Luckily I don’t have to decide right now, so this is purely hypothetical. Also, I don’t have to decide in the offseason either. I don’t ever have to decide whether to tender arbitration to Andres Torres and Manny Acosta. But if by some weird chance Sandy Alderson called me in the next five minutes and said, “Hey Ted! It’s me, Sandy Alderson. Should we tender contracts to Torres and Acosta this season? It’s your call, but we need you to decide right now,” I’d probably say yes to Torres and no to Acosta.

The Mets need outfielders in the worst way. Torres certainly hasn’t earned a starting role in 2012, but he’s probably good enough to merit whatever increase he gets on his $2.7 million salary this year. He covers a ton of ground in the outfield, he’s a switch hitter, and he has quietly raised his on-base percentage to a respectable .351 (as of Thursday afternoon when I’m writing this). He seems a good fit as a fourth outfielder, regardless of who else is on the team.

The counter argument, I guess, is that with Jordany Valdespin and Kirk Nieuwenhuis sort of in the fold and Matt den Dekker hopefully coming up the pike, the Mets don’t really need center fielders. But neither Valdespin nor den Dekker can be counted on for much Major League offense at this point, and Nieuwenhuis obviously needs some work. Plus all three of those guys hit left-handed. I look for bigger upgrades, certainly, but unless I’m planning to sign another switch-hitting center fielder, I’m bringing back Torres.

Incidentally, another switch-hitting center fielder — B.J. Upton — [bah – update: Upton is not a switch hitter. My mistake, he bats right] is slated for free agency this offseason. Upton’s enduring a down year and comes with something of a spotty reputation, but he’s a really nice player and he won’t turn 28 until later this month. He’s not the superstar he was once expected to become and I have no idea what he’ll fetch on the open market, but he does seem like a pretty good fit for the Mets. Just depends on the cost, obviously. (That should cover Andrea’s question, incidentally.)

As for Acosta: I’m a pretty big Acosta apologist (Acostogist?) and he’s not likely to earn that much in arbitration, but the guy’s got an ERA over 10. He’s got good enough stuff that you’d expect someone will want him, but I can’t imagine there’ll be a feeding frenzy for his services. I’d try to non-tender him and bring him back on a Minor League deal or something.

https://twitter.com/RobPatterson83/status/231055658169008130

Lots of questions about the outfield. Let’s throw Jordany Valdespin into that mix too, to cover @SeanKenny’s question.

In decreasing order of likeliness to start in the 2013 outfield, I’ll say: Nieuwenhuis, Torres, Duda, Valdespin, Bay. As bad as he looked for the last part of his tenure with the 2012 Mets, Nieuwenhuis might be the best all-around player of that lot right now, and he stands to improve moving forward. If the Mets’ opponent starts a righty on Opening Day, I’m guessing Nieuwenhuis is in there.

As I said above, it appears there’s a role for Torres on next year’s club barring a free-agent signing or two, so by default he’s vaguely likely to start Opening Day.

Duda’s future with the team most likely depends on his ability to play the outfield, and there’s not much evidence he can do that just yet. The team appears committed to Ike Davis at first. Since it seems likely Duda will hit like a capable Major League corner player again, he has some value. But there’s not much sense in the Mets’ parting ways with him until he starts hitting at some level or he shows he absolutely cannot play left field. He saw his first time there in Buffalo on Tuesday; the Mets should spend the rest of the month trying to figure out if they can make that work. If it does, he’ll be back in the lineup in the Majors.

Valdespin now looks like he has a Major League future of some sort, but I suspect his offense will regress this year and the Mets will want him to learn to be more patient. And I’d be pretty surprised if Bay’s on the roster to start next season, sunk cost be damned.

So if you’re playing at home, the guy I have as most likely to start Opening Day next year is one of the two currently in Triple-A. Weird. Whatever. Who’ve you got?

Jason Bay started in left field for the Mets last night after missing all but one at-bat’s worth of the last two games with a shin injury. He went 0-for-4 with a walk and two strikeouts and left an orchestra on base. Since returning from the disabled list on July 17, Bay is hitting .093 with a .204 on-base percentage and one extra-base hit — a home run against the Nats in his second game back. Though it’s still only a 121 at-bat sample, he now has a .531 OPS for the year, the lowest it has been after more than five games in any season of his career.

Bay is a really nice guy. By nearly all accounts, he’s dedicated to improving himself and working as hard as he did in the strong seasons that earned him the four-year, $66 million contract with a vesting option for 2014 he inked with the Mets before 2010. He is purportedly a very good teammate and, when he’s not struggling, he is hailed as a leader in the clubhouse. And the Mets are still on the hook for all $16 million of Bay’s 2013 salary and the $3 million buyout on the option.

But something has to give. This doesn’t seem revelatory to anyone who has watched Bay struggle these past few weeks and these past few years, yet someone or some collection of people in the Mets’ organization is keeping Bay on the roster and starting the bulk of the team’s games.

Why? The Mets are 15-18 in games Bay has started and 36-36 in the others, so they haven’t exactly been way worse with him in the lineup than without him. Maybe that’s a factor, though it doesn’t seem a particularly good one. He hits right-handed on a roster full of lefties. Sure, he has fared worse against lefties this year than every position player who has spent any significant time with the club besides the backup catchers and Kirk Nieuwenhuis (with whom he is about even)But Bay’s handedness must be a consideration. Plus he runs the bases well in the increasingly rare instance he reaches one safely, and he plays sure-handed if not rangy defense in left field. And there’s all that money.

None of those, in isolation or in conjunction with the rest, seems like a good enough reason to keep Bay in the lineup every night or even on the roster. Presumably Sandy Alderson would like to see Bay bounce back to the point where he could find some team somewhere willing to take on even a little of Bay’s salary in a Gary Matthews-type deal, but what could Bay really do in the next two months to convince anyone he’s worth appreciably more than a guy available at the league minimum? Nothing that seems likely after three straight seasons of underwhelming to awful performance, that’s for sure.

The Mets don’t have many appreciably better options, but a case could be made that both the recently dispatched Nieuwenhuis and Lucas Duda offer more advantage to the Mets even against lefties. Duda is not a good defensive outfielder, but he out-hit Bay against lefties this year and seems apt to potentially be such a massive offensive upgrade against righties to mitigate his flaws. Nieuwenhuis struggled against lefties this year and in the Minors last year, but he is likely a better defender than Bay.

But even if you allow that Duda and Nieuwenhuis are in Triple-A to work on fixing the issues preventing them from excelling at the big-league level and that the team is prioritizing their development over its needs at the big-league level, and even if you figure that the team wants to be able to bring Bay to Spring Training next year to see if he’s somehow rejuvenated and ready to contribute somehow before they cut him loose for good, there’s really no justification for starting him against right-handed pitchers like they did last night. With switch-hitting Andres Torres and lefty-hitting Jordany Valdespin and Mike Baxter on the roster, the Mets could field an all-lefty-hitting outfield with strong defense. And Scott Hairston, too, represents a better option against righties than Bay at this point.

If the Mets want to keep Bay around for whatever reason, they should give him the best chance to succeed by playing him only against left-handers. If they’re still interested in winning as many games as they can — and they showed that they are when they held on to Hairston at the trade deadline — there’s just no good excuse to give Bay so much playing time.

Over at Amazin’ Avenue, Chris McShane contends that the Mets were smart not to force trades at the trade deadline. And he’s right. The hoopla and nonsense surrounding the trade deadline (and the Winter Meetings) seem more like facts of life at this point than anything worth lamenting. Plenty of fans — excited or angry or passionate in some way — demand improvements or change, and old and new media fan the flames because it’s something to talk about in the midst of a long season. So it swells to this tremendous tidal wave of silliness. You can surf it or fight it or try to duck it entirely, but it’s coming regardless.

The Mets didn’t trade Scott Hairston. For some reason this pisses people off even though Scott Hairston has been one of the best reasons to watch the Mets all season. Reportedly, they fielded some offers and didn’t hear anything they felt was worth more to their short- or long-term future than the next couple months of Hairston’s lefty-mashing. Since the Mets’ front office seems to be in the business of making reasonable decisions, and since they employ an army of scouts and I don’t, and since they heard what was offered for Hairston and I didn’t, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.