A running theme in the comments threads and the posts here at GodBlessBuckner seems to be that the Mets can’t decide what kind of a team they are. Are they buyers or sellers, as the pre-trade deadline saying goes. Maybe it’s not their fault, given the circumstances. But one thing seems for sure: indecision is the mark of poor teams in baseball.

But first, the Mets. Of course they spend money like a championship contender, but things didn’t work out for them. Injuries took their toll. The three-headed super-star monster of Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado and Jose Reyes went down and took the team’s offense with it. The rotation, made shaky by poor decisions (Oliver Perez over Derek Lowe), was further worsened by injury to the solid John Maine. The bullpen, which could have been dominant, lost JJ Putz out of the eighth inning and has only been okay since.

On the face of things, the Mets should pack it in for this year. At seven games under even baseball, 12 games out of first in the division with two teams ahead of them, and 9.5 games out of the wild card with six teams between them and the leader, the Mets should realize that this is not the year. The focus should immediately become making next year’s team better.

Perhaps that is what happened when Omar Minaya sat on his hands through the deadline this year. Perhaps he was saving all his bullets for next year. Perhaps.

But there can be no doubt what the Florida Marlins would have done had they found themselves in the spot that the Mets are in now. They would have immediately begun fielding offers for Dan Uggla, a free agent at the end of the year. Players like Jorge Cantu and Jeremy Hermida, who may both become more expensive than they are worth at the end of the year, would have gone on the block too. Any veterans in key roles that may be gone would find a rookie starting for them as the team tried to figure out what they had going into 2010. Hello, Gaby Sanchez.

Does this decisive buyer/seller system work? Well, you can’t argue with the results in the case of the Marlins. They may have some attendance issues, but in terms of winning and losing the Marlins have won more world series titles in their short existence than the Chicago Cubs have won in the past century. Or, for that matter, as many as the Mets have won, in a much shorter period of time.

The attendance issue is a big one for a big-market team like the Mets. Could they have decisively become sellors at the deadline in New York? The prescription seems to be that they should have pushed Gary Sheffield and Luis Castillo agressively, while giving Daniel Murphy and a healthy Fernando Martinez all the at-bats they could handle. Livan Hernandez would have been released by now, and possibly even Pedro Feliciano would have been on the block.

Maybe this sort of prescription only works in smaller markets. The Atlanta Braves, San Francisco Giants, and Chicago Cubs have all suffered similar fates as the Mets, and are all possibly in markets too large to admit to a focus on the future. The Braves did manage to sell Mark Teixeira in a down year, and have been a little bit more decisive than the Mets seem to be. They’ve also had more recent success. The Chicago Cubs, on the other hand, have the same pressures as the Mets: an old veteran team that plays just good enough to avoid an overhaul.

Could the Mets have survived the blitzstorm that would have come from being a seller in this media market? It’s been a long time since one of the New York teams so obviously acted like a Have Not, or took such an obvious focus on Next Year. Would it lose fans in droves? Would the Wilpons be vilified?

Probably. But the team would have been better for it. And fans like winning most of all.