I don’t know, dude. $138 million may sound like a lot of money, but you should see Ike Davis’ bar tabs. But presumably Murphy’s bachelor party will be at a batting cage, so Wright should be able to afford the rental, the pizza, and the party hats.

Can I say no one? Going with no one. They’re never going to top Roy Hibbert’s, and with the Mets’ luck the attempt would end with a career-threatening ankle injury.

Hmm… I’d put them like:

1) Santana trade
2) Piazza trade
3) Hampton trade
4) Wright extension
5) Piazza extension

Though they were certainly nice, both extensions seemed more or less inevitable, so they don’t match the trades for excitement. My enthusiasm for the Hampton trade was mitigated by my how psyched I was for Roger Cedeno, hard as that may now be to believe. When the Mets traded for Piazza, I thought it was cool but decidedly uncool to Todd Hundley, who had been about the second best hitting catcher in the league the prior two years and a favorite of mine. Obviously I didn’t know then how much I would come to love Piazza.

The Santana trade came in my third week working at SNY, so it was a pretty exciting time for me personally, and an especially exciting time for me for the Mets to trade for the best pitcher in baseball. The extension negotiations actually happened inside this office in a conference room upstairs. I mentioned this before but it’s kind of a funny story:

I will say, though, that there’s one minor scoop for which I am directly responsible and have never been credited. I was the anonymous source that fed Matt Cerrone the details of the Johan Santana contract.

It went like this: I got word that Santana, his agents and the Mets’ front office were negotiating his contract in the SNY offices because of their accessible Midtown location. I work in said offices, and figured out which conference room they were in (it wasn’t hard -— it’s the fancy one).

The workday was winding down as the negotiations were starting, and I had nothing particularly important to do that evening, so I went upstairs and parked myself at the receptionist’s desk outside the conference room. I considered doing the old sitcom cup-on-the-door thing. I IMmed Cerrone when they got dinner delivered.

I sat there for a while, browsing the Internet and waiting for something to happen. I was just about to give up when a dude — a young guy, must have been someone who worked for the agent or something -— emerged from the conference room on his cell phone.

“It’s done, dude,” he said. Then he paused.

He continued: “Six. Yeah, six and 137-point-five.”

Ideally, a lot of them. One frustrating thing you see bandied about pretty frequently is that “(Player X) is not a contributor on a championship team.” And if you look at championship teams, it’s so silly. The 2012 Giants used Ryan Theriot as a DH in the World Series. The Tigers gave tons of at-bats to Delmon Young, Brennan Boesch, Ramon Santiago and Ryan Raburn.

Every single guy on the Mets could be part of their next real good team. The guys who play infield all look more likely to be integral parts of that team than the guys who play outfield, but all the outfielders appear apt to be fine in part-time roles, so I wouldn’t even count any of them out yet.

The more important question, obviously, is who’s not on the team that’ll be part of the next real good Mets team. And that beats me. Who they are and where they come from will determine which of the current guys stick around when the club gets good.

People get frustrated with the Mets and David Wright is the most recognizable Met, so people transfer their frustration with the Mets to David Wright. I’m pretty sure that’s it. Same reason everyone blames quarterbacks for struggling NFL teams, same reason the Boston press blamed Ted Williams for the Red Sox never winning, etc.

Other than that, it makes no sense: Wright seems like exactly the type of dirty-uniform gamer many fans would love if he sucked, wearing his heart on his sleeve and playing through pain and generally being upbeat and cool about everything. It’s like he gets penalized for being awesome and handsome.

That, or the Abe Lincoln look that prompted Jose Reyes to say, “Don’t worry, we’ll find the man who did this to you.”

Murphy’s subtly become a shifty facial hair guy for the Mets, but we don’t talk about it much because it’s only like the seventh or eighth most notable thing about Daniel Murphy.

https://twitter.com/Met20/status/274529339582844928

Gee doesn’t have nearly the value on the trade market that Niese does. Niese has been better for longer, for one thing, he’s slightly younger, he has been healthier, he throws left-handed, and he’s signed to a very team-friendly longterm deal. All the reports on Gee’s recovery sound promising, but as Toby Hyde pointed out, blood clots have jeopardized pitchers’ careers in the past.

Yes, but the right kind of weird.