Brooklyn and Queens are on the same island, which means Wally Backman can feel the tremors from out east.

The New York Mets, his old team, are having a stinker of a season — another stinker, that is to say — but the Brooklyn Cyclones, Backman’s current team, are winning two-thirds of their games.

Backman knows how things work in New York, the back-page frenzy, Bring Back Wally — right onto the Belt Parkway to Pennsylvania Avenue to the Jackie Robinson Parkway (which, some of us, with all due respect to that great man, still call the Inta-boro).

But this is the new and mature Wally Backman.

Never mind the dirt and the bats and the invective he heaved at an umpire Saturday; “he said something I didn’t like,” Backman explained.

Wally is officially not going there — the subject of the Mets job.

“I have a job,” he said. At other times, he said, “There are 30 jobs.” And at other times he said, “I don’t want to take anybody’s job.”

He seems profoundly grateful for this job, managing the Single-A farm team of the Mets, in the sweet little stadium the city financed and the Wilpons (the family who owns the Mets) built in Coney Island in the sacred borough of Brooklyn.

“Jeff Wilpon called me back. He didn’t have to,” Backman said.

Backman has a job, after the detour in November 2004 when the Arizona Diamondbacks rescinded his first major-league managing job when that organization discovered (duh) that Backman had separate convictions for drunken driving and domestic disturbance — “two bad days in my life,” he puts it.

He can explain. He is still married after 15 years. And he says the disturbance was more with a neighbor than his wife. But mostly he is concerned with showing that he is now only slightly crazy, somewhat the same fiery-eyed Waldo who helped put runners on base for Keith Hernandez and the rest during the ’80s.

He was a digger and an agitator and he wants to pass on the best part of his game to his players, hardly any of whom were even born when Mookie’s grounder slithered past Buckner’s withered ankles. (It’s always fun to type those words.)

Darrell Ceciliani, just turned 20, was a lefty power hitter back home in Central Oregon (Madras, not far from Backman’s longtime offseason home in Prineville), but in his first batting practice in Brooklyn, he felt the offshore gale blowing in from right field, straight from Iceland, and decided he might have to place the ball.

“I never bunted at all,” Ceciliani said. “It was tough at first, but he (Backman) kept working with me.”

Ceciliani learned how to push a bunt down the third-base line, messing with the fielders’ minds, and on opening night he ignited a late rally. He is now batting about .390, leading the New York-Penn League. No homers but about 10 bunt hits.

The Cyclone players know little about the Mets of 1986, but they have poked around on the Internet and know that Backman is teaching his own top-of-the-order scrappiness.

“He’s real loose, he wants us to have a good time, but only after we get our work done,” said Rylan Sandoval, about to turn 23, out of Castro Valley, Calif. “He likes us to be real aggressive, play every day like it was our last game.”

Backman is not living in the past. He managed in higher minor leagues before the debacle in Arizona and openly wants to manage in the big leagues. But for now he is in a familiar place: When the Mets called him up in 1980, he actually lived off Flatbush Avenue with a minor-league teammate who gave him a tour of Coney Island.

This New York landmark is a strange place for the revival of a career. The old amusement park twinkles behind left field, one can imagine lush syllables of Russian from the adjacent enclave of Brighton Beach, and a few graceful sailboats and prosaic freighters pass offshore. It is funky, familiar Coney Island, reminding me of the Jerry Garcia-Robert Hunter song “Mission in the Rain,” about the Mission district of San Francisco: “No matter what comes down, the Mission always looks the same.” Maybe a perfect way station for Wally Backman.

Brooklyn is joined at the hip with Queens. The kids on the team laugh at the loving but demanding patois of the fans, the emotional highs and lows, which, Backman assures them, is exactly the same as in the home office in the next borough. The Cyclones are in first place. Backman hopes that he can keep his kids through the season, that they won’t be moved up.

Right now, it does not look as if the Mets are going to do anything as this season skitters down the drain. Jerry Manuel, nice man, has never quite shucked his aura of interim manager since Willie Randolph, Brooklyn guy, got submarined. (Odd coincidence: Backman was dismissed by the Chicago White Sox organization for lobbying for Manuel’s job in 2003.)

Let’s face it: Somebody else is going to be managing the Mets next year. I’ve felt all along that Bobby Valentine had a second act in Queens someday, but Bobby V would require money, patience and a sense of humor, and I do not sense the ownership is long on any of that.

But the Wilpons have done something very decent in hiring one of the team’s grittier icons to manage kids. They could have ducked Backman, but they embraced him, and the Cyclones were 30-14 through Monday night. Wally Backman could have, should have, been a manager five years ago, but for his own indiscretions. He is earning that second chance, somewhere. Maybe even at the other end of the Inta-boro.