Alderson said he had been amused to see another innocuous factoid — his revelation that he would be driving to Florida for spring training — joked about, dissected and in some cases seriously analyzed by some on Twitter and on blogs as a reflection of the Mets’ finances.

So someone in his office suggested he create a Twitter account to respond, Alderson said, and he thought, “Why not?”

“We wanted to play off the absurdity of it,” Alderson said. “Everything we do is viewed through the prism of our perceived financial situation.”…

“There are always some that take life way too seriously,” Alderson said. “For those people, it might take longer for my message to get across.”

– Andrew Keh, N.Y. Times.

So… this. All of this. Click through and read the rest, in part because I feel guilty about excerpting so much.

These are tough times for Mets fans obviously, but you ever stop and consider how much worse they would be if the team had a less competent, less reasonable GM at the helm?

According to multiple beat writers, Sandy Alderson joined Twitter today, tweeting as @MetsGM. Here is his first Tweet:

I’m hoping it turns out Alderson’s a massive troll. He’s off to a good start.

The guy is amazing at hitting. We have opposite approaches when it comes to hitting. He is technical, he’s got everything, like every pitch – it’s like science watching him hitting. Me, I’m like pure chaos and I swing as hard as I can.

– Ike Davis, on Mets Hot Stove.

Well that’s just a cool quote. Also, I think “Pure Chaos” would be a cool nickname for someone, but probably not Ike Davis. Probably better for Murphy, actually.

I brought this up on the podcast last week but in case you don’t listen or didn’t make it to that hour: Willie Harris told Mets Weekly producer Joe Kraus, who sits right across from me in the office here, that Murphy knows more about hitting than anyone he has ever played with. Harris said he wants to be a manager someday, and he wants Murphy to be his hitting coach. So that’s… notable, I guess.

When we talk about the Citi Field walls coming in, the first players that come up are David Wright and Jason Bay — for obvious reasons. People seem to assume the walls will mean a couple extra easy homers for Ike Davis and Lucas Duda, but that those guys would hit them out anywhere. And Ruben Tejada and Josh Thole don’t have much power to speak of, so it’s hard to figure how the walls will really impact their onslaught of slapped singles.

Murphy gets lost in that discussion, I think. Part of that is that he hits left-handed, and the changes to the right-field side of the fence don’t seem as dramatic as those to the former Great Wall of Flushing. Plus, though Murphy has doubles power, he’s not a home-run hitter: He has all of 20 in 1030 Major League at-bats.

Do some of Murphy’s doubles become home runs with the new dimensions? Just based on his spray chart from TexasLeaguers.com, it doesn’t look like many of them do. And of course, the way defenders position themselves with the new walls affects which hits will fall in and which one-time doubles outfielders might now get to. But does Murphy — man of hitting science, impressor of Willie Harris — adjust somehow to try to hit for more power? Should he?

I suppose that’s something to ask him about come Spring Training. Which I suppose makes for a decent segue to this: I’m going to be in Port St. Lucie for a couple of weeks in early March. I’ve got some things I know I want to do already, but maybe there’s something Spring Training-related you want to know about that you don’t know about yet. I’ll probably ask this again, but use the following form for any suggestions you might have for Spring Training content you want to see:

[contact-form-7 id=”15378″ title=”Untitled”]

In a guest post for Baseball Prospectus, Aaron Gleeman examines the Mets’ trade for Johan Santana, which now looks pretty bad for both sides. I covered this a bit last year: The Mets traded for young players for the right to sign Santana to a market-rate contract extension, and the trade was contingent on the extension getting done.

Since Santana missed all of 2011 and appears unlikely to ever again be the pitcher the Mets paid for, and especially since due to circumstances unforeseen in 2008 Santana’s salary now accounts for more than 1/4 of the Mets’ total payroll, his contract looks like a pretty massive albatross in the Mets rebuilding/retooling/time-biding plans.

And again: No one’s saying Johan Santana’s not totally sweet, and no one is more psyched than me to see him pitching again at whatever capacity. We just can’t keep calling that deal “a steal” unless you mean it was some sort of art heist in which the Mets came away with some beautiful sculpture that looks awesome but takes up most of the room in their house and makes it difficult for them to add anything else to their collection.