According to Matt at MetsBlog, SI.com’s Jon Heyman told WFAN.com that the Mets are looking for a solid innings guy who doesn’t get hurt.

Here’s the thing: Good luck with that.

It strikes me that there are very, very few pitchers who reliably throw more than 190 innings in a season. Jon Garland is one of them, and he and the Dodgers have a mutual 2010 option on his contract. So he could be a free agent. Jason Marquis is another, and he’s already campaigning to join the Mets.

Both Garland and Marquis are groundball guys, for what it’s worth, so the Mets would probably need to do something about their infield defense to make those investments pay off. I’m looking at you, Luis Castillo.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. The point is that there has to be a huge value in starters who can simply pitch a bunch of innings reliably, even if it’s only at a Major League average level. Longer starts, obviously, save a bullpen, and durability helps a team avoid the need for a below-average replacement pitcher.

It seems, from a cursory look around the league, like a bunch of the guys who can throw 190-220 innings a season consistently are also excellent: CC Sabathia, Dan Haren, Roy Halladay and the like. Of course, that makes sense, since better pitchers go deeper into games more frequently.

But there’s something to be said for pitchers like Garland, Joe Blanton and Bronson Arroyo, who teams can count on to amass innings. (Livan Hernandez, my colleague Mike Salfino likes to point out, does not truly eat innings. Innings eat him.)

I’m not sure there’s any metric out there that weighs a pitcher’s reliability. Part of that is probably because so few pitchers are reliable, and even the ones that seem reliable will eventually crap out or need arm surgery.

Still, it feels like there should be some statistical way to credit a guy like Javier Vazquez who basically has not missed a start since the turn of the Millenium. I guess it’s easy enough to just click around on a guy’s baseball-reference page, but I’m extremely lazy.

That’s all. Just sayin.

The Mets released Ken Takahashi today. That’s a shame because I always hoped to do a feature on his translator, but I never got around to it. Being a Major League translator seems like a really interesting job, because it requires not only being bilingual, but being bilingual in the language of baseball, and I assume that involves talking mechanics and scouting and everything else.

Anyway, I felt like pulling up Ken Takahashi’s Wikipedia page just to see if there was anything interesting about him that I didn’t know, so I searched the Wikipedia for “Takahashi.”

But Ken Takahashi, it turns out, does not even make the Takahashi disambiguation page.

Takahashi is the third most common surname in Japan, behind Sato and Suzuki. Takahashis more notable than Ken, according to the Wikipedia, include two other baseball players from the NPB, five manga artists, five voice actors and one really kickass sounding roboticist, a three-time winner of the humanoid cup.

There are two other Takahashis on the disambiguation page whose first names begin with “Ken,” and coincidentally, both are athletes. Kenichi Takahashi is a distance runner. Kenji Takahashi is a soccer player.

But our Ken Takahashi is nowhere to be found. And though he does have his own page, until Ken Takahashi is added to the disambiguation page I will not bemoan his departure.

Godspeed, Ken Takahashi. We hardly knew ye, but we knew ye better than the Wikipedia apparently does.

UPDATE, 3:31 p.m.

Josh has given Ken Takahashi his rightful place in history and added him to the disambiguation page. I’m sure Ken Takahashi is grateful, wherever he may be.

So it’s no secret that the Mets will be looking for an upgrade in left field this offseason, and luckily for them, both good player Jason Bay and very good player Matt Holliday will be available on the free-agent market.

Unfortunately for the Mets, both the Red Sox and Yankees will be looking for left fielders, as well. I have no idea what specifically those clubs will look for, but Sox GM Theo Epstein has been adamant that he will try to re-sign Bay.

There’s no guarantee that will happen — it’s likely Epstein is openly praising Bay only because Bay is part of the Red Sox. But should it happen, and should the Yanks offer Holliday a blank check — also not a sure thing because of the way they spent money last offseason — it’s easy to imagine the Mets settling for current Yanks left fielder and free agent-to-be Johnny Damon.

Here’s why:

1) Durability: If you’ve followed the Mets under Omar Minaya, you recognize that their offseason tendency is always to fix the principal concern from the previous season. In 2009, that was the team’s inability to stay healthy. In 2009, Damon played in more than 140 games for the 14th consecutive season.

2) Marketability: It will be tough for the Mets to sell tickets and ads in February, but Damon would help the cause. Maybe not as much as Holliday, for sure, but Damon is a familiar face in New York with a reputation as a clubhouse leader and a hustler. The Mets could try to sell fans on his intangibles while propping him up as a “proven winner” after his contributions to the 2004 Red Sox and, should they succeed, the 2009 Yankees.

3) Illusions of power and defense: The Mets are looking to add a power bat to the lineup and upgrade their defense. Damon doesn’t really do either of those things, but he is coming off a 24-homer season and probably maintains some of his rep as a rangy defender even though he’s outgrown it. If the Mets wanted to get really creative, they could argue that Damon’s tendency to pull his homers could help him take advantage of Citi’s right-field corner.

In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, I’m not on board with this idea I created myself. Here’s why they shouldn’t:

1) He’s 35: There’s a reason very few players have played 14 straight seasons with 140 games or more. Old players get hurt more often. Signing Damon — who has managed to stay on the field despite numerous minor injuries — to a multi-year deal because of his ability to stay healthy would likely prove ironic.

2) He’s not good at defense: Damon could still boast above-average range, according to UZR, as of 2008. But in 2009, it appears the nagging injuries and Matsui-forced inability to take days off as a DH caught up with him. Also, if you’ve seen him throw, you know about his “arm.”

3) He’s the biggest sellout of all time: This is a subjective thing and I really don’t begrudge baseball players for taking the largest contracts offered to them, but leaving the Red Sox for the Yankees while shaving his caveman beard and cutting his hair was just too much. C’mon, guy. At least get yourself a beard clause in the contract. He makes Mark McGrath look like Ian MacKaye.

Marty Noble has a new Mets.com mailbag out today, and in it, he discusses Angel Pagan:

He was a productive offensive player last season. But his errors — of omission, commission and in thinking — were so many, assessing his skills can’t be done so readily.

I don’t know. Maybe that’s true. Pagan did make a few really terrible mental mistakes in 2009. But were they really so bad as to take away from the value he added to the team?

Not nearly. Bill James Online, which relies on video scouts from Baseball Info Solutions to judge how many plays a defender makes above or below the average player at his position, had Pagan as a +12 left fielder, a +7 center fielder and a +1 right fielder. Presumably, that includes the penalties levied against Pagan for his blunders.

And on the basepaths? The same site has him as a +12 baserunner, meaning he gained 12 more bases with his feet than the average player would in similar situations. (Note: I initially botched — by a lot — my reading of his stats page. I wrote that he was +35, which is his career total.)

He was thrown out on the bases four times, which isn’t great. But I’d guess that a player so aggressive on the basepaths will always be more prone to the occasional gaffe. So while everyone was so busy chastising Pagan for the times he cost the Mets runs with his baserunning, they forgot to celebrate all the runs he actually earned the team with his legs.

So essentially, there are ways to assess readily assess his skills despite his lapses in concentration. I’m not saying we should take the Bill James Online stats as gospel, but since they do weigh both his positive and negative contributions, they provide a lot of assistance in figuring out how to value his tendency for the baserunning or defensive yip.

And the verdict shows that Pagan, when you combine his plus defense and plus baserunning with his .837 OPS, was pretty damn good in 2009.

Should the Mets count on it going forward? Maybe not. But they certainly shouldn’t hold against Pagan all the nonsensical sanctimony about him playing the game the wrong way.

Incidentally, the first question in Noble’s mailbag regards Carl Crawford’s “personality and leadership” and is posed by a Queens resident named “James K.” Could this be James Kannengieser, Amazin’ Avenue writer, occasional TedQuarters commenter and sabermetric knight-errant of the Mets’ blogosphere? James, are you baiting Marty Noble?