Saturday was a bad day for the Mets, and that took some doing. After Friday night’s 14-inning classic, in which they came back four different times to beat the Braves 8-7, they woke up the next morning and did it again in a day game. Even with all due caveats – these were just two games, and what these teams do in 2006 has nothing to do with what they did in 1999 – winning these games with the shallow end of the rotation going made it seem like the Mets had finally driven a stake into the hearts of the vampire-like Braves.

Sadly, though, the most important thing to happen this weekend was Victor Zambrano’s elbow exploding on the mound in the second inning on Saturday. An MRI exam taken after the game revealed a torn tendon in his pitching elbow, and the Mets announced yesterday that Zambrano will miss the rest of the season.

In a pure baseball sense, the Mets can’t afford the injury – with Brian Bannister and John Maine already hurt, the team was already forced to resort to no. 7 starter Jose Lima – who has the distinction of holding the record for worst single-season ERA in both the American and National Leagues – yesterday. Maybe worse, the circumstances of the injury call the credibility and competence of GM Omar Minaya, manager Willie Randolph, and Rick Peterson into question: How could they not realize Zambrano was hurting? How can the lines of communication be so bad? Where is the leadership? Why didn’t Zambrano just say he couldn’t go? How did this happen?

Even to ask such questions is naive. Major leaguers routinely play through horrible injuries without anyone thinking that much of it. Octavio Dotel recently pitched for about a year without a ligament in his elbow, and all things considered, he fared pretty well. Jeff Bagwell played for years with a shoulder so bad he couldn’t make an overhanded throw; Gary Sheffield played last season in much the same state. The Cubs’ Kerry Wood was too injured last year to start, and the inside of his arm looked like a lunar landscape, so he went into the bullpen and only left the Cubs after they’d fallen out of the race. The Angels’ Casey Kotchman recently revealed he’s been playing with mono all season.

Yesterday, Zambrano, who has a history of elbow trouble, said he has been pitching with discomfort for some time but felt he could fight through it. He added that he hadn’t said anything to the team’s training staff about the elbow.

“I’m not a doctor,” Randolph told the Associated Press, “but I’m sure if we had known we could have taken some preventative measures.”

It would be wonderful if ballplayers were all sensible people who did things like go to their pitching coach and say, “Gee, my arm sure is sore today, coach. I know I’m a bad game or two away from losing my job, and that we have Jose Lima of all people starting tomorrow, and that I’m in the last year of my contract, and that I got traded for one of the best young starters in the game, but I could really use the day off.”

This is dialogue from a conversation that would never happen. These guys are jocks through and through, not actuaries who happen to have strong throwing arms. Unbelievably enough, they and their coaches don’t always have warm, nurturing relationships based on mutual trust. (Coaches and players have even been known to use salty language when discussing injuries!) They routinely do unspeakably dangerous and career threatening things, and when everything works out they’re heroes (hello, Curt Schilling) and no one thinks to comment on how risky they are.

Remember last year, when the fans and columnists now criticizing the Mets moaned that the team should do the right thing and protect its huge investment in Carlos Beltran by taking him out of the lineup rather than have him play through serious leg injuries? Oddly, neither do I.

After the game on Saturday, Pedro Martinez lambasted the press, not so much to blame them for what happened to his teammate, but to admonishing everyone, fans included, for failing to respect the pressure under which all major leaguers play – something he knows a lot about. Martinez said he would have physically stopped Zambrano from pitching if he’d known how badly he was hurting, but I seem to recall Pedro going out in Game 5 of the 2000 ALCS and risking his career by blowing away the Indians with a terrible back injury. I even have a faint memory of him throwing a 122-pitch shutout against the Braves last September when the Mets were pretty much done and he, between back and foot injuries, didn’t have much business being on the mound.

Minaya, Randolph, and Peterson could have gone to Zambrano with state-of-the-art motion capture technology depicting how skewed his delivery was and MRIs taken from outer space using secret NSA satellites showing he was a few pitches away from blowing out his arm. Zambrano would have said he was fine, and they would have taken his word because you have to trust a player to know his own body, even when you have good reason not to.

It may not be ideal, but this is how baseball works. There’s no one to blame here. Zambrano was showing the guts people have wrongly assailed him for not having; barring further disclosures, management was just doing what management normally does, which is let someone play until he can’t play anymore. It isn’t the end of the world, and it’s not a sign that the managers who have led the Mets to their best-ever start have no idea what they’re doing. It’s just what happens.

tmarchman@nysun.com