According to Jon Heyman on Twitter, the Blue Jays are asking for huge prospects in return for lefty setup man Scott Downs. Like blue-chip prospects.

It sounds a bit ridiculous, and since no deal has yet been made it’s reasonable to expect the Blue Jays won’t get anyone near the caliber of Casey Kelly, Jose Iglesias or Jesus Montero for Downs.

But if the market rate for lefty relievers is even a good but not great prospect, a tier down from that trio, the Mets should probably dangle Pedro Feliciano out there and see what teams will offer up.

Downs and Feliciano are not perfect comps, though they will both be free agents after the season. Downs is a little better than Perpetual Pedro against righties and tends to throw longer outings less frequently. He’s closer to Jerry Manuel’s elusive “crossover guy” and less of a straight lefty specialist like Feliciano.

Feliciano’s career stats are more impressive, but only because Downs started his career as a mostly crappy starter. Downs is a better reliever than Feliciano and no doubt a more valuable commodity.

But with the way he flummoxes lefties, Feliciano offers value to a contending team. And if, for whatever reason, setup men are going at premium rates this July, then the Mets should consider spinning Feliciano into something that can help their future.

Now I know what you’re thinking: You’re saying the Mets should be “buyers,” not “sellers,” at the deadline, since they’re still on the fringes of contention.

Nonsense. Those are labels. That’s silly. Teams should read the market and take advantage of inefficiencies when they present themselves. Determining before the trade deadline if you’re a “buyer” or “seller” is a bad way to approach it. You’re a general manager. Improve your team.

It will make for a slightly tougher haul, but if the Mets can contend with Feliciano in 2010 — no sure thing — they can contend without him. Ollie Perez should not be on the team, but if they’re going to insist on keeping him around, he might actually prove a decent lefty specialist — righties have done the bulk of the damage against him this season and last. Mike O’Connor, down in Triple-A, could likely handle the role too. Not as well as Feliciano, certainly, but a close enough approximation to make it worth the Mets’ while if they could get something of real value for the familiar lefty.

Granted, this is all probably immaterial because I will be shocked if a team gives up a top 100 prospect for Downs. I’m skeptical of all trade rumors, and Heyman’s Tweets imply that the Blue Jays are purposefully asking for too much because they don’t want to trade Downs within the division.

I’m just thinking out loud.

Well that was a fun one, huh? Amazing how one solid win will change the tone in the media and blogosphere, too. Everyone who said the season was over two days ago is now fixing for a big deadline acquisition. How it goes, I guess.

I never doubted that the Mets’ lineup would eventually hit — and I’m not willing to take one game as evidence that they continue doing so — so I’m more interested in Jon Niese’s performance last night.

Niese didn’t have his best stuff, pretty clearly. He only struck out one batter, allowed seven hits over six innings, and pitched in traffic for much of his outing. But he induced a lot of weak contact, got groundouts when he needed them and worked past some shoddy defense behind him. I haven’t consulted pitchFX to back this up, but it seems like he has thrown his big, slow curveball more often and more consistently in his last few starts than he had been earlier in the season, (when he almost entirely abandoned it).

It’s good. Fans talk constantly about the Mets’ need for a “true No. 2,” whatever that means, and here’s Niese, at 23, pitching like at least that. Using ERA+ for a quick and dirty study, Niese has been the 22nd best pitcher in the National League in 2010, and only four teams have two pitchers who have been better than Niese.

That’s meaningless, of course. The goal is to have as many good starters as possible and not to label them one thing or another, plus ERA+ is not necessarily a good indicator of how a pitcher will perform moving forward. I’m just saying if you think the Mets don’t currently have a “true No. 2” guy, you’re wrong. Plus, with the emergence of R.A. Dickey, Niese has arguably been only the Mets’ third-best starter.

I keep getting bogged down in things that don’t matter. What does matter is that Niese is 23, under team control for the foreseeable future, and appears to be pretty damn good. Granted, 107 2/3 — or 147 1/3, if you count the last two seasons — Major League innings are not an indicator of much. Plenty of pitchers have started better and fallen apart. But Niese’s Major League numbers in his first full season are in keeping with his Minor League history, so there’s reason to believe he’s actually this good.

And that’s exciting. I’ve been waiting so eagerly for so long for the Mets to have a solid crop of young, cost-controlled players to help them create a sustainable winner, and it appears they finally might. The jury is still out on all of them — Niese and Ike Davis included, and certainly less-proven guys like Josh Thole and Ruben Tejada and all them still in Double- and Triple-A. Some will fail and disappoint us. One or two might be better than we hoped.

I generally try not to link back to things I’ve written in the past because I’ve been wrong about too much, but here’s what I wrote in September:

Eventually, trading away too many Minor Leaguers leaves a team short on Major Leaguers. Not Major League stars, just Major League guys. So the Mets overspend on free agents or trade more young players simply to fill their big-league needs. That not only costs them money they could be spending on the more deserving free agents, it costs them depth.

So every offseason, the Mets construct an elegant sand castle, only to have it destroyed by the first wave of trouble, whether it comes in the form of prolonged slumps or bad bullpens or injuries. In 2009, they were hit with a tidal wave, one no team could weather. But let’s not forget that the Mets weren’t exactly dominating before the injuries to Beltran, Wright and Santana.

Allowing young players to develop — even the ones who might not appear to be anything special — can provide sustainability. The Mets have a series of intriguing prospects of various repute, including recent callup Josh Thole as well as Fernando Martinez, Ike Davis, Ruben Tejada, Reese Havens, Jonathon Niese, Brad Holt and Jenrry Mejia.

None of these players, with the possible exception of the injured Niese, appears ready to help the Mets by Opening Day 2010. But all of them could potentially help by 2011. With a year of development time, the Mets would have a better sense of what to expect from their prospects and a sharper idea of which of their numerous holes need to be filled by players from outside the organization.

Whether design or by accident, the Mets followed that plan. They kept the farm system intact in the offseason. And now, I think and I hope, we’re beginning to see the next winning Mets team take shape. I just hope they don’t screw it up.

By now you’ve probably heard that the Mets put Rod Barajas on the disabled list yesterday and called up legendary Minor League masher Mike Hessman.

Cool.

I wrote yesterday that the team could not afford to carry a roster handicapped by yet another player nursing a day-to-day oblique injury, and Barajas’ absence will give Josh Thole a chance to show he belongs in a regular role at the big-league level. The couple of weeks won’t be an adequate sample to judge Thole either way, but hopefully he gets hot and locks down the job, because the Mets need offense and everyone loves a productive young homegrown player.

Hessman gives the Mets a little defensive flexibility — he is experienced at both infield corners and has actually played every position on the field in his lengthy Minor League career.

But more than that, Hessman provides right-handed pop off the bench. The active Minor League home-run leader, Hessman boasts a .571 slugging percentage in Triple-A in 2010.

Hessman won’t get a ton of hits that aren’t home runs; he’s a three-true-outcomes guy all the way. But given Fernando Tatis’ struggles (in a small sample) as the Mets’ in-house righty bench bat with defensive flexibility, Hessman likely represents an upgrade to the Mets’ reserve corps.

Plus, y’all know I love a Quad-A masher and root like hell for them to get a big-league shot. Hessman has had a few — he has played in 77 games over parts of four seasons with the Braves and Tigers — but here’s hoping he hits well enough to stick this time. Good luck, sir.

I originally thought that your #BlameBeltran hashtag was just a sort of joke you were doing, and that there weren’t actual Mets fans with brains and thoughts that were under the impression the team was not winning because Carlos Beltran had ruined the team’s chemistry.

Then I went on Facebook and saw a friend of a friend of mine who watches the team on a consistent and regular basis blaming Beltran, Ollie and Castillo for ruining the team’s chemistry…

I was wondering if you had any ideas where this line of reasoning comes from? Have there been any reports that the players on the team don’t like Beltran?

– Aaron, via email.

The ellipses replace a long Facebook argument between Aaron and his friend covering all-too-familiar territory. You know the one: Jeff Francoeur plays with hunger and fire, the Mets were playing better before Beltran returned, and thus, obviously, Beltran ruined the team’s chemistry.

The friend’s argument assumes a lot, most notably: A) What happens in the clubhouse contributes to what happens on the field and does not merely reflect what has recently happened on the field. B) Carlos Beltran (as well as Ollie Perez and Luis Castillo) is a bad guy in the clubhouse.

To answer Aaron’s questions: No, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything to suggest that players on the Mets don’t like Beltran. I’ve seen columnists cite anonymous “team sources” and the like to suggest that Beltran is soft, but I can’t remember anything suggesting he is less than an ideal teammate. In fact, much has been made about the way he helped Angel Pagan this offseason.

If I had to guess, I would assume the perception that Beltran is a negative or divisive figure in the clubhouse stems from the fact that he is a Puerto Rican guy named Carlos and so has always been linked by many fans with fellow Puerto-Rican-guy-named-Carlos, Carlos Delgado.

I don’t spend nearly as much time around the team as the beat writers do and so a lot of this is speculation, but Delgado got a lot of heat in the media for being a bit outspoken and sometimes abrasive. Billy Wagner’s “f***ing shocker” outburst, I’m pretty sure, was aimed at Delgado.

And I think fans read negative items about Delgado — who, I should mention, was himself praised by many of his teammates as a great leader — and extrapolate them to Beltran. But ask the Mets’ beat writers or the guys in the SNY booth, and they’ll say nothing but good things about Beltran’s attitude and work ethic.

For whatever reason, many Mets fans don’t like Beltran, and so I think they just subconsciously assume the players on the team feel the same way. The best example of this, I think, is Castillo.

Scour the Internet for a negative report from inside the clubhouse about Castillo’s work ethic, attitude, qualities as a teammate, anything. I’m almost certain you won’t find one.

We, the fans, don’t like Luis Castillo because he absorbs a significant portion of the Mets’ payroll without showing much for it. So we guess David Wright doesn’t like Castillo either, because we like David Wright and he must feel the same way we do about the Mets’ second baseman. The Internet is rife with assumptions about Luis Castillo being a negative force in the Mets’ clubhouse only from people who have never been anywhere near the Mets’ clubhouse.

And I don’t mean to appeal to any sort of authority I might earn by being credentialed. I attend maybe half the Mets’ home games, tops, and I don’t have the type of relationships with any of the players that guys on the beat develop.

But I read a whole, whole lot about the team, and I spend a lot of time tracking how and where these rumors get started. I just don’t think there’s any strong evidence to believe that Beltran is in any way a negative presence in the clubhouse, nor that it would mean much if he were, if he were producing.

For what it’s worth, a few survey responders asked for more weekend posts. That’s a good idea and something I hope to figure out. I try my best to avoid spending too much time in front of the computer on weekends for the sake of my back and, mostly, my sanity. But I’ll come up with something.

As for the Mets? Not good. I maintain that they’ll hit sooner than later, but man do they look terrible.

A few things:

Jerry Manuel took a lot of heat on Twitter and elsewhere for pulling R.A. Dickey out of Sunday’s game. In the heat of the moment, I wished he would have left Dickey in, but in retrospect I think Manuel made the right call there. Dickey has been great, pitchers need their legs, and no reason to risk losing him for any stretch of time. Obviously he maintained he was fine, but lots of players do that, and he didn’t look good on the plays in the infield. Yes, the Mets needed innings after using up their bullpen on Saturday, but there are better reasons to get on Manuel’s case.

Like, for example, allowing Pedro Feliciano to face so many right-handers in a 0-0 tie. Especially — especially — once one of them got on base. It’s amazing how frequently Manuel overlooks glaring platoon splits considering how often he makes decisions based on ones that don’t exist. With the team stumbling and the offense inept, you really can’t have Feliciano facing righties there.

There’s been some talk of a shakeup, either on the roster or in the coaching staff. Good. I don’t know if it will make a difference but as long as the Mets don’t do anything stupid, it probably can’t hurt. I’m not sure the sudden offensive implosion has anything to do with Howard Johnson — I’m skeptical of how much impact a hitting coach really has — but it’s certainly not good for his resume.

I’m not certain the extent of Rod Barajas’ injury, but if he’s going to be out for more than a few days, he should be put on the disabled list. The Mets’ roster is already handicapped by the presence of three catchers who can’t play other positions so it’s not like playing man-down will affect them too much, but giving Barajas a couple weeks to rest his oblique will give the club time to assess whether Josh Thole can take over the catching job on a more permanent basis. At the very least, having Thole in the lineup could help jumpstart the offense, plus having an extra bench player will give Jerry Manuel a little more flexibility.

Also — and I really am just talking out my ass here — the team should probably take a close look at whatever oblique stretches the players are doing. Maybe three separate oblique injuries in the course of a month is a coincidence, but, you know, can’t hurt to examine that.

Oh, and as for the Dan Haren trade? Unbelievable. I’ll say that the kids Patrick Corbin and Tyler Skaggs that the D-backs will get back are both very young and have good peripherals in A-ball, but Joe Saunders just isn’t very good. It’s easy to say, “the Mets should have been able to match this deal,” but most teams in the Majors should have been able to match this deal. I don’t really get it. Some have argued it has to do with the money remaining on Haren’s contract, but that’s ridiculous. A pitcher of his caliber is a steal at $29 mil over the next two seasons.

Should the Mets make a move now? I don’t know. My gut says no, but it’s awful hard to read the market after Cliff Lee went for a huge haul and Haren, a pitcher ultimately more valuable than Lee thanks to his reasonable contract, went for pennies on the dollar. If the Mets can pick up someone as a straight salary dump, then yeah, do it. If they’ve got to move prospects of even marginal value in the name of saving this particular season, I’d hold off.