So Adam Rubin — who is usually spot-on about stuff like this — reports that Jenrry Mejia will work as a reliever in big-league camp for the remainder of Spring Training and, even if he is sent back to the Minors to start the season, will not be stretched out to start games by Opening Day.

Fantastic.

I’ve said my piece about why I think using Jenrry Mejia in a Major League bullpen role is a bad idea (twice, actually), but I figured I should consult some people who know more than I do about prospects and player development before I continue beating this drum.

John Sickels writes the excellent MinorLeagueBall.com for SB Nation. Back in January, he ranked Mejia tops among Mets prospects, and wrote:

He needs to refine his breaking ball and a full year of Double-A/Triple-A is necessary in my view, but he also has number one starter potential. I hope they don’t rush him.

I followed up with him earlier this week to see what he thought about Jerry Manuel’s Major League bullpen idea and all that. I e-mailed John a general overview of my thoughts on the matter, and he responded:

I agree with your take on it. He had just 10 starts in Double-A last year with spotty results, and I think he needs more work with his command before being pushed into a major league role, even in the bullpen. He’s only 20 and I think he needs at least another 10 starts in Double-A and 20 more in Triple-A before being fully ready for major league action, for the reasons you mentioned.

Cool. Good to know I’m not crazy.

Next I e-mailed my colleague Toby Hyde, who you might know from MetsMinorLeagueBlog.com. Toby’s obviously been following the situation pretty closely, and he wrote me this:

Look, if he’s clearly one of the six best relievers in camp, he should be on the big league roster.  The Mets’ first goal is to win games at the MLB level, and if the staff decides that Mejia is decidedly better than the final guys competing for bullpen spots like Kiko Calero and Clint Everts, then Mejia should break camp with the team. Otherwise, he should go back to the minors to refine his craft.  I don’t think he’s at a point yet where he’s ready to contribute, and bringing him up as a reliever now will at best delay, and at worst halt the development of his secondary offerings that he’d need to be a successful MLB starter, or even elite reliever and realize more value down the line.

There’s no question his fastball is awesome.  It lives in the mid-90s and has wicked movement.  He can cut it or sink it.  In the fall, he often could not command it.  His command looks better this spring, but what will happen when batters start really getting their timing down and learn he’s really a one-trick pony with a damn good trick?  For every good curveball he throws, there are a few bad ones.  This is why the minors exist.

Oh yeah, he’s 20.  How many 20-year olds have been really good big leaguers?

So Toby’s mostly on board, and I might even quibble with his first point a bit.  Certainly the Mets’ goal should be to win games at the big-league level, but I wonder exactly how many more games they can expect to win with Mejia in the bullpen over one of the men he would replace.

Even if Mejia would legitimately post better numbers in the bullpen than one of the Mets’ other options, do the few extra runs the team will save by carrying him in the bullpen make it worth hindering his development as a starting pitcher, not to mention starting his arbitration clock early?

I’d say no. There’s a ton of uncertainty, of course, and I recognize the argument that says all young pitchers are a safe bet to get hurt and so teams should cull the most possible value out of them as soon as they can. But if Mejia’s got the potential to be a frontline starter, the team should do everything in its power to let him achieve that potential.

The Mets’ history of organizational myopia is what weakened their farm system in the first place. Now, when it looks like they may finally be crawling their way out from all that, they appear to be considering a quick-fix decision with the best prospect in their organization. Amazin’.

At SNY.tv today, Mike Salfino weighs in on Fernando Martinez’s ranking on the assorted preseason prospects lists. His big finish:

It’s human nature to be impatient after writing about a guy now for three years. And it’s quite uncommon for a guy to stay atop these lists for that long without demonstrating any Major League ability. However, that’s not Martinez’s fault, as he was just 17 years old when he first came on the scene. He was never expected to debut before this year and he appears to me and many others to be right on schedule with very little left to prove in the high Minors.

I generally try not to get too worked up about rankings on prospects lists, since they’re only lists. As I pointed out two years ago, Albert Pujols was ranked only the 42nd best prospect by Baseball America before his rookie season and Mariano Rivera never even cracked the top 100.

The lists are fun to examine, and they’re useful as quick-and-dirty indicators of a prospect’s reputation, but to me, it’s just not that big a deal if a player is 40th or 75th.

But Mike argues, pretty accurately I think, that Mets fans and certain analysts are close to giving up on Martinez simply because they’ve been hearing about him for so long and he hasn’t produced anything yet. I’ve beaten this drum before: He’s 21. No one should have expected anything out of him yet.

I agree with most of Salfino’s points, as I usually do, and I recommend checking out the column. I’ll quibble with a couple, though:

For one, some of Mike’s argument rests on Martinez’s impressive performance in Triple-A in 2009. But while his .877 OPS was certainly good, it was also only across a 190 plate-appearance sample, far from huge and not even terribly larger than his rough 100 PA stretch in Citi Field.

The other thing — and this is certainly the big thing with Martinez, and the reason he was knocked down all those lists — is the injury thing. Salfino points out that none of Martinez’s numerous injuries have been related, and that not many position players have lost careers due to the injury bug.

I wonder, though, how many position players have never even had careers due to the injury bug. Martinez has always been labeled a great prospect and so will likely be given every opportunity to keep playing, but I wonder how many teams have given up on a Minor League just because he couldn’t stay on the field?

And I wonder, too, if the injuries might be related after all. Are some people not simply prone to injury?

My buddy Charlie is one of the best athletes in my group of friends from high school. He’s a huge guy, easily 6’5″, and he was always among the first chosen in pickup games in every sport. He can dunk a basketball, he’s a dominant force at linebacker in tackle football games, and he’s a three-true outcomes masher in stickball.

But, perhaps as some sort of karmic tradeoff for his size and ability, Charlie gets hurt all the time. There’s no identifiable balky knee or troublesome shoulder, either. It’s all different body parts injured in all different ways.

And I don’t mean he has a low threshold for pain or anything like that — I’ve seen the bruises and the swelling and the x-rays; they’re real injuries. An ankle sprained while pitching. A finger broken by a bounce pass. A collar bone broken when he made the mistake of trying to tackle me.

So with guys like Martinez, or Nick Johnson or Cliff Floyd or or Pete Reiser or whoever, I wonder if they’re kind of like Charlie, and there could be something in their makeup that leads them to get hurt all the time.

Of course, I might have thought the same thing about Jose Reyes at some point in 2004, and he played in nearly every game from 2005-2008.

I’m still bullish on Martinez as a prospect, and I certainly hope the injuries are only a byproduct of a teenager growing into a man as he attempts to compete at an extremely high level.

What Mike points out, after all, is correct: Though few of the stats in Martinez’s history exactly jump off the page, that he’s performed as well as he has at the levels he’s faced at the ages he’s been is remarkable.

That’s not say he should break camp with the big club, of course, nor do I think that’s something being considered.

At the same time, I’m not sure I understand the common Internet idea that Martinez needs to stay healthy for a full year in Triple-A before joins the big club. I don’t see why it would be any more difficult for him to stay healthy in the pros than it would be for him to stay healthy in Triple-A, so if Martinez is performing and the Mets have a need, his injury history shouldn’t prevent a callup.

I probably shouldn’t publish this, because it could very well end with me getting scolded about how all of our meetings are very important and I should be paying attention to learn all the crucial intricacies of our business for better leveraging low-hanging fruit in the marketplace of the…

See, now I’m boring myself. And meetings scheduled in the middle of a pretty busy day, when the Mets are playing — even if it’s an otherwise meaningless Spring Training game — are terribly frustrating.

I had one of those and I don’t have a DVR at my desk, so I missed a good hour in the middle of the game today. Cerrone’s got a DVR at his desk and wasn’t at the office, so I guess I could have used his. But his TV isn’t as nice as the one at my desk, and I really couldn’t bring myself to watch an hour of already-played meaningless baseball on a pitiful little screen.

So I missed Jack Egbert’s entire uninspiring appearance in the Mets’ 8-4 loss to the Astros. ‘Tis a pity.

I did see all of Johan Santana’s effort. I’m sure someone somewhere will make too much of the fact that he was hit hard, since Santana allowed six hits and four runs and couldn’t get out of the second inning, but it’s Spring Training, and Santana said he felt good after his first game action coming off arm surgery, and that’s all that matters.

If you’re tempted to think Spring Training stats should count for a whole lot, consider this: Astros first baseman Geoff Blum went 4-for-4 in the affair and is now hitting .538 for the Spring. And Geoff Blum has a .697 career OPS. Everyone’s at a different spot in his preseason conditioning, the competition is all over the map, players are tinkering with certain aspects of their games, and sample sizes are tiny. The output — the actual numbers produced in Spring Training games — mean nothing.

Calling the games entirely pointless, though, is likely a bit overblown. Since the managers and GMs and organizational scouts are, in theory, watching these games to assess the talents of the players on the field and will likely partly base roster decisions off those assessments, we can try to do the same. The problem is, without reliable stats to guide us, and without any actual training in scouting, our eyes have a tendency to see what we already believe to be true.

For instance: It certainly looks to me like neither Alex Cora nor Luis Castillo really has the range to be a Major League middle infielder at this point. And man is that frustrating, knowing what I know about how Mike Pelfrey has been hammered in the press for his supposed psychological issues.

The Astros rolled out some Double-A guy named Wladimir Sutil at shortstop who made a great diving play moving to his left to start a double play. Cora dove in vain for one that wasn’t even hit too hard.

That’s a miniscule sample. I’m just sayin’s all. It’s just frustrating. If you’re going to have backup infielders who can’t really hit, it’d be nice if they could defend.

OK, moving on: Clint Everts’ breaking ball moves a lot. So that’s cool.

Jason Pridie made a nice running catch in right field in the ninth, then turned and nailed the cutoff man, who clearly doubled off Kody Clemens at first base. Clemens was ruled safe, probably because his pops was in the house and the ump feared the Rocket’s rep. But the ump should have made the right call, since that story was a big misunderstanding and Roger probably wasn’t fired up for this Spring Training game.

Ike Davis hit a home run to straightaway center, and the legend grows. He also struck out thrice. That part will get glossed over by legend.

David Wright pulled a homer. Josh Thole hit a couple of warning track doubles.

Mike Jacobs walked twice, and has now walked five times in 13 Grapefruit League plate appearances.

Finally, Astros reliever Samuel Gervacio cracks me up. He does this weird thing before he starts his delivery — it looks like he’s showing the ball to the opposing team’s third base coach, like he’s about to perform a magic trick and is assuring the crowd that it’s a regular baseball he’s about to make disappear.

Then he abruptly turns to the batter as if completely startled by the fact that there’s someone standing there waiting for him to pitch, interrupting the magic show he’s performing for the third-base coach and the fans along the left-field line.

He’s pretty good; he struck out 11.2 batters per nine innings in the Minors and I imagine he’ll end up a closer eventually, so you’ll probably see a lot more of his strange performance. But it’s still novel now, so I’ll enjoy it until some team better than the Astros scoops him up and he’s using it to dominate the Mets in the future.