Turns out I missed a lot in the papers while I was in Port St. Lucie. And if you read the New York Post, you must think this is a pretty terrifying time to be a Mets fan. Let’s look at some of the things the Post would have us fear and rate them by how scary they actually are, on a scale of 1-10.

I should note that there’s plenty to fear in all the other papers and on just about every blog, too. I was going to do a general Mets Fear Index, but I started out at the Post’s Mets page and realized it had all the material I needed. So here’s what we’re afraid of:

Carlos Beltran’s knee problems: There’s a lot about this on the Post, and rightfully so. Beltran’s arthritic knees, we know, have hampered his last two seasons and slowed his preparation for this one. This is something legitimately worth fearing. The only mitigating factor is that, in Scott Hairston, Lucas Duda and Nick Evans, the Mets have a reasonable amount of depth at the position, something new for the organization. Fear factor: 9 out of 10.

Oliver Perez is still here: I’ve said this before: Barring a rash of injuries, Oliver Perez is not going to make the Mets. Every word spilled on the subject — on this site included — is a word wasted. I will not mention Oliver Perez again until either he is officially cut or it is March 31 and he is still on the roster. Fear factor: 1 out of 10.

Jose Reyes is the new Carmelo Anthony: Get this: Because Jose Reyes is not as good as Rickey Henderson, the greatest leadoff hitter of all time, then there’s no chance Sandy Alderson will want Jose Reyes back. The fact that Reyes plays shortstop only gets a single parenthetical mention in this column. I’ll amount there’s a solid chance Reyes won’t be back next year, but, without quoting nebulous “executives,” I’d put it at way less than 95 percent. Fear factor: 4 out of 10.

OH MY GOD WE’RE HAVING A FIRE… sale: I will never hear the term “fire sale” again without thinking of Tobias Funke. Evacuate all of the schoolchildren! That said, I don’t know a lot about business and I don’t have a ton of inside information or anything about the Wilpons’ pending lawsuit and their finances. I’m not eager to get too deep into this, lest I sound like a shill. But everything I understand suggests that most of the media coverage — and basically all the sports-media coverage — entirely fails to grasp any of the nuance involved. Here, the thesis — citing more “executives” — is: We know the Mets have money problems, so we should expect them to cut salary down to the $70 million small-market team range. Seems like the brushstrokes are too broad. Also, my understanding is the whole point of seeking another part-owner is so the Mets’ finances are not impacted by the Wilpons’ troubles.  Fear factor: 3 out of 10.

Originally posted Aug. 20, 2010.

I know you’ve been wondering how they stack up, so here it is: A tale of the tape measuring Robert Alan Dickey against Jacques, the friendly resident advisor on the fourth floor of the New South Dormitory at Georgetown University in the 1999-2000 academic year.

Originally posted Dec. 21, 2010.

Over at MetsBlog today, Matt Cerrone took issue with Ben Shpigel’s assertion that the Mets, “in all likelihood,” would not contend in 2011. I can’t fault Shpigel for the prediction — the Mets, as we all know, are coming off two sub-.500 seasons, have made few roster moves, and will start the year without Johan Santana in their rotation.

But as Matt points out, unpredictable things happen in baseball all the time. I didn’t talk to Cerrone about the post, but if I had to guess I would assume it was at least in part motivated by the sense of fatalism that seems to be growing in Mets fans, especially since the Phillies signed Cliff Lee. There’s nothing wrong with making predictions and taking stabs at what will likely happen, as Shpigel does. Writing off any team entirely before the season even starts is silly.

For what it’s worth, last winter I listed both the Reds and the Padres as “unlikely to contend” in my National League preview for the Maple Street Press Mets Annual. Captain Hindsight can look back now and identify the ways in which both clubs were primed to compete, but at the time it hardly seemed I was taking controversial positions.

Anyway, on to the point. If we’re talking optimistically and trying to figure out the things that reasonably could happen to launch the Mets into contention, I’ll point out that the Mets might have a very good offense next season.

Fangraphs currently lists two 2011 projections for most players — Bill James’ version, and their crowdsourced fan projections. In most cases, the two are reasonably similar. Because I’m trying to see the cup half-full for the sake of this post, I took the better of the two projections for everyone slated to be in the Mets’ lineup and plugged them into David Pinto’s lineup analysis tool.

I even gave Josh Thole a bit of a boost, figuring Ronny Paulino will take some at-bats away against tough lefties. Since Thole was projected at a .358 OBP and a .378 slugging by the fans, I unscientifically bumped those numbers up to .360 and .415, seeing as Paulino has a lifetime .390 OBP and .490 slugging against lefties. I’m painting in broad strokes here.

I plugged in Daniel Murphy for second base, which assumes he can capably man the position. His Bill James projection seemed so optimistic that I didn’t bother adjusting it for any sort of platoon. James’ system projects Murph to post a .339 OBP and .455 slugging in 2011, which would put him among the top handful of second basemen offensively.

Anyway, with a lineup of Jose Reyes, Angel Pagan, David Wright, Carlos Beltran, Jason Bay, Ike Davis, Murphy and Thole/Paulino all performing up to the most optimistic of reasonable projections, the Mets would score just short of five runs per game (4.959, to be exact) according to the tool.

That’s nearly a full run per game better than the Mets scored last season. It would have made them the NL’s top offensive club in 2010.

Obviously the system is not perfect for a variety of reasons. For one, it assumes all players play 162 games at their positions, which clearly won’t happen. There’s a dropoff when you start plugging in bench players for the starters, and even in full health every team needs to plug in bench players with some frequency.

But even despite the team’s impotent offense last year, I don’t think it’s crazy to expect the Mets to score a lot of runs next season. There’s no obvious gaping hole in the lineup, and amazing things can happen when you replace out machines with capable Major Leaguers. Subbing in Jeff Francoeur’s 2010 Mets line for Beltran and Rod Barajas’ for Thole/Paulino would cost the team about a half-run per game, per the tool. (Pinto’s script fails to factor in smiles and leadership.)

If the Mets could only prevent runs as well as they did last year, using the Pythagorean win expectancy formula with that lineup projection, they’d finish with right around 100 wins. So that, well, that’d be cool.

Problem is, it’s just not that likely to happen. The Mets enjoyed very good pitching last year, but they also had a healthy Santana throw 199 innings. Jon Niese and R.A. Dickey, two of the three starters penned in for the 2011 rotation, experienced lasting big-league success for the very first time in 2010. And throwing Murphy in at second base could have repercussions for the defense.

The Mets lineup, as currently constituted, probably won’t score 800 runs. But it will probably be pretty good. That is what we can hold onto until April. That and the knowledge that lots of crazy things happen in baseball.

I’d say neither of those things makes the Mets likely to contend in 2011, but together they should be enough for us to recognize that it’s not downright impossible for the Mets to contend in 2011.

Then Hudgens provided an addendum to his assessment. The art of hitting relies on harnessed aggression, the ability to sift between balls and strikes, punishing mistakes and accepting walks when available. Discretion is necessary.

The Mets’ general manager, Sandy Alderson, builds franchises with on-base percentage and power in mind. Hudgens believes this. Reyes, 27, understands it as he heads into free agency. He hopes to bounce back from a .321 OBP season, his lowest mark in the past five seasons and about 30 points lower than the pace he set from 2006 to 2008.

Which is why Hudgens adds this about Reyes and his attack-mode at the plate: “We just have to make sure he’s getting good balls to hit.”

– Andy McCullough, Newark Star-Ledger.

Excellent work from McCullough, using plate-discipline stats in an accessible way to track Reyes’ pursuit of a better on-base percentage in 2011. McCullough, incidentally, is also the subject of a good interview in the Amazin’ Avenue Annual, discussing, among other things, life on the Mets’ beat.

I’m on my way back to New York as we speak. I’ll be back here in Port St. Lucie at the end of the month to catch the last couple of games then the first series in Miami. I will add this: As much fun as I had covering Spring Training these two weeks — and I had a ton of fun — it gave me a much greater appreciation for what the beat writers do. I like traveling, but two weeks away from home is pretty close to as much as I can handle. Those guys are here for almost all of Spring Training, then get to recover by spending half their days on the road for the next six months. I suppose you get used to it, but that has got to be exhausting.

I’m setting up some re-runs for this afternoon. It seems the Spring Training exposure has brought a good crop of new readers to this site, so I’m digging up some posts from the past that will, I hope, help everyone know what to expect around here when I’m not spending every day around the Mets. I do try to keep pretty close tabs on the Mets all year round and don’t plan to change that, but there’s a good deal of other nonsense here as well.

One of the posts, incidentally, will be the one I made after banning my first commenter. I included that not because I want to further call out Ryan the very angry conspiracy theorist Mets fan, but because it contains some general guidelines for commenting on this site.

But there is one way the Mets could keep Rodriguez from finishing 55 games while plausibly arguing it is for baseball reasons. They could essentially redefine the role of a closer, from a pitcher who is used almost exclusively in save situations to one that is used in the most important situations in a game.

Bases loaded in a tie game in the seventh inning? Bring in the closer. Clinging to a one-run lead with the heart of the Phillies’ order due up in the eighth? Bring in the closer. And if Rodriguez’s pitch count is too high by the ninth inning? Bring in someone else.

It’s a radical idea, but not a novel one. Sabermetricians have long argued that by making closers ninth-inning specialists, teams fail to maximize their potential value. The key word is leverage, which measures the relative importance of each situation on a game’s outcome.

– Brian Costa, Wall Street Journal.

I’ve beaten this drum about a million times and Costa absolutely nails it here, so there’s really little to add. I think he may be off in his use of Leverage Index — he writes that 19 pitchers came into games in on-average higher-leverage situations than Rodriguez, and I’m not sure that’s the case. I will cop to not being that comfortable with LI stats, but it says here that gmLI is the pitcher’s average LI when he enters the game. And Rodriguez actually had the top gmLI on the Mets last year.

But I could be wrong, and it doesn’t matter anyway. Costa’s point is that a team’s best reliever should be used in the most important situations, and no one could argue that coming in with the bases empty and a three-run lead in the ninth is a tighter spot than bases loaded with no outs in a tie game in the seventh. Too often, managers use their closers in — and only in — save situations, and managing to a powerfully flawed stat just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

I will again cite this tremendous Forbes research from 2007. It says:

Those veteran closers making millions can thank Tony LaRussa, who ushered in the era of hyper-specialization as manager of the Oakland A’s in 1988. That year, LaRussa decided that his best reliever, Dennis Eckersley, would be used strictly to protect ninth-inning leads. Other clubs soon followed suit, and top relievers found themselves racking up more saves (the biggest stat driving their paychecks) while pitching fewer innings.

Yet in the 20 seasons since LaRussa’s brainstorm, teams holding late leads have won at about the same rate they did in the 20 seasons before. Since 1988, teams leading after eight innings have won at a .951 clip, according to Baseball-Reference.com and STATS Inc., compared to .948 from 1968 to 1987. That adds up to less than one win per season per team.

To be fair, relievers do seem to appreciate defined roles, which makes sense. Anyone would prefer to know what he’ll be asked to do at work that day before he shows up at the office. But perhaps Collins, with the help of the Mets’ front office, can come up with some sort of newly defined role, or — dare I suggest — tell every reliever that his role is defined as: “guy who gets people out when we ask him to.”