Mike Salfino and Dan Graziano both wrote columns for SNY.tv about the Mets’ approach at the trade deadline. Salfino says the Mets should target an upgrade at second base, and Graziano argues they should go all-in for pitching.

I feel almost exactly the same way I did a year ago tomorrow: Patience is key. These Mets, exciting as they’ve been and awesome as they’ve looked, still have a lot of uncertainty. Roy Oswalt or Cliff Lee would sure make ’em look a lot more likely to stay in the race, but with a couple of injuries and the regression of some young players, no one pitcher would make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. I’m not saying it will happen, only that it could. Remember that last year fans were clamoring for the team to trade prospects for Mark DeRosa.

I’m just not certain Mark DeRosa would have spelled the difference between the 2009 Mets and a pennant contender.

Luckily, with the trade market still developing, not many are suggesting any imminent deals for the Mets.

One potential outcome that scares me: Word is the Mets are interested in pursuing Cliff Lee in free agency, but that the Mariners want Major League-ready prospects for Lee now. I’m terrified the Mets will deal a package of good prospects for Lee at this year’s deadline, then feel pressured to re-sign him to an above-market deal in free agency, costing them the compensatory draft picks they would earn if he walked.

That may sound like typical Mets-fan paranoia, but it’s a very similar situation to the one the Mets faced with Kris Benson, only amplified. Lee is much better than Benson ever was, but he’ll cost more talent in a trade and much more money in free agency. He’s an awesome pitcher, no doubt, and he’s incredibly likely to help whatever team he’s on for the next few years. But expensive long-term contracts for 32-year-old pitchers is never great business.

All of a sudden, the Mets are making believers out of even the most skeptical fans. Their offense is picking up steam and all talk of how they can’t hit in the clutch has evaporated into the ether. They play great defense and run the bases well. Their starters go deep in games and their bullpen holds leads.

And everywhere, there is youth. Gone is so much of the roster filler that mucked up the Mets’ bench and lineup at the season’s outset, replaced by useful young talent meeting or exceeding expectations.  The team has somewhat regularly trotted out an infield of homegrown players averaging 24 1/4 years old, two of them already established stars at 27. After seasons of dark clouds and doubt, rays of hope shine everywhere. It’s damn near thrilling to watch, especially when they win 10 of 11. Puppydogs and daffodils.

Then they bring in Jenrry Mejia.

Unlike fellow rookies Ike Davis and Ruben Tejada, Mejia does not fill an important role for the Mets. He throws mop-up innings, like the ones he pitched last night with a five-run lead and Sunday with an eight-run advantage in Baltimore. On average, he has entered games in the lowest leverage situations of any reliever on the active roster. At 20 years old and with an electric arm scouts rave about, Jenrry Mejia is the bottom man on the Mets’ bullpen totem pole.

All along, the Mets have suggested Mejia’s future is starting games. There is not nearly enough evidence to show he is a better long-term fit for a relief role than in the rotation. It is difficult to believe any team values even a great setup man more than a good starter, and none should: Starting pitching is among the most precious commodities in baseball. And it’s not like the Mets are overwhelmed with it.

So there are several lapses in logic here. When the Mets added Mejia to their roster before Opening Day, he was heralded as a potential “eighth-inning guy” and dominant bullpen ace.

Many — myself included — doubted that the difference between a great reliever and a replacement one could provide more value to the team than a promising young pitcher working on his secondary stuff in the Minors, but at least the motivation was clear. The Mets’ desperate manager and desperate general manager, reportedly on reprieve after a season plagued by injuries, wanted to win at all costs. If that meant hindering the development of their top pitching prospect, they were on board, even if most fans weren’t. Wins are wins and pitching prospects are fickle.

As of last night, Jerry Manuel doesn’t even trust Mejia to work out of a jam of his own devising with a five-run lead. Even if Mejia could help the team win additional games, the manager has no confidence that he can do so. Mejia offers no significant benefit, only cost. Manuel must work to find regular innings for a 20-year-old prospect who could easily be pitching regularly in Binghamton, making himself better instead of struggling to succeed at the game’s highest level.

Who was it that prevented Minaya from making myopic decisions this offseason and stopped a man with a win-now ultimatum from dealing prospects for established Major Leaguers? There must have been a check in place, someone with an eye toward the future insisting Minaya be reasonable. Where is that person now?

Is Mejia selling advertisements, putting asses in seats or improving TV ratings? No. Only winning baseball can, and right now the Mets have no shortage of that. If anything, Mejia’s continued presence on the roster serves only to remind fans of the team’s recent history of logical failures and desperate decisions short on foresight.

As a Mets fan, I want my enthusiasm to be untempered and my optimism unbridled. I want to believe unequivocally, to get up out of my chair and open the window and yell, “Let’s go Mets,” like the man says. And nights like last night, with all those young players fueling wins and runs and hope, I’m really tempted to.

And then they bring in Jenrry Mejia.

It is his scholastic background and an earnestness and work ethic that border on the obsessive, though, that have set Mr. Carter apart not merely from the other 24 players in the Mets’ clubhouse, but from most in Major League Baseball. He played for three years at Stanford University, batting .277 with 23 home runs during his career there, and the reason he played three years, not four, is that it took him just that long to graduate with a degree in human biology.

“He was one of those remarkable students who balanced excelling in sports and academics,” said Dr. Ellen Porzig, a professor in the Stanford School of Medicine, who taught and mentored Mr. Carter. “I remember him as a very bright, balanced, straightforward guy who, I thought, would be a great doctor someday.”

As of June 2009, fewer than 30 major-league players had earned four-year college degrees, according to a Wall Street Journal report, so Mr. Carter’s academic accomplishments make him something of an oddity by contemporary baseball standards. He had been an honorable-mention All-America selection at De La Salle High School in Concord, Calif., and anticipated embarking on a pro baseball career after college. But he performed so well in his high school science classes that he came to regard medicine as his fallback.

– Mike Sielksi, Wall Street Journal.

“Balanced and straightforward.” The legend of Chris Carter grows. Hopefully his on-base percentage will follow.

Last night, Johan Santana threw his third consecutive start in which he walked more batters than he struck out. He had never thrown two in a row before his effort against the Padres on Thursday.

For the season, Santana is striking out only 5.8 batters per nine innings, far below his career 9.0 rate. He is walking more batters than he has in any season since 2002, when he was still a wild 23-year-old. And for the first time in Santana’s career, the average velocity of his fastball has dipped below 90 mph.

None of that is good. To stat nerds like me, he appears a textbook case to regress: A pitcher who has been lucky to post a 3.13 ERA on the season, and who will inevitably soon allow more home runs per fly ball and a higher batting average on balls in play and end up with a line closer to his 3.81 FIP or his 4.70 xFIP.

And if Johan Santana was Kevin Millwood or Ramon Ortiz or someone I’d be saying just that. But Johan Santana is not some run of the mill innings eater. Johan Santana is a two-time Cy Young Award winner only a few years removed from being the most dominant pitcher in baseball. So I’m open to considering other possibilities, and searching for tangible reasons why he might be outperforming his peripherals.

Looking more closely at Santana’s Fangraphs page, it’s difficult to sort through what could be noise and the products of the still-small sample size for 2010. Plus it’s important to remember that Santana is coming off elbow surgery and has always been better in the second half.

Here’s something interesting I noticed, though: Over the past few years, Santana has been steadily yielding more contact that he ever did in Minnesota, though not much more contact on pitches inside the strike zone. His rate of contact induced on pitches outside of the zone has gone from around 51% in his last three seasons with the Twins to 59.8% in 2008, 62.5% in 2009, and 73.8% this season.

Santana’s throwing about as many pitches outside the zone as he always has, opposing batters are just hitting them more often. That could indicate that he’s lost some movement on his pitches, especially since he’s inducing fewer swinging strikes than ever before, but it could also explain some of the stat-belying success. Maybe Santana is more effectively inducing weak contact than ever before, relying more on popups and lazy flies than strikeouts.

Or maybe I’m grasping at straws. I’m a Mets fan, after all, and a Santana fan in particular.

But if someone’s going to do that — if some pitcher could figure out how to rely on weak contact and, despite a lackluster K:BB ratio and an unexceptional groundball rate, maintain an excellent ERA — wouldn’t it stand to reason that it’d be a brilliant pitcher like Santana?

He put a ton of mileage on his arm in Minnesota, and he’s a 31-year-old pitcher now with a history of elbow surgeries and an average fastball.

The decrease in strikeouts and uptick in walks are bad, no doubt, and hardly bode well for the remaining three years on his contract. But he’s still Johan Santana, and as long as the results are there, that has to count for something. I have faith in the predictive power of statistics, but I might have even more faith in Santana’s awesomeness.

Greenberg was the wife of one of Santana’s agents, Ed Greenberg, and her death from melanoma in 2007 at 42 so profoundly affected the Met ace that he joined the fight against skin cancer. On Monday, a Mets off-day, he is hosting the Johan Santana All-Star Bowling Classic at Lucky Strike Manhattan to raise money for his foundation, which will donate the proceeds to programs dedicated to fighting skin cancer….

“We need to make people realize how bad this is and that it can happen to anybody,” Santana says. “We are all human beings, regardless of who you are or what you do. We are human beings and we’re exposed to everything. You go outside, you’re exposed. At the end of the day, we’re all fragile when it comes to illness and disease.”

There were an estimated 68,720 new cases of melanoma in the United States in 2009 and 8,650 deaths, according to the website for the National Cancer Institute.

– Anthony McCarron, N.Y. Daily News.

This will be the first of two posts about Santana and I wanted to start with the good part. He’s taken up a cause that’s pretty important to me, and one that stands to benefit from mere awareness of the issue.

So here’s me doing my very small part. Charities love celebrity endorsements like Santana’s because they raise awareness to the press and public in addition to funds. I’m (vaguely) a member of the press, so I figured I’d spread the word. Wear sunscreen.

Also, the article mentions that Santana bowled a 160 at a bowling event he hosted in Minnesota a few years ago. I’m not a great or frequent bowler by any stretch, but I pretty often put up scores in that same range. So we may have found a sport I could beat Johan Santana at.

Anthony covers the Indians for MLB.com.