So Pedro Feliciano wants to be the Mets’ eighth-inning guy. Everybody wants to be the Mets’ eighth-inning guy. We all want to anoint the new eighth-inning guy.

OK, let me start right off by reiterating that I think the whole need for a specific, dedicated eighth-inning guy is silly. Again, there’s little evidence that even having a one-inning closer helps teams finish out games more successfully than they did in the time before the trend started up in the late 80s:  “In the 20 seasons since LaRussa’s brainstorm, teams holding late leads have won at about the same rate they did in the 20 seasons before.”

Regardless, looking at Feliciano specifically, there may be some merit to the concern voiced by SNY’s Gary Cohen, among others, that Feliciano is too valuable to the Mets in his current role — as a middle-inning lefty specialist — to consider moving to a setup position.

Fangraphs charts Leverage Index, “a measure of how important a particular situation is in a baseball game depending on the inning, score, outs, and number of players on base, created by Tom Tango.” A pitcher’s average Leverage Index when he enters a game is called his gmLI.

According to that stat, Feliciano entered games in, on average, the fourth highest-leverage situations of any Met reliever. Ahead of him were Casey Fossum, whose gmLI was certainly driven up by a tiny sample, J.J. Putz and Francisco Rodriguez. Feliciano finished third on the team behind Luis Ayala and Billy Wagner in 2008.

Turning to the list of 2009 Major League leaders in gmLI, the highest-ranked non-closer is Seattle’s Mark Lowe, decidedly an eighth-inning guy — 50 of the 71 1/3 frames he tossed last season were that game’s penultimate one. The next, Jeremy Affeldt, had the eighth inning account for 36 2/3 of his 62 1/3 innings.

The next two pitchers on the list, though, were Matt Thornton and Phil Coke, a pair of lefties, neither of whom threw more than half his innings in the eighth (although both pitched plenty in that frame).

So what does that mean? Not a ton. Relief pitchers traffic in small sample sizes, and I guess the moral of the story is that though eighth-inning guys tend to enter the game in pretty high-leverage situations, lefty specialists often do too.

Putz, in his short stint of full health, may have entered games in more important situations than Feliciano on average, but no setup man that lasted the year entered games in tougher spots than Perpetual Pedro. And by situational wins, Feliciano was the top pitcher on the team.

There’s no doubt, then, of Feliciano’s value to the team in his familiar role. He might be slightly more valuable as the elusive eighth-inning guy, for sure, but only if he could handle it.

And therein lies the rub. There’s been some talk of Feliciano’s developing cutter, and Feliciano seems earnest in his desire to use it get righties out. Good. He should want to be the best pitcher he can be, always. He’s a professional athlete.

But Feliciano was working on new strategies to get righties out last offseason, too. And righties responded with a .264/.365/.486 line, pretty similar to the .272/.364/.425 mark they’ve tallied off him across his career.

Feliciano’s long been one of my favorite Mets, so I’m rooting for him to succeed in any role. Maybe that cutter will work for him, and then, yeah, he’ll be ever so slightly more valuable to the Mets as a setup man than he was as a lefty specialist.

I’m just not sure it’ll work out that way, though.