Makes some of our contracts look pretty good. That’s a long time and a lot of money. I thought they were trying to reduce the deficit in Washington.

– Sandy Alderson, on Jayson Werth’s seven-year, $126 million deal with the Nats

Badumching, heyooo!

I don’t want to belabor the terms of the Werth deal too much here because based on the Internet’s reaction it doesn’t have a whole lot of supporters. Straight up: It would be at least vaguely defensible to commit that much money and years to a 31-year-old corner outfielder if your team hoped to contend with in the next years. If the Red Sox or Yankees signed him they could say, “Well, he’ll produce excellent numbers for the next few years while we compete for championships, and we realize we’ll have to shoulder the back end of his contract when he’s declining.”

But since the Nationals appear unlikely to contend with or without Werth in 2011, since Stephen Strasburg likely won’t be back until at least the middle of the season and since their best pitcher in 2010 was Livan Hernandez, giving Werth that much money now merits the hefty snark from Alderson. Even if the Nats can compete in two years, they’ll likely have to do so with Werth’s contract entering its albatross phase.

It seems like a perennial loser like the Nats has to overpay just to get a free agent of Werth’s caliber in the door, but that’s the thing: They should first work to make the team a legit contender so they can then woo top free agents without ridiculous terms.

Anyway, it seems like most Mets fans think Alderson’s comments are awesome and hilarious. There’s some tiny fraction of the fanbase that has pointed to them as indicative of Alderson’s small-market approach, and chastised him for not himself chasing Werth.

Those people are probably incapable of being convinced that Alderson’s prudence this offseason is what’s best — and perhaps all that’s feasible — for the franchise. They do not want to hear that the Mets will still very much be spending like a big-market club in 2010. The team will probably enter the season with a payroll around $140 million. It’s not Alderson’s fault that much of it will be allocated to dreck.

So to those few impatient Mets fans, and perhaps to the Mets themselves for abiding such lavish and irresponsible spending the past few years, Alderson will bring nothing but coal and a couple of scrap-heap pickups for Christmas. Frankly, it’s what they deserve. Advocating for or consenting to giant contracts and big splashes and a wholesale lack of foresight puts you on the naughty list in baseball.

For the rest of us, we get some of the greatest gifts a fan could wish for: hope, promise, reason. But to stay on the nice list, we must continue to be patient. We must withstand the onslaught of nonsense from the winter meetings and shoulder the idiotic rantings of the angry “small-market Sandy” set. And we must spend the offseason remembering that though the Mets likely won’t be making any exciting moves, the most exciting thing of all is a front office that’s committed to and perhaps capable of creating a long-term sustainable winner.