Ken Griffey Jr. gets a bad rap.

At least that’s what he thinks.

As he suffers through yet another injury-riddled season, the 32-year-old Griffey still can’t believe how he has been treated.

“It’s like people are blaming me for getting hurt,” Griffey said before his Reds played the Mets at Shea last night.

It was Griffey’s third game back since returning from his second stint on the DL this year. Most recently, Griffey had a strained right hamstring. He also missed time with a torn right patella tendon before that.

“Every time I get hurt, it’s on the field,” he said. “It’s not like I’m doing something I shouldn’t.”

Yet instead of being glorified as potentially greatest player ever, as he was when he played for the Mariners, Griffey is now portrayed as a grumpy young man, and his popularity has suffered.

He seemed to be trying to repair some of that image by being unusually friendly with reporters yesterday. Griffey was still smarting from a poll taken in Cincinnati earlier in the year in which fans voted overwhelmingly that the Reds would be better off without him.

“When a guy is hurt, how can you do that?” said Griffey, who was hitting just .256 with two homers and five RBIs.

“How can you have him in a poll when he can’t take the field to defend himself? That’s all I said. But everyone thought I was bad-mouthing them and the team.”

Griffey did nothing to hide his displeasure at the time, and thinks he is held to a different standard by the media than other stars are.

“Would they have [a poll] like that for [Derek] Jeter, [Mark] McGwire, [Barry] Bonds, [Nomar] Garciaparra?” Griffey asked. “No, they wouldn’t. I just care about being the best player I can be.”

Even if he manages to stay healthy – a significant question since Griffey has missed 149 games over the past two seasons due to various injuries – he believes that he will remain in a bad light.

“If a player comes back and has a solid second half and the team does badly, then you ruined the chemistry,” Griffey said of the upstart Reds, who entered last night’s game one game ahead of the Mets in the wild-card race, trailing the Dodgers and Giants.

“There’s no upside to it. People could have just focused on how well the guys were doing without me when nobody gave us a chance. But everyone likes to focus on the negative.”

And there’s plenty of that to talk about. Griffey opted to skip the team’s meeting with union head Donald Fehr last night due to what he said was “a prior commitment.”

Despite not showing up, Griffey said he was a aware of what has been going on in the negotiations.

“I’ve already been through two lockouts and a strike,” Griffey said. “I hope this strike thing doesn’t happen and that we don’t have to deal with this.

“I don’t want to spend the last part of summer at home. I spend enough time at home.”