Carlos Beltran will appear on the season premiere of Mets Hot Stove tomorrow at 7 p.m. on SNY.

Kevin Burkhardt will be back as host of the show. He’ll be joined by Newsday’s David Lennon, WFAN’s Ed Coleman, and Jon Heyman.

The series premiere of Mets Yearbook will follow at 7:30, featuring the Mets’ 1971 season in review. The show contains Old Timers’ Day footage of Satchel Paige pitching, which I’m guessing is awesome.

Video from Mets Hot Stove will be available shortly after the show on SNY.tv.

A lot of the offseason hubbub so far has suggested that the Mets will pursue free-agent second basemen, assuming, of course, they can find a taker for Luis Castillo.

That’s fine, I suppose, though I wonder if signing Orlando Hudson to a multi-year deal would be more akin to repeating the Luis Castillo mistake than undoing it.

There’s also talk the Mets could pursue Chone Figgins partly because of his ability to play second base, but though Figgins is a tremendous defensive third baseman, he hasn’t played more than nine games at second in a season since 2005 and even back then, in a small sample, he wasn’t overwhelmingly good at it.

And paying Figgins the rate he deserves as a Gold Glove-caliber third baseman just to move him to a corner outfield position, where his bat would be below-average, would be a blisteringly bad decision. He’s a good player, but a lot of his value is wrapped up in his versatility and strong defense at third. Planting him in left field absorbs most of that value.

The most baffling thing, I think, is that I have yet to see a single journalist link the Mets to Felipe Lopez. Maybe I’m missing something, but Lopez was actually better than Hudson this year and is two and a half years younger.

He’s been inconsistent across his career, which could scare the Mets off, but his only really terrible year at the plate came in 2007, when his BABIP was .036 below his career average. That means he was probably a bit unlucky.

I’m not advocating Lopez for the Mets, I’m just noting how surprising it is that his name hasn’t come up. If they actually can part with Castillo and Lopez’s demands are lower than Hudson’s, he seems — on the surface, at least — like a smarter pickup.

Adam Rubin wrote today that the Mets hope to re-sign Alex Cora, a player who probably inspires five times as much debate around this office as anyone else.

This debate, I should mention, almost always features me.

So much was made about what Alex Cora brought to the Mets’ clubhouse this year, and I’m not going to argue otherwise. By all accounts, he’s a nice guy and a smart player and will make a great coach someday.

The problem is he’s not very good at baseball anymore.

Cora played much of 2009 with torn ligaments in his thumbs, which might excuse the .630 OPS he posted in over 300 plate appearances. The problem is, that line is not really that far off Cora’s career .658 mark, and unsurprising given the expected decline of a 33-year-old player.

Moreover, depending on which metric you prefer, Cora played somewhere between average and below-average defense at second base and shortstop. To the eye, he demonstrated a lack of range that likely affected the Mets’ groundball pitchers like Mike Pelfrey and Sean Green.

The co-worker with whom I usually engage in this debate argues that Cora’s deficiencies on the field are more than made up for by his additions to the clubhouse, and claims that to build a winning team, the Mets need more character guys like Alex Cora.

Far be it for me to say a team doesn’t need character guys, but if it does, it should be able to acquire ones who are above replacement-level. And Cora isn’t.

I like to believe that, on a good and successful ballclub, character guys will surface and in nearly any group dynamic, leaders will emerge. In other words, I don’t think a team should be in the business of acquiring leaders or clubhouse guys. I think the team should focus on acquiring the 25 best players it can to fill out its roster rather than building a team on what Theo Epstein might call “psychobabble.”

If Alex Cora could be had at the league minimum, then sure, why not? He could be a helpful guy to have around during Spring Training and if he could prove he merited a spot on the roster, great.

But Alex Cora will not be had at the league minimum, and that’s the problem. Cora cost the Mets $2 million last season, and the Mets — as Rubin points out — are operating with a finite budget.

Every time I post this criticism, someone jumps down my throat and argues that $2 million is a drop in the Mets’ payroll bucket and should not be the difference between signing a bigger-name free agent or not.

Maybe that’s so, but consistently dropping $2 million on players of Cora’s caliber, ones that could by definition be replaced by someone earning the league minimum, adds up. It does. I know we all want the Mets to be able to spend like the Yankees, but until they do, we need to root for them to spend more efficiently.

Finally, with Jose Reyes still something of a question mark moving forward, the Mets should have a backup plan in place that’s better than Alex Cora.

Certainly the best-case scenario for the club would have Reyes playing 150 games at shortstop like he did every year from 2005 to 2008. But though Reyes is supposedly on the mend, his injuries have beguiled the Mets before, and it would behoove the team to have a backup in house who could at least defend the position well, if not also hit a little bit.

If the Mets are so gung-ho on Cora returning to their clubhouse, there’s a bench coach position still waiting to be filled.

I’m really not trying to be snarky about this, but I can’t help myself. If the Mets should target a single free agent this offseason, it should be this one:

Thinking, “we should pursue Randy Wolf now that his value is high because we missed out on him when his value is low,” is akin to saying, “well, I really missed the boat on buying Microsoft stock when I thought about it in 1986, so I better recoup that by purchasing a lot of it now.”

It’s not that difficult a concept to grasp, and I’m certain it’s covered in Mankiw’s introduction to microeconomic principles.

Also included, I’m sure, is an explanation of sunk-cost economics, which would help them understand why they might move on from Omar Minaya instead of keeping him around because they owe him $3.5 million dollars.

But hey, if the Mets’ front office is too busy to do that much reading this offseason, I understand. In that case, they can simply hire my old roommate and namesake, Ted Burke.

Ted works down in Virginia now and hosts a Colorado Rockies podcast, but I’m certain he’d be happy to relocate for a job in a Major League front office.

I know he’s qualified because he was a total stud economics student in college. I know that because every time I introduced myself to some other econ student, they would curse me out for always ruining the curve, and I would have to explain that they meant to curse out my similarly named roommate, who probably wasn’t showing up for too many classes but managed to get the highest score on most of the econ tests.

Basically, they could just sit him at a desk somewhere, and whenever they were thinking about making a move, they could explain their reasoning and say, “Hey, Ted, does that makes sense?” and he could tell them if it did or didn’t.

Also, he’s doing some groundbreaking work in the field of facial hair.