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.

And I have little urge to discuss them. The whole thing seems like the PR equivalent of a broken-bat dribbler bobbled by the pitcher then fired in the dirt to first where it was ole’d by the first baseman into right field then tossed into the crowd by an outfielder who had no idea how many outs there were while meanwhile the hitter faceplanted on his way to second base. It is confusing and ugly, and the only thing clear is that no one involved played it particularly well.

If you want more than that, check out what Patrick Flood has to say.

Also, if you’re looking for a slightly more upbeat (though still unutterably sad) bit of 9/11-memorial news, check out Newsday’s piece on my old high school football coach and his wife, who lost their son in 2001. Coach Caproni is on the short list of the warmest, classiest, most downright decent people I’ve ever known.

For all my bluster about being sick of the incessant charting of prospects years away from the Majors, I spend a lot of time doing exactly that.

And I figured it’s worth noting that though two of the Mets’ most well-regarded prospects coming into the season endured rough seasons in the Florida State League, their numbers appear worse than they actually are.

Wilmer Flores posted a .269/.309/.380 line for St. Lucie. But because that league and that park are particularly rough on hitters, his numbers translate to similar stats in Double-A Binghamton according to the Minor League Equivalency Calculator: .273/.307/.380. Presumably if he was putting up those still-unspectacular numbers as a 19-year-old in Double-A, no one would be ready to call him a bust yet.

Something similar goes for Cesar Puello. Puello hit merely .259/.313/.370 in St. Lucie after a breakout 2010 season in Savannah. Puello’s line translates to an underwhelming .262/.289/.396 at Binghamton, more palatable for a 20-year-old player. Most alarming for Puello is a sharp decline in walks from 2010 to 2011, though that is perhaps a trade-off made in pursuit of better power numbers.

Of course, the obvious corollary is that impressive performances from pitchers Darin Gorski and Zack Wheeler need also be taken with several grains of salt.

Naturally all the players involved still have a lot of development in their future, but I imagine we’ll see tons of Mets prospects lists this offseason that fail to factor in the effects of the unfavorable hitting environment in the Florida State League. So consider this when you read those.