According to Joel Sherman’s Twitter, the Mets will meet with Ben Sheets’ agent at some point during the Winter Meetings.

Good.

Sheets could be a great pickup for the Mets. He’s always a huge injury risk — he’s coming off flexor tendon surgery and hasn’t pitched since 2008, plus was injury prone before that — but he’s also always good.

I have no idea what Sheets is looking for in a contract, and it sounds like no one does. He’s certain to have a ton of suitors, but likely the team that lands him will be one that offers him some intriguing combination of guaranteed cash and performance incentives.

The Mets probably should be that team. If he’s healthy, Sheets will better than everyone in the Mets’ rotation besides Johan Santana.

For what it’s worth, in 2004, Andy Pettitte endured the same surgery that made Sheets miss all of last year. Since 2005, Pettitte has average 210 innings a season.

Of course, Pettitte was a lot healthier than Sheets before he had the surgery, so it’s not a fair comparison. I only mean to say that it’s reasonable to expect Sheets to return to full health, or at least as close to full health as he can ever be.

Plus, Sheets represents a reasonable opportunity for the Mets to leverage the perception of their home park to their advantage. If, as has been reported, sluggers are shying away from Citi Field because of its dimensions, shouldn’t pitchers be more eager to sign on with the Mets?

And then wouldn’t it make sense for Sheets, who will likely be pitching for his next contract in 2010, to throw half of his games in Queens?

Again, it’s all about the cost. If some team is willing to give him two guaranteed years and $20 million, the Mets should bow out gracefully. If Sheets is presented with a slew of similar, incentive-laden one-year contracts, though, the Mets should do their best to make sure theirs is the most favorable.

John Maine’s name has come up in trade rumors today. Chris M made a good point in the comments section earlier on how Maine appears to be regressing since 2007, and it’s true: Maine has posted higher ERAs and lower strikeout rates in each season since his best one.

But, as a Mets fan, I’m prone to hoping Maine can bounce back and finding reasons for optimism: He did, after all, pitch well in a very small sample after returning from injury in 2009.

Moreover, I root for Maine because, from everything I read about him and the few times I’ve spoken to him, he seems like a pretty funny guy, or at the very least an interesting one. Two examples:

1) In February, 2008, John Maine told Marty Noble he had never visited the Internet.

I can’t imagine how this could possibly be true. Maine was born in 1981, like me, and would have been in my class in school. That means he went to college — UNC-Charlotte, specifically — from 1999 until he left for the Orioles farm system in 2002. That was the peak of the supposed dot-com boom, not to mention the peak of the Napster era.

Maybe Maine somehow missed all of that, in which case, he’s certainly fascinating. More likely, Maine made some sort of sarcastic comment in the clubhouse that was taken seriously, then decided to run with it to mess with a reporter.

And that’s awesome. I probably shouldn’t say this, but if I were a professional athlete I would make stuff up to mess with reporters all the time.

2) In September 2008, when the Mets were toying with the idea of bringing Maine back from injury and into a bullpen role, he told reporters he had already selected his closer music: Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Posse on Broadway.”

That’s cool for a variety of reasons. For one, players rarely go on record discussing their choice of intro music, and when they do, it’s usually something like, “Aw, shucks, that’s just what my teammates thought would be fun” or something lame.

Maine thought about it enough to confidently select his own, meaning he’s clearly aware enough to recognize how awesome closer music can be. As someone with a whole lot to say on the subject, I hugely appreciate that Maine cared enough to consider his song, even if it was just in passing, and even if he’ll never really be a closer.

In both parts of my aforelinked closer-music epic, I wrote, “hip-hop is woefully underrepresented in closer music.” Apparently John Maine recognizes this too, and so picked Sir Mix-A-Lot (you know, the “I like big butts” guy).

It’s not a bad choice, either. It’s funny because, though Mix-A-Lot is referring to the Broadway in his native seattle, it conjures images of John Maine and an entourage rolling down Broadway in Manhattan. And Maine’s posse almost certainly includes Mike Pelfrey, and Pelfrey just seems like a hilarious person to be part of a posse.

Here’s the song:

The back page of today’s Daily News features the headline, “GET A CLUE ON NO. 2” with a big picture of John Lackey and a small picture of Omar Minaya. In smaller font, it reads, “Harper: Mets need to realize they need big name like Lackey.”

Let’s go to the article!

Who exactly is the Mets’ No.2 starter?

The question is especially troubling because Mike Pelfrey took a major step backward last season, to the point where baseball people are whispering about him as a head case.

OK, first of all, about the whole “No. 2 starter” thing: That’s meaningless, you know. The only time the presence of a “true No. 2 starter” matters even a little bit is in the playoffs. The order of a team’s starting rotation does not matter.

It doesn’t. Think about it: Would you rather have a team with a “true No.1” and a “true No. 2” and three replacement-level starters, or a team with five pretty decent starters? I’ll take depth. I understand that labeling guys by their theoretical place in some non-existent rotation is convenient, but it’s pointless. Find me a team that has one “No. 1,” one “No. 2,” one “No. 3” one “No. 4” and one “No. 5.”

Harper continues on a long tangent about Mike Pelfrey and how he’s obviously crazy and terrible, but fails to mention — unsurprisingly — that there’s a good deal of evidence to suggest Pelfrey, a pitcher who relies on the players behind him, got a little bit lucky in 2008 and a lot bit unlucky in 2009. Sure, Pelfrey had his yips and balks and everything else, but who wouldn’t get anxious pitching in front of that defense?

Anyway, Harper knows “the Mets don’t seem willing to spend [the] kind of money” required to net Lackey even though “a tough-minded pitcher like Lackey almost cetainly would have a comforting effect on Peflrey, Maine and Perez” (obviously Johan Santana is not tough-minded enough), and despite the fact that “they were expected to meet with Lackey’s agent [at the Winter Meetings] last night.”

There’s plenty in the article I could pick apart, but it mostly boils down to Harper’s opinion that the Mets need a starting pitcher and so should sign Lackey. It’s hard to argue that, because the Mets do need a starting pitcher.

But it seems like a whole lot of people are hell-bent on this logic:

The Mets need a starting pitcher, and John Lackey is the best available starting pitcher, so the Mets need John Lackey.

And that’s just not how it works.

The object of baseball is to score more runs than the other team. You can attempt to do so by stockpiling the best pitchers, or the best hitters, or the best defenders, or, most likely, some combination thereof.

The Mets, dealing with finite resources, need to find the most efficient way to spend their offseason capital. John Lackey is a good pitcher, but at 31 and with some history of minor arm trouble, he’s probably not the best longterm investment.

And the Mets absolutely must consider the years beyond this one. Harper learned this less than two months ago.

Of course, a potential Lackey acquisition should depend, like everything else, on the cost. Maybe Lackey’s demands in dollars and years will drop and the Mets can scoop him up at a reasonable rate.

But rewarding Lackey simply for being the best pitcher in a weak class of free-agent pitchers is foolish, especially when there’s a chance several better pitchers — Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee and Brandon Webb, to name a few — could be available next offseason.

Update, Dec. 8:

You want lazy? This is lazy. I’m bumping this post, originally published on Nov. 11, because I feel the same way today and Mets fans keep going on about getting Roy Halladay:

Original post, Nov. 11, 2:04 p.m.:

In a subscriber-only post to Newsday that I am not able to read, Ken Davidoff compares the trade market for Roy Halladay with the one for Johan Santana before the 2008 season and explains that “the Mets believe they have at least a chance” to land the Blue Jays’ ace.

OK, here’s the thing: Roy Halladay is a stud. He’s thrown over 220 innings in each of the last four seasons, he strikes out a decent number of guys and he rarely walks anyone. Plus, he pitches in the uber-tough AL East, meaning he’s certainly been one of the three or four best pitchers in baseball over that time.

But Halladay’s situation is not exactly like Santana’s situation for a number of reasons.

For one, it’s important to remember that the Mets didn’t exactly trade four prospects for six seasons of Santana. They traded four prospects for the right to sign Santana to a six-year deal at market rate.

Given Santana’s excellence, it’s difficult to put a price tag on the exclusive negotiating rights the Mets acquired when they traded for him, but it’s reasonable to say the deal was a good one.

Still, as great as Santana is, he has already missed part of a season with an arm injury. And though all reports say Santana will return to full health, it’s not a safe bet he’ll stay that way through 2012 and 2013, when he’ll make a total of $49.5 million.

Theoretically, a deal for Halladay would either be a trade for one year of Halladay — he’s due to be a free agent after this season — or an arrangement like Santana’s, wherein the Mets would gain a negotiating window in which to sign Halladay.

And that’s where the situation differs massively from Santana’s. Halladay would certainly require a long-term deal, probably similar to the one Santana signed. But Halladay will be 33 in May, and Santana was about to turn 29 when the Mets locked him up.

Santana won’t be as old as Halladay until before the 2012 season, when he’s entering the final years of his contract with the Mets. Locking up Halladay for that long would mean committing big money to a pitcher while he’s in the back half of his 30s, and that’s a way, way riskier proposition.

Of course, Halladay hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down in the past couple of years. His average fastball velocity, according to Fangraphs, was actually higher than his career mark in 2009.

So maybe Halladay is the rare breed of dude who can remain effective deep into his 30s, and the Mets would be well-suited to lock him up for the long-term, even if it meant committing around $50 million a year to two starting pitchers.

Still, Halladay did miss nearly half the 2004 season with a shoulder injury, so it’s not like he’s impervious to pain.

Of course, analysis of any potential deal cannot be separated from the cost, and since we have no idea what it will take to land Halladay, it’s difficult to say for sure whether the Mets should or shouldn’t pursue him.

If the Blue Jays are randomly smitten with Anderson Hernandez and want to do a straight swap, well then, you know, yeah. But way more likely, any package strong enough to net Halladay would start with several of the Mets’ best remaining young players or prospects, further depleting an already shallow system.

And moreover, when the Mets dealt for Santana, they were coming off a season in which they missed the playoffs by a single game, so it was reasonable to assume Santana alone might push them over the edge.

This year, obviously, that is not the case. And though having Halladay would probably mean about eight more wins for the Mets than trotting Tim Redding out every fifth day, it’s unclear if he alone could make the difference between the 2009 Mets — even assuming full health — and a playoff team.

And that’s an important distinction, because by trading prospects for Halladay then signing him to a big contract, the Mets would likely be committing nearly all of their available offseason resources to a single 33-year-old pitcher.

That just doesn’t strike me as a good idea.