Fans and columnists often enjoy pretending they could be competent general managers, offering neat solutions to turn dreadful teams into champions.This temptation should generally be resisted. The professionals who run major league baseball teams have jobs far more difficult than is generally realized, and their responsibilities entail a reasonable specialization in many disciplines from which the fan and columnist would recoil in horror.

I have no competence to talk on the telephone with someone from Tidewater, Va., about a batting coach’s tendency to make his charges raise their hands in their batting stance, and whether this is leaving them unable to hit the curveball. I would not be able to listen to a preening agent suggest that his star client the centerfielder will be going to the team that signs his scrub client the drunken utility infielder. I could not stand listening to a skinflint owner explain why a bad year in peanut concessions means I should lower my sights from the star centerfielder to the 37-year-old who hits .240 and happens to be the golfing buddy of my team’s ace pitcher. Nor could I stand to read unqualified people writing about how bad I am at my job.

For all these reasons and many others, I would make an awful general manager. Unless the thought of all this fills you with joyful longing, you probably would too.

Still, I am confident that if placed in sole charge of the Mets tomorrow, I would do a better job than the current regime. The same is probably true of you.

This is meant as no slight to Jim Duquette – some day he will do well as a general manager for ownership with enough sense to leave him alone. But it is a simple truth that a job as complex as running a baseball team can be done better by one incompetent person such as myself than by a committee such as that running the Mets, which brings together the highly competent, the self-interested, the incompetent, and the apparently insane.

If I were put in charge, my first move in the off-season would be to pay whatever I had to of their salaries to send Mike Piazza and Cliff Floyd out of town. The Mets have two assets right now: money, and a great deal of average- to above average talent, players like Floyd, Mike Cameron, Richard Hidalgo, and Kaz Matsui. Their massive liabilities are the absence of superstar talent, and a lack of healthy players.

The Mets could have one of the best offenses in the National League if they acquired a superstar talent at first base or left field, a competent hitter for the other position, and a half decent catcher. Just having a regular with a defined role at each position would be an enormous improvement. Piazza and Floyd are by no means done, but they’re a bad fit for this team. They’re injured too frequently to drive this offense, and their presence blocks the acquisition of the kind of talent the Mets need. They have to go.

Next, I’d re-sign Richard Hidalgo and pay whatever it takes to get Carlos Beltran. An outfield of Mike Cameron, Hidalgo, and Beltran would turn any average starter with a fly ball tendency into a star.

As for the catcher and the first baseman, what the Mets need is someone who can field at the former position, and someone who can hit at the latter. Finding players to fill those requirements at those positions isn’t that difficult. If they come cheaply enough, players like Carlos Delgado and Troy Glaus might fit in well at first; otherwise, a stopgap solution like the Royals’ Calvin Pickering, who slugged .712 in Triple-A this year, might be worth a flier. The catching market this winter will include adequate solutions such as Jason Kendall and Damian Miller.

As for the rotation, the Mets are more or less fine. I would let Al Leiter go and get someone like Matt Clement or Matt Morris, but it doesn’t really matter much either way. Because of their park and (theoretically) their defense, the team can get along with a lot of no. 3 starter types and a good bullpen. Tom Glavine, Steve Trachsel, a presumably healthy Victor Zambrano, and either Kris Benson or an easily acquired facsimile form a perfectly respectable, if unexciting, front four.

In addition to all of this, I’d make sure to acquire a few bench players who perform well at one specific aspect of the game. Maybe the most infuriating aspect of watching the Mets this year has been the tremendous number of at-bats squandered on the likes of Joe McEwing and Todd Zeile, who may be good teammates but aren’t even adequate at any phase of the game. Whether replacing them means stocking the bench with Triple-A hitters, or imitating the Cubs and Yankees and paying good players like Todd Walker and Kenny Lofton full-time money for part-time work, an investment in quality reserves might be the easiest and most effective move the Mets can make.

Certainly none of what I propose here is particularly exciting or controversial. It hardly takes an expert to suggest trading veterans, signing Carlos Beltran and a starting pitcher, and assembling a decent bench. But such moves could allow the Mets to win 80-90 games and be well positioned for a year or two.

Such simple steps won’t be taken, though, because of the complex and competing interests of those running the Mets. Put simply, it’s unclear whether anyone in control has winning as his sole priority.

Equally ridiculous, it’s unclear whether anyone in Flushing is even aware of the sort of team they’ve built. The acquisitions of Hidalgo, Benson, and Zambrano would make sense in retrospect if they were meant to solidify the team’s base and plug glaring holes, helping to make the Mets average while soon-tobe acquired superstars helped make it a contender. But as the embarrassing Vladimir Guerrero and Alex Rodriguez debacles showed, this is an organization that doesn’t, of all things, appreciate the value of a perennial MVP candidate.

If you think signing a player the caliber of Guerrero, Rodriguez, or Beltran is a good idea for a team characterized mostly by its abundance of average talent, you’d be a improvement over the shamsters in Flushing.