Sandy Alderson was pigeonholed early in his administration as a risk-averse executive who would strongly reject the idea of a mega-contract for any player, but specifically an injury-prone one such as Jose Reyes, who did not have the Mets’ general manager’s favorite asset: elite on-base percentage.

Alderson warned not to stereotype him, and that decisions would be based on information absorbed during the season.

We should have listened….

Translation: Alderson has learned to admire what Reyes does to such a degree that neither a minor hamstring injury nor the lack of elite on-base skills is dimming his ardor to keep the shortstop.

– Joel Sherman, N.Y. Post.

Oh what a story! Heartless, robotic, spreadsheet-crunching GM comes to town hellbent on trading a team’s lovable homegrown star shortstop, only to be won over by all the player’s intangibles in an effervescent, MVP-caliber first half. It reads like the treatment for Moneyball 2: Revenge of the Guys Without Manboobs.

Unless… unless… What if Sandy Alderson knew from the beginning of his tenure with the Mets that there is more than one tool with which to assess a baseball player? And what if talk of the Mets’ inevitable fire sale was overblown from the beginning?

Crazy. What kind of story is that?

Jose Reyes tweaked something in his left hamstring yesterday, which you probably know. From the very early reports, it doesn’t sound like it’s terribly severe, but then it almost never does from the early reports. So we’ll all sit here holding our breath and crossing our fingers until we know more, or until we see Reyes back on the field and healthy. Ruben Tejada is starting at shortstop today, with Angel Pagan leading off.

In less important and lighter news, Reyes was elected to start at shortstop for the National League All-Star Team, and Carlos Beltran made the squad as a reserve. The All-Star Game is a silly pageant, and though I’ve taken to blustering over individual selections in the past, it’s a bit of a fool’s errand. Due to the whims of the selection process, every year there are going to be several players left off the rosters better than several players included on them. It’s an exhibition.

The good news is that those of us who begrudgingly watch the All-Star Game will get to see that much more of Reyes and Beltran playing baseball this year (assuming they play). Plus it’s nice for them to get recognition — and bonuses — for the seasons they’re having.

On a completely unrelated note, the SNY Why Guys make the case that Bobby Parnell should take over as closer if the Mets deal Francisco Rodriguez before the deadline. I have maintained that the Mets should shop Rodriguez regardless of their situation in the standings to try to avoid getting saddled with his vesting option in 2012, but I’m not sure I’ve ever considered whom they should choose to close out games in his stead.

I think a case could be made for a couple different guys currently pitching in the Mets’ bullpen, but I won’t make any of them because I’m interested to see what you think. I only included active pitchers here, though if and when Taylor Buchholz returns he deserves consideration as well:

[poll id=”27″]

This morning, I asked Twitter to look up Jason Bay’s stats on Canada Day — which is today, July 1.

This brilliant image is ripped off from our man Patrick Flood at PatrickFloodBlog.com.

Matthew Callan obliged. In 22 at-bats on Canada day, the Vancouver native has only two hits, both of which came for the Pirates in a 2005 tilt in Milwaukee. Bay has walked twice and struck out 12 times on the day celebrating the anniversary of the Constitution Act of 1867.

Disappointed that Bay is, all small sample caveats noted, not the Canadian hero I hoped he’d be, I repeated Callan’s research for another noted slugger from north of our border: SABR hero Matt Stairs.

By my count, in 43 at-bats on July 1, Stairs has 13 hits with six walks, 14 strikeouts, two home runs and a double. That’s an impressive — and very Matt Stairsy — .302/.388/.465 line if you’re playing at home.

I did not repeat the exercise for Canadian-born Larry Walker, Justin Morneau, Corey Koskie, Russell Martin, Joey Votto or anyone else, in part due to time constraints and in part because I want to go on believing that Matt Stairs is the Canadian player that performs best on Canada Day, deserving of all the Molson.

Not sure if this is something anyone else noticed or something that even merits a blog post, but Josh Thole seems to have put his early season struggles behind him. He’s up to a .254/.345/.322 line, so it’s not as if he’s the second coming of Mike Piazza, but he’s now well within the range of respectability for catchers — especially 24-year-old catchers.

His defense hasn’t been stellar behind the plate this year, but Thole now has about a full season’s worth of Major League action on his resume, in which he has posted a solid .273/.352/.352 line.

Plus Thole hits left-handed and hits righties well, making him a valuable part of any catching platoon. Mets catchers — primarily Thole and folk-hero Ronny Paulino — have combined for sixth-best in the NL in OPS in 2011.

On the latest episode of the Mostly Mets podcast — which you should check out, by the way — one of my co-hosts (I forget which) mentioned that “if you squint,” you could see how Jason Bay might be coming out of the awful funk that plagued him for the early part of the season.

And that’s true. You can see that if you squint. Bay has his OPS up over the Ordonez Line to .656, a .241/.326/.330 split. That’s still way below standard for Bay, for players making as much money as Bay and for Major League corner outfielders in general, but hey, baby steps here.

If you want to toy with arbitrary endpoints — and I don’t, but I will because it’s Friday and I’m off to a slow start this morning — Bay is hitting .340 with an .887 OPS over his past 13 games. He even has two homers in that span, which feels like a revelation for him.

The last time we watched a once-strong hitter struggle (nearly) as mightily as Bay did these past couple of months, Carlos Delgado busted out with a two home-run game in Yankee Stadium and then proceeded to carry the Mets into an unlikely and ultimately ill-fated Wild Card chase in 2008. I don’t know why I assumed that if Bay broke out there would be something like that, some tidy moment to identify as the turning point where he returned to hitting like the guy who averaged 30 home runs a year from 2004 to 2009.

Maybe Bay’s return to form will be a bit more polite. Maybe it has already started, and only the squinters have noticed.

Still hard to tell. To these untrained eyes, it appears he’s making contact more frequently but remains vulnerable to breaking pitches on the outside half of the plate. But then I never saw quite enough of Bay in his heyday to know exactly what he looks like when he’s going well. I imagine few Mets fans have. So I think our squinting, in this case, amounts mostly to hoping.

But, you know, baby steps.

The term “Moneyball” is now synonymous with on-base percentage, if mostly for people who don’t read. That misses the point of the book. Still, most Moneyball 2.0 articles take the position that a majority of baseball teams understand the importance of getting on base and keeping the lineup moving, such that it isn’t a way to find cheap, good players anymore. Moneyball-as-on-base-percentage is supposedly dead.

Only, once again, check out these current Mets. David Wright and Ike Davis are injured, Jason Bay can’t hit the ball past the infielders, and on most days, the lineup is Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, and a half-dozen second basemen scattered all over the field. But they keep scoring runs….

Because –- points at Jonah Hill –- they get on base.

– Patrick Flood, PatrickFloodBlog.com.

OK, I remember what I said yesterday about not getting too caught up in the returns of a couple days’ worth of baseball games, even if what the Mets have done in the past four has been just about the craziest f@#$ing thing I’ve ever seen. But if we’re talking about stepping back and taking in the whole picture, we need to also count these recent games as part of that evidence. They happened, after all.

These Mets have a good offense. They’re third in the National League in runs per game and tied for second in park-adjusted OPS+ and batting average. They’re second in on-base percentage and tops in walks. They’re first in stolen bases and they steal them at a good clip.

They don’t hit a lot of home runs, but they sustain rallies. They do it, as Flood notes, without David Wright or Ike Davis, and with second basemen filling in everywhere. So what gives?

Remember this post? Last season, the Mets gave 1633 plate appearances to players with on-base percentages below .300, by far the most in their division. 1633. One thousand, six hundred and thirty three.

One game shy of the halfway point in 2011, the Mets have given only 173 plate appearances to players with OBPs below .300. One good game from Lucas Duda and that number will drop to 103. There’s a decent chance the Mets will end the season having given half as many total plate appearances to players with OBPs below .300 than Jeff Francoeur got for them in 2010.

Granted, .300 is an arbitrary mark and this is only an exercise. Plus the year’s not over yet and if one regular player goes into the tank before September that figure could spike a bit. But all nine of the guys the Mets started against the Tigers last night have on-base percentages above the league average, as do two of the guys who were on the bench.

For some reason, a few stubborn fools still act like it’s heresy to suggest that a team’s 27 outs are precious, and that clubs should be happy to waste many of them on players with big, exuberant swings that connect on rare occasions and miss on most. But I shouldn’t pander; I will assume for the sake of this post that you’ve now seen the value of a lineup without gaping holes.

It’s pretty sweet, really. Remember that accurate criticism of the Omar Minaya regime that persisted in some circles about how it never complemented great players with suitable roster depth? The Mets have two great players now, but they’re surrounded by a bunch of dudes who actually deserve to be playing regularly in the Majors. So we go on about their grit and revel in their resolve.

People seem eager to credit Jose Reyes for the Mets’ recent run, and good. It’s not all thanks to Reyes but he has been awesome, and if everyone’s going to blame star players undeservedly when a team struggles, the stars should certainly earn at least their fair share of the praise upon their team’s successes. We are still long in Reyes’ debt in this transaction.

Shame about the pitching, or they could really have something here.