No one is predicting a 94-win season for the Mets. Last I checked, I am not a crazy person. That number was meant to represent the Mets’ best possible outcome, based on very lazy and inexact addition and guesswork. I actually thought it was pretty damning to say that the best the Mets could hope for if absolutely everything went right was a Wild Card — that they’d be limited to second place by their talent, even in the best-case scenario — but the post was nonetheless met with tons of LOLs and readers wondering what I was smoking.

Anyway, just for a point of reference I went through the same routine with all the other teams in the NL East, looking up and down the roster and trying to guess the best possible but still vaguely reasonable estimate for what each player might do in 2012.

As a Mets fan, I’m probably a bit harder on the Mets than I am on their competitors. Plus I’m less informed on the day to day machinations of the Braves and Phillies. But by my total, meaningless guesswork, the best-case scenario, ceiling win totals for the other teams in the NL East look like this:

Phillies: 116 wins
Braves: 106 wins
Marlins: 105 wins
Nationals: 98 wins

Now someone’s going to run to say I’ve just predicted three teams in the same division to win over 100 games, which is — if you’ve been reading — obviously not the case. Everything going right for the Phillies would mean many things going wrong for the Braves, Marlins, Nationals and Mets, so the Phillies winning 116 games would likely preclude the rest of the division from coming close to their here-speculated best-case win totals.

One thing that surprised me was the relative thin-ness of the Nationals, who seem to have become the Internet’s darling this offseason. I’m not sure how much of that excitement stemmed from their rumored pursuit of Prince Fielder, but I tried to be particularly generous with them and still couldn’t come up with a way they’re close to the Braves or Phillies on paper at the season’s outset. They’ve got a bunch of good young players and pitchers, yes, but they’ve also got some pretty big holes in their lineup and at the back of their rotation.

As for the hated Phillies: It’s exceptionally unlikely they’ll be anything like that good. The Phillies’ average hitter was over a year older than every other team’s in the National League last year. Ryan Howard will likely miss the start of the season after surgery on his Achilles tendon, which means 33-year-old Chase Utley, who has missed large parts of the last two years to injury himself, will be the Phillies’ youngest infielder on Opening Day. They’ve still got enough firepower and pitching to remain competitive in 2012, but — though a lot of Mets fans refuse to believe this — no one is immune to time. Their window will close.

And our Mets? Well, this is all a roundabout way of suggesting they have the least immediate upside of any team in their division, but it’s not to say they can’t do a better job capitalizing on their upside than their competitors or that they can’t enjoy a prolonged run of good luck. And since it’s boring to remind you that anything can happen, I’ll remind you this: If you’re absolutely certain in January that any Major League club can not win more than 60 or 70 or 80 games by September, you’re certainly a fool.