Here’s me talking to Wilmer Flores, and talking to Mets Minor League Field Coordinator Terry Collins about Wilmer Flores.

Rod Barajas leads the Mets with nine home runs. He is hitting .233 despite a .164 batting average on balls in play, a mark that likely reflects a little bit of misfortune and a whole, whole lot of fly balls.

Barajas swings hard. Not sure if you’ve noticed that yet. And he swings often.

To date, Barajas has only walked twice. He has a very respectable .823 OPS with a downright bizarre .253/.570 on-base/slugging split.

How bizarre (Ed. note: How bizarre! How bizarre!)? In the history of baseball, no one with enough bats to qualify for the batting title has ever finished a season with an OBP below .275 and a slugging above .550. In fact, no qualifier has ever finished with an OBP below .275 and a slugging above .500.

In fact, if you restore those first parameters and lower the plate-appearance minimum to 50 — arbitrary, no doubt — the search returns only two players: pitcher Don Drysdale in 1958 and Rod Barajas so far in 2010.

This is something I’ve covered before: If you’re swinging at a whole lot of the pitches you see and crushing a fair share of them, you’re not going to continue seeing a lot of good pitches to hit.

It seems like Barajas covers a whole lot of territory with his bat and can put some bad balls in play, but every hitter has his limit. Pitchers will eventually put enough balls in places Barajas can’t reach to either force him into a more patient approach or retire him at an even more frequent pace.

In other words, this won’t continue. Barajas will still hit home runs, but there’s almost no way he will maintain this pace. Of course, if you think Rod Barajas is going to hit 50 home runs this season you’re either heavily medicated or probably should be, so it’s probably silly to even bother explaining why he won’t keep up this pace.

Either way, Barajas has been awesome so far. For a discounted rate, he is providing all the power and staff-handling acumen the Mets could have hoped for from Bengie Molina. Plus, as noted, he has excellent taste in music and comes to the plate to “California Love” and “Low Rider.” So file Rod Barajas under cool.

Cool, and valuable, but not likely to keep hitting this many home runs. It should be interesting to monitor whether he can total more homers than walks this season, an accomplishment that should probably be named for Dave Kingman.

Only in the eighth, when Aaron Rowand hit a two-run homer over the right field wall off Jennry Mejia – who really needs to go back to Triple-A and hone his starting skills – did the wind finally blow a favor to the Giants.

– Bill Madden, N.Y. Daily News.

Emphasis mine. It’s not particularly surprising, but it’s certainly amusing that the city’s newspaper columnists now appear to unanimously agree that Jenrry Mejia should be starting games in the Minors. I don’t recall any newspaper writer but Joel Sherman making so much as a peep about it during Spring Training, when countless Mets blogs were furiously lobbying on behalf of Mejia’s longterm development.

That quibble aside, as far as I’m concerned it’s the more the merrier on the let-Mejia-grow bandwagon. The Mets seem to react to media pressure as much as any team in baseball, so it’s good when the media clamors for something that will actually benefit the team.

Anyway, here’s the thing: Not only is Mejia’s development likely being hindered by irregular work in short bursts — he has thrown 83.7 percent fastballs — he’s also being questionably handled, given his youth. Both appearances and bullpen sessions tax relievers’ arms. Mejia has pitched in 15 of the Mets’ 31 games, but warmed up in plenty more.

For all I know, the Mets do have some sort of Jenrry Rules governing Mejia’s usage, but they certainly don’t manifest themselves in his game logs. And that’s a bit worrisome, because Jerry Manuel’s overuse of certain bullpen arms is one of the aforementioned early-season trends very likely to continue.

It’s nothing new. And with the proverbial axe perpetually hanging over his head, Manuel has little motivation to concern himself with the condition of his relievers late in the season.

Fernando Nieve has pitched in 20 games, putting him on pace for 104 appearances. Pedro Feliciano has pitched in 18, putting him on pace for 94 — a career high even for the guy who has led the league in appearances two years running. And like Mejia, both guys have been “dry-humped” numerous times.

Granted, at least some of the blame lies on the Mets’ starting pitchers — the Mets are second in the Majors in relief innings. But Manuel’s team leads the league by a pretty wide margin in relief appearances on zero days’ rest. Mets pitchers have 35. The league average is 18.

In all likelihood, this will eventually catch up with the club.

In baseball stats and elsewhere, I abhor small samples in isolation. Too often they tempt otherwise reasonable people — myself included — to make rash judgments on insufficient evidence. It’s frustrating, and it makes for some pretty terrible baseball analysis.

One upside to fleeing town for the last week and a half is it allowed the Mets to play more games and accrue a bit more data upon which to base whatever the hell it is I write about here. We’re still dealing with only a fraction of the season, mind you. Livan Hernandez is second among Major League qualifiers with a 1.04 ERA. Smart money says that won’t last.

As a means of helping myself get up to speed with what the Mets have been doing, I’ll be sorting through some of the early returns here the next couple of days to try to determine which are real and which will ultimately go the way of Livan’s ERA.

I caught a few Mets games on my vacation, so I’m not completely out of the loop. I saw parts of the triumphant Rod Barajas win in a New Orleans bar, and heard parts of the triumphant Henry Blanco win while driving between Breaux Bridge, La. and Houston.

I also ate a ton. Perhaps literally. Holy lord; I should probably only eat vegetables for the next month or so. SPOILER ALERT: I probably won’t.

I think the most delicious of many delicious things was this gravy-smothered fried chicken from the Busy Bee Cafe in Atlanta: