I’d say pity the New York Mets, but how can you pity a team that brings misfortune on its own head? Pity should be saved for those who are visited repeatedly by calamity through no fault of their own.

The Mets have not just earned their misery, they’ve gone out of their way to purchase it. They worked hard to be a bad baseball team, and no one should diminish what they’ve accomplished by embellishing it with pity.

But now, the Mets have a chance to do something right. They can, if they really, really want to, get Lou Piniella to manage them next year. They can’t blow it.

Not again.

Piniella should be managing them right now. The Mets could have hired him two years ago when Bobby Valentine was sent packing. Instead, the Mets bought Piniella’s statement that he wanted to manage in his home town of Tampa.

That showed a lack of commitment and determination. When the Evil Empire over in the Bronx decides it wants someone, George Steinbrenner gets him. He does because he won’t rest and won’t close his wallet until the deal is closed.

But the Mets sort of want people. Back when Alex Rodriguez was moving out of Seattle, the Mets sort of wanted him, but then backed out of the deal, apparently too scared of the enormity of the deal to pull it off. They made excuses about A-Rod’s absurd contract demands, but they never really tried to negotiate their own deal, folding their tents like whipped puppies at the first sign that it might be a tough deal to strike.

They did the same with Piniella. You can’t tell me the Mets could not have signed Sweet Lou two years ago. Coming to Queens and building a team that would suck fans and publicity away from Steinbrenner, who had fired Piniella years before, would have been too much for the fiery Piniella to resist.

But it would have taken commitment and decisiveness, and the Mets have neither. Piniella said he wanted to go to Tampa. The Mets gave up, because that’s how they operate.

Instead, they went after Art Howe, a genial man who had managed Oakland while that team was making the playoffs every year with a bargain-basement lineup of kids. The Mets took the A’s performance as a sign of Howe’s managerial genius.

But it turned out that the kids were self-motivated and full of the confidence of youth. They didn’t know what they couldn’t do. Your mother could have managed such a group. Howe’s philosophy of just letting them play was perfect.

In New York, Howe was handed a team full of overpaid underachievers; a lineup assembled by a front office with a genius for finding people who looked good on paper and awful on dirt and grass. It was a team that needed multiple kicks in its collective fanny, repeated daily.

The manager’s laid-back, let-the-guys-play approach was a failure from the start. Unwilling or unable to lay into this gang of self-satisfied losers and demand better, he sat back, waited for them to behave like professionals and two years later is waiting still. As loss piled on loss piled on loss, he had no idea what to do.

So now he’s out, ESPN said Wednesday. This being the Mets, the firing of the manager has already been horribly mismanaged. Someone leaked the story to The Daily News along with the news that the Mets intended to pursue Piniella, who is thoroughly disgusted with the lack of commitment to anything resembling competitive baseball shown by his bosses in Tampa.

Howe reacted with the sort of anger that, had he applied it to his players over the past two years, might have saved his job. For the first time in his nearly two years with the team, he’s demanding action. Unfortunately, the action he’s demanding is that the team fire him. The team is right to oblige him.

The Mets are run by seriously dumb people.

The Mets are, in fact, run so poorly, you’d swear they had the same management as the New York Rangers. Give the Mets’ two choices, one obviously wonderful and the other glaringly awful, they’ll pick awful every time.

New York wakes up every morning, priding itself on being the biggest, the smartest and the best. And every day the Mets try to prove it wrong.

They have money, they have fiercely loyal fans, they have a good television contract, they have a pretty good-sized payroll. And for all of that, day in and day out, in ways both big and small and in between, they stink.

It’s so bad you have to remind yourself that there have been times when the Mets have been very good. As recently as 2000 they went to the World Series. They lost — to the Yankees — but they got there.

And in 1986, they were one of the best and most rambunctious teams baseball had seen since the Oakland A’s of the early 1970s and before that, the St. Louis Gas House Gang of pre-history.

But even when they’ve been good, the Mets have been bad. From 1985-’88, they were the best team in the National League, if not in baseball. Yet they got to the World Series only once, in 1986, when they won it all. In 1988, the were eliminated by the Dodgers — the Kirk Gibson team. In 1985 and 1987, they didn’t make the playoffs. And after 1988, they simply fell apart for a long, long time.

So they contended for a few years in the late ’90s and made the World Series once. They didn’t build on it. Instead of getting better, they got worse. And not just a little bit worse, but a lot worse.

But now they have a chance to start making things better. Tampa would probably leap at the opportunity to get rid of Piniella and replace him with someone cheaper who doesn’t care what happens — someone like Art Howe. And Sweet Lou, who likes winning like Terrell Owens likes television cameras, will need little prodding to leave.

He was a Yankee and a champion. He’s won a World Series. He’s passionate and uncompromising. Bring him to the Mets, and the team is better overnight, even without changing a single player.

Bring him in and let him help put together the team. Take his advice on players to get. Spend the money to build a real team, give it to him to kick and push and prod. Do it right.

It’s so obvious, even the Mets have to see this is the way it has to be. They have to see no one is better to build a New York team around than Piniella.

And all you can do is wait and watch and wonder how the Mets will blow it this time.

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