I am thinking about the Mets and their fans, and about two columns I have written in which certain words triggered pre-judgment before – I believe – the main points could be appreciated.

The first occurred in spring training. I wrote about an outfield drill with these words:

New Mets outfield coach Ruben Amaro is hitting fungos to nine outfielders. New manager Mickey Callaway is watching. One of the nine is wearing his hat backward. One is occasionally catching the ball behind his back. One — despite instruction to treat throw-ins as if runners were on base — occasionally delivers long, underhanded heaves toward Amaro. And before anyone mentions Yoenis Cespedes was nursing a sore shoulder, know that when he wanted, Cespedes displayed the best arm in the group.

A group of Mets fans obsessed on just the “wearing his hat backward” part of the critique. My only regret in hindsight was not writing that I truly do not care if someone wears his hat backward – except if a team is doing a live drill on a sunny day with the outfield coach asking that the players treat it like game action when, you know, the brim of your cap is part of the protection from the sun and the other eight outfielders are down with the program.

The point of the column was not sartorial. It was behavioral. I think the game cries out for more individualism and flair. I like bat flips, for example. But this was not the place or the time, and the hat was the least of the issues — it was just the one that seemed to stop so many. How about the catching behind the back and the flinging the ball underhand when a coach is, again, requesting his outfielders to treat the drill like it were a game?

And what about the coach and the manager who were watching? I asked them about what Cespedes did afterward and they talked about his “energy.”

This was Callaway’s first and perhaps last chance to establish the kind of team he wants to run. Does anyone see these Mets as having discipline and minding fundamentals? In one game in Atlanta last week, Jay Bruce got caught flat-footed as Ender Inciarte hustled a double and Michael Conforto did not initially budge from center to back up a ball off the wall to right. This has been the Mets team this season, a bad defensive team made worse by not minding details.

As for Cespedes, like always – like with the drill – he seems to be apart from the team, on his own program, covered for by a franchise that once alibied not wanting to spend the money on Alex Rodriguez because he was a 24-and-1 player. There seems no great organizational quality control with his injury, of what it is or when he might return. Recently, I asked Sandy Alderson and Callaway if, when Cespedes does return, considering the personnel on hand, doesn’t he profile as the team’s best right fielder? There was no disagreement, but they essentially did not want to unsettle Cespedes.

In that conversation, I also noted to Alderson and Callaway that the 2017 NL MVP, Giancarlo Stanton, is playing left field rather than his comfortable right for the Yankees.

And that leads to another word that distracts — “Yankees.”

Last weekend, during the Subway Series, I wrote that, besides doing the big stuff better than the Mets, the Yanks were doing the small stuff better as well — whether it was buying low on talents such as Chad Green, Didi Gregorius and Aaron Hicks or mining effectiveness out of players such as Domingo German and Austin Romine, who they had at some point taken off the 40-man roster.

But because I used the Yankees as the example, the Mets organization immediately saw favoritism or conspiracy, and their small-brother syndrome certainly has been transfused into the fans. Look, the Yanks have spent the last quarter century winning, the Mets have not. I covered the late 1980s-early 1990s Yankees of Stump Merrill and Alvaro Espinosa that coincided with Met success, and the coverage was flipped then. The coverage is a mirror of how the teams are doing, not some pre-ordained favoritism.

It was the Subway Series, so I used the Yankees. But I could have used any successful team by comparison. Remember that when Alderson took over there was a promise of Moneyball with money. Mets fans have gotten neither. The ownership does not fund a payroll befitting this market, and baseball operations has not found talent on the margins to make smaller payrolls more successful.

We are not talking drafts. Every team drafts. Every team signs international youngsters, though the Mets have not done well here either without Amed Rosario blossoming. You don’t want to talk Luis Severino or Miguel Andujar with the Yankees? How about, where is the Mets’ Juan Soto (Nationals), Ronald Acuna and Ozzie Albies (Braves) or Gleyber Torres (remember the Cubs signed him, not the Yankees)?

Still, we are concentrating on players at the margins, like what Alderson’s predecessor, Omar Minaya, for example, discovered in a minor-league signing such as R.A. Dickey – a gift to Alderson, who turned him into Noah Syndergaard.

This Mets administration did not unearth Justin Turner. It let him walk. The Dodgers – the deep-pocketed Dodgers – signed Turner to a minor league contract, the same as Brandon Morrow and Max Muncy. Chris Taylor came in a small trade. Where over the last eight years is the Mets version of finding a quality player who was down or off the radar? Where is their trade for a Chris Devenski or Travis Shaw or Mike Clevinger?

Curtis Granderson was a big free-agent sign, Bruce was established before the Mets got him, Conforto and Brandon Nimmo were first-round picks, Lucas Duda, Daniel Murphy, Jacob deGrom, Jeurys Familia, Matt Harvey and Steven Matz were here when Alderson arrived, and Syndergaard and Zack Wheeler were well-regarded prospects landed in trades. Jerry Blevins and Addison Reed were good relievers before coming here, Kelly Johnson and Juan Uribe good role players. And Bartolo Colon already had been resuscitated from the baseball scrapheap by the Yankees.

Yeah, sorry for that one, but don’t get distracted by the word “Yankees” or “backward caps.”

Part of the Mets institutional problem is looking for distractions or seeing biases where there are none. The problem is not, for example, comparisons to the Yankees. The problem is the Mets.