In previewing the first round of the Subway Series last week, I wrote that the most important aspect of it for the Mets wouldn’t be so much how well the team as a whole did as how well manager Willie Randolph and the young core of the team – Carlos Beltran, David Wright, and Jose Reyes – did.

On the whole, the weekend set with the Yankees has to be judged a disappointment for the Mets, as they managed, in keeping with longstanding precedent, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Still more disappointing were the performances of Randolph, Wright, and Reyes. It’s still unclear whether this team is truly ready to contend this year. Going by what happened yesterday, it doesn’t appear so.

Reyes had the worst of it, making three misplays, all of which were the result of mental rather than physical mistakes. In the eighth inning, Reyes turned a potential inning-ending double play into a two-on, one-out situation with Alex Rodriguez coming to the plate. The problem isn’t so much that he didn’t make the play, but that he didn’t make it because he was trying to turn a fancy, spinning throw rather than simply taking the safe out at second and using his great arm strength – probably the best in the league at the position – to try to throw out the very old and very slow Ruben Sierra at first. In the process, he turned no outs and was nearly injured by a hard, clean slide from Tony Womack.

Reyes wasn’t much better at the plate. He did drive in a run, but more typical was a nine pitch at-bat in the fourth against Carl Pavano. Having worked the count full, Reyes fouled off three pitches, all of them quite wide of the plate, before popping out to short. Had he simply held up once, he’d have been standing on first base. I’m not nearly so down on Reyes as many are, but no team with aspirations at contention can carry a shortstop who, in a big game, muffs an easy out in an attempt to make acrobatic plays and fouls off three consecutive pitches in an attempt to avoid drawing a walk. Reyes is young, but he has to start learning from his mistakes.

Wright didn’t have nearly so bad a game or series, but it was his fielding error in the eighth that opened the door to Reyes’s game-killing blunder. Like most of Wright’s errors, this was a routine ground ball that simply handcuffed him, all the more odd after he had made several excellent plays on pop-ups in foul territory earlier in the game. This sort of play can be the result of many things, but chief among them is a lack of complete focus on every pitch in every at-bat. All of a sudden, while your mind is wandering, the ball takes a tricky bounce, hops up at your face, and before you know it, the other team has stolen the lead.

There’s nothing so bad here as Reyes’s continued refusal to stop swinging at outside pitches – learning how to bear down is something that comes with age and experience – but Wright’s woes with relatively routine plays this weekend show that no matter his extraordinary talents and performance, he still has quite a lot of development to do.

Much the same is true of manager Willie Randolph. To be blunt, anyone who criticizes him for taking Pedro Martinez out after seven innings of one-run ball is a loon. Martinez had thrown 99 pitches, and his difficulties after the 100-pitch mark are well documented, leaving aside the fact that he was throwing with a hip problem that caused his start to be pushed back two days. Randolph made the difficult, prudent, and correct call by going to his bullpen to protect the two-run lead.

From then on, though, he made all the wrong calls. To open the eighth, he brought in lefty Dae-Sung Koo, who allows walks at an alarming rate for a short reliever, rather than the superior Heath Bell or Aaron Heilman. After the defense got Koo in trouble, Randolph brought in Roberto Hernandez – pitching for the fifth consecutive game – rather than bringing in Bell, Heilman, or durable closer Braden Looper, who can handle long outings and hasn’t been overused lately.

After Hernandez gave up the go-ahead run, Randolph decided to open the ninth with Mike DeJean, the worst pitcher on the staff – this with the Mets still down by only a run. Predictably, DeJean gave up a run and loaded the bases. Finally, Heilman was summoned to induce a weak, inning-ending flyout from Hideki Matsui.

Randolph didn’t so much make the wrong calls here as fail to make the right ones. He stuck with his veteran set-up men, first to protect a two-run lead and then to keep the Mets within one run of tying the game, when there were several unconventional options available – Bell, an unproven young reliever; Heilman, a starter; Looper, usually a ninth-inning man.

At times Randolph has shown a willingness to go against “the book” and go for the win. Yesterday he didn’t, and it cost his team. Until he’s as willing to do it in a big game as he is in a game against the Reds, and until Reyes and Wright mature to the point where they can simply make all the plays they’re supposed to make, the Mets are going to have a rougher time of it than is necessary. Mistakes are only mistakes when no one learns from them, though. There are big games upcoming against Atlanta and Florida, and it will be more than interesting to see what the Mets learned over the last three days.