There’s a little bit of randomness involved in landing a franchise player. The Mariners and Braves had to be bad enough to “earn” the no. 1 pick the seasons immediately before Ken Griffey Jr. and Chipper Jones became draft-eligible. Five teams passed on Derek Jeter before the Yankees selected him in 1992. Twenty-one teams took someone not named Mike Trout before he was picked by the Angels in 2009.

For the Mets, the task of developing iconic players has been less about random quirks and more about bumping into an accidental tourist.

It was twice as likely Tom Seaver, who originally signed with the Braves but was ruled a free agent due to a technicality, would end up with someone else — the Indians or Phillies — as with the Mets when commissioner William Eckert picked a name out of a hat in 1966. David Wright, the only Mets star to play his entire career with the team, was selected with a draft pick the Mets got as compensation after Mike Hampton signed with the Rockies as a free agent. Jacob deGrom, who has a chance to match Wright’s feat, was a ninth-round draft pick who didn’t reach the majors until he was almost 26 and, as someone who possesses a Seaver-esque pursuit of perfection and intolerance for fools, spent most of the first two years of his long-term deal looking like the less happy partner in an arranged marriage.

But no Mets icon was discovered as accidentally as Mike Piazza, who still seems bemused by the sequence of events in 1998 that brought him to New York and convinced him to stay.

“When I sort of surrendered, I guess, for lack of a better word, that I was meant to be here and that I had to see this through, then I felt like this is something I wanted to do,” Piazza said during a Zoom call Monday afternoon.

Not exactly the most romantic of back stories, is it? But Piazza’s status as the Mets’ most visible ambassador and generation-spanning representative as well as the sight of him making his annual visit to spring training — albeit in later fashion and for a shorter period of time than usual due to the pandemic — served as a reminder he might soon be the link to an era in which Mets icons are actually cultivated instead of stumbled upon.

The acquisition of Francisco Lindor on Jan. 7 marked the biggest trade and biggest risk the Mets have made since the Piazza blockbuster. Lindor, who turned 27 in November, has registered a WAR of 28.7 per Baseball-Reference.com, more than at least four modern Hall of Fame shortstops — Derek Jeter, Barry Larkin, Ozzie Smith and Alan Trammell — registered through their age-26 seasons.

Like Piazza a generation ago, Lindor was also acquired months before he was scheduled to become a free agent with the inference the Mets better re-sign him and make worthwhile the risk they took by sending a bushel of prospects to a rebuilding franchise.

Lindor established an Opening Day deadline to get an extension done, but with under a week to go before the Mets are scheduled to play the Nationals, there doesn’t seem to be the nervous energy bordering on panic that surrounded Piazza during his first four months with the team.

Some of that is a byproduct of the calendar. Lindor was acquired in the off-season and got to ease into his new environment during spring training, albeit one taking place during a pandemic.

“Seems like he has such a good head on his shoulders,” Piazza said. “My only advice to him is just go out and play. We used to say when I played: Players play, coaches coach, managers manage, writers write. You just do your job and try not to get too wrapped up. I think all of us are human, so we kind of all want to know where we’re going to be (and) kind of want to have control of our destiny.”

Piazza landed with the Mets on May 22, 1998 following several months of chaos. First his relationship with the Dodgers had to be damaged beyond repair before the Dodgers traded him not to one of the many teams that could have used a Hall of Fame-bound catcher but the rebuilding Marlins.

Piazza spent seven days with the Marlins, a span in which Mets co-owner Fred Wilpon called into WFAN’s “Mike and the Mad Dog” to declare the team had no interest in acquiring Piazza — the Mets were expecting All-Star Todd Hundley to return shortly from Tommy John surgery — before his fellow co-owner and bitter rival Nelson Doubleday called in to say the Mets in fact should get Piazza. Public sentiment was decidedly on Doubleday’s side, and since the Wilpons obsessed over winning the daily news cycle, Piazza became a Met.

In Piazza’s first day with the Mets, he had to catch the grunting, demonstrative, pitch count-climbing and cut fastball-throwing Al Leiter. It didn’t get much easier from there for Piazza, who was booed while hitting barely .200 with runners in scoring position over his first two-plus months with the Mets. Piazza grew so sullen and withdrawn that teammates and executives alike were convinced he’d leave as a free agent.

But after leading the Mets within an eyelash of a wild card berth, Piazza surrendered to his fate and signed a seven-year deal days before he would have hit free agency in October 1998, a move that validated the Mets’ decision to trade for him and established for the franchise a window of championship contention.

Almost a quarter-century later, an inability to sign Lindor will not be a damning indictment of the Mets’ willingness to make big-ticket purchases nor of the top-heavy, all-or-nothing nature of their short-term plans. In just a few months under Steve Cohen, the Mets have proven aggressive — almost foolishly so, when it came to pursuing Trevor Bauer — in attempting to build a team commensurate with the market in which it plays.

While renewing the contracts of pre-arbitration stars Pete Alonso and Jeff McNeil wasn’t the greatest of good-faith moves, the apparent willingness of Cohen to spend a fraction of his billions on maintaining the Mets’ roster carries with it the possibility of the Mets no longer having to carefully pick and choose which of their homegrown players they’ll retain once they hit the big money years.

If the next Mets icon isn’t Lindor, maybe it’s Alonso, McNeil, Michael Conforto. Brandon Nimmo or Dominic Smith following in the footsteps of Wright and, it appears, deGrom.

Or maybe the Mets have at least half as many franchise icons on their roster now as they did in the last 59 seasons.

“If it’s meant to be, he’s going to be here,” said Piazza, the link to an era in which the Mets had to hope a franchise player landed in their laps and decided it was fated.