I like many other Mets fans have been upset regarding the Reyes thing. Then this morning I remembered you have the embarrassing Cole Hamels pictures. Took the sting of Reyes being a Marlin away a little bit. Remind people to look at the photos. At least it will give them a quick laugh!

– Cat, via email.

Not only that, but I’ve added one. Go check it out.

And to top it all off, there’s this to consider, from the man himself:

I don’t know what’s happening to me — if this is some sort of Stockholm Syndrome thing or what — but I believe I’m starting to like Cole Hamels. I fear he might be kind of awesome, actually, in his utter and obvious disregard for what various snarky Mets bloggers might think about him. Plus it’s impossible to ignore that he’s just really, really good at pitching.

Over at Mets Minor League Blog, Toby Hyde looks at the Mets’ top center-field prospects. Presumably Andres Torres, who’ll be 34 on Opening Day, is not the long-term solution.

I’ve seen a few fans wondering already why the team, unlikely as it is to contend in 2012, wouldn’t just hand the starting job to Kirk Nieuwenhuis. I chatted with Toby about it this morning and he confirmed what I was thinking: First, and most obviously, Nieuwenhuis is coming off season-ending surgery, so there’s no reason to rush him back to full health at the big-league level.

Second — and this speaks to the larger point about not rushing prospects in general — baseball is tough enough as it is, and there’s no sense in overwhelming a player by forcing him to compete at a level he might not be prepared for. Plus there’s the whole arbitration-clock issue, for what that’s worth.

Unless Nieuwenhuis shows up in Spring Training fully recovered, then turns tons of heads with his Grapefruit League performance, he’s likely ticketed for at least another month or two in Buffalo. If goes to Triple-A and again plays like he did in the couple of months of 2011, I suspect we’ll see him in Flushing before long.

In Torres, the Mets have a veteran stopgap and switch-hitter who can play all three outfield positions and slide into a fourth outfielder role if and when Nieuwenhuis or any other young Met is ready to command center field at Citi.

The one interesting thing I can find looking at Jon Rauch is that he had a seriously down year in terms of infield flyball rate and HR/FB, both of which fluctuate a lot in general. Now, it could mean that he was unlucky or it could mean that he was leaving a lot of balls up and getting punished. For whatever it’s worth, looking at pitch fx data, he threw fewer pitches in the middle of the zone (which I’m arbitrarily defining as a full baseball’s width from the edge of the strike zone in all directions) in 2010 than in ’09, and fewer in far fewer in 2011 than he did in either. He was, however, missing the zone a lot more, going from between 53 and 55% every year from ’07-’10 down to 50.3% last year. To some extent, this probably goes together, since he was pitching away from the middle of the plate. Still, it seems to suggest he may have just been unlucky.

Frank Francisco actually had the same thing with the off year with IFFB and HR/FB, which makes me wonder if I’ve reverse-engineered the Mets’ recipe here. But he also left a lot more pitches out over the plate than he did in the three (good) years before last.

– Seth, comments section here.

Interesting, and probably worth noting. Could easily be a coincidence, too.

Also worth noting on Francisco, from Dustin Parkes at The Score:

A glance at his numbers for the whole of last season may not impress many, but it should be remembered that he missed most of Spring Training, and because of Rauch’s failings combined with the realization of Octavio Dotel’s one dimensionability, he was likely rushed back from the Disabled List and hurried through his rehab stints. As a result, Toronto didn’t get a glimpse of the real Francisco until mid-season when he finally began delivering on the promise that made the Blue Jays trade Mike Napoli for him before the season started.

After a brutal first half, Francisco posted a 1.37 ERA with a 6:1 K:BB ratio in 24 1/3 innings after the All-Star Break last season. Small sample, though, and his full season line didn’t wind up looking all that different than the ones he posted from 2008-2010.

Within the last hour, the Mets traded Angel Pagan to the Giants for Andres Torres and Ramon Ramirez, signed Frank Francisco to a two-year deal and signed Jon Rauch to a one-year deal.

Whoa.

OK, a lot to digest here, and some more of that’s going to happen in the morning. The trade seems like a fair one: Pagan and Torres both enjoyed career years in 2010 then rough years in 2011, though Pagan seemed to endure some tough luck thanks to batting average on balls in play where Torres did not. When everything’s going well they’re reasonably similar players, but since Pagan is several years younger he seems a safer bet to bounce back. Torres, for what it’s worth, is under team control through arbitration for an extra year.

But the Mets get Ramirez as well, which balances out the age difference between Pagan and Torres. None of Ramirez’s rate stats jump off the page, but he’s doing something right: He has a stellar career 139 ERA+ over 364 1/3 innings of relief work. Someone will inevitably mention — as they probably should, and as I am now — that Ramirez has traditionally underperformed ERA estimators like FIP and xFIP, but the longer he does it, I suppose, the more reasonable it seems to guess that he’ll keep it up.

Francisco’s deal is reportedly worth $12 million over two years, which probably means he’ll be the closer. He’s filled that role in part seasons before for Texas and Toronto, and should be fine in it for the Mets. He strikes out a ton of dudes and allows perhaps a few more baserunners than we’d all like, but given the deal Heath Bell got, Francisco seems like a bargain at that rate.

Rauch is extremely tall and not especially good. He’s one of the aforementioned free-agent relievers that’s not obviously better than Manny Acosta. He has had nice seasons in the past and outside of a rough campaign in 2011 he hasn’t been awful, but with the additions of Francisco and Ramirez today he actually seems superfluous.

Maybe the Mets are planning on re-signing Chris Young and need someone to guard him in pickup basketball games. Either way, Rauch isn’t a huge mistake at one year and $3.5 million since he should be decent out of the bullpen, but it seems odd to invest anything in middle-innings relievers.

I suppose that leaves the bullpen looking something like: Francisco, Ramirez, Rauch, Acosta, Bobby Parnell, Tim Byrdak and, I don’t know… Pedro Beato? DJ Carrasco? Daniel Herrera? Longman McGee? I guess there’s no reason to settle on the 12th pitcher in December. Plus there’s a solid chance more trades will be made. Hell, at this rate there’s a strong possibility more trades have been made while I’ve been writing this.

Also worth noting: Defensive metrics sweat Torres hard. UZR is crushing on Andres Torres like a screaming, fainting girl over the Beatles in 1965. Pagan’s UZR dipped a bunch in 2011, so by Fangraphs’ WAR — which heavily weighs UZR — Torres had a significantly better season than Pagan. I don’t know if that’s the type of thing I’d expect to continue, though it certainly can’t hurt to bring in guys who rate so well defensively.

But more on all of it in the morning, provided the Mets haven’t made six or seven more moves by then.

This is the new NL East. The Mets are poor. The Marlins are rich. It’s a place where you put mustard in your coffee, and cream and sugar on your sandwich. But don’t get used to the Mets being poor. They’ll have gobs and gobs of money soon enough, regardless of who owns them. There are too many eyeballs in New York for the Mets to not make money.

And the Phillies leveraged their run of success into something more, becoming a brand, a thing, in a huge metropolitan area. Even though they’ve committed millions and millions of dollars to players in their 30s through 2015, they’re not going to start a fire sale soon. The Braves have never been wild spenders, but they’ve combined a peerless player-development operation with enough money to do most of what they want.

The NL East has become the super-division of baseball. Every division has a spendthrift in their midsts other than the East. It’s the first division where when Free Agent X hits the market, you can make an argument that every team in one division could be after him. The three-way scrum between the Yankees, Red Sox, and Rays has been wildly entertaining over the past few years, but there’s a chance that, one day, all five teams in the NL East will be involved in a crazy arms race, with mutually assured destruction always on the table for at least three teams.

– Grant Brisbee, SBNation.com.

Good read from Brisbee. But as he concludes, let’s wait until the Mets get rich again and the Marlins and Nationals actually get good before we go nuts with it.