MLB

With Perez gone, Mets fans need new scapegoats

Carlos Beltran (ap)

The Mets have done more than rid themselves of a couple of underperforming baseball players the past couple of days. They have removed Mets fans’ two favorite targets from the clubhouse.

It has left them dangerously thin in an area in which they have been especially flush in recent years: They are now painfully short on scapegoats.

This being New York, of course, this being the Mets, that is sure to change within hours of the season’s first three-game losing streak. A word of advice to Jason Bay and Carlos Beltran: Get off to hot starts. An additional suggestion to Fran cisco Rodriguez: Replicate your perfect spring come April. Because you three, sirs, are the next men up.

They don’t have Ollie to kick around anymore.

Don’t have Luis to boo anymore. Until he shows up in a Phillies uniform, anyway.

“Fans will have a reaction to this move, as they probably did to the Castillo move,” Mets general manager Sandy Alderson said yesterday morning, after announcing Perez’s release. “I’ll leave it to them to determine what that reaction specifically is.”

Well, we already know, let’s be honest. If you have a Twitter account, your computer nearly blew up yesterday morning. If you read the blogs and the message boards, or if you have an especially opinionated group of Mets-fan friends, you already know that there is mostly rejoicing over this move, and with reason.

Perez was more than a lousy pitcher the last couple of years, he was a walking, breathing, brooding symbol of all that Mets fans had grown to detest about their baseball team. It went beyond his inability to regularly find the strike zone, and it wasn’t limited to his flakiness, although none of that helped. It was when he refused a minor league assignment — which was his right, if not his most prudent career move — that things began to turn ugly.

The fact that his final bill for the Mets on his most recent contract was a cool $12 million per win? That made this an untenable relationship.

The question wasn’t if there would be an ugly confrontation between Ollie and the public, but whether it would happen in Florida or back north. Saturday, in Port St. Lucie against the Nationals, Jersey Jeff Frazier and Brian Bixler went Maris-and-Mantle on poor Ollie, and the craziest thing happened then: Chronically sleepy Digital Domain Park turned into the yard at Sing Sing, loud and lousy with boos and worse.

It was time. It was past time.

“For a variety of reasons, it was important to have them in camp,” Alderson said of Perez and Castillo. “I didn’t want to do anything rash or reflexive, given what I had heard about the situation here. It was important to bring them into camp, and give them a legitimate opportunity.

“In both cases we tried to do that. We just got to the point where there was no reason to prolong it.”

It is an example of Alderson’s cool professionalism that he allowed the players to play themselves off the roster; it is, to be fair, a credit to ownership that it approved the $18 million in sunk costs that jettisoning Castillo and Perez means.

And is also a sobering reminder of where the Mets are as a franchise right now: Most off-field celebrations occur when players are acquired; only around the Mets do you get the same reaction when they’re discarded.

“When you get fired from anywhere,” Perez said, “you feel sad.”

That was a lonely opinion yesterday up and down the corridors of Mets fandom. In the space of three days, the two symbols of so much angst and despondency were vanquished, and the joy and relief was palpable. They won’t be missed.

At least for now.

At least until the first losing streak of 2011, when folks will be looking to boo the usual suspects and will have to recruit new bull’s-eyes for their bile.

Nominations will be accepted shortly.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com