MIKE DROP!

CONFORTO DISLOCATES SHOULDER ON SWING, SURGERY POSSIBLE

THIS is probably a coincidence. Yes, yes: coincidence, sure it is, absolutely. There’s nothing there. Certainly. Absolutely. Completely. Right … ? Well, put it this way: As Michael Conforto was writhing at home plate Thursday afternoon, bottom of the fifth inning, Citi Field turned into a full-on morgue (though it hadn’t exactly been a Con Ed electrical plant to begin with on a sunny, sleepy day in the middle of a lost season), and you could see the imaginations of Mets fans running away from them.

“So he hurt himself … SWINGING THE BAT?” “Who hurts themselves swinging a bat?” “Are we sure this place wasn’t built on an ancient Indian burial ground?”

So, yes: There was Conforto, one of the few reasons remaining to watch the Mets, who had shown signs Wednesday night that he was breaking out of a slump, who always seems a day or two away from a 4-for-4 … and it looked as if he had been shot in the shoulder. Swinging the bat. Swinging the bat.

“It turns your stomach,” Mets manager Terry Collins said, looking like a man who had finally, at long last, officially seen it all, after this 3-2 Diamondbacks win was in the books at last after three hours and 45 minutes. “You have a young player, having a great year, the kid’s making a name for himself … to go down like that is tough to watch.”

Michael Conforto probably has swung a baseball bat 50,000 times in his life. Major League Baseball players going back to the beginning of time have swung bats, what, a trillion times? A gazillion times? How many times have they ever hurt themselves swinging the bat? It’s what they do. It’s who they are. Only breathing comes more naturally to them.

And Conforto had dislocated his shoulder. Swinging a bat. And torn the posterior capsule of his shoulder — which sure sounds grisly, gruesome and altogether gross. Swinging. A. Bat. It would be like Billy Joel breaking his fingers on a keyboard.

Mets fans have “paranoia” as their default position, and it’s hard to blame them, especially the way this season has gone. You can try to talk sensibly about these things; the Mets, for instance, have lost 1,057 games to the DL this year and that ranks them only

sixth in baseball. The Dodgers, on pace for 115 wins, have lost 1,264. You can try and talk reasonably about these things. And then their best player dislocates his shoulder. Swinging a bat. And, well, it’s hard if you are a Mets fan not to think it’s a little more than a coincidence that Thursday happened to be the 15th anniversary of a fundamental shift in the Mets’ history. It was on Aug. 24, 2002, that Nelson Doubleday finally gave up the ghost and his share of the team, agreed to accept $100 million from Fred Wilpon immediately and $31 million over the next three years.

The Mets became the exclusive domain of the Wilpon family that day. Fifteen years to the day later …

Well, you can draw your own conclusions about that.

Before the game, the Mets had issued one of the oddest press releases you’ll ever see, one that was equal parts stark and astonishing: 10 names of Mets players in various stages of either returning from the DL (Jeurys Familia, Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, Seth Lugo, Jose Reyes) or being shut down (Tyler Pill, Zack Wheeler, T.J. Rivera, Steven Matz) or in a special section of limbo (David Wright).

Again: the Mets aren’t the only team that has suffered injuries this year. And when they did have a preponderance of players available, they played mostly lousy baseball. It’s always difficult to ponder the notion of the Mets being a jinxed franchise because they were the beneficiaries, never forget, of two of the most impossible baseball miracles of all time, in 1969 and 1986.

Of course, those mystical occurrences happened … well, before.

Before Aug 24, 2002.

Before the Mets changed, for good. It hasn’t all been bad: one World Series, three playoff appearances, six winning seasons. But it surely has been mostly bad: In a week or two, this will be the 10th losing season since 2002, including ’02. And as bad as it’s been, it’s impossible anything could have prepared anyone for this. For a dislocated shoulder. Swinging the bat. Coincidence?