At Amazin’ Avenue, Chris McShane takes a look at some pending free-agent closers likely to be inexpensive due to recent injury troubles. I especially like this idea:

Jonathan Broxton: The Dodgers, specifically Don Mattingly, may not want Broxton back next year after he spent the grand majority of 2011 on the disabled list with bone spurs in his elbow. He’s had surgery to get rid of the bone spurs, and if his recovery goes as well as other pitchers who had the same procedure, he could be ready for spring training.

Prior to the injury, Broxton was dominant, striking out over eleven batters per nine innings in his career. He’s still only 27-years-old and will turn 28 in June. There was some concern about Broxton’s drop in average fastball velocity in 2010, a 2.5 mph drop, but he still managed a pretty good year out of the Dodgers’ bullpen. If the best Broxton can get this winter is a one-year, incentive-laden deal, he seems like a no-brainer for the Mets.

I mentioned Broxton as a potential fit for the Mets on the Baseball Show a week ago, and the odd comments from Mattingly make it seem less likely Broxton will return to the Dodgers. As McShane notes, Broxton was dominant in the Dodgers’ bullpen as recently as 2009 and still pretty damn good (by peripherals, at least) in 2010.

Broxton also holds the distinction of being the single largest human I’ve seen in a Major League clubhouse. He is listed at 6’4″ and 300 pounds, and in person he appears to be at least that. Maybe his presence in New York would let Lucas Duda feel a little more comfortable in his own frame or give the Jets another option to investigate should they suffer any more injuries on their offensive line.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, go check out Mike Fast’s analysis of catchers’ abilities to get borderline strike calls, expanding on work done at Beyond the Boxscore. There’s margin for error, but Fast suggests that the best catchers could earn their teams as many as 15-20 runs a season with the opposite true for the Jorge Posada end of the spectrum. Also: Jose Molina is awesome at it.

Because you’re wondering: By Fast’s data, both Josh Thole and Ronny Paulino have been slightly above average at getting borderline strike calls. I wonder, though, how knuckleballs — a significant portion of the pitches Thole has caught in the last two seasons — affect the outcome.

We’re not looking for an advantage with respect to home runs versus visitors’ home runs. At the same time, I think there is some sense that the park is a little more overwhelming to a team that spends half its time there as opposed to a team that comes in for three games and doesn’t really have to alter an approach or think about it too much and leaves.

– Sandy Alderson.

Alderson spoke about making changes to the outfield wall at Citi Field during last night’s game and then again after it. He said any changes were “not likely to be subtle,” and that the team has “tried to do as much analysis as [it] possibly can.”

Is it reading too much into Alderson’s comments to consider how a change in the size of the park would affect the Mets’ offseason plans? If Alderson believes that Citi Field can be “overwhelming” to a team that has to play half its games there, it would seem silly to make changes to the roster based on assessments of overwhelmed players.

In other words, here’s yet another reason the Mets should not and likely will not move David Wright. If Wright is affected by Citi Field’s dimensions — physically, psychologically, however — then trading him immediately after changing those dimensions would be positively nuts. The Mets can use 2012 to assess the way players perform in a better hitting environment instead of selling them off at the nadir of their value.

The same goes, to some extent, for Jason Bay. If the park has actually gone to Bay’s head and the Mets think unsubtle changes will help him out of the two-season power drought he has endured since joining the club, the team will likely be wary of eating too much of his contract to pawn him off.

Since Bay plays a replaceable position I imagine the team would still move him if the terms were at all reasonable. But if they think he’ll legitimately improve in the reconfigured ballpark, they’d be wise to hold on to him for a few months to see if he becomes more tempting to trade partners. They might wind up with a couple million dollars’ worth of salary relief by shipping him off on a Gary Matthews-type deal in the offseason, but much more if he starts off the year hitting like he used to.

Of course, there remains a strong possibility certain Mets’ offensive struggles have nothing to do with their home park’s dimensions, so adjustments to the park fail to improve their park-adjusted performances. Bay remains the utterly average hitter he has been, and Wright carries on in his prime years as a very good player short of the greatness he showed in his youth. And if that happens, the Mets lose the ol’ fence argument at the negotiating table, for whatever that’s worth.

At the very least, we can hope the unsubtle changes render the wall itself more subtle. The incessant, unnecessary nook-and-crannying bothers me more than the dimensions themselves, even if I — like the hitters — would like to see a few more home runs.

Oh and as for Jose Reyes and his triples: When Reyes is going well he’s going to hit triples pretty much anywhere. For his career, Reyes has 51 triples at home and 48 on the road. Plus, you can bet Reyes likes hitting home runs, too. In his last three years at Shea Stadium, Reyes averaged a home run roughly every 43 at-bats. In three injury-riddled years at Citi Field, he has averaged a home run every 68 at-bats.