When Steve Trachsel went down with a back injury last week, Mets General Manager Omar Minaya went into action. Despite the griping of some Mets fans, his swap of reserve catcher Jason Phillips for Dodgers starter Kazuhisa Ishii – with Los Angeles paying the difference in the two players’ salaries – was a heist. Phillips is a generic backup catcher; Ishii is a good no. 5 starter who can be relied upon to be somewhere between league-average and 10% below league-average. Generic backup catchers can be found in Triple-A or on the waiver wire; reliably semi-competent starting pitchers cannot.

While Minaya has, at least in theory, done a good job filling a hole in the back of the rotation, though, he has also given the Mets a pretty good shot at setting an entirely unofficial record this year – one they definitely don’t want, and one that will magnify the flaws of the team he’s built. The pairing of Ishii, who walked 98 men in 172 innings last year, with the phenomenal Victor Zambrano, who somehow led the American League in walks despite being traded out of the league on July 30, could well lead to the establishment in Flushing of the least awesome pair of control pitchers in baseball history.

I spent some time this week checking through the record books in search of pairs of teammates who couldn’t find the strike zone with a GPS system. The search was limited to the post-integration era, and is not exhaustive – I was looking for teams that had two pitchers with no control, not one giving up walks at historic levels and another with below-average but unremarkably bad command.

Since walk rates have fluctuated fairly widely over time, I adjusted for context, indexing the pitchers’ ratios of walks per nine innings by dividing them into the league average so that a player with a BB/9 ratio of one and a half times league average would score 150 and one with a ratio twice the average would score 200. I then added the scores of the teammates together and arrived at this list of the duos since 1947 who sported the worst control.

A few things are obvious from looking at this list. Firstly, the Yankees and Senators must have played some mind-numbingly dull ballgames in 1955. Secondly, Bobby Witt never did learn how to throw a strike. Thirdly – and most relevant to the Mets’ situation – is that it probably isn’t a good idea for a contending team to trot out two starters who have no idea where the ball is going once it leaves their hand.

Two of these nine teams lost 100 games, another two lost 90, and most of the rest were mediocre. The exceptions were fairly anomalous clubs. The 1955 Yankees were in the middle of one of the game’s great dynastic runs. The 2000 Giants’ record had much more to do with the play of Jeff Kent and Barry Bonds than with what might be charitably be called mediocre pitching from Russ Ortiz and Shawn Estes, who sported a combined 4.52 ERA in the league’s most pitcher-friendly park.

There is a question of cause and effect here: Are Wildman combinations to be found on bad teams because bad teams sign them, or do they by themselves make teams bad? Whichever it is, neither reflects too well on the Mets, who unlike those Yankees and Giants teams don’t have multiple MVP candidates to compensate for a flawed supporting cast.

Had Zambrano and Ishii been teammates in 2004, their combined control index would have ranked second on the above chart. Zambrano walked 6.46 per nine last year, the seventh-worst figure since 1947, which scored a 196 on the league-adjusted index; Ishii walked 5.13, which scored 151. Their combined total of 347 is just a hair worse than what “Sudden” Sam McDowell and Steve Dunning did for the 1971 Indians.

That’s a problem in its own right. But this Mets team is uniquely ill-equipped to handle two pitchers who issue so many free passes.

Two of the Mets’ major question marks going into this season are relief pitching and middle-infield defense. No one seems to be exactly sure who will be coming out of the bullpen, but it will almost certainly be some combination of washed-up veterans and unproven kids who will have heavy demands placed upon them due to the presence of starters Pedro Martinez and Tom Glavine. The addition of Ishii, who like Zambrano will be running up huge pitch counts and leaving plenty of games in the fifth inning due to his propensity for the 3-2 count, will only add to that pressure.

Much the same goes for the infield defense. With Kaz Matsui playing second base for the first time in his career alongside Jose Reyes, who has far more talent than experience, you’d ideally like to see the Mets front office devise ways to minimize what could be a weakness. Instead, they’ve come up with a way to ensure there will be a tremendous amount of runners on first base, which will just put more pressure on a double-play combination that already has more than enough.

This spring has seen no signs that Zambrano and Ishii are going to turn things around anytime soon; the two have combined for 13 walks in 16 innings. Whether or not their addiction to the walk turns out to be of historic proportions, they’re almost certain to put Mets fans to sleep, burn holes in the lining of Willie Randolph’s stomach, and cost the team more than their ERAs would lead you to think.