Alex Remington, continuing his stats-based series of columns for Yahoo!’s Big League Stew, asks, “How many more wins will a healthy Reyes and Beltran bring the Mets?”

It’s a good writeup, but Remington is only trying to piece together two pieces of the giant puzzle that is attempting to project how the Mets will fare in 2010. Big pieces, mind you: The Mets’ success is certainly all wrapped up in the health of Carlos Beltran and Jose Reyes.

But Remington neglects to include how many more wins they’ll gain from a fully healthy Johan Santana, John Maine and Oliver Perez, not to mention returns to form from David Wright and Mike Pelfrey and improvement from Daniel Murphy.

And who could blame him, really? That would require way more analysis than could fit in a 600-word piece, plus would probably be a fool’s errand anyway. None of those things is necessarily a safe bet to happen, though we can hope for all of them.

Remington’s big finish:

It’s a good bet that they’ll get back those six games that they lost with Reyes and Beltran out last year, if not a few more. And that’s pretty close to the prediction offered by Baseball Prospectus’s PECOTA, which predicts the 2010 Mets to finish 78-84. And if they can get just three more wins above that, with Jason Bay’s help, they’d be a .500 ballclub. That’s a tall order, but a win total in the high 70s is eminently reasonable for a team with such pitching problems once you get past Johan Santana.

All of this assumes, of course, that Reyes and Beltran actually are healthy next year. And with the record of the Mets medical staff as of late, that’s a heck of an assumption.

Sounds pretty gloomy to Mets fans, I realize. PECOTA is generally among the most accurate projection systems in baseball — or heck, anything — but I find it difficult to believe that these Mets, if healthy, will only manage 78 wins in 2010.

Then again, I find it difficult to believe these Mets will stay healthy in 2010. Injuries to baseball players often seem to forebode more injuries, and it seems downright delusional to expect the Mets’ top 4 starters to produce 800 innings, as one “Mets higher-up” suggested recently.

Still, assuming Reyes, Wright and Santana break camp healthy and Beltran is on schedule, I’ll take the over on 78.

The bottom line is that projection systems are only that, and though I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics of PECOTA or any other system, I imagine the 2010 Mets are about as hard a club to project as any in history, given the amount of uncertainty.

We can hem and haw all we want about what could go wrong and what might go right, but we won’t know if they’re any good until they start playing games.

Jeff Francoeur said this to Kevin Kernan of the Post yesterday:

“One of my big goals is to have better pitch recognition…. Sometimes you try to say it doesn’t bother you to swing at a bad pitch, but it does. I’m human. I want to get better because I know if I can get better at that the rest of my game will follow. If I can mix in 50-60 walks, I become a totally different guy.”

Sounds awesome, right? Better pitch recognition seems like exactly what Frenchy needs to maintain the level of production he posted in his half season as a Met and avoid slipping back to the sub-replacement level player he was for his final season and a half with the Braves. After all, there’s no doubt he can crush the ball when it’s thrown over the plate.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution doesn’t have a great archive, but thanks to commenter named “Kyle S at work” at Baseball Think Factory, we can find evidence (most pointing to AJC articles) that Francoeur has actually set out to better recognize pitches in each of the last four offseasons:

2006. 2007. 2008. 2009.

His career walk rates:

2005: 4.0%; 2006: 3.4%; 2007: 6.0%; 2008: 6.0%; 2009: 3.6%.

It’s great that Francoeur knows he needs to walk more. The problem is, there’s no evidence he has the ability to do so. He’s still only 26 — which is sort of amazing given how long it seems like he’s been around — so there’s hope he can finally pull everything together and starts recognizing pitches the way he apparently hopes to.

He’s a Met, so I’ll be rooting for him.

Reading David Waldstein’s feature for the Times about the Mets’ heavy Venezuelan presence in camp this year got me thinking.

Of the guys near-certain to make the 25-man roster, several, as Waldstein notes, are from Venezuela. More are from the United States. Jose Reyes, Luis Castillo and Fernando Tatis are from the Dominican Republic. Ryota Igarashi is from Japan. Oliver Perez is from Mexico. Jason Bay is from Canada.

Not counting Puerto Rico — the birthplace of Carlos Beltran, Alex Cora, Pedro Feliciano and Angel Pagan — since it’s technically a United States territory, that means the Mets are one country shy of potentially fielding a seven-nation army and being able to employ the totally sweet (and eminently coverable) White Stripes song of the same name as a rallying cry.

Longshot roster candidate Tobi Stoner, though he grew up in Maryland, was born in West Germany. Reports all offseason said the Mets could sign Cuban defector Yuniesky Maya.

One non-roster invite, veteran infielder Jolbert Cabrera, is from Colombia. Another, lefty pitcher Travis Blackley, is Australian. Infield prospect Ruben Tejada — who certainly shouldn’t break camp with the big club barring another massive and terrifying run of injuries — is from Panama.

I don’t think any of those guys is likely to make the squad, but this has to happen. I don’t love the White Stripes, but Seven Nation Army is an awesome song, and probably as good a justification for carrying somebody who doesn’t deserve the 25th spot on the roster as any of the others the Mets have had in the past few years.

Do it, Omar.