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I probably just lost thousands of "bro" points with a good portion of my audience, so I suppose I should clarify if I want to hang onto any of my exotic-dancing readers: I don't hate the actual strippers themselves en masse or on any personal level. I'm sure there are plenty of strippers who are very nice people, and I certainly don't judge them for their choice of occupation. I don't like the concept of strippers because the whole thing has always seemed to me like some sort of bizarre torture ritual. It is, by its very nature, a giant tease.

DC-based comic Big Al Goodwin, if I recall correctly, once compared it to bringing a diabetic kid to a candy store, but I'm not sure that's a perfect metaphor. It's more like bringing a diabetic kid to a candy store with a $20 cover and overpriced, watered-down drinks, then rubbing candy all over the diabetic kid's body, telling him how sweet the candy is, then asking for twenty more bucks to do it again while reminding him that he can never have the candy.

Also, it's a good bet the stripper's name is Candy.

I mention mostly because I'm getting married in a few weeks and enjoyed a completely stripper-free bachelor party on Saturday. This secretly disappointed a few of my friends, I'm sure, but the affair was based around baseball, food and beer and was wholly enjoyable because, unlike strippers, those rarely disappoint.

(By the way -- and I hate to make excuses -- if I've been a little remiss in this column of late, it's because I've got major life events all over my horizon. They're mostly good ones, but the type of things that take up tons of time and focus. I'm fascinated by all the noise that's come out about Citi Field's effects lately, but I haven't fully digested it yet so I'll resist the urge to spew half-formed analysis.)

But of the three principal elements of that shindig, only baseball can behave like a naked woman cozying up to you for cash. And when the Mets take three out of four games from a good Cardinals team like they did last week, even the most prudent fans and analysts can get like that one guy in every group who becomes convinced that the stripper really likes him.

So we fall into the traps of seeing a winning team full of hustle and heart and it's all great fun until the Yankees come through town and leave us feeling like we finally worked up the nerve to ask for the stripper's phone number only to meet the inevitable rejection.

Wait a minute, what do you mean it wasn't real? You weren't actually interested in what I do for a living? You can't keep winning games when four of the first six hitters in your lineup have OPSes below .700 and when you're counting on Brian Schneider and Luis Castillo for offensive contributions?

It's all true, I'm sorry to say. The stripper doesn't care about your job and the Mets won't win many without any semblance of an offense beyond David Wright and Gary Sheffield.

So people -- including Jerry Manuel, apparently -- will clamor for a deal for a bat. Great. But last I checked, the Mets don't need a bat, they need a lumberyard, and it's not like they have a ton to give up for difference-making offensive players. Selling off whatever promising prospects are left in the system to bring back quick-fix solutions for what could be a longshot pennant chase is at best short-sighted and at worst blisteringly dumb.

Then there's all the backtracking and fingerpointing and crystal-clear hindsight. No, Omar Minaya did not have a great offseason. Yes, it's pretty easy to say for certain now that he should have added an extra bat instead of an extra closer, but it doesn't make any difference at this point. What happened in the offseason happened in the offseason, and what happened in the first three months of the season happened, too, and looking back and trying to figure out what should have been done differently won't help the current club win any more ballgames.

The best recourse for Mets fans at this point, I think, is to temper expectations. It's difficult to hear -- and write -- during a season in which hopes were once so high, but at some point it becomes very hard for an already-shallow team to overcome an amazing run of awful, awful luck. It's that whole random chance thing again. Yeah, it may have been reasonable to expect Carlos Delgado or Jose Reyes or Carlos Beltran or Oliver Perez or J.J. Putz or John Maine to get hurt, and now that we know they did we can look back and plainly see all the red flags. But only a masochist would have predicted all of them ending up disabled at the same time.

They did, though. The good news is there are still reasons for optimism, as my colleague Howard Megdal points out, mostly because no other team in the division is particularly stellar or lucky, either, and there are theoretically reinforcements on the way if any of those guys can get and stay healthy.

The Mets are only 2 1/2 games back of the Naional League East lead despite playing much of the season with a decimated lineup and starting rotation. So they've got a chance. It's just going to take a good deal of good fortune -- maybe some sort of karmic balancing of the scales.

And though it pains me to say it, that's really the best Mets fans should be hoping for right now. After all, it's not the most unreasonable thing in the world. That's the good thing about baseball: Strange things happen.

Without doing the math, I'd say the Mets still have a much better chance of getting lucky than the guy who thinks the stripper is into him.