According to a baseball person, Jose Reyes could sign with the Mets as early as next week. A source familiar with the Mets’ thinking says they will offer Reyes a conservative contract they believe adequately compensates the shortstop for the value he will provide the team for the next several years. Reyes can then accept the contract, look elsewhere, or attempt to negotiate.

If Reyes does not sign with the Mets, he could field offers from various other Major League Baseball teams, especially those with payroll flexibility and a need at shortstop. He could sign with one of them soon, or at the Winter Meetings, or later in the offseason. If Reyes does not sign a contract until later in the offseason, he will likely field offers from unaffiliated Minor League teams attempting publicity stunts.

I’d continue with this again, but I don’t have the stomach for it.

Point is, the whole hot stove season — or at least the media coverage of it — is stupid. It’s fun to speculate about what a team might do. But you and me and everyone else with access to Cots and baseball-reference know as much meaningful information about what will happen this offseason as anyone who is not a MLB player agent or front-office decision-maker.

Information leaked out to the press is often leaked out for a reason. And there’s such an overwhelming glut of nonsensical, pointless and utterly unsubstantiated information reported that in the rare event a reporter might actually have a hot scoop, it will be impossible to distinguish from the mire.

Until any deal is done, no one can be certain it will happen. So all offseason baseball coverage is couched with vague language.

I’m reporting this right now: The Mets could trade David Wright but probably won’t. The Mets might sign Jose Reyes. Let me know if you see anything firmer than that published anywhere.

The more interesting discussion, of course, is whether the Mets should trade David Wright and should sign Jose Reyes. And the constant updates on both scenarios, however silly, perpetuate those discussions, however stupid.

I prefer not to repeat myself more than I already have, so here’s this: The Mets should not trade David Wright. They should re-sign Jose Reyes if the price is right. The Mets should offer arbitration to Mike Pelfrey and to Angel Pagan.

There’s a bunch of other stuff they should do, too. We’ll figure that out as it goes along.

Hey, Jose Reyes: You really don’t want to move. Trust me on this one, bro. Moving sucks so hard.

Even if it makes financial sense to move, it’s still going to be a terrible experience. And I know we’re not exactly in the same income-tax bracket, and you’ve got the resources to hire an army of people to help you transport your stuff anywhere.

But the bottom line is it’s your stuff, so you’ve got the most invested in it. And it’s going to be on you and your family to determine where it goes in the new place, not to mention what to keep and what to throw out. Boxes to unpack and all that. Really, no matter how rich you are, there’s just going to be a ton of mental and physical stress involved with moving.

And moving in the winter? Forget about it, Jose. I purposefully moved in late October just to avoid dealing with winter weather, and you know what happened? Six inches of snow the morning I was set to go. I had to shovel when I should have been packing, then the U-Haul place lost power so I couldn’t get the truck I reserved.

I had to scramble to find another one last minute. In the process I very nearly got into a car accident when some guy in a Volvo spun out of control in the Home Depot parking lot. It was just a miserable, terrifying experience, Jose. And with the way the weather has been around here these last few years, man, I just don’t know of any time before the summer that it’d be safe to plan a move without the threat of a blizzard.

And so expensive! Holy hell do those costs add up. I didn’t calculate the total, but I bet it came to something like, I don’t know, 40 million dollars. Yeah, 40 million dollars. It’d be worth staying in my old place unless I stood to make more than 40 million dollars by moving.

Oh, and then you have to wait for the cable guy! Do you remember how much that sucked last time? They give you a four-hour window, then you just have to sit there like some sort of chump until the dude shows up to plug in the box. You can’t even watch TV while you’re sitting there, because you don’t have cable yet. Jose, it’s awful.

So that’s basically my advice to you, Jose Reyes: Do not move no matter what. Isn’t your current home great?

Yeah, moving’s probably the best way to play that one.

I don’t. I should note that my sense of reason is probably skewed a bit by my appreciation for Reyes, so maybe this is me rationalizing my desire to see him back in a Mets uniform.

But the way I see it, elite 28-year-old free agents don’t hit the market all that often, and especially not elite 28-year-old free agents who play one of the positions you most need to fill.

If Reyes stays healthy, he should still be very productive for the next several seasons. A five- or six-year deal may very well mean a couple of seasons on the back end where Reyes makes more than he’s worth. But if the Mets believe that Reyes can stay productive and that they’ll be in position to compete in 2013, 2014 and 2015, then, well, go for it.

Actually, it’s not a terribly different situation than when the Mets signed Carlos Beltran before the 2005 season. The team was not quite poised to compete that season, but reaped the benefits of Beltran’s awesome 2006-2008 campaigns and stayed in the thick of the pennant race each year.

Of course, Beltran was a year younger than Reyes when he signed and didn’t have anything like the injury history. And it’s easy to look back on Beltran’s contract favorably now, in hindsight.

Point is, though, I don’t think signing Reyes would be a win-now move so much as a win-in-the-next-few-years move, and teams with the Mets’ payroll should never be more than a few years from contention. And by the time Reyes’ contract becomes an albatross — as so many free-agent contracts do — the Mets should (hopefully) be well-enough constructed to shoulder the financial blow and still remain flexible.

On his first day of freedom after a grueling five months in an Egyptian jail, Queens native Ilan Grapel got his cruelest punishment — being told the Mets won the 2011 World Series.

Grapel, expected to fly home to Queens today from Israel, was celebrating his release at a press conference in Tel Aviv, flanked by his mother Irene and Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-Queens), when he was pranked.

– Andy Soltis, N.Y. Post.

Wait, that really happened? This dude just got out of Egyptian jail and people just immediately start messing with him?

That’s like waking up from a coma to have someone like, “Good news, Jim! Your dog’s coming to see you. Just kidding: He’s dead.”

It’s not even a good prank. A good prank would be convincing the guy that in the five months he was in jail, the entire borough of Queens suffered from an epidemic that turned half its population into flesh-starved zombies, then having his dad come surging toward him in zombie makeup when he lands at Laguardia.

Actually that might be going too far.

We’ve got four or five guys that I would call ‘above the line,’ that we could go into the season with, in the rotation.

– Sandy Alderson.

This comment led to a lot of speculation about where exactly “the line” is. I doubt Alderson was letting us on to the team’s internal calculations or whatever. He probably just meant the Mets have four or five guys they consider Major League starters — Jon Niese, R.A. Dickey, Mike Pelfrey, Dillon Gee and Johan Santana.

And obviously that’s got people fired up, because people want to argue that Mike Pelfrey is less than a viable member of a Major League rotation. Pelfrey had a bad year, but for reasons discussed three months ago, he should be offered arbitration and brought back in 2012.

Is that rotation a great one? Hardly. But is it so bad it will single-handedly prevent the Mets from competing in 2012?

Not at all. If you’re looking for an example of a team that can win with a good offense and a bunch of innings-eater types, look no further than the reigning World Champions.

I know Chris Carpenter has the “True No. 1 Ace Bigtime Frontline Show-Pony” label everyone craves in a pitcher, but Carpenter posted an 105 ERA+ in 2011. The Cardinals’ best pitcher on the season was Kyle Lohse, who sported a 107 ERA+.

Mostly, the Cardinals got innings from their starters. Lohse, Jaime Garcia and Jake Westbrook each turned in over 180 frames, and the 36-year-old Carpenter was good for 237 1/3. By ERA, Cardinals starters were eighth in the National League. The Mets’ group finished 10th.

The Cardinals made the playoffs because they had by far the best offense in the National League and a pitching staff good enough to keep the team in games. Remember: The object is only to score more runs than your opponents. There’s no real set formula for the way you have to do that.

So yeah, while the Mets’ pitching staff could stand to improve, signing free-agent starters is almost always a terrible idea. And since any upgrade available via trade would likely cost the Mets a ton in terms of young players, their best approach for 2012 is to try to improve the team’s offense and defense and hope the pitching holds together.

Of course, it’s going to take a lot of work and a couple of big bounce-back years for the Mets’ offense in 2012 to hit anything like the way the Cardinals did in 2011. But that’s at least easier to imagine than Niese, Pelfrey and Gee pitching like Halladay, Hamels and Lee.

Moving sucks and everything hurts. I’m back in the office today, trying not to think of all the boxes piled up in my new apartment waiting to be unpacked.

While I was without the Internet, the Mets apparently announced they’re reconfiguring the Citi Field walls. Presumably you knew that already. But maybe you haven’t yet checked out Gerard Schifman’s work at Roosevelt Avenue Rant, investigating Citi Field’s effects on line-drive hitters. His big finish:

You’ll notice that as LD% goes up, less home runs are hit both on the road and at home.  On the road, Slugging remains fairly constant, slightly decreasing as LD% increases.  But at Citi Field, as LD% goes up, fewer home runs are hit and Slugging hugely decreases.  So no, it doesn’t appear that the Mets have regained any total bases as a result of the ballpark’s dimensions, further justifying the forthcoming changes.  The BABIP and Slugging differences show us that the ballpark is currently the punchless hitter’s dream.  Hopefully now, with reconfigured dimensions, the Mets can channel their inner Ike Davis a little more than their inner Luis Castillo in 2012.

Originally posted July 27, 2011:

I started and scrapped this post a couple times. To be honest, I tried to pre-write it the way newspapers do with celebrity obituaries, though by the time I got around to actually doing so the news of Carlos Beltran’s trade had already started to leak out. And I meant to hold off on publishing it until the deal was made official, but now Beltran is out of the Mets’ lineup tonight and it sounds by all accounts like the announcement is a mere formality.

The first draft included an introduction explaining how real sadness is universal and comes in near-infinite supply, and how in that context Beltran’s departure is not really sad at all. But that’s patronizing. Presumably you know that sadness is a relative thing, and you can distinguish sadness for actual tragedies from the sadness we feel when a favorite baseball player is traded across the country to play out the final few months of his contract with a new team.

There’s no good reason to dwell on it now regardless. Any Mets fan paying attention the last couple of months has heard about and likely reasoned through Beltran’s being moved, a deal that makes a whole lot of sense for a club with little chance of a postseason berth in 2011.

In the trade with the Giants, Sandy Alderson reportedly scored Zack Wheeler, a young player better than the ones many – especially me – expected the Mets would get in return for Beltran. Wheeler is a Single-A pitcher so he’s still a ways off from contributing in the big leagues, but he’s a former first-round draft pick twice ranked in Baseball America’s top 100 prospects and with over 10 strikeouts per nine innings in the Minors.

And Beltran’s exit provides one final excuse to celebrate the man’s career in Flushing. In his tenure with the Mets, Beltran played 831 games. He hit 148 home runs, drove in 552 runs, stole 100 bases, and posted an .867 OPS. Statistically, his 2006 campaign stands among the very best seasons any position player has ever provided the club. He ranks in the team’s all time Top 10 of too many categories to bother listing.

That feels like it’s somehow understating it though, no?

Not long ago, a Kansas City Star reporter wrote, “If you want to know how to approach the game, teammates or life, watch Jeff Francoeur.” Though the author was merely upholding the rich journalistic tradition of writing ridiculous things about Jeff Francoeur, the comment rightfully inspired a ton of hilarious Internet snark.

Swap in Beltran for Francoeur, though, and the guy has a much better point.

And I don’t mean in terms of off-field stuff. We only think we know baseball players from what little they reveal of themselves to the press and the fans: We heard Terry Collins rave about Beltran’s leadership this year, we read about his charitable efforts and saw the professional way in which he handled every single one of the incessant questions about his future, but for all any of us know Beltran punts puppies on his home from the ballpark.

Let’s accept that we don’t really know Beltran as a person and just think about the ballplayer. Could you imagine what the world would be like if we could all do everything the way Beltran plays baseball? If we demonstrated that same elegance and efficiency in our morning commutes, our jobs, our yardwork? What if we could all stay so calm and so patient under pressure, and remain so humble upon success? What a place that would be!

Or would that entire world be mistaken for joyless?

Oh, whatever. I made it this far without mentioning the infernal haters, and it’s probably best to just leave them stewing in their pathetic corners, pissed about whatever it is they’ve chosen to be pissed about next. Let’s applaud Beltran now, not waste time defending him from those that will never understand. Know this: People who don’t appreciate Carlos Beltran by now don’t deserve to.

I’m going to rehash the point I made in regards to Jose Reyes earlier this summer. I apologize for repeating myself: What we’ve seen from Beltran is ours to keep forever, no matter what team he’s playing for tomorrow. Carlos Beltran playing baseball at the peak of his ability is a beautiful sight to behold, and we got to watch it hundreds of times.

The sad thing about baseball is that greatness is fleeting. The awesome thing about baseball – or one of the many, at least – is that more great players and great moments are always on the way. Who knows? Maybe Zack Wheeler is one of them.

So Beltran is off to San Francisco to put the Giants’ putrid offense on his shoulders, and we’ll watch him in the playoffs then hear unsubstantiated and likely fruitless rumors that the Mets are pursuing him in the offseason.

I’m not sure how to wrap this up. Last time through I had some dumb story about the old-man version of me, 30 years in the future, describing Beltran to some punk kid. But it sucked and now I’ve got a train to catch. So we move forward.