I’m as high on the Mets right now as anyone – higher than most, actually. I think they’re the best team in the National League, and not all that far off being the best team in baseball. Largely this is because of their star power; I also think there’s a lot more potential on the roster than people realize. Players like Jose Reyes, Victor Diaz, and Jorge Julio are all excellent candidates to dramatically improve this year, and should they do so, the Mets could be dominant.

Still, I’ve been following the Knicks with morbid fascination lately, and that makes me uneasy. I’m at best a casual basketball fan, the kind who will watch religiously if the Knicks are running a 50-win team out there and won’t even know who’s on the roster if they aren’t. But the hilarious antics of Isiah Thomas have me paying more attention than I have since Larry Johnson’s 4-point play.

I’m hopefully not exposing unfathomable ignorance here, but it looks to me as if the Knicks’ problems are, in a broad sense, rooted in two basic mistakes: a fear of rebuilding and a tendency to compound bad decisions by making them again in the hopes they’ll work out. While there are a lot of differences between the Knicks and Mets – and I have a hard time imagining that the Mets will have the second-worst record in the league come July – there are some disturbing similarities as well.

After it became clear in 2001 that the Piazza/Leiter Mets were done as a contender, the team never did rebuild, putting it in the hole it only began digging out of last year. Veterans were brought in, prospects traded away, and managers hired and fired all on the premise that the team could rebuild on the fly. It couldn’t, and it was only the fluke circumstance of having an All-Star caliber left side of the infield pop up out of a pretty bad farm system that allowed the team to play .500 ball last year even after it brought in the top free agent pitcher and hitter on the market.

That this was luck doesn’t really mat ter on the one hand, but on the other it does. Because the Mets didn’t spend 2002 through 2004 developing a whole lot of young players the way they might have, they don’t have a large roster core of players of about the same age.

That’s not inherently a problem, but it leads to a disconnect: Just as the Knicks’ players are all either several years away from their primes or several years past it (or guys supposedly in the middle of it who don’t play like it), the Mets have the likes of Carlos Delgado and Jose Reyes on the same team, and it’s going to be difficult to keep everything in gear, both in the long term and possibly in the short term. Not impossible, but difficult. It’s not hard to imagine Tom Glavine, Pedro Martinez, and Delgado all being on the diabled list at the same time while Reyes in benched for thinking you have to work five balls for a walk; that’s not a formula for success.

Similarly, just as the Knicks have stubbornly doubled their mistakes up for years – whether it be committing long-term to two shooting guards or doing so with 19 or however many point guards it is they have – the Mets have been doing the same. The clear weakness of the team as of the end of last season was that there were too many excellent but injury prone veterans (Martinez, Glavine, Cliff Floyd) on whom the Mets were too dependent.

A few strategies, like focusing on young stars getting too expensive for their teams, committing to prospects like Mike Jacobs and Yusmeiro Petit to fill holes, or just trying to improve modestly at several spots rather than massively at one or two, could have improved the team just as much as what Omar Minaya did while lessening risk a bit. I happen to think he made the right call, but bringing on Delgado, Paul LoDuca, and Billy Wagner isn’t exactly the way to hedge against opening yourself up to season-crippling injuries.

It’s no secret why New York teams are particularly prone to making these kinds of mistakes. The brutal pressure from the press – and, a lot more so than the self-obsessed press likes to let on, from the big companies that keep teams flush by buying luxury boxes and season-ticket plans – makes it really hard for executives to do anything but grit up, refuse to admit any mistakes, and insist their teams are always in perpetual contention. In the hands of the right executives, this is how you build a perennial winner. It’s also how you build a disaster when things go wrong.

It wasn’t so long ago that people were wondering how deep the Knicks were going to go in the playoffs. The Mets are going to be my pick, and probably most peoples’, coming out of spring training. That doesn’t mean much.