Over at Mets Minor League Blog, Toby Hyde looks at the Mets’ top center-field prospects. Presumably Andres Torres, who’ll be 34 on Opening Day, is not the long-term solution.

I’ve seen a few fans wondering already why the team, unlikely as it is to contend in 2012, wouldn’t just hand the starting job to Kirk Nieuwenhuis. I chatted with Toby about it this morning and he confirmed what I was thinking: First, and most obviously, Nieuwenhuis is coming off season-ending surgery, so there’s no reason to rush him back to full health at the big-league level.

Second — and this speaks to the larger point about not rushing prospects in general — baseball is tough enough as it is, and there’s no sense in overwhelming a player by forcing him to compete at a level he might not be prepared for. Plus there’s the whole arbitration-clock issue, for what that’s worth.

Unless Nieuwenhuis shows up in Spring Training fully recovered, then turns tons of heads with his Grapefruit League performance, he’s likely ticketed for at least another month or two in Buffalo. If goes to Triple-A and again plays like he did in the couple of months of 2011, I suspect we’ll see him in Flushing before long.

In Torres, the Mets have a veteran stopgap and switch-hitter who can play all three outfield positions and slide into a fourth outfielder role if and when Nieuwenhuis or any other young Met is ready to command center field at Citi.

The one interesting thing I can find looking at Jon Rauch is that he had a seriously down year in terms of infield flyball rate and HR/FB, both of which fluctuate a lot in general. Now, it could mean that he was unlucky or it could mean that he was leaving a lot of balls up and getting punished. For whatever it’s worth, looking at pitch fx data, he threw fewer pitches in the middle of the zone (which I’m arbitrarily defining as a full baseball’s width from the edge of the strike zone in all directions) in 2010 than in ’09, and fewer in far fewer in 2011 than he did in either. He was, however, missing the zone a lot more, going from between 53 and 55% every year from ’07-’10 down to 50.3% last year. To some extent, this probably goes together, since he was pitching away from the middle of the plate. Still, it seems to suggest he may have just been unlucky.

Frank Francisco actually had the same thing with the off year with IFFB and HR/FB, which makes me wonder if I’ve reverse-engineered the Mets’ recipe here. But he also left a lot more pitches out over the plate than he did in the three (good) years before last.

– Seth, comments section here.

Interesting, and probably worth noting. Could easily be a coincidence, too.

Also worth noting on Francisco, from Dustin Parkes at The Score:

A glance at his numbers for the whole of last season may not impress many, but it should be remembered that he missed most of Spring Training, and because of Rauch’s failings combined with the realization of Octavio Dotel’s one dimensionability, he was likely rushed back from the Disabled List and hurried through his rehab stints. As a result, Toronto didn’t get a glimpse of the real Francisco until mid-season when he finally began delivering on the promise that made the Blue Jays trade Mike Napoli for him before the season started.

After a brutal first half, Francisco posted a 1.37 ERA with a 6:1 K:BB ratio in 24 1/3 innings after the All-Star Break last season. Small sample, though, and his full season line didn’t wind up looking all that different than the ones he posted from 2008-2010.

Within the last hour, the Mets traded Angel Pagan to the Giants for Andres Torres and Ramon Ramirez, signed Frank Francisco to a two-year deal and signed Jon Rauch to a one-year deal.

Whoa.

OK, a lot to digest here, and some more of that’s going to happen in the morning. The trade seems like a fair one: Pagan and Torres both enjoyed career years in 2010 then rough years in 2011, though Pagan seemed to endure some tough luck thanks to batting average on balls in play where Torres did not. When everything’s going well they’re reasonably similar players, but since Pagan is several years younger he seems a safer bet to bounce back. Torres, for what it’s worth, is under team control through arbitration for an extra year.

But the Mets get Ramirez as well, which balances out the age difference between Pagan and Torres. None of Ramirez’s rate stats jump off the page, but he’s doing something right: He has a stellar career 139 ERA+ over 364 1/3 innings of relief work. Someone will inevitably mention — as they probably should, and as I am now — that Ramirez has traditionally underperformed ERA estimators like FIP and xFIP, but the longer he does it, I suppose, the more reasonable it seems to guess that he’ll keep it up.

Francisco’s deal is reportedly worth $12 million over two years, which probably means he’ll be the closer. He’s filled that role in part seasons before for Texas and Toronto, and should be fine in it for the Mets. He strikes out a ton of dudes and allows perhaps a few more baserunners than we’d all like, but given the deal Heath Bell got, Francisco seems like a bargain at that rate.

Rauch is extremely tall and not especially good. He’s one of the aforementioned free-agent relievers that’s not obviously better than Manny Acosta. He has had nice seasons in the past and outside of a rough campaign in 2011 he hasn’t been awful, but with the additions of Francisco and Ramirez today he actually seems superfluous.

Maybe the Mets are planning on re-signing Chris Young and need someone to guard him in pickup basketball games. Either way, Rauch isn’t a huge mistake at one year and $3.5 million since he should be decent out of the bullpen, but it seems odd to invest anything in middle-innings relievers.

I suppose that leaves the bullpen looking something like: Francisco, Ramirez, Rauch, Acosta, Bobby Parnell, Tim Byrdak and, I don’t know… Pedro Beato? DJ Carrasco? Daniel Herrera? Longman McGee? I guess there’s no reason to settle on the 12th pitcher in December. Plus there’s a solid chance more trades will be made. Hell, at this rate there’s a strong possibility more trades have been made while I’ve been writing this.

Also worth noting: Defensive metrics sweat Torres hard. UZR is crushing on Andres Torres like a screaming, fainting girl over the Beatles in 1965. Pagan’s UZR dipped a bunch in 2011, so by Fangraphs’ WAR — which heavily weighs UZR — Torres had a significantly better season than Pagan. I don’t know if that’s the type of thing I’d expect to continue, though it certainly can’t hurt to bring in guys who rate so well defensively.

But more on all of it in the morning, provided the Mets haven’t made six or seven more moves by then.

This is the new NL East. The Mets are poor. The Marlins are rich. It’s a place where you put mustard in your coffee, and cream and sugar on your sandwich. But don’t get used to the Mets being poor. They’ll have gobs and gobs of money soon enough, regardless of who owns them. There are too many eyeballs in New York for the Mets to not make money.

And the Phillies leveraged their run of success into something more, becoming a brand, a thing, in a huge metropolitan area. Even though they’ve committed millions and millions of dollars to players in their 30s through 2015, they’re not going to start a fire sale soon. The Braves have never been wild spenders, but they’ve combined a peerless player-development operation with enough money to do most of what they want.

The NL East has become the super-division of baseball. Every division has a spendthrift in their midsts other than the East. It’s the first division where when Free Agent X hits the market, you can make an argument that every team in one division could be after him. The three-way scrum between the Yankees, Red Sox, and Rays has been wildly entertaining over the past few years, but there’s a chance that, one day, all five teams in the NL East will be involved in a crazy arms race, with mutually assured destruction always on the table for at least three teams.

– Grant Brisbee, SBNation.com.

Good read from Brisbee. But as he concludes, let’s wait until the Mets get rich again and the Marlins and Nationals actually get good before we go nuts with it.

I’m trying to find some silver lining today, which is difficult in the wake of Jose Reyes’ departure and especially while nursing a not-insignificant hangover. And anyone who has read this site or listened to the podcast with any regularity knows how thoroughly down I am on prospects in general, and on putting so much stock in guys who haven’t done anything at the Major League level.

But it has kind of come to that for the Mets. If this team is to be a legit contender within the next few years, it’s going to need its prospects to pan out. And if all goes incredibly well, we might start getting a glimpse of that this season. So there’s something. Hey!

My understanding is that the club would (understandably) like its pitching prospects to throw a certain number of innings above A-ball before they’re advanced to the Majors. I don’t know that it’s a hard-and-fast total, but I believe it’s between 100 and 150. Paul DePodesta has said multiple times that it’s important for pitchers who come up to the Majors to never have to return to the Minors, which always reads to me like a criticism of the way Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel handled Jenrry Mejia.

Anyway, Jeurys Familia threw 87 2/3 strong innings in Double-A last year and Matt Harvey threw 59 2/3. If they both start off strong and stay healthy (huge ifs, of course), and guessing that the Mets want them to have about 130 innings of upper-level Minor League experience before they join the big club, it’s feasible we could see Familia with the big club by Memorial Day and Harvey by the All-Star Break.

Mejia should return from Tommy John surgery sometime during the season and could — again, if all goes well — join the Major League team by the end of the year. Zack Wheeler is likely ticketed for a full year of Minor League pitching, but if he stays healthy he should hit that ~130 innings mark in 2012 and be a candidate for a Major League rotation spot sometime in 2013.

So in a perfect-world scenario, there’s a chance the Mets could have four highly regarded pitchers under 25 contributing to their Major League club by early in the 2013 season.

Is that likely? Nope. It would take smart handling and an unbelievable run of good fortune. And maybe the Mets are due for that.

All normal hot-stove caveats should apply here, but I’m going to strap my blinders on and assume there’s something real behind the rumor that the Mets are interested in reliever Todd Coffey.

Coffey is utterly unspectacular. He has a career 105 ERA+, he allows a decent number of baserunners, he doesn’t really strike a lot of guys out, and he yields his fair share of home runs. Statistically, he’s really not any better than Manny Acosta has been for the Mets these past two seasons*. He just has more experience.

But what Coffey can boast that makes him so appealing is sport’s most thrilling inconsequential embellishment, no matter how awesome the Marlins’ new home-run thing will be (and I think it’ll be pretty awesome). When Coffey enters games, the bullpen doors open to the tune of the Ultimate Warrior’s entrance theme, and the red-bearded, barrel-chested Coffey sprints maniacally to the mound. It’s amazing.

Jose Reyes amazing? Oh hell no. But we’ve got to take what we can get at this point, no? Bring on Todd Coffey dammit.

*- This actually happens with surprising frequency: I look at some free-agent relief option and determine he’s not actually any better than Manny Acosta has been for the Mets over the past two seasons. I don’t know if this speaks poorly of the free-agent class of relievers or well of Acosta.

I was going to make the case that the Mets should pursue the former Leo Nunez/current Juan Oviedo if and when he’s non-tendered by the Marlins, but I was unable to convince myself that he’s a huge upgrade over Acosta. I guess it’s good to have several decent relievers regardless. Plus Acosta’s still operating in pretty small samples, and it’ll be interesting to see how his increasingly flyball-prone (and already gopher-friendly) game translates to the renovated Citi Field.

Also, signing a non-tendered Juan Oviedo might be too perfect an indication that the Mets and Marlins have switched places. The Marlins spend big and perhaps irresponsibly on high-priced free agents and the Mets take on their leftovers. MLB2K12.