Sports

Amazin’ brass needs to own up to problems

The remarkable part, if you think about it, isn’t that 38,602 of you bought tickets for last night’s grisly slaughterhouse special at Citi Field, or that a good 30,000 of you actually made your way through the turnstiles, or that there were still 25,000 of you still in the house when the Braves’ lead reached double digits, and no fewer than 15,000 when the final, awful moments of this 15-2 butchering was done.

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The remarkable part, in so many ways, isn’t even that so many of you will be back out here tonight. And tomorrow. And over the weekend, when the Mets will trot out their 1969 ancestors as a means of scrubbing a little of the sourness of a horrific season away.

No. The remarkable part, in just about every way, is that you may be sabotaging yourselves, and your baseball team, and that part of you that so fiercely believes that but for the dark cloud permanently hovering above Flushing Bay this could all have been different this year. And will be different next year.

And the truly amazing part — amazing with a “g” at the end and a lowercase “a,” at the beginning, by the way; we’ll put Amazin’ in mothballs until it’s needed again — is that the men who run the Mets are too tone deaf to realize your loyalties in 2009 are to a building, not to anything they have built, to curiosity and not confidence.

As long as you come, even if it’s more for Shake Shack than Sheff, you run the risk of all of this being misinterpreted. Last night’s crowd put the Mets over 2.3 million fans for the year, and they still play to 93 percent capacity every night. In a bottom-line world, that is quite a bottom line.

For the men who own the team.

For the men, women and children who follow the team, who care about the team — and, judging by the still-appalling lack of accessible history at Citi, care a lot more about the team than the men who own the team do — there is another bottom line. That’s called professionalism. It’s called respectability. It’s called accountability.

Have the Mets been beaten up this year? Of course they have. Would any team — even that other team, the one that gives the men who run the Mets night sweats when you talk about them as any point of comparison — survived that obscene disabled list? Not a chance.

You know something? The Yankees would have tried better than this. They just would have. They would have tried to put a representative product on the field. They might have lost most nights, might have lost 15-2 some nights. But the fans they soak for hundreds-of-dollars worth of seats and eight-dollar beers and six-dollar frankfurters wouldn’t have walked away from those nights as sour as Mets fans do.

Right now, you still flock to Citi, even on these blast-furnace nights, because it’s still new. It will not be new forever. It will not be new beyond this winter. It would be nice to know that the men who own and operate the Mets understood this, nicer to know that it bothers them enough to do something about it. It would irk me if I owned the team. It would irk you.

Does it irk them?

I want to believe it does. But until they start to realize just how broken things really are here, we will all be left to wonder. And the franchise will be left to founder.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com