Here are some pictures of Jordany Valdespin that Jordany Valdespin has tweeted.

In this photo it appears Valdespin is in front of a collage of Jordany Valdespin highlights:

In this photo, he’s wearing a Marlins hat. Some Mets fans seem mad about this but I could hardly care less what hat Jordany Valdespin wears in the offseason. He’s presumably wearing it for style, not because he’s a Marlins fan. It is sort of odd though:

In this photo, Jordany Valdespin shows off his introspective side:

Apparently one of Valdespin’s hobbies is posing for photos in and around his apartment. It takes all kinds, I suppose. There are actually a few more. Every photo that Jordany Valdespin has ever tweeted has been a photo of Jordany Valdespin.

Word is the Rangers are willing to deal Mike Olt to get R.A. Dickey if they lose out in the Zack Greinke sweepstakes.

Olt has a great reputation. He ranked No. 43 on Baseball America’s Top 100 prospects list coming into the 2012 season, was No. 13 on John Sickels’ preliminary Top 50 ranking of position player prospects and sits No. 16 on Jonathan Mayo’s Top 100 prospects list.

Olt’s not quite Wil Myers, not by reputation or performance to date. The biggest difference is in their ages; Olt is more than two years older than Myers, so he can’t quite be expected to improve the way Myers can — though every prospect is his own unique snowflake and either could develop into an awesome or awful hitter. Also, though experts seem bullish on Olt’s ability to transition to the outfield, he hasn’t really done it yet. A third baseman by trade, Olt has played five professional games in right field.

If the Mets were to acquire Olt, he’d probably need to start the season in Triple-A to get reps in the outfield and at the plate before advancing to the Majors. Though Olt spent time with the Rangers late in 2012, he didn’t hit much in his big-league tenure, and he’s yet to play at Triple-A. Myers appears ready for prime time, at least based on his dominance of Pacific Coast League pitching in 2012.

Of course, since the Royals do not appear willing to trade Myers for Dickey, the comparison doesn’t matter. Neither Myers nor Olt fits the Mets’ needs quite the way Giancarlo Stanton would, but if it’s not happening it’s not really worth talking about.

The good news about Olt is that he does a bunch of the things the Mets need: He hits right-handed and with a lot of power. At Double-A Frisco in 2012, he hit 28 home runs in only 354 at-bats. It’s worth noting, though, that Frisco’s park is rather amenable to the longball.

Olt’s also a local kid, for what it’s worth. He grew up in Connecticut and played college ball at UConn. And, most importantly, we’d be able to reference Arrested Development and yell “MIKE OLT!” every time he did anything.

The Rangers have a couple other players that could interest the Mets in a trade, to boot. If they do miss out on Greinke but re-sign Josh Hamilton, they could have something of a logjam on their hands. Obviously there are a lot of moving parts and I have no idea what the Rangers’ plans hold, but it seems like they have a bunch of outfielders the Mets could use, plus, a bit further away, Double-A second baseman Leury Garcia blocked by the young duo of Andrus and Jurickson Profar in the middle infield (plus Ian Kinsler, who looks likely to be displaced).

So it seems like there’s a deal to work out in there somewhere, if the Mets opt to trade Dickey at all. The Mets would seem to be best served working out a package deal — perhaps including more than just Dickey — to net an outfielder ready for Opening Day in addition to Olt.

The Mets selected left-handed pitcher Kyle Lobstein from the Rays in the Rule 5 draft this morning, despite talk they wouldn’t take anybody due to a crunch for space on the 40-man roster. By my count, Lobstein becomes the 38th man on the 40-man, so if the Mets add three more players via trade or free agency, he could get sent back to the Rays and this will all be meaningless.

But Lobstein seems like an interesting candidate for the Mets’ 2013 bullpen, even if he’s made only one professional appearance as reliever. He’s left-handed, first and foremost, so at the very least he becomes Spring Training competition for Robert Carson in the Mets’ seemingly perpetual quest to find a viable second lefty in the bullpen.

Though Lobstein’s stats as a starter have been underwhelming, he’s been very strong against Minor League lefties for at least the past two seasons. Across High A and Double-A in 2011 and 2012, Lobstein has struck out 27.3 percent of the left-handed hitters he’s faced and held them to a .238/.307/.357. And pitchers can usually throw a touch harder when used in shorter bursts, so it’s reasonable to expect Lobstein could become marginally more effective in a bullpen role.

Based on some Google returns, Lobstein seemed to throw fastballs in the high 80s and low 90s while working as a starter, so perhaps that ticks up to a consistent low-90s average as a reliever. He showed good control in the low Minors, but walked a few too many guys in Double-A in 2012.

That’s about all I’ve got. At the very least, Lobstein is a pretty funny name for a pitcher. Here’s what he looks like:

UPDATE, 10:30 a.m.: But then there’s this:

https://twitter.com/AdamRubinESPN/status/276709862908497920

Lobstein, we hardly knew ye.

And there it is:

https://twitter.com/AdamRubinESPN/status/276716662030495746

Goodnight, sweet prince.

The double entendre here almost has to be intentional, right?

Either way, good for “Big Pelf.” Make sure to give him a high-five or a hearty bro-hug the next time you see him. I mean… twins!

Pretty sure he’s married, though.

In all seriousness: Good for Pelfrey. I’ve maintained here that Pelfrey got a short shrift from Mets fans, in large part because he was brave enough to admit he went to a sports psychologist — the same one that treated noted headcases Greg Maddux and Roy Halladay. Pelfrey’s issues on the mound, I remain convinced, had way more to do with his inability to develop a consistent secondary pitch than his mental health.

It doesn’t seem like it makes sense for Pelfrey or the Mets (as currently constituted) to return the big righty to Flushing, but I’m hard-pressed to come up with an ex-Met I’ll be pulling for more (non-Beltran division). The guy used “Lake of Fire” as his warmup music, after all, and once spent several minutes of his time chatting with me about sandwiches.

I mention the Mets’ need for outfielders pretty frequently here, what with the Mets desperately needing outfielders and all. What I haven’t discussed since the offseason is their need for relief pitchers, mostly because relief pitchers should be easier to find on the cheap than outfielders.

The way I figure it, as it currently stands the Mets’ Opening Day bullpen would include Frank Francisco, Bobby Parnell, Josh Edgin and four pitchers from a group that includes Greg Burke, Jeremy Hefner, Collin McHugh, Elvin Ramirez, Robert Carson, Jeurys Familia, Jenrry Mejia, and Gonzalez Germen.

So youth is on their side, at least. And I don’t think that group would necessarily make for as bad of a bullpen as it looks on paper, given their lack of Major League experience. Hefner and McHugh can both throw strikes in a long-relief role, Burke and Ramirez both succeeded in Minor League bullpens last year, and Carson, Familia and Mejia all throw hard. I know next to nothing about Gonzalez Germen.

But neither Burke nor Ramirez has done much in the Majors yet, both Familia and Mejia should probably be starting games in Triple-A at the season’s outset, and Carson looked pretty hittable in the Minors in 2012.

Still, I’m finishing this post with a different conclusion than I thought I’d reach. The Mets probably need one steady bullpen arm and maybe a few guys on non-roster invites to compete for a job to create a reasonable big-league bullpen, but not the complete revamp I figured. Parnell’s good, Francisco underperformed his peripherals in 2012 and should bounce back a bit, and Edgin appears promising. Burke’s dominance in the Minors in 2012 suggests he can probably hold down a big-league job. So if the Mets brought in just one guy they can be reasonably confident will be a good reliever in 2013, they could let Hefner and McHugh battle for the long-man job in Spring Training, set Familia, Mejia and Germen for starting roles in the Minors and throw the remaining job up for grabs among every other pitcher they’ve got in camp.

Of course, last year the Mets brought in several guys they were reasonably confidence would be good relievers and it didn’t work out very smoothly. Going with a group of mostly younger guys, in-house options and scrap-heap finds seems apt to serve them at least as well without costing them most of their offseason resources.

I tried my best to keep up with all the talk from the Winter Meetings, I promise. But I had some other stuff to do today and spent about an hour not feverishly refreshing MetsBlog, MLB Trade Rumors and Twitter, and it got away from me.

At some point, something’s going to happen with R.A. Dickey. Or nothing will happen, and the Mets will have an awesome pitcher on an extremely favorable salary and the flexibility to try to trade him or re-sign him later in the season.

The Mets are also reportedly working on a trade for an outfielder that does not involve Dickey, which is good because the Mets don’t have many outfielders. Maybe the deal will be good or maybe it’ll be bad, but we’ll certainly find out all about it when it happens. That is assuming it happens. If it doesn’t happen, we may still hear about it or not, but it won’t really matter.

Which is all to say that I’ve come to the hour of my annual Winter Meetings fatigue, the moment when I give up on looking into the sausage factory and just start waiting for the sausage.

Here’s an exhaustive Winter Meetings rundown: Maybe the Mets trade Dickey, maybe they don’t. Maybe they trade Jon Niese, maybe they don’t. Maybe they trade someone else or maybe they make no trades at all. Maybe they sign Dickey to a contract extension. Maybe they sign a free agent or two. Maybe they don’t. That all could or might happen, and it’s certainly all stuff the Mets have considered.

And we’ll definitely know what they’ve done come April, when the Mets start playing games and a bunch of guys in blue and orange uniforms trot out to the field. Until then, there’s really no rush for the Mets or us.

This is nothing new, of course. And it’s not like I’m planning to stop tracking the rumors when they come. The frustrating part, I suppose, is merely how worked up so many of us allow ourselves to get over rumors that sometimes seem based on the most tenuous of information. Grant Brisbee said it well at Baseball Nation:

[T]his sequence makes you step back, slowly take off your sunglasses, and mutter, “My god. This is what just about every rumor is, isn’t it?” The explanation allowed for a peek behind the curtain. There’s no sliding scale of importance, no way to make a rumor directly from a GM’s mouth show up as a special green color in Twitter. Rumors come from agents looking to spread disinformation when it benefits their clients, teams looking to spread disinformation when it benefits their negotiations, and I’d wager that more than a few come from offhand comments from low-level people that make a rumormonger think, well, I gotta tweet something this hour.

This is all nonsense.

This makes me think of people sitting in a theater at the turn of the 20th century, excited to watch the moving pictures that everyone was talking about, and then freaking the hell out when they thought a train was going to come out of the screen and kill everyone in the theater. Except people got used to that technology. But the freakouts keep happening with Twitter. Over and over, at every trade deadline and every Winter Meetings.

Those of us following nonsense and linking to nonsense and retweeting nonsense are about as guilty as those dishing it out, since it is served for our benefit and we wolf it down. And every year it’s fun for a while, then every year it all turns into tiresome noise. Here we are.

Maybe the Mets sign R.A. Dickey to a contract extension. Maybe they trade him. Maybe they don’t. Same as last week.

Rumors have it the Mets would be willing to sign Ryan Ludwick to a two-year deal, for whatever that’s worth. Ludwick hits right-handed, has power, and plays the outfield, so he’d fill a lot of the Mets’ most pressing needs. And he’s coming off a very nice year for the Reds.

But Ludwick is 34 and only one season removed from being essentially a replacement-level player. Twitter fellow and thinking baseball human Marc Normandin suggested Ludwick especially struggles in pitchers’ parks, which seems difficult to prove but would explain why he cratered upon joining the Padres and revived his career in Cincinnati. And it doesn’t speak well for the Mets’ pursuit of Ludwick unless they plan on bringing the walls in even further.

Moreover, Ludwick is the success story I typically trumpet when arguing on behalf of so-called Quad-A mashers, guys who always seem to destroy Minor League pitching but never get prolonged looks in the Majors. Ludwick didn’t settle into the Cardinals’ lineup until he was 28, and the Cardinals were the fifth organization for which he played.

So it seems to me that the Mets would be better served trying to identify the next Ryan Ludwick rather than committing two years’ worth of guaranteed money to the current Ryan Ludwick. Somewhere, almost certainly, there’s a guy the Mets can have for nearly nothing who can serve as an effective right-handed half of an outfield platoon in the Majors. Maybe he’s not likely to hit as well as Ludwick did in 2007, but it’s far from a safe bet Ludwick will, either.

With some quick searching, I found my horse: Andrew Brown. The 28-year-old Brown notched 112 unspectacular at-bats with the Rockies in 2012, then elected free agency last week after the Rockies removed him from their 40-man roster. Brown bats right-handed, has experience in all four corners, and has hit .296/.373/.551 over the last two seasons in Triple-A with a .314/.416/.564 line against lefties.

Brown’s presented here more as an archetype of what the Mets should be looking for than a specific guy the Mets should be signing, and for all I know there are 10 teams currently bidding for Andrew Brown’s services. But if Brown’s looking for Major League playing time, it’s hard to figure a better spot for an unproven righty-hitting corner outfielder than Queens right now.

Naturally, this all flies out the window if the Mets trade for Wil Myers and re-sign Scott Hairston.