As the Mets were playing the Chicago Cubs yesterday afternoon, several Flushing partisans sent me e-mails asking, basically, the same question: This is what $135 million buys? One regular correspondent, notable for his generally even keel, simply slugged his subject line “Minaya” and pasted the starting lineup into the body of his e-mail. At times, simple observation counts as an expression of disbelief.

For a second straight day, a classically tense pitcher’s contest turned into a farce in the late innings. Just as in Monday’s game, Cubs shortstop Ronny Cedeno, whose career batting line is .250 AVG/.282 OBA/.351 SLG, delivered with the bases loaded. Also just as in Monday’s game, Mets reliever Jorge Sosa served as the goat; yesterday, he grooved the pitch Cedeno yanked for a grand slam, as the day before he’d surrendered the three-run Felix Pie shot that turned that game into a joke. This game, played twice over as it was, exposed all the Mets’ weaknesses as surely as the thrashings they dealt Washington and Philadelphia last week highlighted their strengths. The Mets may be the best team in the National League, but it’s Chicago that more and more looks the part.

More than anything, this has to do with second-line talent, and this is where yesterday’s senders of aggrieved e-mails were dead on the mark. Last week, during the five-game winning streak in which the Mets looked to have come alive for the first time all year, Jose Reyes, David Wright, and Carlos Beltran reached based 31 times in 69 tries and threw in 13 extra base hits as well. During the two losses to the Cubs, the troika made base six times in 25 tries, without a single extra-base hit. This is why their team scored two runs in the losses, and it’s why the games weren’t competitive.

Reyes, Wright, and Beltran are hardly to blame for two bad games; the point is more that these two gruesome losses have made it clear that Mets have basically nothing right now past their best talent. Yesterday was a day game played after a night game, the famous Wrigley special, and so it makes sense that second-string players were rolled out onto the field. The outrage wasn’t that the lineup was lousy, it was that the lousy lineup exaggerated a tendency.

No one should begrudge Raul Casanova, Damion Easley, Brady Clark, or (especially) Nelson Figueroa their playing time, especially given that they were all playing mainly due to injuries. It’s fair, though, to note that the first three are basically slight caricatures of unimpressive regulars at their positions, and that Figueroa is starting because, contrary to the loudly expressed wishes and desires of every fan and pundit with the least interest in the Mets, the team didn’t sign a cheap, reliable innings sponge such as Livan Hernandez or Kyle Lohse this winter. Thus, when the Mets fall apart because such players can’t pick up the slack when the stars don’t hit, you have people shouting “Minaya!” in the streets like William Shatner intoning the name of the hated villain Khan.

This dynamic was made especially clear against Chicago, for three reasons. First, as noted, Chicago’s lesser lights came through. Suddenly legendary outfielder Kosuke Fukodome — whose suggestive name has inspired bootleggers to mint profits on genuinely obscene shirts, one of which this columnist had to buy and preserve for archival reasons — keyed their rallies, but Cedeno and Pie were the ones who seized the advantage. Second, top Cubs starters Carlos Zambrano and Ted Lilly, in having their way with the heart of the Mets lineup, exposed one of the weaknesses of relying on a few great hitters: If top pitchers can shut them down, they can cripple the whole lineup and leave the team flailing. Finally, the notable contrast between the Cubs’ excellent relief pitching and the Mets’ parade of long-ball-prone bums made visible the difference between a team prepared for October and one praying that Johan Santana, John Maine, and Oliver Perez can pitch nothing but shutouts should the team win the division.

It is always the firm mantra of this column that individual baseball games mean little, that results before the first six weeks worth of returns are in mean even less, and that panic and doomsaying can do little but make one look silly. Aaron Heilman, a notably reliable reliever for years, can be forgiven a bad run here and there, and focusing on the negative can leave one forgetting important things, like how well Angel Pagan and Ryan Church have played in the field and at the plate, or how effective Figueroa and Maine were against an imposing Cubs lineup. Still, this team is not only showing its seams and frayed edges; those seams happen to be the same ones many observers were pointing to as weak points before a game was even played this year. For once, asking incredulously if this is all $135 million buys isn’t at all a silly thing to do.

tmarchman@nysun.com