A Mets fan, if he or she takes in 100 games, will spend 300 or so hours watching the team this year. If he or she spends another hour each day reading sports pages and Web logs, listening to radio call-in shows, and talking about the game during the regular season, and a half hour each day during the rest of the year, that will account for another 2721/2 hours. If the fan attends 20 games at Shea Stadium, and travels an hour coming and going, that will account for another 40 hours. In all, this committed fan will spend 6121/2 hours on the Mets this year, which works out to 251/2 days, or a bit less than an eighth of one’s waking hours. That’s more time than many people spend with their children.

The demands the sport makes are what make being a baseball fan so different from being a fan of any other sport, and what make its rewards proportionally greater. Irrational as it is to give over a full waking month of your life every year to watching and thinking about grown men chasing a leather ball around, there’s nothing so right or so hard to explain to a baseball agnostic as those long stretches when your team can’t lose, or even those moments when it comes so close to winning that it physically hurts.

If baseball’s rewards are greater, though, so are its punishments, and none are worse than those moments when you suspect you’re being played for a fool — that the people who profit from your insane investment of time and devotion are indifferent to or laughing at you.

I remember watching grown men cry at a bar on St. Mark’s Place when Kenny Rogers cashiered a season with a walk-off walk, and I know people who remember watching Carlos Beltran stare at a curveball for a called third strike with the same clarity they remember hearing that the Challenger had exploded. Baseball can hurt. But neither of those things called into question that full month of the year sunk into the game. A pitcher not being able to throw a strike didn’t make the Grand Single seem cheap; a great hitter getting frozen by a curveball didn’t make anyone feel like a chump for caring about the Catch that Endy Chavez had made not even an hour before. Over time, the painful moments can even begin to feel almost good, like the ache where a pulled tooth was.

What distinguishes the Mets among all teams is their unique ability to commit baseball crimes that, unlike on-field failures, can make someone embarrassed and ashamed to care about them, and feel that all the hundreds of hours spent caring about the team’s fate every year were wasted. (You could have been learning German or playing bocce ball.)

The already infamous firing of Willie Randolph was one of these crimes. Even if you believe owner Fred Wilpon’s disavowal of any involvement in the firing of his own manager, or general manager Omar Minaya’s sketchy claims that he had to fire Randolph at 2 a.m. New York time because of sources and logistics, that the team was in this position at all betrays a slapdash carelessness that borders on contempt for all the time and passion fans invest in the Mets.

Fans aren’t owed much — the obligations of players are spelled out in their contracts, and fans who don’t like the way a team is run are always free to take those German lessons — but the stewards of a team, which is basically a public trust that precedes and will survive those who happen to own or be running it at any given time, do owe them straightforwardness and decency. The Mets specialize in the opposite, offering insult after insult to their loyalists for no reason at all.

When a manager is fired after the first game of a road trip after having won three of four, it obviously wasn’t a decision that had just been made. On its own, the Randolph firing could be considered merely a job botched in difficult circumstances and under pressure, but it follows on far too many sleazy moves made for sound reasons that were inexplicably denied for it to be taken as anything but a pattern showing, in its fullness, that the Wilpons think their fans are stupid.

That month that a fan invests in the team entitles them to the truth and honest dealing. It’s okay to fire a manager whose team has been playing mediocre baseball for a year; if you want to do it, though, do it while the people who care most are awake. It’s okay to decide that you don’t want to pay a shortstop $250 million; that being so, admit you think the player wants too much money. It’s defensible to trade away a risky prospect to take a slim shot at a playoff berth; if you do it, though, admit that’s what you’re doing. In each of these cases, the Mets took a routine bit of business and turned it into a self-inflicted humiliation just because they weren’t willing to be clear about why they do what they do. And until the public trust is passed on to new stewards, it’s most likely that they’ll do so again and again, every time making more fans feel that their 6121/2 hours are a calamitous waste rather than a full investment in the pleasures of the greatest sport to be found anywhere in the world.

tmarchman@nysun.com