OK, I promise I didn’t already know about Johan Santana’s forthcoming season-ending surgery when I argued earlier that the Mets should be looking for pitching help this offseason.

But the fact is this’ll make three straight years with surgery for Santana, and though he finished strong and his peripherals started picking up near the end of this campaign, it’s foolish to expect he’ll be fully healthy for all of 2011. He could be, of course, but he’ll be a 32-year-old pitcher with a lot of innings on his arm and a bunch of surgeries on his chart.

We’ll get back to this a billion times this offseason and there’s a bunch of interesting baseball to be played between now and then. Plus we’ll have a better sense of the market, of who’s available, of what Dillon Gee looks like across a few more Major League starts, how much public sentiment there’s going to be clamoring for Jenrry Mejia and everything else.

This doesn’t matter much for the 2010 Mets because nothing has mattered much for the 2010 Mets for a while, which is why we get all caught up in off-field nonsense, politics, media criticism, armchair psychoanalysis and everything else.

This matters for the 2011 Mets, though, and the 2012 and 2013 Mets too. The club owes Santana $77.5 million over the next three seasons, according to Cots, and if he’s not pitching for any prolonged stretch of that it makes Luis Castillo’s contract look like a bargain.

Sorry if I sound gloomy. Maybe the news will seem better when we have more of it.