Look, the Mets aren’t going to apologize for the National League, OK? Neither are the Nationals. Neither are the Cubs. Neither are any of the haves who will spend all summer massacring have-nots and ultimately battling each other for the right to emerge from a 15-team league that sure feels, most nights, like a 6½-team league.

This much is clear: The Mets need to do precisely what they’ve done for the last six games — and exactly what they couldn’t do in the first six games they played at Citi Field this year, a 2-4 slog against the Phillies (much better, so far, than we thought they’d be; ask the Nats) and the Marlins (almost exactly what we thought they’d be).

They finished off a three-game sweep against the Reds by, essentially, showing up, standing upright and not falling asleep. This time the score was 5-2, and it was a second straight win for Matt Harvey, who threw a little bit harder and a little bit better than he has been, but is still more a beige pawn than a Dark Knight at this point.

Against the Reds and a lineup consisting of about 3½ major-league hitters? He probably could have pitched six strong innings left-handed.

“I think we have a chance to be a good team,” Terry Collins said.

The roster is set up that way. And so is the league. There are so many fundamentally awful teams in the National League that it’s hard to envision any of the contenders — for argument’s sake, let’s say the Mets, Nats, Cubs, Pirates, Dodgers, Cards (maybe) and Giants (maybe) — going on anything close to an extended losing streak because a terrible team handily shows up on their schedule almost every week.

Look at the Mets: They get three varsity games against the Giants this weekend at Citi, and while they haven’t been great so far, this IS an even-numbered year — and even if the Mets lose two out of three, or worse, and start to mutter to themselves, guess what? The Braves — who are plainly putrid — follow the Giants in. And then the Mets get four with the Padres, who are barely competitive.

Again: The Mets needn’t apologize for this, because all the contenders have the same goodies hidden on their schedules, too. In fact, what’s become clear simply looking at the NL East is that as intriguing as the 19 games the Nats and Mets will play with each other ought to be, the teams are so evenly matched, it’s hard to see one team having more than a 10-9 or 11-8 advantage.

That means the division will be decided on who can bludgeon the tomato cans with more efficiency. And we’ve already seen the stakes. The Nats jumped out to a five-game lead because they were able to crush an early-season feast of games against the Braves, Twins and Phillies, while the Mets scuffled early against their first set of gimmes.

Now the Mets have all but caught up already, sitting only a game out as dawn breaks Thursday, because they have clobbered the Phillies, Braves and Reds while the Nats have stumbled two straight nights against the Phillies.

Now this is baseball, of course, and so there will be a batch of games that seem winnable — un-lose-able is maybe the better term — and strange stuff will happen. Look, the Braves are going to win 50 games against somebody. So in an odd way, as the season progresses, there might actually be more pressure for the good teams attached to the games they play against the dregs.

The Nats can explain losing to the Mets, after all, or the Cubs. But the Brewers? The Reds? The Rockies?

Those losses, you can see, will almost count for two. It’s crazy. It’s nuts. But hey: Welcome to the National League in 2016, where the promise of prosperity lies in pulverizing the poor. No, no apologies are necessary. Just show up, don’t fall down, don’t snooze, and take care of business. It ain’t pretty. Nobody ever said it had to be.