Through games of Friday night, the Mets still had the worst record in all of baseball. They were 10 under .500 after beating the Angels on Friday, 11-21 for this season and 49-76 since being 45-24 last June. We also watched them have the longest April losing streak — 12 games — in the team’s history. You should know that includes the ’62 Mets, who inspired a wonderful baseball book by Jimmy Breslin called “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game.”

These Mets aren’t going to be as bad as the ’62 Mets, who ended up losing 120 games. But the question about the ’26 Mets, even when they are back to full strength, is this:

Do they actually have a chance, as presently constituted, to be any good?

There was a time in the early ’90s when the Mets inspired another book, this one written by John Harper and Bob Klapisch, both with the Daily News at the time, called “The Worst Team Money Could Buy.” And that is exactly what they just looked like in April of ’26, except with this qualifier now that Steve Cohen owns the team:

They have looked like the worst team all the money in the world — which Cohen has — could buy. And the fact of things, when you look at the product on the field, is that the Mets are worse than they were the first year Cohen owned them, which means 2021. They were 77-85 then.

Is there still time for them to somehow turn things around, as badly as they have played? Yeah, there is. Two years ago, deeper into the season than this, Carlos Mendoza’s rookie year as manager, they were 22-33 at the end of May and — against what seemed like all odds at the time, or logic — became one of the best teams in baseball the rest of the way. But that was a vastly different Mets team, one not fully imagined by David Stearns the way this team so clearly is, a hybrid of his personnel decisions and the ones of his predecessor, Billy Eppler.

You surely know by now that Stearns, whom Cohen clearly decided was some kind of wonderful because of the work he’d done with the Brewers, gave Mendoza a tepid vote of confidence on Friday, saying he didn’t intend to make a change with his manager. But if the Mets don’t turn things around, and soon, the one who is going to need a vote of confidence when this season is over — no matter how much runway he thinks he has with Cohen — is going to be Stearns himself.

There was a Hollywood director who once famously said that just about everybody out there has a 3-movie contract until the first movie is a flop. We all saw the way last season ended and this season has begun. You better believe this is Stearns’ movie the rest of the way, to the trade deadline and beyond, as much as Cohen still believes that he is a front-office boy wonder with a blueprint for the Mets to become the Dodgers.

For now, Stearns is presiding over a team with another epic payroll, $380 million or thereabouts, and baseball taxes that put the bottom line at around half-a-billion dollars. Billion with a B. Bottom line being quite appropriate with the product for which Mets fans are currently paying.

Listen, everybody knows there are no guarantees that spending money the way Cohen has spent on the Mets guarantees ultimate success in baseball, unless you do happen to own the Dodgers. Over the past dozen years, the Dodgers have won the World Series three different times with the highest payroll. In this same time period, the only other team to have the top payroll and end up winning it all was the 2018 Red Sox.

Still: If you are going to spend this kind of money on baseball teams and bestow even a huge salary on the head of your baseball operations — Stearns is making $10 million annually, reportedly even more than Andrew Friedman is making with the Dodgers — you have a reasonable right to expect more bang for his buck than Cohen has been since that 45-24 record less than a year ago. After that, in agonizing real time, the Mets became both an epic and embarrassing financial disaster, even for somebody with pockets as deep as Steve Cohen’s.

We all know Cohen, who grew up a Mets fan the way Stearns did, came in hot when he bought the team at the end of 2020. He was going to be the new George Steinbrenner, you bet. Four years after Steinbrenner did get the Yankees they were in the World Series against Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine, and in his fifth year of ownership, the Yankees won the first of back-to-back titles. Ultimately, they would win seven World Series in all while Steinbrenner was the team’s principal owner.

The Mets came close to making the World Series two years ago, they sure did. That was Stearns’ rookie year the same as it was Mendoza’s. Even though Mendoza didn’t win Manager of the Year — Pat Murphy of the Brewers did — he really should have, holding his team together after that 22-33 start and watching it upset Stearns’ old team the Brewers in the playoffs and upset the Phillies until finally running into the Dodgers in the NLCS. Yeah, them. Dodgers. They spend better than Cohen does, have better players and better people in charge — and better vision — and might just make it three World Series in a row this year.

Stearns’ vision, one he clearly sold to Cohen with both hands, was that the Mets were going to become the East Coast Dodgers. The Dodgers were backed by the Guggenheim Partners. But the Mets had Cohen, the richest owner in the sport. And now the Mets sit in last place and the Dodgers are once again in first place, same as the Yankees are across town from Cohen’s Mets.

Cohen has spent big, give him credit for that. The biggest move of all was spending $765 million on Juan Soto. You know Cohen would probably do it all over again, not just to get Soto but to get him away from the Yankees, and look like the biggest baseball guy in town. But you wonder if Soto would still sign on with the Mets if given a do-over, especially since Hal Steinbrenner was offering the same kind of crazy money to keep him.

Things are working out just fine for the Yankees without Soto, Brian Cashman found other ways to spend Hal’s money. The Mets? Unless and until they turn things around, they do look like the worst team all the money in the world can buy.

They haven’t just looked bad. They’re making the owner look bad. And guys who have done what Cohen has done in business really, really hate looking bad. And if this thing doesn’t get turned around, you wonder what he is going to do about all that.

KNICKS CAN’T BE ONE-MAN BAND, NO TO AN OBJ REUNION & CAM LIVES UP TO HYPE …

Karl-Anthony Towns is probably wondering where all his new friends came from over the past week?

You know the deal:

There was a time this season when everything going wrong with the Knicks was supposed to be his fault.

Now everything with him is right as rain, as if the Knicks just added KAT to the roster halfway through the Hawks’ series.

Listen:

Everything changed on the court for the Knicks when Jalen Brunson got here from Dallas.

Everybody can see what a big-game and big-moment guy he is.

But what we saw conclusively after his team was down 1-2 to the Hawks was that this isn’t a one-man band.

And can’t be a one-man band to get to where it wants to go.

In another time, remember, with a reference out of another time, Pete Hamill called the old Knicks the Count Basie Band of basketball.

He means all of them, not just one of them.

By the way?

When the Knicks were up about two hundred points at halftime of Game 6, I was waiting for another team to take the Hawks’ place, like this was a pickup night on W. 4th St.

Come on, who honestly thinks that bringing back OBJ is really some kind of crackerjack idea for John Harbaugh’s Giants?

If you have not yet read “Revenge Prey” by the great John Sandford, do yourself a favor and buy it today, just because this is Mr. Sandford at the top of his game.

And great big congrats this week to my pal, Robert Crais, whose “The Big Empty” just won the Edgar Award for Best Novel.

This is an honor long overdue.

The idea that we need to expand the NCAA men’s basketball tournament is dumber than a bag of hammers.

The Denver Nuggets have turned themselves into an old line from Coach John Wooden:

A lot of teams have won one in a row.

Say this again:

Cam Schlittler is the best fastball starter to come out of the Yankees’ farm system since Ron Guidry.

Is this still a small sample with Hot Schlittler?

You bet.

But the young guy out of Walpole, Mass., has gotten this good, this fast.

We have heard for years about the powerhouse Yankee farm system when it really wasn’t a powerhouse.

Now, because of young guys like Schlittler and Ben Rice, the Yankees are clearly doing more than talking a good game about prospects.

Because the prospects have turned into, well, Schlittler and Rice, haven’t they?

A Red Sox fan I know called me up the other day with this question:

“How long until pitchers and catchers?”