I’m going to go with adequately rated, but note that I rate it very highly. There are better lunchmeats out there but they also tend to be more expensive, and no brand offers a better variety than Boar’s Head — the area standard. Also, there’s such a huge drop-off between their stuff and both the pre-packaged nonsense that turns my stomach just to think about and the non-Boar’s Head generic brands they slice for you behind the counter. I have been burned way too many times by knock-off ham.

I bring a sandwich to work almost daily, and about 95 percent of the time that sandwich is filled entirely with Boar’s Head products. To keep things interesting, I usually use two types of meat and one cheese. Usually it’s a variety of ham and a variety of turkey and some cheese I’ve decided should complement them well, but once in a while I buy the chicken breast and roast beef to prevent myself from getting sick of ham and turkey sandwiches all the time.

This week’s selection: Buffalo roast chicken, Londonport roast beef and Vermont cheddar. It’s geographically diverse, but it works. I had it today with some leftover green sauce from Pio Pio, which would make pretty much anything delicious.

OK, I’ll bite. Tons of caveats here, though. Mostly that I don’t really know what I’m talking about when it comes to prospects, except that I believe my general skepticism is justified. Also that 2014 is a hell of a long way away, and any number of things could change for the Mets, these players, or hell, planet Earth between now and then.

But I’ll go with Lucas Duda in left, Kirk Nieuwenhuis in right and some to be determined free agent in center. I’m holding out hope for Matt den Dekker because he’s pretty funny on Twitter, but expecting two relatively unheralded (at least in the national sense) current Minor Leaguers to emerge as starters by 2014 seems a bit too bullish for my tastes.

I’m picking Nieuwenhuis over den Dekker because he has hit more and done it at higher levels, and I’m putting him in right field instead of center because I’m hoping it starts happening this year and displaces Jason Bay. Also, since Duda, Nieuwenhuis and den Dekker all hit left-handed, there’s a role for righty-hitting Juan Lagares in there too if he shows his breakout 2011 was more than a BABIP fantasy.

Brandon Nimmo will have just turned 21 on Opening Day 2014, so expecting him to be ready by then seems pretty optimistic. A lot of people seem to love Cesar Puello, but it seems troublesome that he got hit by pitch more than he walked in 2011.

Well if every current Met was a single sandwich, they’d be a pretty huge sandwich with a ton of ingredients of varying deliciousness. If you mean you’re looking for sandwich comps for each individual player on the team, well… I usually get off before six and even though my wife and I agreed we wouldn’t do anything for Valentine’s Day I should probably get home at some reasonable hour. Here are a few that I can’t remember covering in the past:

Lucas Duda is a sandwich I discussed here a long time ago, The Full Bird from the old Busco’s Deli in Rockville Centre: A chicken-cutlet hero with bacon, american cheese and mayo. The Full Bird is good, tremendous and unsubtle. I very much enjoy the Full Bird, but the Full Bird is not a sandwich built for speed.

Dillon Gee is a tuna-salad sandwich. Coincidentally, that’s Dillon Gee’s favorite sandwich.

You ever see a sandwich that looks delicious on the menu and features all the elements of a great sandwich, and then you eat the sandwich and it’s underwhelming and you can’t figure out why? That’s the Jon Niese of sandwiches. It’s still not bad and you’re willing to try it again, but you feel like it should be so much better.

Mike Pelfrey is a sandwich from the lunch place nearest your office. You wind up going there all the time and sometimes you get so sick of it you swear you’re never going to get one ever again, but then inevitably you get busy or it’s raining or you just don’t feel like thinking of someplace else to go and you wind up with the same old thing. And truth be told, it’s not as bad as you think it is; you just get tired of eating it sometimes.

Jose Reyes is someone took my sandwich.

It is possible that both Wheeler and Harvey become important parts of the 2014 Mets, although it may not be probable. If you imagine the two are a pair of dice, the odds both become quality starting pitchers are similar to the odds of rolling an 11 or higher, while the odds they both fail is similar to the odds of rolling a four or below. Roll a five or six, you end up with one Pelfrey and one bust; roll a seven, you get two Pelfreys; roll an eight, you get a quality pitcher and a bust; a roll of a nine or 10 gets you one Pelfrey and one quality pitcher.

That is to say that half the time, you end up with a single Pelfrey or worse.

– Patrick Flood, PatrickFloodBlog.com.

Flood posts his power rankings of the players most likely to be valuable to the 2014 Mets. This bit about Zack Wheeler and Matt Harvey is important to remember.

Is SNY.tv ever going to have the investigative chops and journalism integrity to discuss the fact that retired Mets stars George Theodore, Rod Gaspar, Hank Webb, etc aren’t getting MLB pensions? And that GM Sandy Anderson, who is still on the Board of Directors of the MLB Players Alumni Association, has never commented about this matter?

– Doug Gladstone, via email.

Hey guys: Did you know that retired Mets stars George Theodore, Rod Gaspar and Hank Webb aren’t getting MLB pensions? It’s true. They played before 1980, and before 1980, players needed to accrue four years of service time to secure the Major League pension.

In April, 2011, an agreement was reached to award the 874 living former players not eligible for pension with up to $10,000 in annual payment, depending on service time, for two years. The new collective bargaining agreement signed in November extended those payments through 2016, though it does not include medical or survivor’s benefits and does not come close to matching the full pension earned by all players on active rosters for as few as 43 days after 1980.

Much more on the plight of the pre-1980 players with less than the required service time for pension can be found in the 2010 book A Bitter Cup of Coffee by… Doug Gladstone.

Right now, we’re looking at Duda in right and Bay in left. Duda is clearly a significantly below average outfielder, Bay is probably a slightly above average outfielder. Why not put Duda in left and Bay in right? That would definitely make the outfield better for this year and would also cement Duda in left for the future which is probably where he belongs. Why should we force Duda to learn right field when he’ll probably move to left as soon as Bay leaves anyway? The only reason would be to respect Bay’s tenure in left and not inconvenience the veteran player. But frankly Bay doesn’t deserve this respect given how awful he’s been. He should be forced to move to right both to make this year’s team better and so that Duda can become comfortable in the position where he’ll most likely end up in the long term anyway. What do you think?

– Josh, via email.

I’ve seen this come up a couple of times elsewhere and wondered about it myself. First things first: It’s almost certainly not going to happen unless Bay suggests it himself. As much as Duda’s development is and should be a priority for the Mets, getting Bay corrected is important too. And I can’t imagine the team will want to give him another thing to think about beyond the whole hitting thing he clearly spends a lot of time thinking about.

Plus, while Josh is right that Bay hasn’t done much on the field in the past two seasons to earn any deference from the Mets, he is by all accounts a hard-working veteran leader in the clubhouse, and for a variety of reasons (and as we’ve seen time and again) those guys get a ton of respect in baseball. Forcing Bay to switch positions at 33 could easily be perceived as jerking him around — especially if it didn’t go well — and is the type of thing that could make the younger players lose faith in their manager and front office.

Moreover, and most importantly, I’m not certain it would actually benefit the Mets in the short or long term. You’re talking about the same personnel with the same range (or lack thereof), and there are about as many balls hit to right field as there are to left field. They’re going to cover the same amount of ground regardless of where they’re standing.

The defensive metrics say Bay is a below average left fielder due to limited range, though he appears decent to the eye. Duda was by all accounts pretty woeful in his audition in right field last year. As Patrick Flood pointed out in an email discussion hashing this out, the standards are higher for right fielders, so Bay’s defensive stats would likely dip (and Duda’s benefit) after a switch because those rates are calculated against league average. But since Bay would still be Bay and Duda would still be Duda, switching them theoretically wouldn’t change much in terms of total runs saved by the Mets.

Toby Hyde noted in that same email chain that a switch might make some sense if Bay had an outstanding arm, but though Bay’s throws are generally accurate he’s not exactly Jeff Francoeur.

I guess the caveats to all that would be a) if there’s something about picking up the ball off the bat in right field that Duda just can’t handle and won’t be able to adjust to or b) if trying to play right field starts affecting Duda’s development on offense. Neither seems likely enough to merit messing with Bay.

In any case, it seems like Andres Torres has his work cut out for him.

Alderson said he had been amused to see another innocuous factoid — his revelation that he would be driving to Florida for spring training — joked about, dissected and in some cases seriously analyzed by some on Twitter and on blogs as a reflection of the Mets’ finances.

So someone in his office suggested he create a Twitter account to respond, Alderson said, and he thought, “Why not?”

“We wanted to play off the absurdity of it,” Alderson said. “Everything we do is viewed through the prism of our perceived financial situation.”…

“There are always some that take life way too seriously,” Alderson said. “For those people, it might take longer for my message to get across.”

– Andrew Keh, N.Y. Times.

So… this. All of this. Click through and read the rest, in part because I feel guilty about excerpting so much.

These are tough times for Mets fans obviously, but you ever stop and consider how much worse they would be if the team had a less competent, less reasonable GM at the helm?