A skeptic, keeping an eye on early returns, might point out that no matter how impressive they are in theory, this year’s Mets are old, injury-prone, and thin, and that teams fitting this description are rarely impressive in practice. Carlos Delgado’s weekend may as well have been designed to illustrate the point. Saturday, the first baseman left camp for Manhattan to have doctors check into hip pains, which also shelved him down the stretch last year. While Delgado insisted yesterday that all is relatively well, his generalized hip pains rank right there with Orlando Hernandez’s arthritic neck among the more recent and symbolically resonant Mets injuries. The Mets are, of course, quite old. Delgado is 35, Pedro Martinez and Billy Wagner are 36, and El Duque and Moises Alou are, between them, nearly 90 years old. This is countered to some extent by the youth of David Wright, Jose Reyes, John Maine, and Oliver Perez, but it usually isn’t a good thing when a quarter of the team’s lineup, two-fifths of the rotation, and the closer are all aging and demonstrably fragile.

Compounding this is the roster’s lack of depth. When a team is counting on players such as Martinez, Hernandez, and Alou — who are sure bets to miss a fair amount of time, even though superb when healthy — it’s more than usually important to keep quality spares around. The Mets, though, have no solid sixth starter and no fourth outfielder who wouldn’t be a bit stretched by playing full-time. It’s one thing to not have a credible backup for Wright, who, barring freak calamity, is a lock to play 160 games. It’s something else to not have one for Delgado.

All of this being so, the Mets, no matter their frailties, are still an excellent bet to win 95 games and be vastly better than any other team in the league. This isn’t just because of the considerable strengths of their more youthful and vigorous players, such as Johan Santana, or because the older ones tend to be excellent when available. It’s also because the old-timers aren’t nearly as integral to the team’s success as their fame would have it.

Delgado is a perfect example. While the Mets would certainly prefer to see him healthy, the truth is that they don’t need him to do all that much. Baseball Prospectus projects that, following the career path blazed by such similar lead-footed sluggers as Boog Powell and Tino Martinez, Delgado will recapture nothing of his earlier form this year, hitting .265 AVG/.343 OBA/.471 SLG. Important to note here is that this line, which isn’t even average for a first baseman — especially one who can’t run or field — would actually represent improvement over last year’s .258/.333/.448.

Last year, the Mets scored 804 runs; that was more than enough to win the division, had a few balls bounced differently. Delgado doesn’t have to do anything at all impressive for them to do as much this year. He just isn’t an important part of the offense anymore. Marlon Anderson, a former second baseman and current pinchhitter, projects to hit .264/.345/.429 — not meaningfully worse than Delgado, and not much to cost the Mets much more than a win or so if he were to play in Delgado’s place all year. The problem, so far as there is one, is that Delgado isn’t very good at this point in his career, not that he isn’t healthy.

From a different angle, much the same is true of Martinez and Hernandez. There’s no chance whatsoever that these two will combine for anything near 400 innings, and I’d be surprised if they combined for 45 starts. This is already priced into an expectation of 95 wins, though. That number assumes that Santana will dominate, as he usually does; that Maine and Perez will pitch about as well and about as much as they did last year, and that Martinez and Hernandez will between them pitch about as much as Santana. Together with a reasonable bullpen, some minimal contribution from such fill-in starters as Mike Pelfrey, and a strong defense, that’s more than enough to win a weak division. Martinez being healthy enough to make 30 starts would be a pleasant surprise; as last year showed, it isn’t necessary for the Mets to be in the race down to the last day.

In all, while it would be better if the Mets were younger and healthier and deeper, these problems are highly unlikely to sink their season. The reason they’re expected to dominate is basically that there are no questions about their best players. Santana, Wright, Reyes, and Beltran are each arguably or clearly the best in the league at their positions, and the only one likely to miss any time at all is Beltran, who annually needs a couple of weeks off. With even a mediocre lot around them, those four would be enough to make the Mets strong contenders; what they have around them is better than that. It’s only when one of them is hurt that the skeptics’ song of impending doom will be really worth listening to.

tmarchman@nysun.com