The Mets optioned Extra-Base Omir Santos back to Double-A Binghamton after their win over the Marlins yesterday and will reportedly call up outfielder Jesus Feliciano before tomorrow’s matchup with the Padres.

This is good.

Feliciano is not particularly exciting*, mind you. He is 31, and the definition of an organizational soldier. He has been patrolling the Mets’ Triple-A outfield since 2007. He plays all three positions, but by most accounts is not a great center fielder. And though Feliciano is hitting .385 this season, he is not a particularly patient hitter and he has never demonstrated any appreciable power.

But Feliciano puts the ball in play. He has struck out only 17 times in 206 plate appearances in Buffalo this season. When you make a lot of contact, sometimes a lot of balls fall in and you hit .385. It’s happening this season for Feliciano, and so he’s on his way to the Majors after parts of 13 seasons of Minor League play. That’s how baseball works sometimes, and it’s awesome.

And as exciting as the promotion must be for Feliciano, what it represents may be even more thrilling for Mets fans.

For one thing, Feliciano is very likely an upgrade over the man he’s essentially replacing, Gary Matthews Jr. If neither player is a great defensive center fielder and neither packs a punch at the plate, the Mets should at least carry the backup outfielder who might actually make contact with the ball with some regularity. Feliciano can do that; Matthews — who struck out in more than a third of his chances with the Mets — apparently no longer can.

During this season, the Mets have parted with “proven veterans” Matthews and Frank Catalanotto and replaced them with Minor League veterans Feliciano and Chris Carter. When “Major Leaguer” Mike Jacobs failed as their starting first baseman, they replaced him with prospect Ike Davis. When Luis Castillo went on DL last week, they called up 20-year-old Ruben Tejada and promised to give him the bulk of the playing time at second base.

If I spend so much time criticizing Omar Minaya and his administration for their past failures to maximize the production from the margins of the Mets’ roster and for their apparent preference for broken-down old players, I should commend them when it appears they’re doing things the right way. And that’s about how it looks now.

And while it would be easy to argue that several of these moves should have been made before the season even started or further blast Minaya for backtracking on his decisions without an adequate sample of evidence, well, whatever. What happened happened, and the important thing is that the Mets are making moves now to better the team going forward.

*UPDATE, 12:08 P.M.: I changed the language here, thanks in part to Carlos’ point in the comments section. I initially said “isn’t particularly good,” but I realized that sounds obnoxious. Everyone who succeeds in Triple-A is particularly good, because Triple-A baseball is an insanely high level compared to the level any of us could handle. And Feliciano makes a lot of contact there, which is a skill. He’s just not going to make the Hall of Fame, is all.

According to Brad Como, Gary Matthews Jr. has been designated for assignment. In his place, the Mets have recalled Omir Santos for some reason I can’t decipher.

Extra-Base Omir was slashing .074/.167/.111 at Double-A Binghamton in 27 at-bats since being demoted from Buffalo, where he posted a .194/.216/.306 line.

This could be the ol’ Abraham Nunez Axiom rearing its terrifying head again, but I have to imagine Santos’ promotion is logistical and transitional. Maybe Rod Barajas or Henry Blanco has some minor nagging injury that we don’t know about, or it takes some time to fill out the requisite paperwork to add Jesus Feliciano to the 40-man roster and Omar Minaya was desperate to take Matthews away from Jerry Manuel before he got any more at-bats. At this point, it’d be hard to blame anyone for not wanting to watch GMJ “hit” anymore.

I used to let little details like this upset me a lot more, but I’ll wait until the dust clears before I freak out about it.

Ironically — or I guess unironically, and completely predictably — the only healthy outfielder listed on the Mets’ 40-man roster who is not currently on the active roster is missing man Nick Evans, who has a healthy .284/.357/.557 line in Double-A. Granted, Evans has only played first base in Binghamton and certainly could not be expected to back up center field — purportedly the reason the Mets were keeping Matthews around. Of course, Omir Santos can’t do that either, but whatever.

The good news here is that Matthews is gone, not only because it means he won’t be inserted for pinch-bunting tonight, but also because it demonstrates a rare willingness to acknowledge sunk cost on the part of the Mets’ front-office. The roughly $1.5 million the team owes Matthews is hardly the same as the $20 million it still has committed to Oliver Perez, but hey, baby steps.

The Mets have 10 days to trade or release Matthews, and I have a sneaking suspicion they won’t find a willing trade partner. Little Sarge finishes his career in Queens with a .190/.266/.241 line with 24 strikeouts in 65 plate appearances, many of which came in his eight ill-conceived starts in center field over the much, much better Angel Pagan.

UPDATE, 4:26 p.m.: Adam Rubin tweets that Blanco is indeed banged up. So we can close the book on that one.

Manuel confirmed today that Niese would face the Marlins Saturday. He said that the Mets would demote a pitcher to clear room for Niese on the 25-man roster, and did not know who it would be if not Perez.

“It becomes a broad discussion for the most part (if Perez does not agree to a demotion). We have to sit down and see what fits.”

Reliever Elmer Dessens could return to Buffalo, though Manuel has said that he is interested in using Dessens in a late-inning setup role. Jenrry Mejia, who because of command problems is no longer under consideration for a setup job, could also be sent down.

– Andy Martino, N.Y. Daily News.

What a weird, weird time to be a Mets fan. After an offseason spent clamoring for the team to make measured decisions focused on longterm success — we’re probably the first fanbase to ever widely campaign against the early promotion of a prized prospect — we are left vaguely hoping a bad pitcher continues to stubbornly hurt his team by refusing an assignment to Triple-A. We cling to the small sliver of possibility that Perez’s behavior forces the team to send Mejia to the Minors where he can start games and work on his secondary arsenal like he should be.

I mean, that’s what I’m clinging to. I don’t think it’ll happen, and it’s a damn shame that a decision that seems so simple should have to come at the cost of a valuable roster spot. But the greater good, in this situation and this season, would be served by Mejia stretching out in the Minor Leagues, working his way toward the 2011 rotation.

Jerry Manuel’s affection for the youngster seems to skew his sense of reality, though, so it’s hard to imagine Mejia will be the pitcher sent packing even if Perez refuses. Manny Acosta pitched better than Mejia in his small-sample stint with the team, as Elmer Dessens has in spotty work. But neither of those veterans has that miracle pitch. They might both feature more than one pitch they can command, but nothing in either pitcher’s arsenal appears apt to make a manager salivate like Mejia’s cutting fastball.

But since Mejia has allowed a ton of baserunners in his 23 innings — something Manuel himself has noted — there’s no reason to believe he can maintain his 3.13 ERA.

He’ll probably get the opportunity to do so, though, even with the Mets floundering at .500 and with obvious needs in the starting rotation. Because hey, why concern yourself with the team’s future when all signs say you’re not a part of it?

The most amazing part of this, of course, is that reports surface constantly that Mejia’s role is the subject of frequent or even daily debate among team brass. They’re thinking about it a lot. And even after all this time thinking about it, they still haven’t been able to reach the same obvious conclusion the bulk of the media and blogosphere came to months ago. That’s damning, and damn near terrifying.

What’s the Curse of Roberto Alomar? I just made it up. The Mets’ second-base position has been riddled with injuries, instability, ineffectiveness and Luis Castillo since Alomar displaced Edgardo Alfonzo in the Mets’ middle infield in the 2002 season so, you know, I’ll call it a curse. (It should be noted that the Mets got one nice season out of Jose Valentin in 2006 before the curse claimed him too.)

Yeah, maybe it’s less of a curse and more of an insistence on stocking the position with players past their primes, committing at-bats to Miguel Cairo and handing a long contract to Castillo and everything. But whatever. My point is Daniel Murphy got hurt last night in the very first game of Project Murph-to-Second 2.0, and Luis Castillo’s probably bound for the disabled list.

The small bright side is that it all probably means we’ll get to see more of Ruben Tejada, a prospect always more exceptional for his youth than his production, but a nonetheless impressive defender. The underreported downside is that it almost guarantees the option on Alex Cora’s contract will vest, because Alex Cora is a warrior who will play in 80 games even if they have to cut both his thumbs off.

It is certainly way, way too early to suggest this and probably a flavor-of-the-moment idea, but there’s got to be a non-zero chance Reese Havens will be starting games at second in Flushing by the end of the season. Havens has played all of nine games above Single-A, mind you, plus this is his first season as a second baseman and he’s struggled with injuries in his young career. I’m really only reminded of him now because he hit two home runs last night.

But Havens has always been a patient hitter, and was lauded for his maturity and labeled a potential quick-mover when the Mets drafted him in the first round in 2008. He’s hardly a baby at 23 years old, and if he continues to torch Double-A pitching, it could at some point become clear that the Mets have no better option for the position. I haven’t heard much one way or the other about his defense at second base, but assuming the transition from shortstop doesn’t prove too difficult for him, Havens is probably worth keeping an eye on.

In his second consecutive column about Oliver Perez, Mike Lupica tells us not to get “overly worked up” about Oliver Perez. But that’s, well, whatever. That’s not what disgusted me about the column. Check out this part:

And we can all go ’round and ’round the mulberry bush about how [Perez’s contract] is the worst Mets contract this side of Beltran’s.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh…

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

Excuse me? All due respect, sir, but what the f@#$ are you talking about? Did you really just suggest that the three-year, $36 million contract handed to Oliver Perez — a guy who has posted a 6.62 ERA since inking the deal — is not as bad as the hefty one the Mets gave Carlos Beltran before the 2005 season? Is that what you’re saying? Because it really sounds like that’s what you’re saying.

And that’s ridiculous.

Look: I know everyone wants to get in their potshots at Scott Boras, because god forbid an agent be excellent at getting his players tons of money. And since Beltran’s hurt now it’s not as if his contract is a steal. But did you somehow forget the production he provided the team from 2006-2008, when he was one of the very best players in the Major Leagues on both sides of the ball?

Even if you’re on Team Phillips, that galumphing horde of ingrates unappreciative of greatness, you must recognize the difference between paying $12 million a year for Ollie Perez, a guy actively hurting his team, and paying even up to $18.5 million a year for Beltran, a guy actively hurting, but a guy who has only helped the Mets when healthy.

Wait, hold on, we have stats for this. Spreadsheets from our nerdery. Fangraphs converts WAR to a dollar scale to evaluate what a player should make in free agency. Over the course of his contract, even with his injuries, Beltran has already been worth $101.5 million to the Mets. That’s not including any value he might provide this year if and when he returns, or next year when he’s still under contract. So the Mets have already gotten nearly a full return on the $119 million they committed to Beltran before 2005, at least according to that stat.

Perez has been worth -$5.5 million since the start of 2009. Negative 5.5 million. Oliver Perez has been costing the Mets wins since they signed that deal. He cost them wins by pitching terribly, and now he is costing them wins by occupying a roster spot he doesn’t deserve. Oliver Perez should be paying the Mets for the right to pitch awfully, like some sort of absurd and masochistic vanity pursuit — the type you can afford when you’re earning $12 million a year for no reason in particular.

Whatever. Whatever. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I love watching Carlos Beltran play baseball, and so I am, as always, hopelessly biased. Maybe Mike Lupica falls in line with the Joe Benignos of the world, those that are sure Beltran hates baseball, and that he’s a lousy player who hasn’t brought the Mets championships and struck out looking one time to end an NLCS in which he hit three home runs.

Here’s what I know: I remember standing in the scrum of reporters around Beltran on the last Friday night of the 2007 season, after Beltran homered but the Mets lost to the Marlins and the team finally fell out of first place. Beltran faced the crowd and said all the right things, a bunch of words that couldn’t in any way convey the shock and horror on his face. With apologies to Tom Glavine, the dude looked devastated.

And I remember a night late in the 2008 season, when the Mets’ bullpen tried to blow Pedro Martinez’s last start with the team but Beltran wouldn’t let them, lining a walkoff single with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. Before that game, Beltran had told reporters that he learned to stay measured during the ups and downs of that strange season, but that his wife took the late-season losses hard. Then after the game, someone asked him how the missus would feel about the win. He paused for a moment, then burst into a mile-wide smile.

“It’s gonna be a good night,” he said.

You can tell me Beltran isn’t a winner, doesn’t care about baseball and isn’t worth is salary, but I just won’t believe you. And you can bombard me with conspiracy theories about his knee surgery and slow recovery, but I’ll remain skeptical. I have no idea what went down this winter in the he-said, they-said drama, but at this point, based on empirical evidence, I trust Beltran’s baseball instincts more than I do that of the Mets’ front office.

And if he’s only in it for himself and slowly working to come back so he can play for his contract, answer me this: Why the hell did he come back last September, with the team out of the race, with his bone-on-bone knee issue and everything else? I don’t know, but I think maybe Carlos Beltran really, really likes baseball. Or maybe it seizes him in some way I could never understand without being that good at something.

The Flaming Lips:

Tell everybody waiting for Superman
That they should try to hold on as best they can.
He hasn’t dropped them, forgot them or anything
It’s just too heavy for Superman too lift.

I should note before I get into this that there are two people commenting under the username “Ryan,” much as there are about 40 different users named Chris. One Ryan has been posting regularly on this blog since February and took care to distinguish himself from the Ryan whose comments are published below, who commented for the first time yesterday.

Anyway, he responded to my post about bias and the media with this:

Pretty hacky stuff here Ted. Everyone knows Matt is a complete hack who never criticizes the team for anything because of his connection with SNY.

When you sell out (look yourself in the mirror) you lose the privilege to write defensive columns like the one above.

I replied:

Ryan, I look myself in the mirror all the time. It’s hard to pull my eyes away from a face like this one.

Seriously, though, you can call me anything you want, and I know you have no real reason to trust me, but I never, ever publish anything I don’t believe.

And if you think an affiliation with SNY prevents someone from criticizing the Mets, you must have missed the columns/posts where I called for Minaya’s head, blasted the process behind the Francoeur deal, implied the team lacked understanding of basic microeconomics, suggested that the Mets’ entire front-office was asleep at the wheel, and compared Minaya and Adam Rubin to howler monkeys bellowing nonsense.

Ryan:

Ahh, the always controversial opinion about the Jeff Francouer trade, the most boring trade in American history. And the always appreciated Mets company line that Omar was wrong but so was Rubin. Nice work Ted.

Ted, how about that none of your SNY blogs, even the flagship has even touched the Mets dropping payroll $22 million this offseason. No, lets not touch that one. That is not relevant to Mets fans, that is not a complete slap in the face. That’s the hackiness element, that’s the sellout who can’t write what he feels or thinks because his paycheck comes from the team he is covering.

Why also does Matt write like this…maybe it allows him to hedge his opinions…saying something without saying anything…so he doesn’t look access…maybe i dont know….maybe access to interview Kevin Burkhardt….the always hard-hitting Kevin Burkhardt…so that he can ask him…why Alex Cora…does all the little things right? …..Maybe I don’t know….

Me:

http://www.tedquarters.net/2010/02/10/all-sorts-of-mets-stuff-from-sny-tv/

Ryan:

The article you linked below, why? You don’t mention Mets payroll at all. You certainly do not mention 22 MILLION DOLLARS. In fact the article stems from yourself being criticized for not being critical. Which is my point.

Me:

In that post, I linked and responded to an article that said the Mets have no money left, which pretty clearly relates to the Mets’ payroll. I didn’t mention 22 MILLION DOLLARS because it was February and I had no way of knowing if the Mets were done spending. Since I rarely obtain any inside, anonymous-source type information, I had no way to know whether the Mets’ decline in payroll was due to bureaucratic inefficiency or an actual lack of money. I still don’t.

Ryan (here comes my favorite part!):

To this day, Ted nor Matt have commented on the EXTREME amount of drop in payroll which is suspicious. Downright suspicious. Other Metscentric blogs have. SNY Sponsored Blogs have not.

Your article is not relevant to the conversation and it was not a good article anyway.

I am a big fan of SNY Mets broadcasts. The Big 3 can be very critical of this organization, which is great, and which they should be. There has not been a bigger disgrace of organization management in baseball than the New York Mets (Randolph Firing to Present) Metsblog and Tedquarters has not been critical, at all. They would rather talk (along with Burkhardt) about how Alex Cora does the little things well and Fernando Tatis provides veteran latino presence, all the while the team and the organization is imploding and frankly a joke to the rest of the league.

Me:

“They would rather talk (along with Burkhardt) about how Alex Cora does the little things well and Fernando Tatis provides veteran latino presence.”

And with that, I feel no obligation to respond to anything else you say since you’ve obviously never read this blog before.

I didn’t re-post the exchange here out of pettiness, though I am admittedly petty. I just think the irony is rich, considering the original post: Ryan entered this conversation with a strong bias. He was certain that me and Matt Cerrone and everyone writing about the Mets on the SNY.tv family of sites are shills for the team, even though he has since made it abundantly clear that he just hasn’t read a whole lot of my writing.

In that post, I wrote, “We see stories develop and we want them to be true, so we draw inferences and connect dots and work to confirm them as reality.” And here, Ryan has found one particular factoid on which I did not directly criticize the Mets and latched onto it as proof that I am a mouthpiece for the team without considering that I might just have missed the fact or glossed over it while I was busy ripping Alex Cora’s contract for most of the offseason.

Anyway, in case you’re curious, and I guess for posterity, the 2010 Mets do indeed have a payroll about $23 million less than it was last year, according to Cot’s. I don’t know why. I have heard team officials say they have the flexibility to add payroll in a salary dump trade at the deadline, and I could even argue that waiting to see how the 2010 Mets fared before bringing on high-priced players on multiple-year deals was a reasonable strategy, given all the uncertainty on the Opening Day roster. But I don’t know if that was the actual motivation.

And I could add that it hardly seems suspicious that a team coming off such a miserable year in a rough economy would struggle to match the previous season’s payroll, since it would presumably be much harder to sell tickets, advertisements and merchandise. I don’t know the exact details of the Mets’ budget, though, so spending too much time on it would amount to uninformed speculation.

What I do know for sure, though, is that $126 million — like $149 million or $137 million — in the hands of a capable front office should be plenty to field a competitive team. The problem has never been the Mets’ payroll, but the appropriation thereof.

Jonathan Mayo from MLB.com doesn’t expect the Mets to draft above slot. As he points out, that doesn’t make a massive difference when they’ve got the seventh pick overall, but it’s not great news to any Mets fan frustrated with the team’s recent drafting history.

Mike Pelfrey’s 2010 success is all the rage these days in the blogosphere and local papers, and probably comes as a surprise to all those who raged over his mostly defense-induced struggles from 2009.

So what’s made the difference? No surprises, really: Pelfrey’s getting a bit lucky, benefiting from a better defense, and using his new splitter to induce more weak contact and swinging strikes than ever before.

Big Pelf has yielded a .279 batting average on balls in play, well below his career .311 rate. That’s at least partly due to a slight uptick in Pelfrey’s trademark groundballs — he’s now inducing 52.5 percent, up from a career 50.3-percent rate. It also can’t hurt that the Mets’ defense has played, statistically, significantly above average this season after being third worst in the Majors last year.

Still, while Pelfrey is certainly enjoying the return of Jose Reyes behind him, it’s probably unreasonable to expect him to continue yielding so few hits. At some point, a few more balls will drop in or squeak by defenders.

The good news is Pelfrey’s better prepared to handle that situation because he’s missing more bats. The big Kansan will never be Tim Lincecum, but he’s striking out 6.5 batters per 9 innings, more than a full batter more than his career average.

That’s good, and likely largely due to Pelfrey’s new splitter. The pitch has been, on average, his most effective offering this year. It will be interesting to see if hitters learn to lay off the ball as it dives out of the zone once the new-look Pelfrey has been around the league a couple of times, but at the very least the effective splitter must make Pelfrey’s heater a bit more difficult to time.

All the fancy stats — FIP, xFIP and tRA — show that Pelfrey’s been pitching significantly better than he ever has before. That’s no stunning insight, of course, but the stats seem to indicate real improvement and not plain luck or random fluctuation.