According to multiple beat writers, Sandy Alderson joined Twitter today, tweeting as @MetsGM. Here is his first Tweet:

I’m hoping it turns out Alderson’s a massive troll. He’s off to a good start.

The guy is amazing at hitting. We have opposite approaches when it comes to hitting. He is technical, he’s got everything, like every pitch – it’s like science watching him hitting. Me, I’m like pure chaos and I swing as hard as I can.

– Ike Davis, on Mets Hot Stove.

Well that’s just a cool quote. Also, I think “Pure Chaos” would be a cool nickname for someone, but probably not Ike Davis. Probably better for Murphy, actually.

I brought this up on the podcast last week but in case you don’t listen or didn’t make it to that hour: Willie Harris told Mets Weekly producer Joe Kraus, who sits right across from me in the office here, that Murphy knows more about hitting than anyone he has ever played with. Harris said he wants to be a manager someday, and he wants Murphy to be his hitting coach. So that’s… notable, I guess.

When we talk about the Citi Field walls coming in, the first players that come up are David Wright and Jason Bay — for obvious reasons. People seem to assume the walls will mean a couple extra easy homers for Ike Davis and Lucas Duda, but that those guys would hit them out anywhere. And Ruben Tejada and Josh Thole don’t have much power to speak of, so it’s hard to figure how the walls will really impact their onslaught of slapped singles.

Murphy gets lost in that discussion, I think. Part of that is that he hits left-handed, and the changes to the right-field side of the fence don’t seem as dramatic as those to the former Great Wall of Flushing. Plus, though Murphy has doubles power, he’s not a home-run hitter: He has all of 20 in 1030 Major League at-bats.

Do some of Murphy’s doubles become home runs with the new dimensions? Just based on his spray chart from TexasLeaguers.com, it doesn’t look like many of them do. And of course, the way defenders position themselves with the new walls affects which hits will fall in and which one-time doubles outfielders might now get to. But does Murphy — man of hitting science, impressor of Willie Harris — adjust somehow to try to hit for more power? Should he?

I suppose that’s something to ask him about come Spring Training. Which I suppose makes for a decent segue to this: I’m going to be in Port St. Lucie for a couple of weeks in early March. I’ve got some things I know I want to do already, but maybe there’s something Spring Training-related you want to know about that you don’t know about yet. I’ll probably ask this again, but use the following form for any suggestions you might have for Spring Training content you want to see:

[contact-form-7 id=”15378″ title=”Untitled”]

In a guest post for Baseball Prospectus, Aaron Gleeman examines the Mets’ trade for Johan Santana, which now looks pretty bad for both sides. I covered this a bit last year: The Mets traded for young players for the right to sign Santana to a market-rate contract extension, and the trade was contingent on the extension getting done.

Since Santana missed all of 2011 and appears unlikely to ever again be the pitcher the Mets paid for, and especially since due to circumstances unforeseen in 2008 Santana’s salary now accounts for more than 1/4 of the Mets’ total payroll, his contract looks like a pretty massive albatross in the Mets rebuilding/retooling/time-biding plans.

And again: No one’s saying Johan Santana’s not totally sweet, and no one is more psyched than me to see him pitching again at whatever capacity. We just can’t keep calling that deal “a steal” unless you mean it was some sort of art heist in which the Mets came away with some beautiful sculpture that looks awesome but takes up most of the room in their house and makes it difficult for them to add anything else to their collection.

Have I mentioned that I’m tired? I’m tired. Eli Manning’s all, “OMAHA!”

Here’s this:

Hmm… April 1, a few days before the season starts. This will be an interesting Spring Training for Mets fans, since there won’t be many new faces or last year’s Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran storylines to distract the focus from the actual, underwhelming team. Still, I imagine some large portion of Mets fans — myself included, because I do it every year — will turn all optimistic in late March and start seeing the ways everything could go right for the 2012 Mets.

And in the Giants, now, there’s a convenient reminder of how everything can sometimes go right fresh in every New Yorker’s memory. There’s even the Philadelphia parallel, since before the season the Eagles looked like a dream team on paper and everyone figured Big Blue’s best hope was to gun for the Wild Card.

Of course, baseball and football are very different, and the NL East has a bunch of teams besides the Phillies that appear likely to be good. But I imagine many of us will be happy to ignore that come early April, when we’re eager to find some modicum of hope with which to approach the Mets’ 2012 campaign.

In 2012, only a pretty bleak one. As has been reported, Wright can void the option on his contract for 2013 if he is traded. So if Wright plays well enough in 2012 that other teams would want to give up prospects and pay his salary for his production, the Mets could — I believe — pick up his 2013 option after the season and trade him then, presumably fetching a larger haul for the full-season of Wright than they would at the 2012 deadline.

But then if Wright plays well enough in 2012 that other teams would want to give up prospects to pay him $15 million in 2013, there’ll should be talk of an extension — and whether the Mets could afford that type of thing. (Oof.)

My best guess, the way Wright does get traded in 2012 is if he continues playing the good but unspectacular brand of baseball he has produced since the Mets moved to Citi Field, some contending team finds itself in dire need of a third baseman and willing to take on Wright’s remaining 2012 salary, and the Mets find themselves out of contention, ready to move on from Wright and not eager to pick up his $15 million option for 2013 anyway.

When I write it down like that it doesn’t seem all that unlikely. I still don’t think it’s going to happen, but then I’ve been wrong about stuff before.

It’s difficult to come up with great sandwich comps for young players like Thole because a sandwich’s entire lifespan rarely lasts more than an hour. So there are very few sandwiches of which you could say, “Well, I don’t know exactly how good this sandwich is yet.” You get or make a sandwich, you take a few bites of the sandwich, you think about the sandwich, then you know how good the sandwich is.

But I would say Thole is a ham and egg sandwich, because right now he’s sort of a ham-an-egger of a Major Leaguer: He clearly deserves to be there, but he hasn’t done anything to distinguish himself. Since he’s still only 25 though, I’d say he’s a ham and egg sandwich that’s still under construction. And though we’re getting some clues as to how it’ll be we should probably give it some time to see if baseball’s Great Deli-Man winds up adding cheese or hot sauce or ketchup or something to bump Thole up to a higher tier.

I’ll take Pelfrey on that one. Pretty simple: He stays healthy. Santana’s no lock to pitch even a single game in 2012, and we have no idea how effective he’ll be when he does start. I’d guess he’ll be better than Pelfrey when he pitches, but I don’t think he’ll make enough starts to make up the difference in wins (though obviously there’s a massive randomness factor to it all). Plus, if Pelfrey’s pitching well, he could easily be traded to a contender when one of the Mets’ young starters is ready.