Matt Cerrone cites the Bill James Handbook to point out that it was 10 percent easier for right-hand hitters to hit home runs at Citi Field than in other National League parks.

Cool. And Cerrone is right that the Mets should stress this type of information when pursuing free agents. I’ve covered this before; there’s just not much evidence to suggest Citi Field diminishes offense nearly as much as it is purported to.

Still — and this is why I need to get that book — I’d love to see if there’s a way to figure out the tendencies of specific hitters who performed better at Citi Field. I know the handbook assesses hitter tendencies, and I wonder if the right-handed hitters that fared better at Citi were mostly right-handed pull hitters.

In the comments section from my post on Citi Field a few weeks ago, Sam Page from Amazin’ Avenue pointed out that David Wright hit about 10 balls in Citi that would have been homers at Shea, according to HitTracker Online.

I love HitTracker, but I’m still not willing to go all in on its ability to judge park effects, especially since Wright struggled to hit home runs on the road as well.

But it does look to the eye as though guys who traditionally spray the ball around, like Wright, might be hurt (in their home-run totals, at least) by Citi’s cavernous right-center field gap while a pull-hitting righty bat might be able to take advantage of the relatively short fences in left and left-center.

And HitTracker paints an interesting picture in regards to the two big free-agent left fielders this offseason. Here’s Matt Holliday’s home-run chart from 2009:

And here’s Jason Bay’s:

I’m not certain what this means, if anything. Holliday’s homers travel further than Bay’s on average, but he spreads them around a lot more. Bay is far more pull-heavy.

Of course, Bay played half his games in Boston with the Green Monster making a tempting target in left field, and at least a few of those wouldn’t have gone out of Citi Field, or Busch Stadium and Oakland Coliseum, where Holliday played.

Home runs aside, Holliday is younger than Bay and a far superior all-around player, and so in a vacuum, the Mets would be much better served to sign Holliday.

But the offseason market is a fluid thing, and if there appears to be a lot more competition for Scott Boras-client Holliday and Bay’s stock drops, the Mets might want to at least consider how Bay’s pull power would play at their home park.

He’s not worth nearly, nearly as much as Holliday is in dollars or years, but he’s still a very good power hitter, and I would guess he’s the type that would succeed at Citi Field.

Yesterday I promised to provide more thoughts about Daniel Murphy and his role with the Mets moving forward, but I got busy with actual work.

My apologies.

Murphy may have been trumped by Jeff Francoeur as the most divisive Met, but the young first baseman still inspires tons of debate among the Shea Faithful.

Here’s what we know: Murphy did not hit well enough in 2009 to be an everyday first baseman for a competitive Major League team. His .741 OPS was more than 100 points below the National League average, and even as his numbers surged in the second half, his walk rate declined.

Despite a few embarrassing blunders, he acquitted himself nicely at first base after switching positions. At times he appeared a bit lost in the new spot, but he demonstrated good range by both objective and subjective measures.

It seemed, to my eye at least, like Murphy mastered the rhythm of the infield, even if he wasn’t always playing the right notes.

But that’s 2009. That’s gone. What matters is what Murphy can do in 2010 and beyond.

Because that’s the thing about Murph. Whether he’s a blue-collar stud or an overhyped dud, he’s under the Mets’ control and inexpensive for the next several years.

If you’re in the camp that says the Mets are only a piece or two away from a World Series berth in 2010, then you don’t — and probably shouldn’t — care what Murphy is earning. If the Mets are only a piece or two away from contending, they shouldn’t bank on Murphy’s improvement in 2010 and he should be traded away or relegated to a bench role, where he’ll be just some guy earning the Major League minimum.

But if you’re in the camp that says the Mets have many, many question marks beyond the ones surrounding their young first baseman, then you’re in the same camp as me. (We can be camp friends!)

And if that’s the case, then you must recognize that the Mets should stick with Murphy, at least for now.

Sure, there’s plenty to suggest he won’t ever be the player the Mets need him to be. If Murphy doesn’t markedly improve from his 2009 campaign, he will not be an adequate first baseman for a team that aspires to postseason play.

On the other hand, Murphy is 24, and before this season had precisely 135 at-bats above Double-A. It can take a long time for a young player to fully adjust to Major League pitching, and plenty of good hitters have had Age-24 seasons far worse than the one Murph just endured.

If Murphy can become a good hitter, even good enough to be an average first baseman — and that’s a pretty darn good hitter, mind you — he’ll be something immensely valuable: A low-cost everyday player who can free up spending cash for the Mets to use elsewhere.

In short, he could be a guy. Not an Hall of Famer or an All-Star, but also not a value-sapping below-replacement-level scrub like the ones the Mets too frequently trot out. Just a guy, a deserving Major Leaguer.

This has been my whole thing for a while: The Mets need guys. Inexpensive guys. And Murphy can be one of them.

He should be given that opportunity this season. There’s not that much to lose and there’s a ton to gain. At worst, he can hold down the fort until Ike Davis is ready. At best, he can force the oft-rumored move of Davis to right field when Francoeur inevitably regresses to his mean.

It’s about patience. The Mets need to take their time assessing Murphy, Murphy needs to take more pitches at the plate, and Mets fans need to stop taking for granted that the team can piece together a winner without making efforts toward sustainability.

OK, there are two things you should read before continuing here. First, this from Jon Heyman, who suggests that “Omar Minaya is on thin ice” and “some Mets people believe the biggest reason Minaya is being kept for now is the three years and $3.5 million remaining on his contract.”

Second, this from Jeff Sackmann at the Hardball Times, which evaluates how teams fare in earning value from the draft, international free agency, trades, waivers and plain-old free agency.

By his system, the Mets ranked second from last in the Majors in 2009 in getting value from the draft, received no value from international free agents, were  near the middle in trade and waiver-wire pickups, and dead last in value spent versus value returned in free agency.

Sackmann’s system is admittedly limited, plus he’s only working from 2009, when the Mets didn’t really get much value out of anybody. Still, it underscores something many Mets fans — this one included — have been saying for years: Omar Minaya does not spend his resources efficiently.

I always take offseason rumors from anonymous sources with several grains of salt, but what Heyman suggests does seem to jive with everything that has happened in the Mets’ front office and every rumor we’ve heard.

And if it’s really true, the Mets should fire Omar Minaya right now.

Look: Either you have confidence in a GM to build your team for the upcoming season and the future or you don’t. “Putting the heat on him,” as has been suggested, is about the worst possible approach. That only further pushes Minaya toward moves of desperation, the type made to save his job but not necessarily to forward the franchise.

That’s a bad thing. That’s the opposite of progress. That’s regress.

What’s worse, keeping the guy around just because he’s owed more money is not only a pitiful misunderstanding of sunk-cost economics, but a massively ironic one. If — as Sackmann shows — Omar Minaya does not spend money efficiently, then why continue paying him to waste your money just because you owe him a tiny fraction of your overall budget?

If the Mets think Minaya is the guy to run the Mets for the long haul, they should make that abundantly clear to everyone and make sure no one in their front office is leaking out any suspicions to the contrary.

After all, Minaya — maybe as much as any GM in baseball — is conscious of public perception. Remember, this is the guy who couldn’t go out for bagels without hearing about how he should fix the bullpen.

And if the Mets are unwilling to make a long-term commitment to Minaya as a general manager, there’s no sense in making a short-term commitment.

There might be some advantage to having a manager know he’s on the hot seat, because it might compel him to shake things up and think of new and better ways to get the team to win. It’s the manager’s job to try to win immediately.

But that’s not the case with the GM. The GM must be held responsible for the present and the future. He needs to focus on building a sustainable winner, not a patchwork club wearing thin on resources.

Putting the GM on the hot seat will only force him to make myopic decisions, precisely the type that got the Mets into this mess in the first place.

I was just discussing autographs with two co-workers. I don’t really understand the point of autographs and I never have, because I don’t understand why I should want an example of someone’s handwriting just because they are famous.

Cerrone pointed out that, in a lot of cases, people just use autographs to prove that they met someone, and he’s probably right. But I don’t understand why I should have to prove that one time I sat next to Bill Murray at a Mets game (I did, hilarious experience) or saw Heather Graham in a restaurant (quite pleasant). You can feel free to not believe me; what do I care? I know it happened.

The conversation meandered and eventually became a discussion of what living current or former Met we would most like to have lunch with.

I said Kevin Mitchell. Say what you will about the guy, it sounds as though he’s had a pretty interesting life, in baseball and otherwise. Plus he seems like a guy who’d give it to you straight, so maybe I could finally find out the truth about the cat story.

Also, he’s got to be the only guy to ever injure himself eating a donut. That sort of makes him my hero by default.

And furthermore, he’s the subject of my single favorite baseball card of all-time, the 1987 Topps one showed here. There are still about 30 of those — no exaggeration — in a binder in my parents’ basement.

Anyone have any better ideas? Is there a Met that would make for a more interesting lunch date than Kevin Mitchell?

According to Matt at MetsBlog, SI.com’s Jon Heyman told WFAN.com that the Mets are looking for a solid innings guy who doesn’t get hurt.

Here’s the thing: Good luck with that.

It strikes me that there are very, very few pitchers who reliably throw more than 190 innings in a season. Jon Garland is one of them, and he and the Dodgers have a mutual 2010 option on his contract. So he could be a free agent. Jason Marquis is another, and he’s already campaigning to join the Mets.

Both Garland and Marquis are groundball guys, for what it’s worth, so the Mets would probably need to do something about their infield defense to make those investments pay off. I’m looking at you, Luis Castillo.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. The point is that there has to be a huge value in starters who can simply pitch a bunch of innings reliably, even if it’s only at a Major League average level. Longer starts, obviously, save a bullpen, and durability helps a team avoid the need for a below-average replacement pitcher.

It seems, from a cursory look around the league, like a bunch of the guys who can throw 190-220 innings a season consistently are also excellent: CC Sabathia, Dan Haren, Roy Halladay and the like. Of course, that makes sense, since better pitchers go deeper into games more frequently.

But there’s something to be said for pitchers like Garland, Joe Blanton and Bronson Arroyo, who teams can count on to amass innings. (Livan Hernandez, my colleague Mike Salfino likes to point out, does not truly eat innings. Innings eat him.)

I’m not sure there’s any metric out there that weighs a pitcher’s reliability. Part of that is probably because so few pitchers are reliable, and even the ones that seem reliable will eventually crap out or need arm surgery.

Still, it feels like there should be some statistical way to credit a guy like Javier Vazquez who basically has not missed a start since the turn of the Millenium. I guess it’s easy enough to just click around on a guy’s baseball-reference page, but I’m extremely lazy.

That’s all. Just sayin.

The Mets released Ken Takahashi today. That’s a shame because I always hoped to do a feature on his translator, but I never got around to it. Being a Major League translator seems like a really interesting job, because it requires not only being bilingual, but being bilingual in the language of baseball, and I assume that involves talking mechanics and scouting and everything else.

Anyway, I felt like pulling up Ken Takahashi’s Wikipedia page just to see if there was anything interesting about him that I didn’t know, so I searched the Wikipedia for “Takahashi.”

But Ken Takahashi, it turns out, does not even make the Takahashi disambiguation page.

Takahashi is the third most common surname in Japan, behind Sato and Suzuki. Takahashis more notable than Ken, according to the Wikipedia, include two other baseball players from the NPB, five manga artists, five voice actors and one really kickass sounding roboticist, a three-time winner of the humanoid cup.

There are two other Takahashis on the disambiguation page whose first names begin with “Ken,” and coincidentally, both are athletes. Kenichi Takahashi is a distance runner. Kenji Takahashi is a soccer player.

But our Ken Takahashi is nowhere to be found. And though he does have his own page, until Ken Takahashi is added to the disambiguation page I will not bemoan his departure.

Godspeed, Ken Takahashi. We hardly knew ye, but we knew ye better than the Wikipedia apparently does.

UPDATE, 3:31 p.m.

Josh has given Ken Takahashi his rightful place in history and added him to the disambiguation page. I’m sure Ken Takahashi is grateful, wherever he may be.

So it’s no secret that the Mets will be looking for an upgrade in left field this offseason, and luckily for them, both good player Jason Bay and very good player Matt Holliday will be available on the free-agent market.

Unfortunately for the Mets, both the Red Sox and Yankees will be looking for left fielders, as well. I have no idea what specifically those clubs will look for, but Sox GM Theo Epstein has been adamant that he will try to re-sign Bay.

There’s no guarantee that will happen — it’s likely Epstein is openly praising Bay only because Bay is part of the Red Sox. But should it happen, and should the Yanks offer Holliday a blank check — also not a sure thing because of the way they spent money last offseason — it’s easy to imagine the Mets settling for current Yanks left fielder and free agent-to-be Johnny Damon.

Here’s why:

1) Durability: If you’ve followed the Mets under Omar Minaya, you recognize that their offseason tendency is always to fix the principal concern from the previous season. In 2009, that was the team’s inability to stay healthy. In 2009, Damon played in more than 140 games for the 14th consecutive season.

2) Marketability: It will be tough for the Mets to sell tickets and ads in February, but Damon would help the cause. Maybe not as much as Holliday, for sure, but Damon is a familiar face in New York with a reputation as a clubhouse leader and a hustler. The Mets could try to sell fans on his intangibles while propping him up as a “proven winner” after his contributions to the 2004 Red Sox and, should they succeed, the 2009 Yankees.

3) Illusions of power and defense: The Mets are looking to add a power bat to the lineup and upgrade their defense. Damon doesn’t really do either of those things, but he is coming off a 24-homer season and probably maintains some of his rep as a rangy defender even though he’s outgrown it. If the Mets wanted to get really creative, they could argue that Damon’s tendency to pull his homers could help him take advantage of Citi’s right-field corner.

In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, I’m not on board with this idea I created myself. Here’s why they shouldn’t:

1) He’s 35: There’s a reason very few players have played 14 straight seasons with 140 games or more. Old players get hurt more often. Signing Damon — who has managed to stay on the field despite numerous minor injuries — to a multi-year deal because of his ability to stay healthy would likely prove ironic.

2) He’s not good at defense: Damon could still boast above-average range, according to UZR, as of 2008. But in 2009, it appears the nagging injuries and Matsui-forced inability to take days off as a DH caught up with him. Also, if you’ve seen him throw, you know about his “arm.”

3) He’s the biggest sellout of all time: This is a subjective thing and I really don’t begrudge baseball players for taking the largest contracts offered to them, but leaving the Red Sox for the Yankees while shaving his caveman beard and cutting his hair was just too much. C’mon, guy. At least get yourself a beard clause in the contract. He makes Mark McGrath look like Ian MacKaye.

Marty Noble has a new Mets.com mailbag out today, and in it, he discusses Angel Pagan:

He was a productive offensive player last season. But his errors — of omission, commission and in thinking — were so many, assessing his skills can’t be done so readily.

I don’t know. Maybe that’s true. Pagan did make a few really terrible mental mistakes in 2009. But were they really so bad as to take away from the value he added to the team?

Not nearly. Bill James Online, which relies on video scouts from Baseball Info Solutions to judge how many plays a defender makes above or below the average player at his position, had Pagan as a +12 left fielder, a +7 center fielder and a +1 right fielder. Presumably, that includes the penalties levied against Pagan for his blunders.

And on the basepaths? The same site has him as a +12 baserunner, meaning he gained 12 more bases with his feet than the average player would in similar situations. (Note: I initially botched — by a lot — my reading of his stats page. I wrote that he was +35, which is his career total.)

He was thrown out on the bases four times, which isn’t great. But I’d guess that a player so aggressive on the basepaths will always be more prone to the occasional gaffe. So while everyone was so busy chastising Pagan for the times he cost the Mets runs with his baserunning, they forgot to celebrate all the runs he actually earned the team with his legs.

So essentially, there are ways to assess readily assess his skills despite his lapses in concentration. I’m not saying we should take the Bill James Online stats as gospel, but since they do weigh both his positive and negative contributions, they provide a lot of assistance in figuring out how to value his tendency for the baserunning or defensive yip.

And the verdict shows that Pagan, when you combine his plus defense and plus baserunning with his .837 OPS, was pretty damn good in 2009.

Should the Mets count on it going forward? Maybe not. But they certainly shouldn’t hold against Pagan all the nonsensical sanctimony about him playing the game the wrong way.

Incidentally, the first question in Noble’s mailbag regards Carl Crawford’s “personality and leadership” and is posed by a Queens resident named “James K.” Could this be James Kannengieser, Amazin’ Avenue writer, occasional TedQuarters commenter and sabermetric knight-errant of the Mets’ blogosphere? James, are you baiting Marty Noble?

According to Ken Davidoff, Matt Holliday is reluctant to sign with the Mets this offseason because it’s hard to hit at Citi Field.

Here’s the issue: No one can really be sure that’s the case.

Looking up and down the Mets’ 2009 roster, it appears to be true. After all, Daniel Murphy led the team in home runs with 13.

Then again, looking up and down the Mets’ 2009 roster will reveal a whole slew of guys who have never hit for any appreciable power.

Moreover, and for like the eight millionth time, the 2009 Mets both hit more and allowed more home runs in Citi Field than they did on the road.

Park factors vary pretty greatly from year to year, and there are a lot elements that affect them. But ESPN.com’s park factors for 2009 showed that Citi Field reduced run scoring by about six percent. So yeah, it played as a pitcher’s park, but not exactly the cavernous vacuum of offense that so many have made it out to be. In fact, it played a whole lot like Shea did in 2008.

Baseball players are a chatty and superstitious sort. I don’t know much about Matt Holliday’s temperament, but I know that baseball players around the league appear to be legitimately afraid of ghosts in the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee.

So it’s not hard to argue that word of phenomena that may not actually exist can spread quickly around the Majors.

I imagine the book on Citi has something to do with David Wright’s weird year. But I’m unwilling to chalk up his power outage to the park alone, since, again, he home runs at a (slightly) higher rate at home than he did on the road.

What was especially telling about Wright’s season, I think, is that he hit as many balls the other way as he pulled. Many fans nostalgic for some earlier era of Wright that may never have existed will argue that Wright should be driving the ball to the opposite field, but looking at his career splits will show that he has hit for much, much more power while pulling the ball.

Wright said a number of times that he was trying to go the other way more often to cater to the ballpark. (Edit: As Ceetar points out in the comments section, Wright may not have actually said this. I thought I remembered him saying it a few times, but I can’t find any evidence of it online. That appears to be mostly Jerry Manuel’s beat.) I have no idea if that’s true and that had something to do with his diminished power numbers, or if it was a function of the way the league was pitching him or the product of a strange one-year fluctuation. In any case, most of the actual baseball players and former baseball players I’ve spoken to say players should just hit the way they know how to hit, and not worry about adjusting to park conditions that may or may not actually exist.

And, you know, that makes a lot of sense.

Especially since, if Wright hit more like we all know Wright can, future Matt Hollidays won’t fear the specter of Citi Field’s home-run sapping dimensions.

Over at Amazin’ Avenue, Sam and Rob put together pretty solid lists of potential low-risk, reasonable- (not quite high-)reward pickups for the Mets.

Sam ran down the Minor League free agents, and Rob looked at potentially available pitchers. They’re both good reads, and they both reinforce a point I find myself making all the time: Every year, there are a bunch of talented players available for little cost that could provide value to a big-league club.

The Mets have a lot of holes to fill in the upcoming offseason, but one they should not overlook is their need for a capable backup middle infielder. Alex Cora was asked to do more than the Mets needed him for in 2009, plus he was hurt, so it’s hard to kill the guy for his performance. But he proved to be a poor defender at shortstop and didn’t hit at all.

Uncertainty surrounds Jose Reyes entering 2010, successful surgery or not. And Luis Castillo is unlikely to repeat his 2009 performance at the plate. The Mets would be wise to attempt to trade Castillo while his value is about the highest, but they could have trouble finding a taker for an injury-prone second baseman who can’t really play defense anymore.

So a contingency plan for the infield is a must. And it would behoove the Mets to find someone a little better than Cora so they wouldn’t be inserting an offensive black hole in their lineup if and when Reyes can’t play.

Wilson Valdez, who appeared to be the most capable defender of the backup-shortstop regiment in 2009, should return. But outside of a bizarrely awesome 2007 in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League, Valdez has never been much of a hitter, and would probably be best served as an organizational safety valve stashed in Triple-A in case any infielder goes down with injury.

So then who? Well, your guess is as good as mine, so feel free to provide your guesses in the comments section or wherever. There are some free agents available who might be had on the cheap, but I have no idea what these guys are looking for or how the market will play out:

Akinori Iwamura: The Rays are apparently unlikely to pick up Iwamura’s option thanks to Ben Zobrist’s breakout season. He spent a big part of 2009 with a torn ACL, which is bad, but he came back healthy in September. He has been about a league-average defender at second and has stayed consistently around his career batting line of .281/.354/.393. But he’s never played shortstop and he’s coming off the ACL injury, so, you know, not a perfect fit.

Omar Infante: Infante may have played well enough over the past two seasons to earn a starting job somewhere, something he hasn’t had consistently since his first full big-league season as a 22-year-old in Detroit in 2004. He spent time on the DL in each of the past two years with HBP-related hand injuries, but he has been an average defender at second, short and third over his career and appears to be improving as a hitter. I suspect the Braves will want to bring him back, and again, I have no idea what he’ll cost, but he’d be a great fit as a potential super-sub.

David Eckstein: Please don’t sign David Eckstein. It would just be too irritating, plus he actually sucks at defense now.

And I’ll throw in, for good measure, a guy rumored to be on the block this offseason:

Mike Fontenot: Longtime readers will know that I’ve been advocating a Fontenot acquisition since 2006, when he was merely some guy hitting well and buried behind bigger prospects on the Cubs’ organizational chart. Now, after torching the ball in 2008 and not hitting at all in 2009, the tiny little Cajun could get dealt, even though he likely doesn’t have much trade value and he’s coming off a year in which his BABIP was .034 below his career line.

Fontenot hasn’t played a ton of shortstop in the Majors, but he’s been a good defender at second base and I’m convinced his offensive numbers will bounce back. I’m not certain Fontenot’s a perfect fit at this point, but I’d just like this to happen because I’ve been hoping for it for so long.