Shea Stadium and environs have been an accountability-free zone for years, one of baseball’s closer analogues to the sort of municipal agency where a dead man can draw overtime for years at a clip without anyone noticing. So it was no surprise at all last night when ESPN’s Buster Olney reported, just minutes before the first pitch of the most important game the Mets have yet played this year, that general manager Omar Minaya had agreed to a four-year contract extension.

Minaya, his many other failings aside, is still breathing, and so it was essentially a given that he would be back next year and for many more to come. The Mets have failed to entirely fail this year — as has been asserted in this space, the fact that they’re still playing relevant games is in itself a sort of victory — and, given long-established Queens precedent, that was clearly going to be enough to save his job whether or not the Mets died a gruesome, miserable, choking death down the stretch.

Resigned as one can be to the world being as it is, though, it’s still worth noting that there are only two possible reasons why Mets brass would extend their top capo even as his team — largely due to his bad judgment in such areas as signing a lot of ancient players and assembling a bullpen full of nothing but situational relievers — verged on kicking away a playoff spot for the third time in four years. Neither should give fans much hope.

The first possibility is that the Dolan Wilpon family, having assayed the landscape, truly believes that Minaya is the single most qualified man to lead the Mets into a brave, successful future. This would imply that they hold the man’s achievements, such as signing Carlos Beltran and trading for Johan Santana, in such high regard that they feel no need at all even to talk to such rising executives as Cleveland’s Chris Antonetti, Boston’s Jed Hoyer and Ben Cherington, Logan White of the Los Angeles Dodgers, or San Diego’s Paul DePodesta, to see what they might do with the Mets’ vast resources of cash and player talent.

The second possibility is that Mets brass, having thought things through, is not wholly convinced that Minaya is the single most qualified person on the entire planet for the job. This would imply an acceptance of the idea that among the many assistant general managers, vice presidents of player personnel, former general managers, scouting directors and so on, there may be at least one person whose idea of how to run a winning club extends past running out a bunch of MVP candidates with whatever players happen to be laying around and hoping for the best. It would also imply acquiescence to the idea that qualities other than being the best person for the job matter, not just a little but a lot.

I’ll leave it to the angry Mets fan to decide which of these would be more dispiriting, but neither would reflect very well on those willing to sign their name next to Minaya’s.

That being so, there is a positive side to the idea of a Minaya extension. This space has argued for years that baseball is such a complicated game, influenced so much by chance, that the only way to fairly judge a field manager or an executive is by the process, not the result. You can make the right decisions again and again in baseball and get no reward at all for them; equally so, you can make hare-brained calls over and over and get playoff spots as your reward.

To extend Minaya right now, at the very moment when it’s least clear whether his work will end in hard-earned playoff games or disaster, is whatever else it might be, an endorsement of his methods. It’s an acknowledgment that no matter how successful the year, it was at least handled as well as could be.

I’m not sure I buy that claim. In areas ranging from his inability to find a reliever capable of pitching a full inning at a time to his inexplicable reluctance to call up minor league slugger Val Pascucci to the surreal fiasco that was the firing of Willie Randolph, Minaya hasn’t covered himself in glory this year. At the same time, though, he’s hardly embarrassed himself, and granting that many of his problems were of his own making, he’s done well in maneuvering around a lot of them.

From larding the bench with young talent to refusing to give up on Carlos Delgado to vesting trust in manager Jerry Manuel, Minaya has, under real pressure, made decisions that have his team in the race down to the last week, and however the season ends, he deserves credit for that. Does he deserve so much credit that he shouldn’t have been made to compete for his own job? That’s a difficult question to answer. At least at press time, though, it didn’t seem to be a relevant one. Thanks Charles and Jim Fred and Jeff for that.

tmarchman@nysun.com