Makes some of our contracts look pretty good. That’s a long time and a lot of money. I thought they were trying to reduce the deficit in Washington.

– Sandy Alderson, on Jayson Werth’s seven-year, $126 million deal with the Nats

Badumching, heyooo!

I don’t want to belabor the terms of the Werth deal too much here because based on the Internet’s reaction it doesn’t have a whole lot of supporters. Straight up: It would be at least vaguely defensible to commit that much money and years to a 31-year-old corner outfielder if your team hoped to contend with in the next years. If the Red Sox or Yankees signed him they could say, “Well, he’ll produce excellent numbers for the next few years while we compete for championships, and we realize we’ll have to shoulder the back end of his contract when he’s declining.”

But since the Nationals appear unlikely to contend with or without Werth in 2011, since Stephen Strasburg likely won’t be back until at least the middle of the season and since their best pitcher in 2010 was Livan Hernandez, giving Werth that much money now merits the hefty snark from Alderson. Even if the Nats can compete in two years, they’ll likely have to do so with Werth’s contract entering its albatross phase.

It seems like a perennial loser like the Nats has to overpay just to get a free agent of Werth’s caliber in the door, but that’s the thing: They should first work to make the team a legit contender so they can then woo top free agents without ridiculous terms.

Anyway, it seems like most Mets fans think Alderson’s comments are awesome and hilarious. There’s some tiny fraction of the fanbase that has pointed to them as indicative of Alderson’s small-market approach, and chastised him for not himself chasing Werth.

Those people are probably incapable of being convinced that Alderson’s prudence this offseason is what’s best — and perhaps all that’s feasible — for the franchise. They do not want to hear that the Mets will still very much be spending like a big-market club in 2010. The team will probably enter the season with a payroll around $140 million. It’s not Alderson’s fault that much of it will be allocated to dreck.

So to those few impatient Mets fans, and perhaps to the Mets themselves for abiding such lavish and irresponsible spending the past few years, Alderson will bring nothing but coal and a couple of scrap-heap pickups for Christmas. Frankly, it’s what they deserve. Advocating for or consenting to giant contracts and big splashes and a wholesale lack of foresight puts you on the naughty list in baseball.

For the rest of us, we get some of the greatest gifts a fan could wish for: hope, promise, reason. But to stay on the nice list, we must continue to be patient. We must withstand the onslaught of nonsense from the winter meetings and shoulder the idiotic rantings of the angry “small-market Sandy” set. And we must spend the offseason remembering that though the Mets likely won’t be making any exciting moves, the most exciting thing of all is a front office that’s committed to and perhaps capable of creating a long-term sustainable winner.

But to me, the biggest contingency plan for the 2010 Mets is the 2011 Mets. Because if things go horribly awry this season — and after 2009, we’d be foolish to dismiss that possibility — the team at least won’t have to look far to see the future. Top prospects Ike Davis, Fernando Martinez, Josh Thole and Jon Niese — should he not earn the fifth starter’s role in Spring Training — should all start the year in Triple-A….

And so I’m hoping that the Mets’ biggest failure this offseason was not in roster construction, but merely in communication when they threw around terms like “unacceptable” and “change” and “spend” and “trade.” Maybe they would’ve been better off starting with the slogan I suggested back in September:

“The 2010 Mets: Please Be Patient While We Get Our S@#$ Together”

– Me, here, Feb. 10, 2010.

I’m wrong about enough stuff that it doesn’t really pay to start going back and quoting myself. Heck, I was hardly right about everything in that post — little did I realize the Mets were about to turn their top starting-pitching prospect into a middle reliever.

I just stumbled onto it today and thought it was funny how my proposed slogan for last offseason seems to be pretty close to the actual slogan for this offseason. So that part of the post, at least, appears prescient.

I was probably wrong, though, in assuming that one year of development time for the Mets’ crop of upper-level prospects would be enough to return the Mets to contention in 2011. Yes, Ike Davis, Jon Niese and to a lesser extent Josh Thole seem primed to be (and continue being) valuable and cost-effective Major League contributors. But I was probably at least a bit guilty of the standard fan practice of overrating prospects. Clearly 2010 did not go as we would have hoped for Martinez, Reese Havens, Brad Holt or Jenrry Mejia.

James Kannengieser at Amazin’ Avenue recently took a stab at projecting the 2011 Mets’ win totals based on the current roster. He based the post on WAR and took an admittedly conservative approach, assuming that none of Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and David Wright return to the forms they showed from 2006-2008 and that neither Davis nor Thole provides more to the club in 2011 than he did in 2010.

Still, despite all that, Kannengieser puts the Mets — these Mets, without any offseason additions — at 79 wins. With some reasonable, inexpensive roster tweaking, a couple of high-upside plays that pay off, a return to peak form from at least one of the stars, and some improvement from Davis, Thole and Niese, it’s not too hard to imagine an 87-89 win team.

Maybe that’s hoping for a lot of things to go right. The new front office would have to make the right upside plays, for one thing, or at least enough of them to have some of them work out. For another, we’d have to hope the young players improve instead of suffering regression in their sophomore seasons.

But a well-managed team with a solid crop of young contributors can turn things around mighty quickly. And a win total in the high 80s should put the Mets at least on the fringes of contention.

So while yes, this offseason is a winter for the Mets’ getting their proverbial s#@$ together, it could also feasibly be one in which they scrap together enough small moves to field a competitive team in 2011. We shall see, I suppose. At the very least an Opening Day lineup with some promising young homegrown players should be more palatable than one with Gary Matthews Jr., Alex Cora and Mike Jacobs in it.

Also, for what it’s worth: That headline is a Rhymefest reference. I’m not actually ahead of my time or behind in my rent, though the latter is mostly because my wife is a vigilant bill-payer, for which I am thankful.

As you’ve probably heard by now, the Mets have opted not to offer arbitration to John Maine and Sean Green and not to even offer a contract to Chris Carter, meaning, in all likelihood, none of them will be back with the Mets in 2011.

The departures of Green and Carter serve mostly to further indict the Omar Minaya Administration. I defended the trade of Billy Wagner for Carter at the time, arguing that since it was unclear that Wagner would a) remain healthy coming back from surgery and b) decline arbitration, the Mets only opted for a sure thing and a potentially valuable spare part instead over the potential for draft picks. Of course, at the time I hadn’t seen Carter throw.

For their part in the deal, the Sox got 13 2/3 innings out of Wagner during their stretch run in 2009, plus prospects Kolbrin Vitek and Bryce Brentz — the players they drafted and signed for slot money with the compensation picks for Wagner.

The Mets got a few million dollars in salary relief, plus 180 plate appearances, a .706 OPS and some woeful defense out of Carter. Plus perhaps a series of lessons in stem-cell research. (Incredibly intense stem-cell research.) Hindsight is always 20/20, but, well, oof.

Green came over with J.J. Putz and Jeremy Reed in a deal with the Mariners that assured Omar Minaya could go out for bagels without having to hear about the Mets’ awful bullpen. To date, Minaya’s series of quiet breakfast runs in the latter part of the 2008-09 offseason stands as the Mets’ biggest gain from the deal.

In their tenures with the Mets, Green, Putz and Reed combined for a -1.2 WAR (per baseball-reference.com). For that, the Mets traded seven players, most of them young. Joe Smith, though he’s been injured for parts of both seasons since, has been a much better reliever than either Green or Putz was for the Mets.

Of the three, Maine will be remembered most fondly by Mets fans, certainly not for his pitching in 2009 and 2010, but for his contributions to the team in 2006 and 2007, especially on the second-to-last day of the latter campaign (the day, of course, that Lastings Milledge and/or Jose Reyes “woke up” the long-dormant Marlins). Plus, Maine always seemed like a  decent and likable dude — a guy who managed to convince Marty Noble that he had never been to the Internet, who went on the record with his choice of closer music and who earned praise from Smith and Mike Pelfrey for his prowess in Call of Duty.

Maine’s last two years with the Mets stand as a lesson to fans — to this one, at least — that pitchers cannot be counted on to return from shoulder injuries. I hoped all along that Maine would turn it around and again become the pitcher he was in 2007, but clearly he physically could not.

Maine is still young enough that he’ll likely surface somewhere. Since he always had a limited arsenal even when he was effective, I imagine he might make for a decent reliever (though there was always talk that he took too long to get warmed up). In any case, he’s not going to get anyone out throwing 85, so he’ll have to strengthen his shoulder first. Good luck to him.

The folks at Amazin’ Avenue put up a good John Maine farewell thread, so check that out if you’re feeling sentimental for his departure. We will remember him whenever we see the Verizon Fios guy.

Even though he’s moved on from ESPN, Steve Phillips is still doing the goofy “pretend I’m a real-life GM” thing. Only now he’s not at a podium taking scripted questions from fake press, he’s sitting in front of a bookshelf talking to a webcam and showing a healthy dose of bare chest. The big reveal, of course, is that Steve Phillips owns books.

To his credit, Phillips’ objective is to fix the Mets for 2011 and not necessarily beyond. But the two major pillars of his offseason plan are trading Ike Davis for Prince Fielder and shelling out for Cliff Lee. Coincidentally, I have specifically argued against both of those moves in this space.

Both moves would inarguably make the Mets a better team in 2011. But Fielder is slated to be a free agent after 2011 and will require a hefty long-term contract extension to stick around, whereas Davis will be inexpensive and under team control until the latter part of this decade. Lee is awesome, but he is a 32-year-old pitcher likely to command a massive paycheck that could ultimately hamstring a team. Also, given what we know about the Mets’ payroll commitments for 2011 and their lack of flexibility, signing him seems completely infeasible.

In other words, Phillips’ plan to fix the Mets seems a lot like a reasonable way to further break the Mets. Yes, adding Prince Fielder and Cliff Lee (and Orlando Hudson) would make just about any team a lot more likely to contend in the short term. But it is the GM’s job to consider the future as well.

Really, there’s an almost stunning lack of insight in the video, considering Phillips is an actual former Major League GM. Every decision he suggests has been beaten inside out in the comments section of every Mets blog, and he appears to approach the team’s needs in terms of labels — No. 1 starter, “true cleanup hitter.”

At least he’s willing to keep Carlos Beltran around, though, despite his wholesale lack of “game-winning plays” and tendency to “lock up in a critical situation.”