NEW YORK — The disabled list looks like an All-Star roster.

Carlos Delgado, Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran. And now David Wright.
All four offensive stars on the fading New York Mets are sidelined with substantial injuries, rendering a $136 million team conspicuously irrelevant as baseball’s pennant races heat up.
Blame it on bad luck, poor planning or both, but the result is undeniable: A season that began with high expectations and the opening of a cozy new ballpark has crumbled into a painful wreck for the broken-down Mets.
“It seems like everything goes against us,” ace pitcher Johan Santana said. “It’s just crazy.”
Santana is one of the only stalwarts still standing.
Delgado has been sidelined since May 11 due to right hip surgery. Reyes hasn’t played since May 20 because of an excruciating hamstring injury. Beltran went down June 22 with a bone bruise on his right knee. And then came Wright, the most frightening of them all.
The All-Star third baseman was beaned with a 94 mph fastball last weekend from San Francisco pitcher Matt Cain, leaving Wright with a concussion. He spent a night in the hospital and landed on the 15-day disabled list for the first time in his six-year career.
It almost seems as if injuries are more contagious in the Mets’ clubhouse than any flu bug.
“I was part of an Atlanta squad last year that lost pretty much the entire pitching staff. But I’ve never seen anything like this,” said outfielder Jeff Francoeur, acquired last month in a trade with the Braves to provide some much-needed production.
New York’s arms haven’t been immune, either.
Starting pitcher John Maine has been out since June 7 with a sore shoulder. Setup man J.J. Putz is rehabbing from June 9 surgery to remove a bone spur from the back of his right elbow. Left-hander Oliver Perez missed more than two months with tendinitis in his right knee.
Even the subs can’t seem to stay healthy. Outfield prospect Fernando Martinez (right knee surgery), left-hander Jonathon Niese (torn hamstring tendon) and right-hander Fernando Nieve (torn thigh muscle) all went down.
Gary Sheffield, who leads this punchless team with 10 homers, missed time with a tight hamstring. Switch-hitting outfielder Angel Pagan was on the DL twice. Reserve infielder Alex Cora needs surgery on both thumbs and is done for the season.
Second baseman Luis Castillo even sustained a mild ankle sprain when he stumbled down the dugout steps.
“Injuries are the only part of the game that we can’t control,” Santana said. “If they’re healthy, then this would have been a different story.”
Despite his own aches and pains, a gritty Cora filled in for Reyes at shortstop for as long as he could. When the Mets finally put Cora on the disabled list Tuesday, it was the 20th time they used the DL this season (among 18 players), the most of any major league club at that point, according to the commissioner’s office.
With his team a medical mess, spiritual manager Jerry Manuel has had to get creative just fielding a competitive lineup.
“Challenging. Tremendously challenging,” Manuel said. “From a biblical standpoint you always ask for patience, but in Greek that means long suffering. Basically that’s what we’ve been doing right now.
“At the same time, you ask for a Gideon’s type army and my goodness that’s what we’ve got here. We have some things that have really, really stacked up against us. But I would say for me personally, as difficult as it has been, it has been a growing experience as well. Growing in the sense that you just have to manage a lot differently than you anticipated coming in. As painful as that has been, it’s been growth.”
Entering the season, the confident Mets were a National League favorite.
The additions of Putz and closer Francisco Rodriguez appeared to fix a terrible bullpen that led to the team’s second consecutive September collapse last year. Many thought general manager Omar Minaya had finally found the right mix.
Indeed, Sports Illustrated even picked the Mets to win the World Series.
But they got off to a foreboding start at $800 million Citi Field when San Diego’s Jody Gerut teed off on Mike Pelfrey, becoming the first batter to christen a big league ballpark with a leadoff home run.
All year long, the Mets have found amazin’ ways to lose: Daniel Murphy dropped a fly ball in left field, Ryan Church missed third base while rounding the bag, Castillo flubbed Alex Rodriguez’s ninth-inning popup at Yankee Stadium.
No doubt, this has been one of the most maddening seasons in the 48-year history of a franchise plenty familiar with maddening failure.
“It’s not what we expected. When we started from spring training we felt we had a good team that would be able to compete,” Minaya said. “I don’t know what to chalk it up to. The bottom line is, we haven’t executed, either.”
All the injuries have exposed the Mets as a top-heavy organization that lacks depth in several areas. However, it’s hard to imagine any team prospering with the sort of injuries New York has endured.
That’s why some think the depleted Mets have been criticized unfairly while sliding to fourth place in the NL East this summer.
“You took the All-Star team away,” reliever Billy Wagner said. “If that was Pittsburgh, no big deal. But here, the wheels fell off.”
Still, with the Mets poised to miss the playoffs for the third straight season, Minaya’s job could be in jeopardy. He was in the middle of a front-office fiasco last month when the club fired one of his friends and top lieutenants, vice president of player development Tony Bernazard, for a series of publicized blowups.
At a bizarre news conference to announce the move, Minaya questioned the motives and credibility of a beat reporter who wrote several damaging stories about Bernazard, saying Adam Rubin of the Daily News had “lobbied” Mets executives for a job in player development.
Rubin insisted he had merely sought career advice, an explanation that was backed up by Mets chief operating officer Jeff Wilpon. Minaya later apologized.
After last season, Minaya was given a three-year contract extension that runs through 2012, a deal that contains club options covering 2013 and 2014.
On opening day, the Mets had the second-highest payroll in the majors, behind the crosstown rival Yankees.
“The bottom line is, when you’re the general manager of the team, you take full responsibility for how the team performs or how the team goes,” Minaya said. “I’m still in a day-to-day mode. I’m focused just on doing my job today.”
And trying to stay healthy.