“This ain’t about love,” Mets general manager Omar Minaya wants you to know. “We’re trying to win a championship.”

At a press conference in Anaheim yesterday, much of which he spent unconvincingly claiming that Mets ownership had nothing to do with the Monday night massacre that claimed the jobs of manager Willie Randolph, pitching coach Rick Peterson, and first base coach Tom Nieto, Minaya went all-in. Having to defend the indefensible — coming just past midnight Pacific time after a win on the first game of a road trip, the firings seemed timed to keep the news off the back pages of the tabloids for a day and made an instant martyr of the inept Randolph — Minaya was not content merely to say that he had assembled a team that should have won this year, but said outright that he thinks his team still can win.

“I feel that we have a championship team,” he said. “We have talent to do that.”

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In the sense that any major league team has the talent to win a championship, this is true. As Minaya spoke, his team was 61/2 games behind Philadelphia for the division lead and seven behind St. Louis for the wild-card lead. At the same time a year ago, the Yankees were 81/2 games out of first place, the Chicago Cubs were 61/2 games out, and Colorado was 51/2 games behind. Those three teams all ended up playing in October; and given the circumstances, there’s no need to dwell on where Philadelphia placed in the standings as of last September 12. The Mets are, in theory, far from done.

To believe that the Mets have a serious chance at winning is, though, to venture far from the fields of probability and into the fields of faith — always a bad bet, given that, as the great band the Minutemen reminded us, even God bows to math. Going into last night’s games, Philadelphia was 42-30, and the Mets were 34-35. Were the Phillies to play .500 ball the rest of the year, the Mets would need to go 54-39 the rest of the way to surpass them. That works out to a winning percentage of .581, a 94-win pace over the course of a full season.

Certainly the Mets could play that well, just as I could be the beneficiary of a giant bag of $100 bills falling out of the sky, but over the last calendar year, the team is 85-81, and since the beginning of 2007, they’re 107-100. The evidence suggests that they’re slightly better than a .500 team — capable of going on a league-shredding tear, but unlikely to do so. It should be noted as well that even if they do win 58% of their games for the rest of the year, which would leave them with 88 wins, it will hardly guarantee them a playoff berth. Philadelphia is well capable of winning more than half their games over the rest of the year, and only twice has a team won the wild card with fewer than 90 wins.

Any kind of independent analysis foretells a grim fate for the Mets. Baseball Prospectus calculates that the Mets have a 9% chance of winning the division; going by oddschecker.com, offshore bookmakers give them 9-2 odds. Even figuring in the wild card, the Mets have, to be generous, a one-in-five chance of making the playoffs.

The problem for Mets fans is that while Minaya may be drawing to an inside straight, and facing long odds in doing so, he’s pot committed: Whatever the odds of the team playing in October are, they’re higher than the odds of the GM keeping his job if the team finishes out of the money. He thus has every incentive to forge bravely onward, chasing his vanishing chance of success. The Wilpon family, which owns the Mets, also has every reason to run after any fleeting shot at victory. If the team makes a miraculous comeback, it will guarantee the team millions, and perhaps tens of millions, in playoff revenue, while assuring them of still more cash in years to come as the turnstiles turn and the people tune in to Mets games on SNY. Thus, even if in some abstract sense the best thing for the team would be to shop Oliver Perez, Billy Wagner, and perhaps even Carlos Beltran for young talent, doing so would benefit no one with any stake in the game.

This being the dynamic, the question is basically whether new manager Jerry Manuel might actually pull off the improbable and engineer a raging run at first. It may be a long shot, but longer shots have landed.

What the Mets do have going for them is that a lot of their best players have more in them than they’ve given. Perez has been execrable, while John Maine has been average. Beltran and David Wright can hit better than they have to date; Pedro Martinez is healthy-ish. If all these core players just revert to their usual selves, the Mets will improve. Even Johan Santana, who’s been Cy Young-worthy so far, has more in him than Mets fans have seen; the traditionally slow starter has been on fire over his last three games, and may well be on course for some preposterous stretch of a dozen straight games in which he gives up two or fewer runs. He’s done it before.

Conversely, there are few players who can be expected to be much worse than they’ve been. Jose Reyes is hitting near the top of his range, but not over his head; he can be counted on. Meanwhile, the team has treaded water with Moises Alou and Ryan Church hurt, Carlos Delgado hitting as well as Luis Castillo, a bench populated by decrepit second basemen and third-string catchers scraping unfathomed depths, and Aaron Heilman invoking fond hopes for the return of Guillermo Mota. Anything approaching health or improvement from this part of the roster will give the team a real boost.

If all of this amounts to saying that the Mets will be good if lots of players who have played well play better while others who haven’t played well play less badly, that’s because that’s what it would take for the Mets to be any good. There are short odds of any of this happening, let alone all of it, which is why the team rates as a cosmic joke, an epic botch to rate with anything we’ve seen out of Madison Square Garden the last several years, and why in a sensible world the whole thing would be blown up with high explosives.

No secret midnight firing, no epically lame press conference, and no shameful, cowardly, Dolanish conduct on behalf of ownership can change what this team is. Their only hope is the rawest of raw luck, and not only isn’t it coming, they don’t deserve it.

tmarchman@nysun.com