With few fans on hand at Citi Field last night and presumably few people watching on TV, in a meaningless game against a terrible team, Nick Evans seized his opportunity for some rare Major League playing time and smacked a home run. It looked like this:

I bleat on about this endlessly: Too often under this regime, the Mets have overpaid free agents to fill out the margins of their roster instead of developing in-house options to fill useful, albeit unheralded, roster roles. It appears that in 2011, more out of necessity than design, they will not be able to repeat that.

Evans is 24 now and will be 25 when Spring Training rolls around, and it sure doesn’t seem like the team considers him much of a prospect anymore. But before he gets cast into a Mike Hessman mold, some Minor League masher doomed to dominate Triple-A pitching for the next decade, perhaps the Mets will provide him an opportunity to serve a valuable role as a righty corner bench bat in the bigs.

Evans, after all, crushed pitching at the two upper levels of the Minors to the tune of a .317/.371/.536 line this season, and boasts a career Minor League split of .314/.391/.572 against left-handed pitching.

At this point, it doesn’t seem like carrying Evans on the Major League level — even with limited at-bats — would amount to hindering his development much. Though for some reason the Mets didn’t let him play the outfield spots this season, he can man all four corners and provide a bit of pop, as a few of us saw last night.

In short, Nick Evans is probably ready to be a Major League guy for several years on the cheap, and the Mets could use those.

Right Field: … Where the starter next April has to be Carlos Beltran, assuming certain reasonable outcomes. Consider that Beltran has an $18.5 million contract for 2011, a history of bad knees, just turned 34, and his OPS this year is .709.

Who exactly is trading for him? A team willing to take on almost none of his salary, and part with an unimpressive prospect for their trouble, I figure.

So since the Mets could pay some other team $17 million for the chance to see Beltran rebound, why not pay him a little more and see if he can help you in the final year of his deal? As recently as last season, he hit at an elite level, and though it is a foolishly small sample, his OPS is up above .900 in September.

– Howard Megdal, SNY.tv.

I don’t know what will happen with Beltran this offseason. His agent, Scott Boras, has grumbled — with reason — about the way team brass “anonymously” fumed to reporters after Beltran, because he had other charitable commitments, missed an optional trip to Walter Reed hospital to visit veterans.

So I imagine politics will play into whatever happens with Beltran this offseason, for better or worse. But that said, I agree with Howard. Even if Beltran demonstrates some massive turnaround in the next two weeks, no team is likely to take on his contract unless the Mets essentially provide the Gary Matthews Jr. treatment — eating most of it and accepting little in terms of players in return.

And if they’re going to do that, then, man, I don’t know. It’s hard to bet that he’ll ever be anything like healthy again, but if you’re just looking in terms of back-of-the-baseball-card likelihood for a bounceback, Beltran seems a reasonable bet.

Basically what Howard said. He’s got too much potential upside to be kicked to the curb like he’s Gary Matthews Jr. They would just need a very solid backup plan for if Beltran gets hurt or proves ineffective.

Matt Cerrone just linked to something I said last night on Twitter and I figured I should reiterate it here. It was this:

Amazing how many Mets fans see Santana’s injury as evidence for giving a big long-term deal to Cliff Lee and not the other way around.

I imagine Cliff Lee’s back issues have scared off at least a few of the legions planning on storming Citi Field and rallying outside SNY’s studios this offseason, but there will still likely be a vocal contingent dead set on making sure the Mets hear its pleas for the best free-agent pitcher available.

Lee, after all, looks to be the only man on the open market proven to be a True Number One. A Bona Fide Ace.

But again, those are labels. And though they’re labels used to describe great pitchers, and great pitchers help teams win and Cliff Lee is most certainly a great pitcher primed to help some team win, he’s also a 32-year-old pitcher likely to command a massive and lengthy deal.

And the lesson, I think, from Santana’s injury is that even the pitchers that seem invincible — the guys that can go out and pitch brilliantly on one knee in must-win games on the second-to-last day of the season and who bellow about their manhood when their managers come to pull them from games — are liable to break down eventually. It’s the nature of pitching.

So while it may be tempting to say, “aw, injuries happen, just because Santana got injured doesn’t mean Lee will; the Mets could really use an ace and Lee is the only ace that’s a free agent and thus the Mets should sign Lee,” because all those things are true, that doesn’t mean they add up to smart business. Running a baseball team wisely requires smart investments, and you just can’t be handing out big-time money to aging pitchers for multiple years when you’re already in financial straits.

That means, of course, that the Mets will — barring trade — have to plow into 2011 without the Frontline Starter of lore, but that is, frankly, the bed that they made. It is suboptimal, for sure, but there is no rule I know of in the Major League books that says you can’t win without heading into a season with a starter deemed a certain ace.

Here is another way to look at this: The Yanks felt similarly after the 1995 season about a young corner infielder with power (Russ Davis) and a talented lefty starter (Sterling Hitchcock) as the Mets feel now about the powerful Ike Davis and lefty Niese. The Yanks turned their duo into dynasty cornerstones Tino Martinez and Jeff Nelson.

This is not advocating trades, but is a suggestion not to close avenues in favor of a marketing strategy.

Let’s focus a bit more on Davis to make this point. What do you think will be his best year, something like .275 with 30 homers? That is good. But it probably never makes him one of the 10 best first basemen in the game.

– Joel Sherman, N.Y. Post.

A couple of people emailed me about this column so here’s this.

OK, on that last point first: By WAR, Davis is the 11th best first baseman in the league this season, right now. A lot of that is due to his defense per UZR, a stat known to fluctuate pretty wildly from year to year, but to the eye Davis has undoubtedly been pretty sharp at first base.

But even by offense-only stats like OPS, Davis falls right near the middle of the pack of Major League first basemen, though a bit on the short side. Of course, he’s doing it while playing half his games in Citi Field, while only 23 years old, and with only half a season above A-ball under his belt.

Davis may never be the best hitting first baseman in the Majors, but it is far too early to say he’ll never be among the best hitting first basemen in the Majors, nor that his defense won’t be enough to mitigate the difference between him and the top-tier offensive players at the position.

Also, for what it’s worth, if Davis hits .275 with 30 home runs and maintains his penchant for the base on balls, he almost certainly will be among the 10 best first basemen in the game offensively, provided the offensive environment remains anything like the way it is this year.

Now, all that said, I agree in some way with the general thrust of Sherman’s piece: Yes, the Mets should focus on winning over marketing. I write that all the time. 100% on board with that thesis. And yes, they should keep an open mind to all trade possibilities, even the ones including popular young players like Davis.

But though I recognize that comparing current players and situations to similar ones from the past is a fun and persistent part of sports analysis, it’s difficult to follow Sherman’s Davis/Niese:Davis/Hitchcock analogy through to its conclusion without realizing its massive faults.

Russ Davis was indeed a well-regarded prospect, but he was two years older than Ike Davis and had only 123 Major League plate appearances when the Yanks dealt him. Hitchcock, too, was older than Niese and, though his pedestrian 1995 showed promise, did not have a season in the bag as impressive as Niese’s 2010.

Plus, it should be noted that the Yankees held onto a different lefty in 1995: Andy Pettitte. They also neglected to trade Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada or Mariano Rivera, all of whom debuted that season, for Tino Martinez and Jeff Nelson.

And that’s the thing, really: Drawing the comparison between the two is to ignore how the Yanks’ core of young players carried the team to championships, and to say that the Mets are only a Tino Martinez and a Jeff Nelson away from a World Series berth. Neither seems reasonable.

Besides, the Yankees have a luxury the Mets don’t, like it or not: a near-unlimited payroll.

It seems almost unconscionable to me that anyone could write an entire column suggesting the Mets consider trading their young players and not mention even once that those young players are all cost-controlled for the next several seasons, providing the Mets potentially productive players to field while they get out from under their albatross contracts and payroll flexibility once those contracts expire.

But all that said, again, Sherman’s right that they should consider everything. Plus he advocates trading for pieces that will help the club in the long term, which I support. The Mets should just think long and hard before they consider trading young, cost-controlled players that have proven they can hold their own in the Majors, since those aren’t all that easy to come by.