No one knows when Pedro Martinez will be ready to return to the major leagues, or just how effective he will be when he does return. I don’t know, you don’t know, Omar Minaya doesn’t know, and Martinez doesn’t know.

Despite this, nearly everyone believes that Martinez will, once he joins the Mets’ major league roster, be at least effective and perhaps magnificent. I certainly believe this, you probably do, and while one can never know what another man truly believes, I’m quite sure that if you hypnotized Minaya and Martinez and committed them to telling the truth, they’d admit they believe it as well.

Why this is so isn’t immediately obvious. Martinez is 35 years old and recovering from a torn rotator cuff, the most serious injury a pitcher can endure. He last pitched a good ballgame more than a year ago. In his two rehabilitation starts, he’s allowed seven runs in eight innings against rookie league players, which is something like having allowed seven runs in eight innings against a very good high school team. He doesn’t seem to have the endurance to throw more than 80 pitches right now, and his fastball isn’t reaching 90 mph. Martinez may be a legend, but then so is Tom Seaver, and no one expects him to help the Mets down the stretch.

It isn’t, though, the persistent legend of Martinez that has everyone cautiously optimistic, but rather the details of that legend — just as it isn’t the details of his recovery that matter, but the fact that he’s recovered at all. All the facts above may be true, but they just don’t matter all that much. If Martinez can take a mound, he is going to pitch well.

The most important and fundamental fact is that the man is pitching at all. Rotator cuff injuries can be horrible things that cause a pitcher to drop out of baseball because he can no longer physically deliver a pitch. The worst fear about Martinez’s injury was that he would be suffer the fate of Justin Thompson, who tore up his shoulder in 1999, endured operations, rehabilitated diligently, and pitched two more games in the major leagues — in 2005. That isn’t the case. Martinez may only be throwing 88 mph, but that’s a lot harder than he was throwing at various points of the 2005 and 2006 seasons; there’s simply no reason right now to believe that he left anything on the surgeon’s table. He may be a pitch away from the end of his career from now until he retires, but that’s true of nearly every pitcher who still has a major league job at Martinez’s age.

For this reason, his performance in his rehabilitation starts has been, andwillbe, irrelevant. Pitching is difficult and unnatural, and Martinez is doing it with a surgically repaired shoulder. He can’t and won’t know the limits of his endurance, how consistent his velocity and command will be, the difference between normal and abnormal pain, and so on, until he’s had a good deal more experience with recuperating over days from throwing a lot of pitches and throwing off a mound. Gaining comfort with his own body and learning what works and what doesn’t is what matters now. Even if he got out every hitter he faced between now and the time he takes the Shea mound for the first time, it wouldn’t tell him or the world anything. As he rightly said yesterday, “My pitches are not for here. They are for the big leagues.”

Since the injury in itself isn’t necessarily cause for concern, and since we won’t be able to tell much from what he does in the minors, that leaves us with what we know about Pedro Martinez, which is a lot. We know that from the beginning of 2004 through the first half of last year he was one of the very best pitchers in baseball while in great pain and working with a fastball that on some days could reach the mid-90s and on some days didn’t get much above 80 mph. We know that in the decisive game of the first round of the 1999 playoffs, with a badly damaged shoulder blade, when he had no business at all on the mound, he saved the Red Sox’s season by pitching six innings of hitless relief against an Indians lineup that ranked among the most dominant in history. We know how prideful he is, and that like all the greatest players, he wants not just to win, but to comprehensively destroy the opposition.

Concretely, the man has as much experience as anyone can with working around inconsistent pitches while in pain. He knows what it’s like to have no idea how hard you can throw a pitch, and what it’s like to compete while aware that throwing too hard could rip your shoulder apart right there on the mound. He knows how to improvise, how to set up batters, how to make them fear him, and how to use his aura against them. And these aren’t hoary tales — we’ve seen it, again and again. Down the stretch in 2005, pitching to keep the Mets’ fading hopes alive, he threw a complete game one-hitter against Atlanta, striking out 10 with a fastball that barely cracked 80 mph at times. The man is a genius.

Does any of this guarantee success? Of course not. Genius or not, baseball is a sport, not an intellectual exercise; if Martinez can’t last through a start or make any of his pitches do anything at all, he won’t do the Mets much good. But we can be sure that as long as he has, even by the slimmest margin, the stamina and strength required to pitch in the majors, he’ll be able to get hitters out. And the very fact that he’s taken a mound twice now, and is preparing to do so a third time this weekend, makes me confident that he will prove to have that stamina and strength. Will that be enough? I think so. Pedro Martinez is no ordinary man, and every time he’s ever been doubted he’s shoved it right in everyone’s face. It won’t be long before he does it again.

tmarchman@nysun.com