According to El Nuevo Dia, via MLBTR, the Mets have invited Carlos Beltran to meet with Sandy Alderson. I don’t know why, I don’t have any inside information and I don’t know if or when they’ll actually meet. But if they do, I hope Alderson says something like this:

“Hey, Carlos: I know you might feel like you haven’t gotten an entirely fair shake here — from the team, the fans and the media. And I have no idea what happened last year with the miscommunication around your surgery, and frankly, I don’t care.

I know that you are a great player, and for us to compete in 2011 we’re going to need you healthy, happy and productive. I know it’s not much, but I will take every opportunity I can to stress your importance to this club.

And we feel you would be especially valuable to us if you could move to right field this season. I trust you’ve seen the way your friend Angel Pagan covers ground in center, and we think his presence gives us the luxury of moving you to the corner to take a little bit of strain off your knees.”

And then they share a bro-hug or something, and Beltran buys Alderson a beer for being such a straight shooter, and they all live happily ever after.

Duda alone would not get a deal done as it would take at least one more player – probably someone with even better prospect status, as Duda himself failed to rank in Kevin Goldstein’s top 11 list this past winter. For that reason, the Mets may have little to no interest in Garza as it is, but their depth makes them an interesting candidate for a trade. Even if nothing comes from it.

– The Process Report

Wait, really? A deal for Matt Garza centered around Lucas Duda? Do it. Do it.

Look: I like Duda as much as anyone; it really seems like something clicked for him this year and he blossomed into a legit power-hitting prospect. But he’ll be 25 on Opening Day, he has only one year of Minor League excellence on his resume, and he’s not much of a defender.

Garza is 27, under team control through arbitration through 2013, and has pitched well and stayed healthy in baseball’s toughest division since 2008.

I imagine it would take a good deal more than Duda to net Garza in a trade. But the Process Report is a sabermetrically inclined Rays blog, not a bunch of delusional Mets fans proposing senseless deals on talk radio. And their main point here is a good one — the Mets have a lot of young depth at the corners and need pitching, the Rays have pitching to trade and need someone to replace Carlos Pena.

Since Garza would likely help the Mets both in 2011 and down the road, dealing for him would not represent the type of imprudent spending I advised against here. If the cost in prospects is reasonable, acquiring Garza would mean taking advantage of a rare opportunity to grab a reliable and cost-controlled starting pitcher, albeit one with a disgusting chin beard.

The Mets have hired former Blue Jays GM J.P. Ricciardi as Special Assistant to the General Manager.

Ricciardi, if you’ll recall, once ripped Adam Dunn on talk radio, claiming that he “doesn’t really like baseball that much.” Then he said he called Dunn and apologized, but Dunn denied ever speaking to Ricciardi. Ricciardi maintained that the person on the other end of the phone said he was Adam Dunn and said, “That’s quite a prank to pull.” All this is available on Ricciardi’s Wikipedia page.

On the upside, he put together a decent young core of pitching talent in Toronto that didn’t really take hold until after he was fired at the end of the 2009 season.

Ricciardi played infield in the Mets’ system for two seasons in the early 1980s. He told reporters he had a standing offer from Theo Epstein to join the Red Sox front office, but decided to join the Mets when Sandy Alderson got the job. He said he hopes to bring the Mets to where the Red Sox are (in the organizational sense, not moving them to Boston). He stressed the importance of building a farm system through the draft and international scouting.

He said he’s excited to work for a team with the resources that the Mets have.

A few years ago, I painted the interior walls of an apartment with a friend. Neither of us had ever endeavored a paint job of that magnitude before, but we figured it wasn’t exactly rocket science — tape the moldings, paint the walls.

The actual painting part wasn’t terrible, but taping all the edges turned out to be a huge pain in the ass. We spent at least as much time taping as we did painting, and the project took us about twice as long as we expected.

Just before we finished, the cable guy came. He complimented our paint job, and asked if we had taped up all the moldings. We said that we had, and he informed us to the existence of paint edgers, an inexpensive tool that paints the edges of walls without the need for all that tape.

We cursed ourselves for not doing more research and cursed fate (and probably Cablevision) for sending the cable guy so late in our process, but at no point did we curse the paint edger.

That’s why it’s a bit weird to me, as I sort through all the reactions to Sandy Alderson’s introductory press conference at Citi Field on Friday, that so many people seemed to get so riled up about sabermetrics.

For one thing, I don’t even know what “sabermetrics” means. I know it involves baseball and statistics, and I know that lots of people seem willing to speak or write on behalf of all so-called sabermetricians. But which stats define sabermetrics? It’s not batting average; we know that. Is it on-base percentage, or is that still too basic? It strikes me as strange that we should need a fancy term for those who recognize the merits of hitters that get on base often.

My understanding has always been that the numbers we throw under the umbrella of sabermetrics are those that aim to give us a more precise understanding of a player’s value than the so-called traditional ones on the back of a baseball card, and that “sabermetrics” itself refers to the pursuit of those more precise metrics.

The book Moneyball, contrary to widespread belief, was not just about sabermetrics. It was about a cash-strapped baseball team identifying an inefficiency in the market and taking advantage of it. Running a successful business.

So I get a bit confused when I see debate over when Alderson first started using sabermetrics, like he at some point flipped on a light switch to enact sabermetrics, and from there his team was a sabermetric team. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work like that. All stats are just tools, and every team uses stats, among other tools, to evaluate players.

That’s all. No real point in getting frustrated about it. Some teams use the tape and some teams use the edger, and probably most teams use both depending on the circumstances, and everyone’s got an opinion on which option works better. The point is there’s no real good reason to get upset and say, “f@#$ you, it’s tape!” or to be all, “yield to the dominance of the edger!” because it’s really silly to get so worked up over tools.

If you hope Sandy Alderson uses sabermetrics and Moneyball to run the Mets, then great. If you hope he doesn’t, that’s fine too. Both of those words are just big sweeping labels assigned to reasonably simple concepts, and if you want to use them or not use them to describe what Alderson does as Mets GM, you know, whatever.

All I care is that he seems dedicated to running the team the right way, and appears apt to do so.