According to MLB Trade Rumors, Ryan Garko could be non-tendered by the San Francisco Giants.

If the Mets are really looking for a right-handed bat to complement Daniel Murphy at first base and are unwilling to give Nick Evans a shot, Garko might be a nice fit.

Garko will turn 29 in January and sports a career .887 OPS against lefties. He’s not a great defensive first baseman, but on the upside, he wears high socks and vaguely resembles Gaston from Beauty and the Beast.

Garko started 10 games in corner outfield positions last season. Also, my wife thinks he’s hot. I think he’s kind of goony looking, but there’s no accounting for taste I suppose.

One of the more bizarre events of the Winter Meetings flew under the radar yesterday when the Mets diverted headlines with contract offers to Bengie Molina and Jason Bay.

The Rule 5 Draft is often meaningless and I am far from an expert in the subject, but it is a reasonable place to find a low-cost role-player, provided you’re willing to keep him on your 25-man roster. If not, you must send him back to the team from which you’ve taken him. That’s how it works.

Anyway, strange things were afoot yesterday. As I wrote:

The Mets took Carlos Monasterios from the Phillies in the Rule 5 Draft this morning. It’s not a big deal, but the Phillies only had 33 men on their 40-man roster so weren’t even close to protecting Monasterios, plus he didn’t even make the list of 14 guys Jonathan Mayo suggested at MLB.com, plus he only threw seven innings about Single A last season, plus this guy was available. The Mets must really like something about Monasterios, in other words.

Update, 10:02 a.m. And apparently Monasterios has been traded to the Dodgers for cash considerations.

It turned out, according to David Lennon, that scouts loved Monasterios, so there’s that. But enough to make up for the fact that he’d only thrown seven innings above Single A? I guess so. And no one even selected Yohan Pino, a guy who posted over a 4:1 K:BB ratio in over 120 innings across Double-A and Triple-A in 2009.

Shows what I know.

Anyway, the bottom line is the Mets, with 40-man roster spots available, turned the seventh overall pick in the Rule 5 draft — a solid opportunity to find a role player on the cheap — into cash considerations from the Dodgers.

It could be that the deal forebodes some future move with the Dodgers and was some sort of good faith move between the two clubs, as Lennon suggests. I have no idea.

In any case, it doesn’t mean much. But it’s certainly weird.

I was going to write a whole SNY.tv column about something, then Joel Sherman sort of scooped me. In today’s Post, he writes:

Ticket sales are lagging and fans are screaming for the Mets to make a meaningful acquisition.

And, poof, they suddenly were acknowledging making an offer yesterday to Jason Bay.

That’s a bit more cynical than the angle I was going to take, but the point is similar: We spend a ton of time weighing in on and reacting to reports from anonymous sources, but we almost never consider the motivations of anonymous sources.

Yesterday, after the Yankees had acquired Curtis Granderson, when Mets fans were starting to get impatient, after Scott Boras essentially called the Mets out in public, someone leaked word to Mike Francesa that an offer had been extended to Jason Bay.

Mike Francesa! You don’t leak information to Mike Francesa as a gesture of goodwill or good faith to a reporter who covers the team in good conscience every day, you leak information to Mike Francesa because it’s easier than standing on top of the Empire State Building shouting it into a 50-million watt megaphone while Twittering it into a Blackberry synchronized with a team of skywriting biplanes and the Goodyear blimp.

For whatever reason, the Mets desperately wanted us to know that they made an offer to Jason Bay.

I can think of a few possible explanations:

They really want Bay. Occam’s razor, right? The simplest explanation is often the best. The Mets could really believe that Bay’s power will play at Citi Field or that he’ll be a better value than Holliday, and so they are legitimately pursuing him and want their anxious fanbase to know it.

What Sherman says. By all accounts, ticket sales are slow. The Daily News has fueled a ton of paranoia that the Mets will not spend much money this offseason, so it could be that the team is extending offers to show fans that it is, indeed, willing to spend to improve this year. Bay pretty clearly is not going to accept the four-year, $65 million deal, since it’s only nominally larger than the one he was reportedly offered by the Red Sox, so it could very well be just for appearances.

They really want Holliday. If the deal is disingenuous, as Sherman seems to suggest, it could just as easily be an attempt to leverage perceived interest in Bay to drive down Matt Holliday’s price tag. I have no idea that that’s the case, and that’s probably wishful thinking on my part since I think Holliday’s a better fit, plus I think Scott Boras is probably too smart for that to work, but you never know.

Anyway as I’m writing this about six other blog posts have come out on the Internet wondering exactly the same thing about the motiviations, so apparently it’s not nearly as brilliant a realization as I initially assumed. Carry on.

Apparently everyone has left the Winter Meetings and is in transit, meaning all forms of baseball-related media have gone quiet except for Mike Francesa, who has seized the opportunity to declare that the Mets have offered a contract to Jason Bay.

I should note that I am not listening to Francesa’s show; I find it difficult and quite likely bad for my health, so all of this information is coming second and third hand.

Anyway, Francesa apparently says the Mets have offered Bay a contract because they prefer him to Matt Holliday based on charts they have that show his power will play better at Citi Field.

This has caused an immediate uproar on Twitter and in the blogosphere, and rightfully so; Holliday appears to be a better player than Bay overall, and a younger one.

While more reliable sources have since confirmed that the Mets have made an offer to Bay, it’s important to slow down a second: Keep in mind that there’s more than just straight player evaluation at work here, and so far Francesa is, as far as I know, the only journalist who has suggested the Mets prefer Bay to Holliday.

It could be that the Mets see Bay as potentially a better value than Holliday — a far less perplexing determination. Holliday, after all, is a Scott Boras client and the premiere free agent on the market and so will likely be expensive.

Of course, his price hasn’t been set yet — neither has Bay’s — and it’s difficult to trust any of the myriad rumors that have surfaced this offseason about the salaries players will command.

The commotion online strikes me more as the fallout from a fanbase grown entirely distrustful of its front office. We’re so certain that the Mets will screw something up this offseason that we’ll take Mike Francesa’s word as proof that they already have.

Meanwhile, it does appear that right-handed pull hitters succeed at Citi Field, and Bay is a lot more pull-heavy than Holliday.

That’s not to say he’s better, of course, but it seems a pointless exercise to destroy the Mets for a move they haven’t even made yet.

Besides, if we’re going to do that, the one to target is the Bengie Molina one. That guy’s no good.

Maybe I’m creating a strawman here, but I feel like there’s some sense of anxiety from Mets fans that the Winter Meetings will come and go and the team will have done nothing to improve its roster, and that’s somehow bad.

But it’s not.

If you read this space with any regularity, you know it’s far from my bag to defend Omar Minaya and his administration, but there’s no reason to rush into anything.

Think about it: Has there been any move made this offseason that’s made you say, oh wow, the Mets really missed out on that one?

Maybe signing Rich Harden for $7.5 million. But even that — for a near lock to get injured — seems far from a steal.

The rest? Would anyone have been thrilled if the Mets gave Randy Wolf three years and $30 million? Or four years and $36 mil for Chone Figgins? Multi-year deals for Brian Schneider or Ivan Rodriguez or Yorvit Torrealba? No thanks.

It seems like the dominant sentiment among Mets fans, based mostly on reports in the Daily News, is that the team isn’t going to spend enough money to compete for the big free agents on the markets. But the team keeps claiming it will, and it’s not like any of the big free agents have gone off the board below market rate without the Mets in on the bidding.

The Mets need to improve their roster by Opening Day, not by the end of the Winter Meetings. The Winter Meetings are a non-event. They may be full of sound and fury, but they signify nothing.

I know this is not something any Mets fan wants to hear, but be patient. It’s actually better that the front office be reading the market and reacting than going all-in and overspending.