Talking about things related to the Mets, tangentially associated with the Mets, and not at all involving the Mets with Toby Hyde and Patrick Flood. Streaming below and on iTunes here.

Feedback is welcome at MostlyMetsPodcast@gmail.com and in the comments section below. A full rundown follows the dealie-who.

Also: I make the point about how chicken is the only meat we call by the name of the animal, but I fail to note that we do the same with goat even after the long discussion about eating goat.

Opening: Monday Night was Fun
3:00 Bye-bye Murph
7:00 Is this random?
10:00 Where’s the SNY softball team?
16:00 Ted Buys a Glove
18:00 Why We Watch
28:00 Who Remembers Jeff Duncan?
30:00 Josh Satin…
38:00 What about Zobrist?
45:00 Savannah Sand Gnats Kid Promotion/Who’s roasting a Goat?
58:00 The price of being an early adopter
58:00 Picking Guys
1:00:00 Pagan Discussion
1:08:00 Can the Mets build a better bullpen?
1:10:00 What does Pedro Martinez do all day?
1:24:00 Patrick says smart things about the Mets’ path to today through 2011
1:29:00 Oliver Perez!

Before last night’s game, Terry Collins told reporters that the Mets “have to be open-minded enough to think the outfield may be a spot” for Daniel Murphy.

Presumably neither Collins nor Sandy Alderson saw much of Murph’s first go-around in the outfield in late 2008 and early 2009, when Shea Stadium’s left field seemed to expand to a hundred times its normal size: a sprawling grassland stamped flat by Murphy hustling in every direction in dogged pursuit of balls hit past him, over him and sometimes right at him.

But then maybe it’s better Alderson and Collins missed that. If Murphy can hit anything like the way he did for the Mets in 2011, his bat plays in an outfield corner — way better than it does at first base. Murphy’s .320/.362/.448 line this season and .292/.343/.441 career mark are better than the league averages in both corner outfield spots this year, and notably better than the (perhaps flukishly low) .256/.322/.404 line posted by Major League left fielders in 2011.

Gone are the days when the average left fielder had an .820 OPS. Barry Bonds, as they say, ain’t walking through that door.

And for as bad as Murphy looked in left field, it was 59 games at a brand-new position for young player in his first days in the big leagues. If the Mets find a spot for Murphy in the outfield, his first handful of games there shouldn’t deter them from trying it again.

That’s the thing, though: Where exactly does Murphy fit in the outfield? Last I checked, the Mets are committed to paying Jason Bay at least $35 million through 2013 with a vesting option for 2014. So Murphy plays right, then?

I guess the idea is that trying Murphy in the outfield again offers the club flexibility. A good left-handed bat that could play five different positions would be a pretty damn valuable thing to have, it would just mean the team would have to continue suffering some of the mistakes that come from Murphy’s defensive inexperience and expect that he’ll repay them on offense.

Since I broached the topic of Bay: Earlier in the season, when his OPS floundered below the Ordonez Line, Bay looked like one of the game’s most untradeable players. His recent torrid stretch pushed his OPS up over .700 Monday night, and those two years, $35 million and vesting option now look… well, still pretty hard to deal.

Just thinking out loud here, but is there any way Bay finishes the season hot enough to allow the Mets to get out from under his contract this offseason?

He has raised his OPS 82 points in his last 10 games. He won’t maintain this pace, but if he can even match that gain over the course of the rest of the season, he’ll finish with a well better line than this year’s awful average left fielder. If that happens, could the Mets find a taker for Bay in return for, I don’t know, a low-level prospect and some salary relief? (Depends on how much salary relief.) Would they? How much of Bay’s deal should they be willing to eat to unbury themselves from the rest of it?

These are offseason questions, and perhaps unnecessary ones; Bay has teased us before.

But neither Murphy nor Lucas Duda seem to have the arm strength typically associated with right fielders, and moving Bay would allow the Mets to employ one of their less-expensive, homegrown (and likely more productive) bats in the outfield while using whatever part of Bay’s salary they save to upgrade elsewhere. That is, if it’s at all possible.

I like this sequence from 30 Rock. A mildly funny joke followed by a better joke building off the first one, then elevated to absurdity by the third, all across 20 seconds.

I thought of it yesterday while watching the Mets lose to the Braves from the second deck in right at Citi Field, and not just because Excelsior sounds like a name Jack Donaghy would choose for a level in his stadium.

Something about the rapid-fire one-upsmanship during the game reminded me of the scene, with bad news replacing Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin — first Willie Harris pinch-hitting for Jose Reyes, then Daniel Murphy hopping out to short right field and collapsing with a season-ending knee injury, culminating in the ridiculous sight of David Wright playing shortstop and then, when it seemed like being a Mets fan couldn’t get any more depressing and silly, the game’s ultimate punchline: Chipper Jones lining the game-winning hit.

The metaphor fails because 30 Rock is funny and injuries to Reyes and Murphy are nothing like that, except I suppose in some grim, rock-bottom way.

Murphy was to date the team’s third-best hitter. Carlos Beltran, debatably the team’s first-best hitter, plays for the San Francisco Giants now. We await word on how long this hamstring tweak will sideline Jose Reyes, the other side of that debate. And that’s not to mention Ike Davis, who had been hitting better than all of them when he went down with the ankle injury that appears to have ended his season.

This sucks. It’s a damn-near miracle that the Mets can shoulder so many losses and still field a lineup of mostly not-embarrassing Major Leaguers, but a lineup of David Wright and a bunch of mostly not-embarrassing Major Leaguers isn’t going to score nearly as many runs as one with Wright, Murphy and Reyes, with a couple extra not-embarrassing Major Leaguers on the bench. Obviously.

I guess a more appropriate simile would be to say Sunday’s game hit like a flurry of punches from Mike Tyson in his prime, jabs and hooks and crosses and uppercuts, leaving us dazed and on the ropes. Something like that.

Whatever. Who cares what it’s like? It is what it is: Two of the Mets’ best players and best reasons to keep watching for the rest of 2011 getting hurt within the course of a few innings. Reyes may be back soon. Murphy won’t.

The upshot is we’ll probably see Lucas Duda in the lineup just about every day from here on out, and maybe more of Nick Evans too. We won’t get any better sense of if Murphy can play second in the future, though if you’re playing at home that makes two straight seasons for Murph ended by knee injuries sustained at the keystone, for whatever that’s worth.

Brutal. At least there’s still David Wright, playing shortstop or anyplace else. And Jason Bay… oh, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Hey Ted, how’s the Pascucci watch 2011 coming? It looks like he’s having another great year. Anything you can blog about?

– Wayne, via email.

I hoped the departure of Carlos Beltran was going to mean a big-league call for Val Pascucci, in what would have to be the most bittersweet TedQuarters moment imaginable. Nearly every position player the Mets had in Triple-A who was on the 40-man roster was either hurt or still within a 10-day window of being sent down, and the team has room on the 40-man and can make more by moving Ike Davis to the 60-day DL.

But alas, they called on the only position player in Triple-A who was healthy, on the 40-man and eligible to come up: catcher Mike Nickeas.

Meanwhile, Pascucci just keeps crushing the ball. The 6’6″ masher is rocking a .282/.393/.515 line, alarmingly similar to his career Triple-A mark of .277/.396/.515. The guy is as regular as… I don’t know, a quartz clock? Someone with an extremely high fiber diet?

So yeah, Wayne: Pascucci Watch continues. But I don’t know what more anyone has to see. The guy destroys Triple-A pitching, and no one seems eager to find out if he can do the same in the Majors. He apparently isn’t much one for defense, he strikes out a bunch, and he’s 32. Soon enough, the window will close.

September is coming, and the Mets don’t have many obvious candidates for call-ups that aren’t already on the 40-man. Throw the guy a bone, huh?