Has MLB, never strong on foresight, painted itself into a seriously ugly corner?

After all, any conspicuous drop, next season, in this year’s ridiculous, records-shattering home run totals would be highly suspicious.

Why would MLB prod players to quit playing baseball games, replacing them with home run or strikeout contests that produce dubious home run and strikeout records prefaced by throwing baseballs that next travel senselessly suspect distances?

In other words, how will this season be regarded, recorded, during next season?

Are we to believe that this year was just a 30-team colossal coincidence? Or was it that batters were just responding to the MLB prompts these particular baseballs invited?

Will this counterproductive coincidence soon end or will it be extended through at least next season for the sake of official denial and to the continued detriment of The Game?

How did this happen? My guess:

Rob Manfred, who learned at the feet of Bud “Bottom Line” Selig, knows that the MLB Steroids Era, approximately 1990 through 2004, was the most lucrative in The Game’s history. Bad teams drew big crowds to watch what they never before had seen: More home runs than you could swing a stick at.

Team owners boosted ticket prices when sudden sluggers Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez hit town.

But then MLB and the MLBPA, both greedy and arrogant enough to believe they’d never be caught, were revealed to be in PED bed together. Though Selig pretended to have succeeded in blowing the whistle, that whistle was forced upon him by legal, political and news media pressure.

He had to play The Lone Ranger come to town to rid Skunk Gulch of the outlaws, those he’d so fully enabled as the Steroids Era’s primary enabler.

In 2015, when Manfred replaced Selig, he was under pressure to duplicate MLB’s revenues from the Steroids Era. There were team owners to answer to, especially the newer ones with buy-in debts to service.

My theory: Why not doctor the baseballs, make them go boom!

When we hear pitching vets such as Justin Verlander unequivocally state that these aren’t the same baseballs as seasons past, that they’re designed and manufactured to travel farther and cause lazy fly balls to land 15 rows deep, we don’t have to believe them, we can see for ourselves.

Heck, SNY’s Gary Cohen, calling Mets games since 1983, several times per week begins a lazy-fly-ball call he suddenly has to crank up to his home-run call, then he swaps dubious, what’s-going-on-here amazement with Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling.

If my theory is true, it has badly backfired as new, “improved” baseballs have turned The Game into daily and nightly farces that further disfavor the fading beauty of baseball.

John Smoltz pitched from 1989 through 2009, through the Steroid Era then after MLB checked into drug rehab.

Last Saturday on Fox, if Smoltz didn’t say that MLB has conspired to unnaturally increase the distance baseball’s travel, he came close:

At Fenway Park, the Yankees’ Gio Urshela hit an opposite-field fly ball that once upon a time, not long ago, prefaced a catch made in medium right-center. But last Saturday that ball easily cleared the fence, a distance Fox estimated to be 417 feet.

Smoltz: “Then of course, you have that storm that has taken place about the distance the baseballs are going and the number of homers that have been hit.

“I mean [as a replay of Urshela’s HR appeared] that goes a long way. You don’t always want to fall on that [opinion] that it’s about the baseballs, but it makes you wonder. The balls are going in places and distances that we haven’t seen.”

In 1996, the Orioles’ Brady Anderson, at age 32, improved from hitting 16 homers the year before to hitting 50. Of course, such an unnatural leap seems impossible for all but the bliss-blinded to ignore.

In 1998, Tim McCarver authored “The Perfect Season,” a book subtitled “Why 1998 Was Baseball’s Greatest Year.” Throughout, McCarver championed Sosa, McGwire, Bonds, Rodriguez and Texas’ Juan Gonzalez as modern marvels worthy of our lasting great regard.

An astute career baseball man such McCarver had no idea? Or did he choose to watch with his eyes closed, his practical senses frozen?

By 2004, the inevitable: MLB was exposed in Congressional hearings. Not that studious fans and media needed Congress to tell them MLB is drug-infested, not when HR King Bonds, his head swollen to the size of a beach ball, in 2001 hit 73 home runs at age 36, 45 at 39.

It smashed HR records, sold tickets, jacked salaries among MLBPA players and swelled MLB’s TV-rights revenues.

It remains impossible to believe MLB and the MLBPA believed they could keep the lid closed on this.

So next season will tell the next story. If it’s a repeat of this dubious, destructive, ridiculous season, MLB is stuck in its own sport-diminishing and mindless mud.

But if there’s a significant drop in homers and perhaps even a residual return to playing baseball with legit baseballs, MLB is stuck with 2019 as another record-breaking season that raises serious questions.

If it ain’t broke, try to fix it anyway

Satire-proof: Mets up, 4-0 in the ninth, at the White Sox on Thursday. Mets reliever Luis Avilan, looking good forcing ground balls in the eighth, gets the first out in the ninth when Mickey Callaway bolts out of the dugout, signaling for ol’ reliable Jeurys Familia.

Am I nuts? I’d rather watch the Yankees’ Mike Tauchman trying — and often succeeding — to play winning baseball than watch Giancarlo Stanton, for $325 million, strike out trying to hit home runs.

Hey, Ryan Ruocco, stop with all the stats on YES’s Yankees telecasts, please! Do it for yourself and for us. Many of those you recite as significant are purely circumstantial, thus irrelevant. Baseball is not played in a test tube. Well, not yet.

Would you buy this story? I couldn’t recall the name of the contested World War II port city in Norway, Trondheim, so I type in “Cities in Norway.” Up on the screen pops pictures of blond women in one-piece bikinis. I tell her I accidentally typed “Cuties in Norway.” … Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.