Sandy Alderson was named general manager of the New York Mets Oct. 29, 2010, but there’s not a whole lot of evidence that he has shown up for work.

Last Tuesday, in an attempt to find out if Alderson actually had a desk at Citi Field, I called the telephone number listed for him in the Mets’ directory. A woman answered and said Alderson wasn’t in, but she took my name and number.

When he hadn’t called two days later and I still wasn’t convinced that Alderson was employed by the Mets, I called Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ vice president for media relations, and asked him if Alderson really worked for the Mets.

When Horwitz asked why I was asking and I told him, he laughed. Yes, he actually laughed. I thought it was a remarkably upbeat response. The Mets, after all, had just suffered a three-game sweep by the Cubs in which they scored one run.

“He does work here,” Horwitz said.

I was skeptical of Alderson’s status because I had trouble believing that any general manager would leave his team floundering in an abyss of abysmal offense in which the Mets wallow.

The Mets and their fans rave about their pitching, which is very good, but offensively the Mets are impotent. I think they plunged to the nadir of their season with their nearly scoreless sweep by the Cubs. They may score more runs in the second half of the season than they did against the Cubs – they couldn’t score fewer – but I believe they are on the down side of their season. The fans have seen their best days of 2015.

Alderson, the phantom general manager, has to know that. Yet he has taken no steps toward fortifying the offense, which despite fan thinking was never that of a contender.

The tipoff to pending problems was Alderson’s signing last winter of Michael Cuddyer. The Mets treated that $21 million free-agent acquisition as the answer to their offensive shortage, but they were unrealistic if not disingenuous.

Cuddyer was someone who could fill a hole that existed at the middle or lower end of the production line. He was not going to be the head hitter. Daniel Murphy has driven in one more run than Cuddyer in 14 fewer games.

Now what do the Mets do? Speculation has risen that they will fire manager Terry Collins. Why would they do that? Because Collins has lost his magic wand that he should be using to produce runs? The source of the Mets’ absence of scoring goes directly to the front office, not the manager’s officer. Collins can’t make chicken salad out of chicken excrement.

There’s no indication Alderson will do much of anything. This would be a good time to promote top-ranking prospects from the minor league system, as other clubs have, but the Mets don’t have that kind of merchandise on their shelves.

Two players who were selected in Alderson’s first four drafts, catcher Kevin Plawecki and relief pitcher Logan Verrett, are with the Mets. Another reliever, Jack Leathersich, appeared in 17 games for the Mets earlier this season. No other player drafted in the Alderson regime has played in the majors.

When Alderson’s predecessor, Omar Minaya, was fired following the 2010 season, he departed with the criticism that he left the Mets with a barren farm system. The critics apparently didn’t know the definition of the word.

Fourteen of the 25 players who were on the Mets’ major league roster this past weekend began their major league careers in the Mets’ barren farm system. That group includes four of the five starting pitchers, the closer, the entire starting infield and the starting center fielder.

Starting pitchers:

• Matt Harvey                1^st round 2010
• Jacob deGrom             9^th round 2010
• Steven Matz                2^nd round 2009
• Jonathan Niese            5^th round 2005

Closer

• Jeurys Familia             non-drafted free agent 2007

Infield

• 1B Lucas Duda           7^th round 2007
• 2B Wilmer Flores        non-drafted free agent 2006
• SS Ruben Tejada        non-drafted free agent 2007
• 3B Daniel Murphy      13^th round 2006

Outfield

• CF Juan Lagares         non-drafted free agent 2006

Before Dillon Gee was bumped from the starting rotation, he was another product of the Minaya years, a 21^st round pick in the 2007 draft.

“We drafted those guys,” Minaya said modestly last Friday, “but they did a big part of getting those guys up there.”

Two players whom Minaya signed as free agents, R.A. Dickey and Carlos Beltran, were central figures in Alderson trades. Noah Syndergaard, who was summoned to join the starting rotation, came to the Mets in a trade with Toronto for Dickey. Zach Wheeler, who is out this year following elbow reconstruction surgery, had been expected to start after the Mets got him by trading Beltran to San Francisco.

Alderson’s other major acquisitions have been Bartolo Colon and Curtis Granderson as free agents.

Here, though, is another move Alderson made. Two years ago he traded a 26-year-old pitcher to the Rockies for Eric Young, who played the rest of the season for the Mets and batted an insignificant .251. After that season, 2013, the Rockies put Collin McHugh on waivers and the Astros claimed him.

The Mets, under Minaya, had selected McHugh in the 18^th round of the 2008 draft. He pitched briefly for the Mets in 2012 and ’13 and emerged from 11 games with an 8.26 earned run average.

Pitching for the Astros last year, he had an 11-9 record and 2.73 e.r.a. This year he has a 9-4 record and 4.54 e.r.a. in 17 starts.

Nearly five years after Alderson’s arrival, the Mets remain Minaya’s legacy, like them or not. If you don’t like it, ask what Alderson has been doing for most of five years.

He has one excuse, not that he has been using it, but he became general manager in the aftermath of Bernie Madoff’s historic financial fraud scheme, which crippled the Mets.

The scheme prevented the Mets from signing expensive free agents, but it shouldn’t have undermined their ability to find and sign moderately priced free agents the way Alderson’s protégé, Billy Beane, did in Oakland.

Minaya spent a lot of money on Beltran, Pedro Martinez and Johan Santana, but he also acquired inexpensive, useful players such as Dickey, Jose Valentin and Fernando Tatis. Alderson and his staff have not found and signed that type of player to get them through lean times.

Alderson has not offered any explanations for his failure to improve the team. The Mets have a terrific set of pitchers. Any team in the majors would be happy to have them. But they need offensive support. They can’t be expected to win games constantly 1-0 and 2-1. It puts unbearable pressure on the pitchers.

Entering Sunday’s games, the Mets had a team batting average of .232, lowest in the league and 8 points lower than the next lowest average (San Diego).

In their 82 games, they have scored no runs in 9 games, 1 run 11 games and 2 runs 10 times, a total of 30 games in which they had scored fewer than 3 runs.

Last week the Mets scored one run in losing three games to the Cubs. They won their next game despite scoring only two runs against the Dodgers. They didn’t score any runs in the first seven innings in the next game, then scored three in the final two innings.

By the start of Sunday’s games, the Mets had fallen 4 ½ games behind Washington. They were also behind the Pirates, the Cubs and the Giants and were only half a game ahead of the Braves and the Diamondbacks among wild-card contenders.

As of the posting of this column, I have not heard from Alderson. “He went on the trip,” Horwitz had said, referring to the Mets’ West Coast trip. “I’ll tell him you’re trying to reach him.”

I can only guess Alderson was too busy making a list of ways he would not try to improve the Mets. That’s all he seems to have done so far.

MIXED BAG OF OFFENSE

Make of it what you want, but scoring is down slightly this season and home runs are up. Those mid-season developments are what we see in numbers provided by Elias Sports Bureau. Those numbers will not please Major League Baseball, which has been concerned by the declining offense.

Through June 30 this season, scoring was down compared with an equivalent number of games from last season, 8.32 runs per game to 8.25. However, home runs were up from 1.80 per games to 1.91.

In two other aspects of the offense, walks and strikeouts were both down, walks from 6.08 per game 5.68 and strikeouts from 15.46 per games to 15.17.

If nothing else, the numbers should please the commissioner’s office in one way. With 431 fewer walks and 253 fewer strikeouts, pitchers should be throwing fewer pitches. That, in turn, should speed up the pace of the game, which baseball has been trying to do.

DIPOTO DOES HIMSELF IN

The departure last week of Jerry Dipoto as general manager of the Angels was generally believed to be the result of an intramural fight over analytics between Dipoto and Mike Scioscia, who in his 16^th season is the longest running manager in Major League Baseball.

According to the popular version of Dipoto’s departure, the fourth-year general manager felt Scioscia was not making proper use of the computer data he was given and was not passing it on to the players.

This would not be the first time general managers and managers would fight over a difference between the new – statistical analysis – and the old – scouting and managerial instinct. However, I have an official who tells me that wasn’t the fight at all.

“It wasn’t over statistical analysis,” he said.

The fight, he said, was over Dipoto’s desire to have his job be a more traditional general manager’s job with all of the authority a traditional manager has. The trouble in Anaheim was the owner, Arte Moreno, gave Scioscia a great deal of authority and that conflicted with what Dipoto wanted.

Dipoto went to Moreno to try to get what he wanted, the official said, and Moreno backed Scioscia.

“The owner gave Mike a lot of authority,” the official said. “Scioscia has more input than most managers. The owner gave him a 10-year contract. The manager’s been there a long time. He has the players’ support. The owner has an investment in the manager. He’s an active owner.”

Moreno is certainly that as well as a lot of other things.