Here’s a friendly reminder to come join me at the Blue and Orange Hot Stove Huddle tomorrow night at River on 43rd and 10th in Manhattan. More details of the event are here.

Numerous personalities from your favorite World Wide Web sites will be on hand to discuss the Mets and the MLB offseason.

I am told there will be a series of discussions moderated by Will Davidian of BlueAndOrange.net.

I’ll participate in the last of them, meaning I’ll have to either lay off the booze to save from embarrassing myself in a public forum, or realize that I’m going to embarrass myself regardless of whether I’ve been drinking and end up so tanked that I fight Joe Janish of MetsToday.com and get kicked out of the bar before I even have the opportunity to drool out nonsense about the Mets’ offseason strategy.

Which will happen? You can only find out if you go.

Helpful hint: It’ll probably be the former, but I can’t guarantee I won’t fight Joe Janish stone-cold sober.

Little-known fact: I once wrote an article about Japanese pitchers that was so loaded with falsehoods it inspired Japanese baseball expert Patrick Newman to start the excellent NPBTracker.com.

That, ironically, is probably my greatest contribution to the baseball blogosphere.

Anyway, with word surfacing that the Mets are about to sign Japanese reliever Ryota Igarashi, I turned to NPBTracker for info. Patrick posted a profile of Igarashi in May. He wrote:

Igarashi is known one of the hardest throwers in Japan, and jointly holds the record for fastest pitch* by a Japanese pitcher in an NPB game with a 158 kmph (98.75mph) fastball….

Although he doesn’t throw quite as hard as he used to, but still runs his heater into the upper 90’s, and augments it with a hard splitter that he throws at around 90mph. He’s also got a slider and a curve that he’ll mix in occasionally, but is primarily a fastball/splitter pitcher.

Igarashi’s weakness has been his control. Over the course of his career through 2008, he’s allowed 221 walks and thrown 42 wild pitches over 517.1 innings.

So it sounds a tiny bit like the Mets are signing the Japanese Fernando Rodney. Anyway, see for yourself:

So Jorge Arangure’s Twitter, via Matt Cerrone, tells me that the Mets are interested in Fernando Rodney. And Cerrone says Rodney’s seeking a three-year, $30 million deal.

Remember yesterday when I said the Mets hadn’t actually screwed anything up yet and so we shouldn’t kill them just for their inaction? Yeah, if they’re actually interested in Fernando Rodney, and if they actually sign Fernando Rodney for any significant money, that’s screwing something up.

Fernando Rodney is eminently average. He throws very hard, which is nice, but he lacks control, and missed time in 2008 due to shoulder tendinitis, and is 32. He has a career 105 ERA+, just barely above league average, and a 1.424 WHIP, too high for a late-inning reliever.

Rodney is the prototypical example of a guy who will be overpaid because of the closer label. If you’ll recall, that’s precisely what I whined about the Mets doing all last offseason.

But I figured, with the way the J.J. Putz thing blew up in their faces, they learned from that mistake. And I hope they did.

If they go out and give a big contract to Fernando Rodney, who’s honestly probably not much better a bet than Bobby Parnell moving forward, it will show that they haven’t.