Former Mets Jeff Kent and Carlos Beltrán sandwich longtime Braves center field vacuum and bomber Andruw Jones at the Hall of Fame Sunday. Today’s Mets even made them proud back in New York. (National Baseball Hall of Fame photo.)

So little has gone right for the Not-So-Amazin’ Mess (er, Mets) this season that even the grumpiest cynic among Met fans must have entered Sunday praying for something, anything. On a day when two former Mets were inducted into the Hall of Fame, one of whom elected to be represented as a Met, the least the Mets could do was win a damn game.

Carlos Beltrán was one of baseball’s center field greats. Not open for debate or debunk. He was a demolition expert at both sides of the plate. He’s one of only five men to hit 400+ home runs and steal 300+ bases. And, as Jayson Stark (The Athletic) hoisted forth, there are only two men in all baseball history to play 40+ postseason games and a) bat .300+; b) reach base for a .400+ on-base percentage; and, slug .600+

Who’s the other guy? Some moon-faced mug named Ruth.

“[W]ith apologies to Reggie Jackson,” Mr. Stark croons, “Beltrán may have been the real Mr. October.” (Sit down and shut up about that 2006 National League Championship Series-ending called strikeout. His Babehood saw and raised, running unconscionably into a World Series-ending out trying like a fool to steal a base he couldn’t have stolen aboard a scooter by then.)

No apologies necessary. Nobody forgets Jackson’s three-bomb Series-winning party in Game Six of the 1977 Series, of course. But take a look at what counts in the long haul, Beltrán over 65 postseason games and Jackson over 77 (WPA: win probability added, not the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal):

It’s almost to wonder how come Beltrán never earned a nickname comparable to Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson’s. Did you know Beltrán is the only player in major league history with 312 stolen bases and an 86.4 percent stolen base percentage? The Man of Steal has a mere 80.7 theft percentage.

Beltran was also as run preventive as the day was long with his glove. Maybe not quite as run preventive as fellow Sunday Hall inductee Andruw Jones—but nobody else was, either. Not even the immortal Willie Mays. Jones and Mays are numeros uno y dos, after whom come Paul Blair, Jim Piersall, Kenny Lofton, and Devon White. If only those four could have hit in the Beltrán-Jones league, never mind Mays.

“When people ask me why I choose this cap,” Beltrán said during his induction speech, referring to the Mets after saluting every team for whom he played, “I have to say this, guys. It’s simple. Every organization shapes your career. New York shaped my life.”

Jeff Kent wasn’t all that much as a very young Met, of course. He was prickly at his best at that time. Dealt from the Blue Jays (for pitching great David Cone), Kent answered a prank from his new teammates with fury. From there to the Indians in another trade and then to the Giants, he built a parallel rep as a solid player (especially at the plate) and a bit of a sour belly.

As a Giant, Kent yanked himself into the books. No, it didn’t hurt that he got to bat with Barry Bonds’s kind of protection, but that kind of protection matters nothing if you don’t or can’t take advantage. Kent took. And how. Six straight seasons of 20+ home runs and 100+ runs batted in; nine straight of 20+ bombs and 90+ steaks.

By his own eventual admission, Kent found it difficult to impossible to let himself be seen as human. Yet when the Contemporary Era Committee elected him last winter, Kent let himself show what he didn’t dare unless he was getting into a scrum with Bonds: real emotion.

He even thanked his Giants manager, Dusty Baker, profusely enough. “He was the right man at the right time for me, and I’m naturally a half-empty guy . . . Looking back, I think I complicated the game a lot more than it needed to be. And Dusty was the opposite. Dusty didn’t complicate the game. He respected it.”

If only the Jeff Kent at the Cooperstown podium could have been available to the Jeff Kent who snapped at pranking teammates, lied about popping wheelies on his motorcycle his final Giants spring training, and chewed out mercurial Dodger teammate Milton Bradley for non-hustle when Bradley was playing on a balky knee that exploded on him on a subsequent baserunning play. Among others.

Meanwhile, back in New York, Kent’s and Beltrán’s former Mets were going to be damned if they were going to let the Dodgers take a third straight from them on Hall of Fame day.

Freddy Peralta, whose shaky season seems to have ensured his Mets tenure will be short and somewhat less than sweet, pitched four decent innings of six-hit, three-run (two earned) ball. The Mets bullpen put the Dodgers on lockdown the rest of the way for the most part.

Then the Mets took what they could get from Dodger starter Emmet Sheehan (a first-inning RBI single from Francisco Lindor) and his nasty little array of heaters and skidders, before he yielded after five innings. Then the Mets got to abuse the Dodger pen starting in the sixth. Jack Dryer walked a pair around one out, but Evan Phillips had the honour of Tyrone Taylor blasting his 1-1 service into the left field seats.

An inning later, a passed ball enabling A.J. Ewing to score led to a two-out walk to Jorge Polanco, which led to Marcus Semien—one of the gaggle of Mets brought aboard for this season only to find themselves playing out of position (and possibly out of their gourds) often enough—banging Will Klein’s 1-1 offering over the left field fence.

All the Mets had to do was keep the Dodgers pinned the final two frames. Luke Weaver squirmed unscathed out of a bases-loaded jam into which he’d squirmed a little too handily in the eighth—Freddie Freeman singling; Tommy Edman singling two outs later; Kyle Tucker hit by a pitch—before Teoscar Hernández bounced one to the third base side that Weaver himself grabbed and threw on from a fadeaway angle to just get the third out. Then Devin Williams found enough of his once formidable self in the ninth to shake off a leadoff single and strike the side out.

Met fans could be forgiven for asking why ex-Mets couldn’t be inducted into Cooperstown every day; or, at least, five out of seven days. Because on the sunny day when two received their plaques, the Mets had the great sense to play like the team they were supposed to have been cobbled, knobbled, and roped together to be this season.