Remember Nick Evans? Yeah, don’t worry: few do. Least of all Major League managers.

It’s a shame though, because Evans can hit at least a little bit. And he can play a bunch of positions, and he’s still relatively young. But he’s the victim of a numbers crunch in Flushing: The Mets have a bunch of prospects they need to protect in the upcoming Rule 5 draft that they must feel offer more long-term upside than Evans, so they outrighted Evans to Buffalo to clear space on the 40-man roster, and Evans elected free agency.

Evans will catch on somewhere, and I suspect within a couple of years he’ll find his way into a regular Major League gig for part of a season and rack up 15 homers or so, then Mets fans everywhere will flip out, like, “never should of traided Nick Evans!” Then Evans will serve as a useful cog off some team’s bench for a few years, and then, of course, fade away as we all ultimately do.

None of that now appears likely to happen with the Mets, which seems too bad to those of us who came to root for the young man every time he got passed over for obvious opportunities by various managers. But decent-hitting right-handed corner-bat types aren’t terribly difficult to replace, so losing Evans to free agency hardly cripples the Mets’ future.