As I’ve often written in this space, the most important thing for the general manager of a baseball team as rich as the Mets to do is to get the big calls right. In baseball, as in life, the most important benefit of money is that it allows a margin of error. A plutocrat who loses $1,000 playing the horses quickly withdraws another $1,000 from the bank and gambles again; an everyman who does the same might not eat for a while. Much the same is true of rich and poor baseball teams. Carlos Delgado is a great player, but the Mets can afford to bet that he’s not about to do a Mo Vaughn impression in a way the Cleveland Indians can’t.

This being so, our plutocrat cannot afford to make a habit of wadding up cash and throwing it in the gutter for laughs. Soon enough, he’ll regret the lack of cash, even if it only means that he can only afford gold hubcaps instead of platinum ones. And baseball teams cannot give away good players for no reason; they’ll come to regret it.

Over the last two winters, Omar Minaya has become the idol of Mets fans because he has grasped the first principle here. But he has yet to demonstrate that he has grasped the second. He, and Mets fans, may come to regret it.

This week’s trade of starter Jae Seo and a D-grade prospect for Dodgers reliever Duaner Sanchez and another D-grade prospect is just another in what is now a fairly lengthy list of minor stupid moves, none of which are enough in by themselves to get agitated about, but which are in their totality troubling.

Among these are last year’s trade of useful backup catcher Jason Phillips for useless starter Kaz Ishii, as well as several deals Minaya has made this winter. Minaya sent the underrated Mike Cameron to San Diego for the redundant Xavier Nady, valuable pitching prospects to Florida (which was in the middle of a fire sale) for merely decent catcher Paul LoDuca, and probably paid too much for Delgado, who wasn’t in extremely high demand. Again, each move was defensible. But Minaya has sacrificed a starting center fielder, a no. 3 starter, a top-10 pitching prospect, and several useful reserves like Phillips and Mike Jacobs, all needlessly.

What’s most galling is that he’s done so not out of necessity, but impatience. This winter, the most valuable properties on the market are outfielders and, especially, starting pitchers. Such mediocrities as Jacques Jones and Esteban Loaiza are pulling down big-money deals, while teams like the Red Sox and Yankees have been rabidly scrambling to fill yawning voids in center field. The likes of Jeremy Reed, Corey Patterson, and Joey Gathright are being bid on like oil futures; above-average starter Jarrod Washburn fetched a 4-year, $37.5 million deal.

So, you would think that a GM with a Gold Glove center fielder with 30-home run power and a cheap young starter coming off a season in which he rang up a 2.59 ERA would sit back, let the market come to him and fill some holes. That’s not Minaya. It’s clear that once he gets an idea in his head, whether it be, “I must trade Mike Cameron,” or, “I must trade Jae Seo to improve the bullpen,” he reaches a point at which he just wants to move on to the next order of business rather than wait until some minimal standard of acceptability is met.

This is the downside to the decisiveness everyone finds so appealing when it nets a player like Pedro Martinez, and it leads to thoughts like, “I must have Carlos Delgado, and I’m not waiting out the Marlins over some Triple-A pitcher, because another team might swoop in and grab him.” Which is fine in the isolated instance – but when it leads to the team losing significant talent in every trade it makes, it becomes a problem.

Jae Seo isn’t a great pitcher – the most likely outcome for this season is that he’s going to pitch about as well as Steve Trachsel, throwing 180 innings with a 4.20 ERA or something similar. He might be better than that, though, and he’s a far sight better than Duaner Sanchez, who isn’t even good. (Over the last three years, he’s allowed lefties a .302 batting average – he’s essentially a crummier version of Braden Looper.)

You can say much the same of the other Minaya’s given up, and when you can’t, you can at least say that they didn’t have to be given up. With the Marlins desperate to move salaries and the Mets offering to pay all of Delgado’s huge contract, would they really have not made the deal had Minaya not budged on prospect Yusmeiro Petit? If the Mets really needed an older, worse version of Victor Diaz, did they really need to give up Mike Cameron? This kind of thing comes around to haunt even the richest teams eventually when it goes on regularly enough – just ask the Yankees.

tmarchman@nysun.com