Today the Mets come home to play the first games of Shea Stadium’s next to last season, and everything goes swimmingly. Flushing’s finest may have lost the swing match of the weekend’s threegame set with Atlanta, but a week ago any Mets rooter would not only have taken a 4–2 open to the season but would have done so gladly. Balls will be dropped, relievers will surrender runs in close games, and series will be lost, but right now the Mets look every bit the best team in the National League.

There have been happy developments from all directions. So far as one can judge from six ballgames, Jose Reyes has at the least maintained, and more likely, refined the disciplined approach he adopted at the plate last year. Thus he has a good chance of establishing himself as the best shortstop in baseball this year. More generally, the Mets offense has been as potent as any in the league without a home run from Carlos Delgado, David Wright, or Jose Valentin; as others cool off, these three will heat up, and so the lineup should maintain its strength. And in the bullpen, young relievers Joe Smith and Ambiorix Burgos have given some observers cause for optimism. In particular, Smith looks like a credible replacement for departed righty specialist Chad Bradford.

Most of all, though, the starting pitching is what has been impressive. In six games, Mets starters have thrown 37 1/3 innings, in which they’ve allowed 23 hits, struck out 24, walked 10, and given up four home runs. The sum result has been a 1.45 ERA. Save Tom Glavine’s more than serviceable Saturday start, the Mets haven’t yet had a game in which the starter failed to go six innings or gave up more than one run.

Coming out of spring training, the rotation was more than an unanswered question — it loomed as a potential disaster. Their complete dominance of two contending ballclubs should at least quiet the panicked few who saw little difference between the Mets’ rotation and that of the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. For everyone else, though, a week of baseball is just a week of baseball. What can it tell us?

For Glavine, who’s had essentially the same season every year for 20 years, the answer is, “Nothing.” His arm is still attached to his body and he hasn’t suffered a sudden attack of aphasia; he can thus be expected to pitch 200 innings with an ERA between 3.50 and 4.00. Two good starts do not provide new information, and in this case that’s a good thing.

For the Mets’ other three starters, we actually have learned something. In Orlando Hernandez’s case, it’s that he’s fairly healthy and capable of holding up under game conditions in cold weather. For someone old enough to have been diagnosed with an arthritic neck in February, that’s no small thing, but it’s only marginally more informative than Glavine’s performances. El Duque’s ability to pitch at the top of his range in the season’s first week is a good sign, but the team will have to live with the knowledge that Hernandez could pull up lame at any time. In John Maine’s case, it’s that he’s retained the willingness to challenge hitters that was the key to last season’s success. It sounds like the usual lame coachspeak, but Maine will succeed or fail based largely on whether or not he’s willing to put the ball in the strike zone and let the outfield do some work, something that’s easier said than done because if he doesn’t do it well he’s going to get bombed. Throwing 65 of 97 pitches for strikes and keeping the ball up in the zone, where he risks the longball, Maine demonstrated that he understands why and how he did well last year, and that he can do so again.

Most important for the Mets, though, was the start they got from Oliver Perez, who, frustratingly, is both potentially the best starter on the team and by far the most likely to pitch his way into the bullpen. Whereas El Duque is old, and Maine faces some skepticism because his merely decent stuff requires him to risk failure every time he throws a letter-high fastball, Perez needs to show that he can consistently do very basic things: Maintain his focus on the mound, repeat his delivery, and put the ball over the plate. If he can do those things, he’ll become very rich. If getting him to do those things were as easy as it seems from the stands, though, he’d still be a Pirate. Having seen him execute the moves in his very first start, everyone can be assured that he has, in fact, showed up this season with all his capacity intact. The trick for the Mets’ coaching staff will now be to get him to show the ability to maintain focus from game to game, rather than pitch to pitch. It’s progress.

Whereas there’s a bit less reason to be worried about this pitcher’s arm or that pitcher’s approach right now than there was a week ago, though, there’s a bit more reason to be worried about something just as important: The outfield defense. Shawn Green and Moises Alou are outright bad glovemen, and thus far in the season manager Willie Randolph has not shown himself inclined to be quite as aggressive about dealing with that as he might be. When Aaron Heilman gave up his three doubles in the eighth yesterday to turn a 2–1 lead into a 3–2 deficit, for instance, it was hard not to note that neither Endy Chavez nor Lastings Milledge was on the field. The Mets’ starters have been very good so far, but they’re all fly ball pitchers who have been tossing in the kind of cold weather that turns everything hit in the air into a can of corn. When things heat up, are we going to see the starters allowing six hits per nine with Green and Alou chasing balls down in the gaps? I doubt it, and I think that, not the capability of the rotation, is the thing to worry about right now.

tmarchman@nysun.com