Baseball isn’t a very complicated game. The pitcher throws the ball, the batter tries to hit it, and if he succeeds, the fielders try to catch it. You don’t expect a backup shortstop to hit home runs in the clutch, and you don’t expect a burly designated hitter to serve as an emergency catcher.

For a variety of reasons, people like to make the game out to be more complex than it is and detail complicated reasons for why certain strategies ought to be employed, or why certain players ought to be used in certain ways, or why players succeed and fail. You saw all of that last season with Carlos Beltran, the $119 million center fielder who hit .266 with 16 home runs and was roundly labeled a failure.

There were no mysteries behind last year’s performance. Beltran entered the season a career .284 hitter who’d hit .267 the year before; .266 was a bit low, but in line with reasonable expectations. He’d averaged 24 home runs per year in his career, playing mostly in an extremely hitter-friendly park in Kansas City in the American League, where there’s more offense; 16 home runs was a low total, but not unfathomably so.

Considering that in the early part of the year he played with a badly strained thigh muscle and in the latter part of the year he played with broken bones in his face, there wasn’t all that much reason to be surprised by his performance.

None of this, of course, stopped people from psychologizing during the winter about how the pressure of New York and of his giant contract had gotten to Beltran, and speculating about whether the addition of the powerful Carlos Delgado would ease that pressure and allow him to reach his potential. The more speculative and far-flung the answer to a question, the more likely people are to buy into it; it makes them feel like they know what they’re talking about.

All this being so, Mets fans were ready to boo Beltran on Opening Day, and when he grounded out and flied out weakly with runners on in a tight game, they got their excuse. You’d have thought he’d beaten Mr. Met with his bat right at home plate, the way the fans were reacting. He didn’t look a whit more confident than he did last year, but instead looked like the second coming of Roberto Alomar – an impression reinforced by his insistence this spring that he would lay down bunts as he saw fit, something not entirely fitting with his role as a no. 3 hitter and a $119 million man.

The booing is just silly, and reinforces the idea that Chicago, not New York, is the real baseball capital of the country. Chicagoans are every bit as savvy as New Yorkers and don’t boo much of anything other than outright lack of hustle or egregious, repeated failure that’s the result of stupidity or stubbornness. When the fans boo Beltran, they put themselves above the game by preening and drawing attention to themselves, the same way Philadelphia fans do. Buying a ticket may give you the right to jeer; it doesn’t mean you have to exercise that right.

Unless Beltran starts hitting, and soon, this is going to be a major story this season, just the sort that takes on its own momentum and, inanely, becomes a crisis. Beltran will be unable to avoid questions about the boos; the fans, frustrated because a player who was sold to them as the second coming of Willie Mays isn’t that, will just boo more and more loudly, and it will all serve as a vicious and mutually reinforcing cycle that will benefit no one save the leather-lunged types who tend not to pay much attention to what’s actually going on in the game.

Happily, a rather easy solution presents itself. There’s an odd quirk in Beltran’s numbers during the last three years. As a no. 3 hitter, he’s hit .261 BA/.335 OBA/.445 SLG in 1,003 at-bats; those are essentially dead-average numbers. As a no. 2 hitter, however, he’s turned into, well, Willie Mays, hitting .290/.391/.575 in 497 at-bats. This is a large enough sample size, and the difference is big enough that you have to come back to first principles and conclude that, for whatever reason, Beltran should be hitting second in the lineup.

Baseball’s not complicated, and whatever works, works. This is a game in which people will go without washing or changing their underwear for weeks at a time so as not to interfere with a hot streak, and in which a player as defensively brutal as Jason Giambi will be kept on the field because of the huge difference between his numbers as a designated hitter and a first baseman. Expecting Willie Randolph to take notice of this odd split and act on it isn’t expecting too much.

Why are Beltran’s numbers so much better as a no. 2 hitter? It’s easy enough to guess: His offensive game is built around taking pitches, hitting line drives, and speed, which are prototypal attributes of the second-place hitter. Anyone who’s seen him in an RBI situation waiting on the perfect pitch and then overswinging at it when he gets it knows that, whether he’s aware of it or not, he’s pressing in the 3-hole.

Put him where he gets results, leave him alone, and all the talk of pressure imposed by his contract and city will, I suspect, evaporate as he becomes the player everyone was expecting to see. Does it make any sense? Not really, but that doesn’t matter so much. What matters is not overthinking things, ensuring that you don’t ask a player to do something he can’t do, and that you put him in a position to succeed. Beltran is certainly as important as any of the Met’ pieces. It’s up to Randolph to make him fit.

tmarchman@nysun.com