Matt Cerrone just linked to something I said last night on Twitter and I figured I should reiterate it here. It was this:

Amazing how many Mets fans see Santana’s injury as evidence for giving a big long-term deal to Cliff Lee and not the other way around.

I imagine Cliff Lee’s back issues have scared off at least a few of the legions planning on storming Citi Field and rallying outside SNY’s studios this offseason, but there will still likely be a vocal contingent dead set on making sure the Mets hear its pleas for the best free-agent pitcher available.

Lee, after all, looks to be the only man on the open market proven to be a True Number One. A Bona Fide Ace.

But again, those are labels. And though they’re labels used to describe great pitchers, and great pitchers help teams win and Cliff Lee is most certainly a great pitcher primed to help some team win, he’s also a 32-year-old pitcher likely to command a massive and lengthy deal.

And the lesson, I think, from Santana’s injury is that even the pitchers that seem invincible — the guys that can go out and pitch brilliantly on one knee in must-win games on the second-to-last day of the season and who bellow about their manhood when their managers come to pull them from games — are liable to break down eventually. It’s the nature of pitching.

So while it may be tempting to say, “aw, injuries happen, just because Santana got injured doesn’t mean Lee will; the Mets could really use an ace and Lee is the only ace that’s a free agent and thus the Mets should sign Lee,” because all those things are true, that doesn’t mean they add up to smart business. Running a baseball team wisely requires smart investments, and you just can’t be handing out big-time money to aging pitchers for multiple years when you’re already in financial straits.

That means, of course, that the Mets will — barring trade — have to plow into 2011 without the Frontline Starter of lore, but that is, frankly, the bed that they made. It is suboptimal, for sure, but there is no rule I know of in the Major League books that says you can’t win without heading into a season with a starter deemed a certain ace.

Here is another way to look at this: The Yanks felt similarly after the 1995 season about a young corner infielder with power (Russ Davis) and a talented lefty starter (Sterling Hitchcock) as the Mets feel now about the powerful Ike Davis and lefty Niese. The Yanks turned their duo into dynasty cornerstones Tino Martinez and Jeff Nelson.

This is not advocating trades, but is a suggestion not to close avenues in favor of a marketing strategy.

Let’s focus a bit more on Davis to make this point. What do you think will be his best year, something like .275 with 30 homers? That is good. But it probably never makes him one of the 10 best first basemen in the game.

– Joel Sherman, N.Y. Post.

A couple of people emailed me about this column so here’s this.

OK, on that last point first: By WAR, Davis is the 11th best first baseman in the league this season, right now. A lot of that is due to his defense per UZR, a stat known to fluctuate pretty wildly from year to year, but to the eye Davis has undoubtedly been pretty sharp at first base.

But even by offense-only stats like OPS, Davis falls right near the middle of the pack of Major League first basemen, though a bit on the short side. Of course, he’s doing it while playing half his games in Citi Field, while only 23 years old, and with only half a season above A-ball under his belt.

Davis may never be the best hitting first baseman in the Majors, but it is far too early to say he’ll never be among the best hitting first basemen in the Majors, nor that his defense won’t be enough to mitigate the difference between him and the top-tier offensive players at the position.

Also, for what it’s worth, if Davis hits .275 with 30 home runs and maintains his penchant for the base on balls, he almost certainly will be among the 10 best first basemen in the game offensively, provided the offensive environment remains anything like the way it is this year.

Now, all that said, I agree in some way with the general thrust of Sherman’s piece: Yes, the Mets should focus on winning over marketing. I write that all the time. 100% on board with that thesis. And yes, they should keep an open mind to all trade possibilities, even the ones including popular young players like Davis.

But though I recognize that comparing current players and situations to similar ones from the past is a fun and persistent part of sports analysis, it’s difficult to follow Sherman’s Davis/Niese:Davis/Hitchcock analogy through to its conclusion without realizing its massive faults.

Russ Davis was indeed a well-regarded prospect, but he was two years older than Ike Davis and had only 123 Major League plate appearances when the Yanks dealt him. Hitchcock, too, was older than Niese and, though his pedestrian 1995 showed promise, did not have a season in the bag as impressive as Niese’s 2010.

Plus, it should be noted that the Yankees held onto a different lefty in 1995: Andy Pettitte. They also neglected to trade Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada or Mariano Rivera, all of whom debuted that season, for Tino Martinez and Jeff Nelson.

And that’s the thing, really: Drawing the comparison between the two is to ignore how the Yanks’ core of young players carried the team to championships, and to say that the Mets are only a Tino Martinez and a Jeff Nelson away from a World Series berth. Neither seems reasonable.

Besides, the Yankees have a luxury the Mets don’t, like it or not: a near-unlimited payroll.

It seems almost unconscionable to me that anyone could write an entire column suggesting the Mets consider trading their young players and not mention even once that those young players are all cost-controlled for the next several seasons, providing the Mets potentially productive players to field while they get out from under their albatross contracts and payroll flexibility once those contracts expire.

But all that said, again, Sherman’s right that they should consider everything. Plus he advocates trading for pieces that will help the club in the long term, which I support. The Mets should just think long and hard before they consider trading young, cost-controlled players that have proven they can hold their own in the Majors, since those aren’t all that easy to come by.

OK, I promise I didn’t already know about Johan Santana’s forthcoming season-ending surgery when I argued earlier that the Mets should be looking for pitching help this offseason.

But the fact is this’ll make three straight years with surgery for Santana, and though he finished strong and his peripherals started picking up near the end of this campaign, it’s foolish to expect he’ll be fully healthy for all of 2011. He could be, of course, but he’ll be a 32-year-old pitcher with a lot of innings on his arm and a bunch of surgeries on his chart.

We’ll get back to this a billion times this offseason and there’s a bunch of interesting baseball to be played between now and then. Plus we’ll have a better sense of the market, of who’s available, of what Dillon Gee looks like across a few more Major League starts, how much public sentiment there’s going to be clamoring for Jenrry Mejia and everything else.

This doesn’t matter much for the 2010 Mets because nothing has mattered much for the 2010 Mets for a while, which is why we get all caught up in off-field nonsense, politics, media criticism, armchair psychoanalysis and everything else.

This matters for the 2011 Mets, though, and the 2012 and 2013 Mets too. The club owes Santana $77.5 million over the next three seasons, according to Cots, and if he’s not pitching for any prolonged stretch of that it makes Luis Castillo’s contract look like a bargain.

Sorry if I sound gloomy. Maybe the news will seem better when we have more of it.

Since his first season in rookie ball, Tejada has also eschewed the walk. He didn’t hit average walk rates in Single-, Double- or Triple-A. He also had a career ISO of .075 in the minor leagues (and flyball rate that fell as he advanced, which seems to predict little future power), so he kind of looks like a younger Castillo without the walks and a little better defense. The defense is the reason management thinks he is best candidate for this year, but the offense will limit him to a backup most likely. If only he walked more, or even had the exciting speed of Arias, he would have a secondary skill beyond defense and upside for more value.

– Eno Sarris, Fangraphs.com.

Eno does a really nice job running down the Mets’ second-base situation, but I’m not sure he gives Tejada an entirely fair shake by saying he “has also eschewed the walk,” lumping him in with Joaquin Arias.

First of all, Arias walked in only about 4.3% of his Minor League plate appearances and Tejada walked in about 7.9%, a pretty big difference. But the major distinction is that Tejada did all his damage while always very young for his level — often the youngest player at his level, and a full year younger than Arias was as he progressed through the Minors.

Clearly Tejada’s not about to go all Alex Rodriguez on the Major Leagues or anything, but I’m just not ready to give up on him and say he won’t be a regular Major League middle infielder someday.

I don’t think that’s what Eno’s doing, but it seems like way too many Mets fans are willing to write Tejada off entirely just because the team has advanced him at a very young age to a level at which he cannot yet succeed. That’s not really his fault.

Plus, and not for nothing, it’s not like he’s completely embarrassing himself. Yes, he’s got a .188 average and no power to speak of. But he’s also suffering from a very low .221 batting average on balls in play, suggesting he has been victimized by a bit of bad luck. Plus, for whatever it’s worth, he’s still getting on base at a higher clip than three guys who were in the Mets’ hilarious Opening Day lineup (and just below two others).

And look: I don’t know that Ruben Tejada will ever turn into a productive Major League hitter or anything like that. I’m just saying that 200 plate appearances at age 20 mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. If he were in Double-A right now, where he’d still be young for the level, we’d probably be salivating over the kid and wondering why he wasn’t considered a bigger prospect.