It’s the Winter Meetings, dammit! Here’s a post where I round up all the Mets-related rumors I’ve seen on MetsBlog and spew my opinions on them. SPOILER ALERT: Just about everything I say will include “depending on the price.”

Mets interested in Fred Lewis: Well that’s cool — depending on the price, of course. Lewis would make a fine fourth outfielder, and a legitimate contingency plan for the three penciled-in starters — all of whom have struggled with injuries recently or historically. He can play the corners and fill in at center field in a pinch.

And while Lewis won’t make anyone in New York forget Mickey Mantle, he can hit a bit too — especially against right-handed pitchers. For his career, the lefty-hitting Lewis has a solid .280/.354/.442 line against righties.

Mets close to signing Ronny Paulino: I feel like Ronny Paulino has been “close” to signing with the Mets like 15 times before. Paulino has a rep as a solid defensive catcher and fared well in Beyond the Boxscore’s catcher-defense rankings. He is not a great hitter, though his career .273/.328/.383 line is pretty similar to the 2010 National League average for catchers — .253/.326/.388.

Perhaps most importantly, the righty-hitting Paulino has, for his career, a marked platoon split. He’s got a measly .635 OPS against righties but an .881 mark against lefties, essentially the Matt Diaz of catchers. Assuming he doesn’t cost multiple years or numerous millions, he would be a great choice to spell Josh Thole against tough southpaws, or even in a straight platoon — since catchers need time off anyway. Combined, they’d give the Mets excellent offense from behind the plate.

Mets “in contact” with Russell Martin: Martin would also make a nice righty-hitting complement to Thole, but I don’t see this one happening. Martin reportedly rejected a one-year, $4.2 million deal from the Dodgers, so the only way I imagine the Mets getting seriously involved in his pursuit would be if he’s still a free agent later this winter.

The one interesting thing about Martin is that he has said he’s open to playing first, second and third next year if some team wants him for a super-utility role. But since the Mets have Thole in house, they could probably find better ways to spend $5 million.

Mets among 6-8 teams interested in D.J. Carrasco: How interested, though? Because if there are 5-7 other teams bidding on Carrasco I imagine he’s going to require a decent chunk of change, and he’s really not all that spectacular. If the Mets are trying to save money they should probably be searching the scrap heap or converting starters to fill out their pen, not signing free-agents. I’d pass on this one.

We should keep Jerry Hairston Jr.’s name in mind: I have no idea what that means, but I will do just that. I am a fan of Old Man Hairston’s kid. Plays every position pretty well, gives a team a lot of flexibility. Also, good guy.

Mets interested in every living unspectacular or recently injured free-agent starting pitcher: I mean, someone’s going to need to pitch. Maybe it’ll be Freddy Garcia or Chris Young or Jeff Francis. This one is almost entirely based on information I do not have access to: The cost and reports the pitcher’s health. Hard to speculate on which one of these guys would be best if I don’t know who seems most likely to hold up for a season.

Mets willing to take calls on every player, unlikely to deal stars: This seems like it’s probably true every year, right?

Mets might hire Moises Alou as first-base coach: Not a chance he stays healthy for the full season.

What’d I miss?

The Mets signed catcher Dusty Ryan to a Minor League deal today and invited him to Spring Training.

It’s certainly not a high-impact move or a big Winter Meetings splash. I imagine it won’t preclude the Mets from signing a more experienced right-handed complement/backup to Josh Thole, and I would guess that if Dusty Ryan ends up on the Major League Mets in 2011 it means someone is either hurt or woefully underperforming.

But Ryan — unlike so many of the guys signed by the Mets to be Minor League roster filler in recent years — actually has some upside. He is 26, for one thing. For another, he actually has some mild history of offensive production in the Minors.

Ryan does not make a ton of contact — he hit .199 in Triple-A in 2010. But he has demonstrated a decent batting eye at the level, and can boast a decent-for-a-catcher .237/.348/.416 line in 631 plate appearances in Triple-A. (As a point of reference, Omir Santos’ career Triple-A line is .251/.305/.324.) There is some chance Ryan can improve or enjoy a career year and actually contribute something positive to the Mets at the Major League level.

Right around this time last year, I wrote:

What neither Coste nor Cora will provide is upside. Upside is the chance a player can actually provide more to his team than he’s being paid to provide. Upside is something the Mets should be searching for among the potential Rule 5 Draft picks and non-tendered free agents. Upside is something worth committing money to when a team is operating with a finite budget.

Maybe I’m again reading to deeply into a minor move, or maybe the acquisition is yet another sign that things are looking up for the Mets. Point is there’ll be someone behind the plate in Triple-A that might actually outperform expectations and that’s, you know, cool.

Makes some of our contracts look pretty good. That’s a long time and a lot of money. I thought they were trying to reduce the deficit in Washington.

– Sandy Alderson, on Jayson Werth’s seven-year, $126 million deal with the Nats

Badumching, heyooo!

I don’t want to belabor the terms of the Werth deal too much here because based on the Internet’s reaction it doesn’t have a whole lot of supporters. Straight up: It would be at least vaguely defensible to commit that much money and years to a 31-year-old corner outfielder if your team hoped to contend with in the next years. If the Red Sox or Yankees signed him they could say, “Well, he’ll produce excellent numbers for the next few years while we compete for championships, and we realize we’ll have to shoulder the back end of his contract when he’s declining.”

But since the Nationals appear unlikely to contend with or without Werth in 2011, since Stephen Strasburg likely won’t be back until at least the middle of the season and since their best pitcher in 2010 was Livan Hernandez, giving Werth that much money now merits the hefty snark from Alderson. Even if the Nats can compete in two years, they’ll likely have to do so with Werth’s contract entering its albatross phase.

It seems like a perennial loser like the Nats has to overpay just to get a free agent of Werth’s caliber in the door, but that’s the thing: They should first work to make the team a legit contender so they can then woo top free agents without ridiculous terms.

Anyway, it seems like most Mets fans think Alderson’s comments are awesome and hilarious. There’s some tiny fraction of the fanbase that has pointed to them as indicative of Alderson’s small-market approach, and chastised him for not himself chasing Werth.

Those people are probably incapable of being convinced that Alderson’s prudence this offseason is what’s best — and perhaps all that’s feasible — for the franchise. They do not want to hear that the Mets will still very much be spending like a big-market club in 2010. The team will probably enter the season with a payroll around $140 million. It’s not Alderson’s fault that much of it will be allocated to dreck.

So to those few impatient Mets fans, and perhaps to the Mets themselves for abiding such lavish and irresponsible spending the past few years, Alderson will bring nothing but coal and a couple of scrap-heap pickups for Christmas. Frankly, it’s what they deserve. Advocating for or consenting to giant contracts and big splashes and a wholesale lack of foresight puts you on the naughty list in baseball.

For the rest of us, we get some of the greatest gifts a fan could wish for: hope, promise, reason. But to stay on the nice list, we must continue to be patient. We must withstand the onslaught of nonsense from the winter meetings and shoulder the idiotic rantings of the angry “small-market Sandy” set. And we must spend the offseason remembering that though the Mets likely won’t be making any exciting moves, the most exciting thing of all is a front office that’s committed to and perhaps capable of creating a long-term sustainable winner.

But to me, the biggest contingency plan for the 2010 Mets is the 2011 Mets. Because if things go horribly awry this season — and after 2009, we’d be foolish to dismiss that possibility — the team at least won’t have to look far to see the future. Top prospects Ike Davis, Fernando Martinez, Josh Thole and Jon Niese — should he not earn the fifth starter’s role in Spring Training — should all start the year in Triple-A….

And so I’m hoping that the Mets’ biggest failure this offseason was not in roster construction, but merely in communication when they threw around terms like “unacceptable” and “change” and “spend” and “trade.” Maybe they would’ve been better off starting with the slogan I suggested back in September:

“The 2010 Mets: Please Be Patient While We Get Our S@#$ Together”

– Me, here, Feb. 10, 2010.

I’m wrong about enough stuff that it doesn’t really pay to start going back and quoting myself. Heck, I was hardly right about everything in that post — little did I realize the Mets were about to turn their top starting-pitching prospect into a middle reliever.

I just stumbled onto it today and thought it was funny how my proposed slogan for last offseason seems to be pretty close to the actual slogan for this offseason. So that part of the post, at least, appears prescient.

I was probably wrong, though, in assuming that one year of development time for the Mets’ crop of upper-level prospects would be enough to return the Mets to contention in 2011. Yes, Ike Davis, Jon Niese and to a lesser extent Josh Thole seem primed to be (and continue being) valuable and cost-effective Major League contributors. But I was probably at least a bit guilty of the standard fan practice of overrating prospects. Clearly 2010 did not go as we would have hoped for Martinez, Reese Havens, Brad Holt or Jenrry Mejia.

James Kannengieser at Amazin’ Avenue recently took a stab at projecting the 2011 Mets’ win totals based on the current roster. He based the post on WAR and took an admittedly conservative approach, assuming that none of Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and David Wright return to the forms they showed from 2006-2008 and that neither Davis nor Thole provides more to the club in 2011 than he did in 2010.

Still, despite all that, Kannengieser puts the Mets — these Mets, without any offseason additions — at 79 wins. With some reasonable, inexpensive roster tweaking, a couple of high-upside plays that pay off, a return to peak form from at least one of the stars, and some improvement from Davis, Thole and Niese, it’s not too hard to imagine an 87-89 win team.

Maybe that’s hoping for a lot of things to go right. The new front office would have to make the right upside plays, for one thing, or at least enough of them to have some of them work out. For another, we’d have to hope the young players improve instead of suffering regression in their sophomore seasons.

But a well-managed team with a solid crop of young contributors can turn things around mighty quickly. And a win total in the high 80s should put the Mets at least on the fringes of contention.

So while yes, this offseason is a winter for the Mets’ getting their proverbial s#@$ together, it could also feasibly be one in which they scrap together enough small moves to field a competitive team in 2011. We shall see, I suppose. At the very least an Opening Day lineup with some promising young homegrown players should be more palatable than one with Gary Matthews Jr., Alex Cora and Mike Jacobs in it.

Also, for what it’s worth: That headline is a Rhymefest reference. I’m not actually ahead of my time or behind in my rent, though the latter is mostly because my wife is a vigilant bill-payer, for which I am thankful.