His words, not mine:

“A lot of statistical people seem to be a huge on-base percentage thing. And I don’t ever — it seems like 15 or 20 years ago it wasn’t a big deal. I don’t know. All of a sudden, it has become one.”

The Daily News has more about the Mets’ pursuit of Jason Bay today. John Harper:

Though all of New York seems to be waiting impatiently for the Mets to make a big move this offseason, they are negotiating at a deliberate pace with Jason Bay.

Let’s edit that:

Though all of New York me and my colleagues at the Daily News seems to be are waiting impatiently for the Mets to make a big move this offseason provide us with easy fodder to write about, they are negotiating at a deliberate pace with Jason Bay.

Done.

The impatient Met fan, this year, appears to be a bit of a straw man. I thought he was out there a few weeks ago when I wrote this post, then I spoke to him again here.

But check out the comments section on Matt’s measured, reasonable post about the Mets’ offseason so far at MetsBlog. Nearly everyone agrees with him. And if you want a good barometer for the going sentiments among Mets fans, there’s no better place to check than the MetsBlog comments section.

Anyway, what’s more important is the rest of the Daily News article. It basically says that the Mets don’t know that there’s another bidder out there for Bay, so are resisting the urge to extend their offer to five years and are trying to feel out the market for the right-handed slugger.

That’s good. Heck, that’s great. If that’s true, that’s the best thing I’ve heard about any of the Mets’ offseason processes in a long time.

I’m still not sure Bay is the absolute best fit for the Mets, but I know he’s a terrific hitter who managed to mash AL East pitching for the last couple of years and tends to pull the ball, which appears to make him well-suited for Citi Field.

I don’t know if the Mets think Bay is a better fit than Matt Holliday or just feel he’s a better value play, nor do I know how they came to whichever conclusion they made.

Either way, their patience is probably a good thing. Provided Bay is willing to play in New York and interested in making the most money, I doubt his agent allows him to sign elsewhere without giving the big-market team with the hole in left field and a clear need for a strong right-handed bat ample opportunity to beat the deal.

Luckily, Mets fans seem willing to wait it out.

I read the Daily News every weekday. I have an iPhone, so I could probably rely entirely on electronic sources at this point, but buying the paper is part of my morning routine.

I have a pretty long train ride, so I usually finish just about the entire thing by the time I get to Grand Central, and the paper is, I think, one of the best ways to get firm handle on the city’s news and the way it is being covered.

But I’ve been a bit disturbed lately by the way the News has covered the Mets. Not just the bizarre Bill Madden incident from last week, either. This, too:

That subhead says: “Time running out for Jolly Ol’ St. Omar to deliver.”

The small black font under the photo says: “Nine days until Christmas and there’s still nothing under Mets’ tree thanks to Omar Minaya’s casual approach to free-agent season.”

Interesting. I had no idea Major League rosters needed to be set by Christmas. Is that a new rule?

There are a lot of fair criticisms of Omar Minaya. I perpetuate most of them in this space.

His inaction this offseason? Not one of them. Sure, it does appear the Mets misread the market a bit and thought there’d be more discounted players available, but would Brad Penny and/or Rich Harden really have made the difference to the Daily News? And other than those two, have there been any deals made that the Mets absolutely missed out on?

John Lackey at five years and $85 million or whatever it was? I’ll pass.

Roy Halladay was never even an option.

I’ve been urging Mets fans to be patient this offseason, but the more Mets fans I talk to, the more I realize it’s mostly not the fans that are impatient. I haven’t heard any Mets fan use the term “dithering.”

If we want to criticize Minaya, we should talk about how he gives too much money to replacement-level players and appears to actually think Bengie Molina is good. Those are fair criticisms.

But Minaya has not done any irreparable damage to the Mets yet this offseason, by action or inaction. Let’s wait until he does before we tee off on him.

Here’s a friendly reminder to come join me at the Blue and Orange Hot Stove Huddle tomorrow night at River on 43rd and 10th in Manhattan. More details of the event are here.

Numerous personalities from your favorite World Wide Web sites will be on hand to discuss the Mets and the MLB offseason.

I am told there will be a series of discussions moderated by Will Davidian of BlueAndOrange.net.

I’ll participate in the last of them, meaning I’ll have to either lay off the booze to save from embarrassing myself in a public forum, or realize that I’m going to embarrass myself regardless of whether I’ve been drinking and end up so tanked that I fight Joe Janish of MetsToday.com and get kicked out of the bar before I even have the opportunity to drool out nonsense about the Mets’ offseason strategy.

Which will happen? You can only find out if you go.

Helpful hint: It’ll probably be the former, but I can’t guarantee I won’t fight Joe Janish stone-cold sober.

Little-known fact: I once wrote an article about Japanese pitchers that was so loaded with falsehoods it inspired Japanese baseball expert Patrick Newman to start the excellent NPBTracker.com.

That, ironically, is probably my greatest contribution to the baseball blogosphere.

Anyway, with word surfacing that the Mets are about to sign Japanese reliever Ryota Igarashi, I turned to NPBTracker for info. Patrick posted a profile of Igarashi in May. He wrote:

Igarashi is known one of the hardest throwers in Japan, and jointly holds the record for fastest pitch* by a Japanese pitcher in an NPB game with a 158 kmph (98.75mph) fastball….

Although he doesn’t throw quite as hard as he used to, but still runs his heater into the upper 90’s, and augments it with a hard splitter that he throws at around 90mph. He’s also got a slider and a curve that he’ll mix in occasionally, but is primarily a fastball/splitter pitcher.

Igarashi’s weakness has been his control. Over the course of his career through 2008, he’s allowed 221 walks and thrown 42 wild pitches over 517.1 innings.

So it sounds a tiny bit like the Mets are signing the Japanese Fernando Rodney. Anyway, see for yourself:

So Jorge Arangure’s Twitter, via Matt Cerrone, tells me that the Mets are interested in Fernando Rodney. And Cerrone says Rodney’s seeking a three-year, $30 million deal.

Remember yesterday when I said the Mets hadn’t actually screwed anything up yet and so we shouldn’t kill them just for their inaction? Yeah, if they’re actually interested in Fernando Rodney, and if they actually sign Fernando Rodney for any significant money, that’s screwing something up.

Fernando Rodney is eminently average. He throws very hard, which is nice, but he lacks control, and missed time in 2008 due to shoulder tendinitis, and is 32. He has a career 105 ERA+, just barely above league average, and a 1.424 WHIP, too high for a late-inning reliever.

Rodney is the prototypical example of a guy who will be overpaid because of the closer label. If you’ll recall, that’s precisely what I whined about the Mets doing all last offseason.

But I figured, with the way the J.J. Putz thing blew up in their faces, they learned from that mistake. And I hope they did.

If they go out and give a big contract to Fernando Rodney, who’s honestly probably not much better a bet than Bobby Parnell moving forward, it will show that they haven’t.

Twitter is exploding right now. Honestly, go to Twitter; it’s on fire. The whole Internet will soon be engulfed in flames.

Apparently the Red Sox have closed on a five-year, $85 million deal with John Lackey and the Phillies, Blue Jays and Mariners have agreed on a deal that will send Roy Halladay to the Phillies, Cliff Lee to the Mariners and to-be-determined prospects to the Mariners.

OK, Mets fans, here it is:

Don’t panic.

It’s probably best to wait until the dust settles to figure out exactly what happened today, but on the very surface, well, I dunno. On multiple occasions I wrote why the Mets shouldn’t trade for Roy Halladay, because one year of Roy Halladay and the opportunity to sign a 33-year-old pitcher to a longterm extension at market rate did not seem worth the cost in prospects.

We don’t know yet what exactly the cost in prospects will be for the Phillies — it should be mitigated by the inclusion of Lee — nor what deal Halladay will get, but it’s safe to assume they’ll still be committing a huge sum of money to an aging pitcher. Granted, Halladay’s been something of a horse, but no one is impervious to Father Time.

Look: I know the idea of Roy Halladay on the Phillies seems terrifying. I’m scared myself. That lineup, with Halladay and Cole Hamels at the front of the rotation in 2010? Yeah, that’s not going to be easy to compete with.

But how much better is Halladay, for 2010 alone, than Lee? I don’t know. And how much better will the Phillies be for the deal if it means they sign Halladay to a contract that could ultimately be crippling?

As for Lackey: Many Mets fans, myself included, way preferred Matt Holliday to Lackey at the offseason’s outset. I still do, for that matter. The movement for Lackey mostly developed, it seems, when news surfaced last week that the Mets had made an offer to Jason Bay.

But the Mets haven’t actually signed Bay yet, and no one has signed Holliday. So there’s more waiting to be done there. Let’s see what happens before we kill the team. Remember that they don’t play games in December.

Would I have committed five years and $85 million to Lackey? Probably not. Of course, as a sabermetrically inclined baseball fan I’m contractually obligated to assume what Theo Epstein does is correct, so maybe he knows something I don’t.

And since the market for pitchers was set by the three-year, $30 million contract Randy Wolf got from the Brewers, maybe Epstein saw Lackey as something of a bargain.

Still, it seems like an awful lot of cash to commit to a pitcher who hasn’t thrown over 200 innings since 2007, however minor his injuries were. And I don’t buy the argument that he deserves A.J. Burnett money simply by being better than A.J. Burnett; Burnett is wildly overpaid.

Again, and for the millionth time: I know you’re starting to feel impatient. I feel that way too. And, as pessimistic as I am about this front office’s ability to build a perennial contender, I’m certainly not saying, “just wait and see, the Mets will be fine.”

I don’t know that’s the case. But I also don’t know that they screwed anything up by not acquiring Lackey or Halladay.

According to Honkbalsite.com, the Mets have signed Dutch teenagers Kevin Weijgertse and Björn Hato. Both are expected to train at the Mets’ instructional facility in the Dominican Republic starting in April, but only one is expected to have an umlaut in his name.

The  Babelfish translation of the Honkbalsite.com article is predictably hilarious. Here’s what is has to say about Weijgertse:

The third limping man finished three games for the club head village. Weijgertse to Corendon Kinheim, moved at the end of the season, where he the fixed third limping man became. In service of the Haarlemse plough the binnenvelder 39 played games with 36 limping battle (.243), fifteen scored runs and seventeen binnengeslagen points.

It’s probably a bad sign that he’s already limping, but you have to be impressed by the seventeen binnengeslagen points.

As for Hato:

Also Björn Hato (18) ended up last season for head class serum Corendon Kinheim. The binnenvelder made one’s debut on Sunday 26 April in the head power then he in the eighth collection of the game against Mr. Cocker HCAW was used as pinchrunner.

I’ll say this much, it’s pretty impressive that Babelfish knows the Dutch word for “pinchrunner.” It’s less impressive that the Mets are signing guys who are only being used as pinch runners in Dutch baseball games.

Of course, for all I know “pinchrunner” here means he somehow hit seven home runs in a game and he’s actually the Dutch Babe Ruth.

Yorvit Torrealba’s grievance against the Mets is scheduled for Wednesday.

Regardless, the Mets may pursue Torrealba if they can’t land Bengie Molina.

This can only end well.

And by “well,” I mean, “with a weak-hitting catcher signed to a multi-year deal.”

This is from late 2007 (as evidenced by Jeff Conine), but I’ve never seen it before. Sadly, few of the players say anything cool, but there are a couple of nuggets of Rickey Henderson-inspired awesomeness in the middle. Jeff Conine is predictably uninteresting.

David Wright likes the Beastie Boys. It’s really funny to hear David Newhan say, “gangster.”

The Pedro Feliciano part — dismissing all of it — is particularly entertaining in how boring it is. He is the most workmanlike dude imaginable. It’s kind of awesome.

One game Feliciano got out Ryan Howard, Chase Utley and Raul Ibanez on a total of six pitches or something, so I went to ask him about it, and he was just like, “yeah, that’s my job, I get lefties out.” So, trying to get something more out of him, I asked him if he got especially geared up for the Phillies with all their great lefties, and he was like, “nah, just doing my job, getting lefties out.”