In 20 games in April 2012, David Wright hit .389 with a .494 on-base percentage and a .569 slugging. Wright performed well in the 10 games he played in July of 2011, but has not enjoyed a full month of this type of production since 2010, when he hit six home runs and posted an 1.130 OPS in June. Moreover, his strikeout rate is sitting at 15.7 percent, right around where it was in his pre-Citi Field halcyon days, and he’s walking and hitting line drives at higher clips than he has in any full season in his career.

So what does all that mean? In the grand scheme of things, not much: It means he had 20 consecutive mostly good games that so happened to be the 20 games he played in the days determined to be part of April by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, and, more importantly for the purposes of this discussion, that so happened to be the first 20 games of his 2012 season.

Wright was nearly this good for a 22-game stretch from Aug. 24 to Sept. 16 of 2011 — the worst season of his career — posting a .973 OPS that no one would ever have noticed because those endpoints are utterly arbitrary and it was bookended by slumps. Which is to say that no matter how great Wright has looked in his first 20 games of 2012, it’s still too soon to rule out another woeful season — at least by Wright’s standards. We might just be seeing his best stretch. Small sample size, you know.

That these 20 games did come to start this season, though, with the adjustments to Citi Field and everything else, means Mets fans can reasonably wonder if Wright is awesome again — not just awesome in the 2009-2011 good-guy, good-player sense, but awesome in the 2005-2008 top-few-players-in-baseball sense.

And that’s fun. Since we have no real idea what precipitated Wright’s precocious decline — if it was those walls, the 2009 beaning, the giant arm muscles, the various injuries, the general malaise surrounding the Mets the last few years, the economy, global warming, whatever — we can sit here and dream on the possibility that whatever happened stopped happening and now David Wright is his old awesome self.

He’s not going to hit .389 all year and he’s not going to maintain a .446 batting average on balls in play. But the longer he keeps crushing the ball, the more likely he is to keep crushing the ball.

It seems the general sentiment among Mets fans is that Terry Collins should never have let Manny Acosta start the eighth inning in Houston last night with the game tied at 3. And in hindsight, obviously, they’re right: Acosta allowed an infield single to Jordan Schafer, then Schafer stole second when Josh Thole bobbled a pitch in the dirt and scored the game’s deciding run on Jed Lowrie’s line drive single back through the box.

To me, though, the most frustrating part of Collins’ bullpen management this season has been his quick hook and the frequency with which he has warmed up and used all of his relievers. The Mets lead the league in relief appearances in 2012, and it seems like for every guy that gets in a game, another is in throwing in the bullpen ready to go. That taxes relief arms and could be one of the reasons for the bullpen’s general ineffectiveness.

Acosta has been mostly awful this year, no doubt. But he threw a strong seventh inning without a ton of pitches and bringing him back out for the eighth presented Collins an opportunity to keep some of his more frequently used relievers on the shelf. Acosta was the only member of the bullpen who didn’t throw in Sunday’s 11-inning game, recall, and multiple innings from Acosta would have benefited the Mets if Monday’s game also went to extra frames.

Also, don’t forget that Acosta was (perhaps by default) pretty much the best reliever the Mets had down the stretch in 2010 and 2011. He has started off poorly in 2012, yeah, but that’s no reason to expect it’ll continue. He allowed a squib swinging-bunt hit to Schafer, retired the for-some-reason-bunting Jose Altuve, and yielded a sinking liner to Lowrie. It’s not like he was knocked around the park.

To stop the bleeding, Collins wound up using Tim Byrdak and Bobby Parnell in the inning as well, so it wound up being the worst of both worlds: Acosta starts the eighth and allows the run and Collins still needs three relievers to get through the inning.

But I think if your primary gripe with Collins’ management is his heavy usage of relievers — as mine is — you can’t also complain when he lets a guy who just threw a strong inning come out for a second.

It didn’t work out last night. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Adam Rubin at ESPNNewYork.com reports that starting in 2013, Major League Baseball schedules may no longer include annual home-and-home series among the so-called “natural” rivals like the Mets and Yankees. Seems like good news for the Mets, who get as tough a draw as anyone and have a 35-49 record against the Bombers since Interleague Play started in 1997.

The Mets took their Western road trip to heart and wore costumes to match the occasion. Amazin’ Avenue and ESPN New York have photos. Daniel Murphy is the least convincing cowboy, which makes sense because I imagine if someone in 1850 were like, “Hey, Old West Murph, come help me rassle some steers,” he’d be all, “not now bro, got to get my cuts in first.” And everyone would wonder what the hell he was talking about, at least until a barnstorming base ball club moseyed on into town and Old West Murph promptly hit .320 against them.

R.A. Dickey’s look wins in a landslide, so much so that you have to figure Dickey just dresses like this sometimes and the rest of the Mets agreed it was cool enough for them to make a whole thing out of it. Only then once they did they realized none of them could pull it off like Dickey can so it was a bad move to try to compete, like that time in college I bought a leather jacket like the one Brad Pitt wears in Fight Club thinking it’d help me look like Brad Pitt.

Everything about Dickey seems to work as an Old West lawman. You figure Sheriff R.A. Dickey would be wily and just, contemplative and empathetic but aware of his responsibilities and willing to bear their burden to keep scoundrels at bay.