I’ve seen several Mets fans suggest lately that if Johan Santana pitches well, he’ll be dealt at the trade deadline.

The Mets owe Santana $55 million over the next two years (including the $5.5 million buyout). That is, I believe, the most any pitcher in baseball will make over that stretch.

For the Mets to find a taker for Santana’s contract in 2012, he’s going to have to stay healthy and pitch extremely well — think vintage Johan Santana. And even then, it might be tough to find some team desperate enough this July to take on Santana, coming off shoulder surgery, and commit to paying him the $31 million he’s owed in 2013.

Which is to say: It’s probably not worth fretting about the possibility that Santana pitches well and the Mets trade him during the season. Not only is it unlikely, but it’d be a huge boon for the Mets. Santana is awesome, granted, but there are better ways for a rebuilding team to invest $31 million than in one season of a 34-year-old with past shoulder issues.

Context: Ronny Cedeno has a career .286 on-base percentage, but it has been .297 since he joined the Pirates in the middle of the 2009 campaign. The Mets have emphasized plate discipline under hitting coach Dave Hudgens, and Terry Collins specifically noted earlier this spring that they’d asked Cedeno to work on getting on base more. No one with more than 60 plate appearances for the 2011 Mets finished with an OBP below .300.

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And baseball has been even more unfair to batters facing Johan Santana. Because for the batter facing Johan Santana, somewhere in that sequence of windup and pitch, this batter has to notice that the car traveling ahead of him is, in fact, slamming on its brakes without any warning from the brake lights. He’s gotta see the Santana changeup, recognize a difference in arm speed, or the delivery, or something. When Santana’s on, it’s impossible because there isn’t any difference. Those panic swings and bats flying into the stands on Santana changeups are the brakes being slammed and steering wheels being pulled towards the shoulder just a little too late. And those smoother, way-out-in-front whiffs on Santana’s changeups, that deceptive grace is really the mark of the badly, badly fooled – those hitters rammed full speed into the car in front of them, never noticing that anything had slowed down.

– Patrick Flood, PatrickFloodBlog.com.

Flood returns from Port St. Lucie with a couple thousand words, all of which are worth reading. That’s far more worthwhile than anything that’ll follow in this post, so click through, check it out then come on back.

As for other recent Mets stuff:

– The Mets are apparently finalizing a Minor League deal with Chris Young. Good. It’s no safe bet he’ll be healthy at all this season, but every team could use starting pitching depth and there’s very little risked in giving Young a Minor League deal. If he comes back in August and makes four starts, it’s a win for the Mets.

– David Wright is playing today. That’s excellent news, assuming he’s playing because he’s fully healthy and not because this is the latest he can possibly start playing games to get himself ready for Opening Day.

– Spring Training stats are still mostly meaningless.

– I’m going to the Mets’ “All-Star Dining Line-up” at Citi Field tonight to sample the various new food options being offered at Citi this season. It’s going to be a bloodbath.

– Chase Utley will miss the start of the season with chondromalacia in his knees and there’s no timetable for his return. In Utley’s absence, the Phillies will likely start Freddy Galvis, a 22-year-old with 121 at-bats above Double-A and a .613 career Minor League OPS (though to Galvis’ credit, he has been young for every level). Last week Ryan Howard started playing catch and taking grounders while seated on a stool. Without Howard and Utley, the Phillies’ lineup looks awfully mediocre. The pitching staff still looks phenomenal, though. And 1/5 of it looks like this.

This almost certainly won’t happen, but does anyone think the Phillies might trade something of some value for Justin Turner? Do the Mets have enough confidence in Daniel Murphy at second base to do something like that?

– The Mets now have five little yellow crosses signifying injuries on their MLBDepthCharts page. The Braves have four, the Marlins have two, the Phillies have five and the Nationals have six.

Context: Because the Mets appear distant longshots to take the NL East in 2012, because they’re coming off three straight losing seasons and because we live in a world with ever-shrinking grey areas, someone will inevitably suggest that the 2012 Mets will vie with their 1962 predecessors for the worst record in Major League history.

Barring catastrophe, the 2012 Mets should win way more than 40 games. The 1962 Mets were almost unimaginably bad, and unlucky on top of that.

The 2009 Mets won their 41st game on July 11, the 2010 Mets won it on June 23, and the 2011 Mets won it on June 29. July 9 this year marks the beginning of the All-Star Break. The game on July 8 will be the Mets’ 86th game of the season. Also, my dad’s birthday.

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Context: Josh Edgin is a 25-year-old left-handed pitcher in Mets camp who topped out at High A St. Lucie last year. He has turned heads in Spring Training with his mid-90s fastball and strong breaking stuff and appears to be in the competition to replace the injured Tim Byrdak in the Mets’ Opening Day bullpen. Edgin is not on the team’s 40-man roster.

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I tried to fool people with a Twitter poll based on this but most people were on to my trick: I plugged Ruben Tejada’s 2011 stats in Buffalo and with the Mets into the ol’ Minor League Equivalency calculator then added them up to see how he would have performed if he spent the whole season at Double-A Binghamton.

Obviously it’s not a perfect way to determine what would have actually happened, but Tejada’s Triple-A and Major League stats translate to a .338/.424/.426 line in over 500 at-bats at Binghamton. And Tejada would have been the youngest player on the team.

Remember that: Ruben Tejada would have been the youngest player on the Mets’ Double-A team last year. He’s seven months younger than Matt Harvey and Juan Lagares, more than two years younger than Matt den Dekker, and two weeks younger than Jeurys Familia.

Tejada’s one year and 10 months younger than Jordany Valdespin, who caught the eyes of many Mets fans with his .297/.341/.483 line at Binghamton in 2011.

Hak-Ju Lee, a shortstop in the Rays system that ranked No. 44 on Baseball America’s Top 100 prospects list, is a year younger than Tejada. In his Double-A debut in 2011, he hit .190/.272/.310 in 100 at-bats. Braves shortstop Andrelton Simmons, a month and a half older than Tejada, hit .311/.351/.408 in High A ball last year and ranked No. 92 on the same list.

An .850 OPS would have put Tejada 19th among Eastern League players with at least 141 at-bats at the level in 2011. But of the 18 players ahead, all but four played primarily in corner positions and only one — Blue Jays catching prospect Travis d’Arnaud — is less than a full year older than Tejada. And d’Arnaud, born Feb. 8, 1989, is 10 months older than the Mets’ shortstop.

Point is, Ruben Tejada is very, very young. A variety of circumstances forced him through the Mets’ system quickly and into the big leagues in 2010 and 2011, but I suspect many Mets fans would be more psyched about him if he were a 22-year-old shortstop that tore up the Eastern League last year and they’d never seen play instead of a 22-year-old shortstop that performed adequately in the Majors for most of 2011.

So the other point is that many people overvalue prospects, which you probably know. What Tejada did in the Majors at 21 in 2011 is rare and impressive. It’s not a guarantee that he’ll turn out a big-league All-Star or even a capable regular, but it’s a very nice start.

Since yesterday’s bullpen odds post, the Mets have sent Chuck James and Fernando Cabrera to Minor League camp. I’m adjusting the odds accordingly:

Bobby Parnell (1:4): Technically, Parnell and the rest of the righties should get slight bumps today, since the departures mean there are fewer competitors in camp vying for jobs. But making the math work out is paramount.

Miguel Batista (1:2): Same story as Parnell.

Garrett Olson (3:2): All the healthy lefties in camp get bumps from the elimination of James from the competition. Olson is among them.

Josh Edgin (3:2): Edgin pitched 2/3 of a scoreless inning yesterday. That alone shouldn’t be enough to push him to even footing with the more veteran Olson, but it seems vaguely important that Collins brought Edgin into the game in the middle of the inning. The Mets.com homepage says Edgin will pitch again today. Assuming that’s true, that also seems important: If the Mets want to see how he fares in back-to-back outings, they’re probably not just keeping him around for a look-see.

Tim Byrdak (3:1): Since Byrdak’s odds of making the team are entirely dependent on his health, they’re unchanged by the cuts.

Danny Herrera (3:1): Herrera also benefits from James’ departure.

Chris Schwinden (14:1)
D.J. Carrasco (19:1)
Pedro Beato (19:1)
The field (14:1)