PORT ST. LUCIE — The bottomless repertoire of smiles, grimaces and facial tics is in mid-season form.

Bobby Valentine is ready to play ball.

Everything is intact: The smile that looks like it belongs to a tetanus patient, the batting eyelashes, the

cock of the head, the pursed lips as he waits for a questioner to finish, and the furrowed brow that he affects when he wants to appear oh-so-interested in what someone else has to say.

Then, the eyes narrow, the wheels spin, the lips move. The words come out.

And at least half the time, I have no idea what he is talking about.

In case you were wondering, and worrying about it, success hasn’t changed the Mets’ micro-manager.

His post-game interview sessions should still be conducted from an analyst’s couch rather than a manager’s swivel chair.

Perhaps that is what happens to a man whose team comes within two wins of the World Series and still has to manage for his job.

Then again, Valentine has always seemed to be on the verge of some kind of breakdown, whether times are good or bad, happy or sad.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. As the man himself would probably tell you, there’s a fine line between genius and madness and Valentine seems to talk it as nimbly as Karl Wallenda once walked a high-wire.

And it isn’t so bad for the people who have to cover him, either. Sportswriters as a rule are sedentary, even lazy individuals. Valentine works us out as he works us over. After interviewing him for five minutes, my mind always feels as if it had just completed the Ironman Triathlon.

Years ago, another Mets manager affected a similar style. They called it Stengelese, and it was all a shtick concocted to entertain the press and take some of the spotlight off what was a dreadful team.

But BobbySpeak is something altogether different, a unique language designed to confound, confuse and ultimately discourage the questioner from probing too far into areas Valentine is trying to protect.

It worked yesterday with poor Charlie Hayes. Coming off the field, he asked Valentine a simple question: Am I going to make this team?

By the time Valentine got through explaining all the nuances and factors and peccadilloes that go into his daily decision-making process, Hayes was done packing his bags.

“I tried to be as honest as I could,” Valentine said. “I didn’t think that was gonna send him packing or I would have been less honest.”

Ah, but then he would not have been Valentine.

There are no yes-or-no questions in Valentine’s world, and the simplest post-game inquiry — something along the lines of, “So, what did you think of Dawkins’ performance today?” become merry journeys of circumlocution with a definite beginning, a somewhat indistinct middle and no real ending.

But that does not mean he is being dishonest. It just means that truly, the guy never knows precisely what he’s thinking or where he is going at any particular moment.

So it was yesterday after the Mets beat the Indians, 4-2, behind a starting pitching performance from Glendon Rusch that at the very least should have qualified him as the (temporary) front-runner for the last real job to be won in this camp, that of the fifth starter in the rotation.

In fact, it would seem safe to say that today’s start by Bill Pulsipher will determine whether Pulse is Generation K or Generation Kaput.

But nothing is ever that simple around here. “I really don’t think it’s totally results oriented,” Valentine said, before agreeing that “Bill’s performance tomorrow, not necessarily the results, but the last impression of him as a pitcher, will, uh …”

Will what, Bobby?

Only Bobby knows. Then again, it might not matter what Pulsipher does today, because what he has done so far — 0-2, 6.55 ERA — does not compare favorably with Rusch’s 1-0, 3.24, no matter what language you speak.

Valentine may have been saying something like that when he observed, “I don’t know if one performance is going to negate a lot of thoughts we have building in our minds.”

That might mean Pulsipher will be picking up his mail in Norfolk come next week even if he strikes out 27 Dodgers this afternoon.

Then again, Valentine might be inclined to cut Pulsipher some slack considering the guy almost dropped dead in his bathroom the second week of spring training.

“I really thought there would be some kind of consensus early on to, uh, just go with one person,” Valentine said, “But I think there were some kind of extenuating circumstances that changed the schedule. … “

The “extenuating circumstances,” it was determined, were Pulsipher’s near-catastrophic reaction to (official explanation): a combination of Prozac, a prescription medication for arthritis, an over-the-counter weight-loss supplement and skipping breakfast.

In any event, Rusch made his last spring training start yesterday. Pulsipher is about to make his today and seems to need a Koufax-like performance to stay in the hunt.

And yet, only Valentine knows all the factors that are going into this very difficult decision.

Valentine then went into an arcane but incredibly detailed explanation of the options open to the Mets as far as taking (or not taking) the fifth starter (whoever that turns out to be) to Japan, where the team will open the season against the Cubs on March 29.

The Japan trip, of course, is posing its own unique set of problems for the Mets. In preparation for the body-clock shock to come, Valentine has had clocks set up throughout the clubhouse set to Tokyo time.

“I did that so guys would start to understand that there is a difference,” he said. “When you get on that plane and you look out that window and it never gets dark because you’re chasing the sun, it’s weird, disorienting.

“It’s a different feeling, it really is.”

Kind of like trying to get a straight answer out of Bobby Valentine.