Adam Rubin investigates for ESPN New York.

Sandy Alderson says:

It’s very difficult, unless you’re one of a couple of teams, to have three, four guys making $15 million-plus. I don’t care who you are — again, with the exception maybe of a couple of teams. So I would expect we’ll be looking actively in the free-agent market, but we’ve got to get it to a position where we can be active every year and not be hamstrung by existing contracts. Part of that is making good decisions in the first place. I mean, if you invest $15 million, you hope you’re going to get $15 million worth of performance. We haven’t always gotten that.

It’s an obvious cop-out to say, “we’ll have to wait and see,” but, well, we’ll have to wait and see, right? We’ll have to wait and see if the Mets pursue Reyes, how much Reyes winds up getting and from whom, and where the team’s 2012 payroll winds up.

Alderson mentioned “the $100-$110 million range,” but in a pretty abstract way. It’s reasonable to extrapolate from the comment that the payroll will drop to that range, but it’s not like he explicitly said the team has a hard cap at $110 million.

The bright side, I suppose, is that the Mets have a bunch of Major League contributors that aren’t even eligible for arbitration yet. In Ike Davis, Daniel Murphy, Josh Thole, Justin Turner, Ruben Tejada, Lucas Duda, Nick Evans, Jason Pridie, Jon Niese, Dillon Gee and Pedro Beato, the Mets should be able to adequately fill at least four positions, most of the bench and two starting rotation slots with guys making barely more than the league minimum.

But naturally we don’t know yet if that will provide them enough flexibility to bring back Reyes.