There are as many Omar Minayas as there are people with opinions on the Mets’ general manager: The man who, against brutal odds, became the most powerful Hispanic executive in major league history is also the blunderer who inexplicably failed to place Ryan Church on the disabled list for three full weeks after the outfielder suffered his second serious brain injury of the year. The savvy evaluator who snagged players such as Oliver Perez and John Maine for little or nothing is the same naif who traded away a full bullpen for no return. The apostle of athleticism is the man responsible for signing the legless wonders who have done so much to ruin the team’s chances this year.

With manager Willie Randolph now more dead parrot than lame duck — “His metabolic processes are now history, he’s off the twig,” as John Cleese famously stated — Minaya is finally coming in for his share of abuse. The thumbnail sketch of the case against him is that he had nearly nothing to do with most of what’s right about his team. He didn’t draft Jose Reyes or David Wright; he was able to trade for Johan Santana only because Boston and the Yankees passed on him, and in signing expensive free agents such as Carlos Beltran and Billy Wagner, all he was doing was spending other people’s money. Conversely, the team’s general decrepitude, and the lousy reserve corps that’s exacerbated the problem, are more his fault than anyone else’s.

A lot is wrong with this theory, just as a lot is right. Signing a pricey veteran is never a sign of genius — but spending $120 million on Beltran is not the same thing as spending it on Barry Zito. Everyone knew that the Mets were taking on risk when they acquired Pedro Martinez and Carlos Delgado. There’s a difference between signing an old-timer for the sake of doing so, and signing a player for four years even though you know he’s only likely to help you for two. Minaya’s critics should acknowledge this.

If Minaya’s critics aren’t wholly fair, that’s mostly because there’s no fair way to evaluate general managers. (This is also true of managers and their critics.) Because of this, their reputations rise and fall in precise proportion to their team’s current winning percentage.

During Minaya’s tenure, the Mets have traded 35 players and one player yet to be named, ranging from Lastings Milledge to Dante Brinkley, in exchange for another 30, ranging from Johan Santana to Jorge Julio. Excepting reliever Heath Bell, no one the team has traded has done especially well at a position where the Mets had a need, while plenty of players Minaya has brought on, from Perez and Maine to Paul Lo Duca and Orlando Hernandez, have at worst filled gaping holes on the roster, and at best excelled. Despite this, there’s a pretty good case to be made that Minaya’s trades are one of the worst parts of his record in Queens.

One way to judge this is to total up the contributions made by all the players involved in these trades. Going by win shares above baseline (WSAB, a modified version of a Bill James statistic available at the Hardball Times Web site that compares a players’ total value to a freely available reserve), Minaya has traded off players worth about 21 wins, while adding about 14 wins worth of value. Lots of the players he’s traded off have been very good — Bell, Brian Bannister, and Xavier Nady have all had strong runs, and Mike Cameron had a spectacular year in 2006 — while only Delgado in 2006 and Maine and Perez last year have had really good seasons.

This doesn’t mean that Minaya has been bad at making trades; it ignores context in too many ways to count, and WSAB, like all similar metrics, is grievously flawed. But it’s fair to say he’s traded off more performance than he’s brought on board, at least so far. (If Santana wins a couple of Cy Young awards and Church recovers from his injuries, that might well change.) He’s also done so at cost.

Prorating this year’s salaries, the Mets have paid around $60 million to players he traded for on long-term contracts, depending on how you do the accounting, while shipping out about $25 million worth. (Anti-Minayaists shouldalwaysrememberthename of Kris Benson.) He’s brought on several young players under cost control, most notably Maine, Perez, and Church, but lost several others, perhaps most notably Bell, Milledge, Nady, and Carlos Gomez. This amounts to spending tens of millions of dollars to bring on a bit less talent than he sent out, granting that the players he’s brought on fit the team better than those he swapped for them.

How does this record add up? Any way you’d like — which is just the problem. If you’re well disposed to Minaya, you could certainly argue that on the whole bringing on core players such as Maine and Church, and solid if not glamorous hole-fillers such as Luis Castillo and Shawn Green, more than outweighs the loss of the odd freak season from someone such as Bell or Cameron. If you’re not well disposed to him, it’s easy to argue that he’s at best inefficient and at worst clueless when it comes to minor trades involving minor talent, and that this is basically why the team is frequently using third-string catchers as pinch hitters.

If, though, you’re somewhere in the middle, as most people are, it’s easiest, and probably fairest, not to just judge him by the team’s record. Do that, and however many Minayas there are, they start to look eerily similar, like someone ready to surrender to the same malaise that’s all but formally claimed his manager.

tmarchman@nysun.com