Before last night’s game, Terry Collins told reporters that the Mets “have to be open-minded enough to think the outfield may be a spot” for Daniel Murphy.

Presumably neither Collins nor Sandy Alderson saw much of Murph’s first go-around in the outfield in late 2008 and early 2009, when Shea Stadium’s left field seemed to expand to a hundred times its normal size: a sprawling grassland stamped flat by Murphy hustling in every direction in dogged pursuit of balls hit past him, over him and sometimes right at him.

But then maybe it’s better Alderson and Collins missed that. If Murphy can hit anything like the way he did for the Mets in 2011, his bat plays in an outfield corner — way better than it does at first base. Murphy’s .320/.362/.448 line this season and .292/.343/.441 career mark are better than the league averages in both corner outfield spots this year, and notably better than the (perhaps flukishly low) .256/.322/.404 line posted by Major League left fielders in 2011.

Gone are the days when the average left fielder had an .820 OPS. Barry Bonds, as they say, ain’t walking through that door.

And for as bad as Murphy looked in left field, it was 59 games at a brand-new position for young player in his first days in the big leagues. If the Mets find a spot for Murphy in the outfield, his first handful of games there shouldn’t deter them from trying it again.

That’s the thing, though: Where exactly does Murphy fit in the outfield? Last I checked, the Mets are committed to paying Jason Bay at least $35 million through 2013 with a vesting option for 2014. So Murphy plays right, then?

I guess the idea is that trying Murphy in the outfield again offers the club flexibility. A good left-handed bat that could play five different positions would be a pretty damn valuable thing to have, it would just mean the team would have to continue suffering some of the mistakes that come from Murphy’s defensive inexperience and expect that he’ll repay them on offense.

Since I broached the topic of Bay: Earlier in the season, when his OPS floundered below the Ordonez Line, Bay looked like one of the game’s most untradeable players. His recent torrid stretch pushed his OPS up over .700 Monday night, and those two years, $35 million and vesting option now look… well, still pretty hard to deal.

Just thinking out loud here, but is there any way Bay finishes the season hot enough to allow the Mets to get out from under his contract this offseason?

He has raised his OPS 82 points in his last 10 games. He won’t maintain this pace, but if he can even match that gain over the course of the rest of the season, he’ll finish with a well better line than this year’s awful average left fielder. If that happens, could the Mets find a taker for Bay in return for, I don’t know, a low-level prospect and some salary relief? (Depends on how much salary relief.) Would they? How much of Bay’s deal should they be willing to eat to unbury themselves from the rest of it?

These are offseason questions, and perhaps unnecessary ones; Bay has teased us before.

But neither Murphy nor Lucas Duda seem to have the arm strength typically associated with right fielders, and moving Bay would allow the Mets to employ one of their less-expensive, homegrown (and likely more productive) bats in the outfield while using whatever part of Bay’s salary they save to upgrade elsewhere. That is, if it’s at all possible.