if Dickey says it’s time for them to step back, be honest and start trying to fix things, it’s hard for me to argue. I don’t know exactly how that process works, but with the team spending every evening digging itself deeper into a rut and further from playing even a single meaningful game this season, yeah, I’d say it’s probably about time it happens.