According to a baseball person, Jose Reyes could sign with the Mets as early as next week. A source familiar with the Mets’ thinking says they will offer Reyes a conservative contract they believe adequately compensates the shortstop for the value he will provide the team for the next several years. Reyes can then accept the contract, look elsewhere, or attempt to negotiate.

If Reyes does not sign with the Mets, he could field offers from various other Major League Baseball teams, especially those with payroll flexibility and a need at shortstop. He could sign with one of them soon, or at the Winter Meetings, or later in the offseason. If Reyes does not sign a contract until later in the offseason, he will likely field offers from unaffiliated Minor League teams attempting publicity stunts.

I’d continue with this again, but I don’t have the stomach for it.

Point is, the whole hot stove season — or at least the media coverage of it — is stupid. It’s fun to speculate about what a team might do. But you and me and everyone else with access to Cots and baseball-reference know as much meaningful information about what will happen this offseason as anyone who is not a MLB player agent or front-office decision-maker.

Information leaked out to the press is often leaked out for a reason. And there’s such an overwhelming glut of nonsensical, pointless and utterly unsubstantiated information reported that in the rare event a reporter might actually have a hot scoop, it will be impossible to distinguish from the mire.

Until any deal is done, no one can be certain it will happen. So all offseason baseball coverage is couched with vague language.

I’m reporting this right now: The Mets could trade David Wright but probably won’t. The Mets might sign Jose Reyes. Let me know if you see anything firmer than that published anywhere.

The more interesting discussion, of course, is whether the Mets should trade David Wright and should sign Jose Reyes. And the constant updates on both scenarios, however silly, perpetuate those discussions, however stupid.

I prefer not to repeat myself more than I already have, so here’s this: The Mets should not trade David Wright. They should re-sign Jose Reyes if the price is right. The Mets should offer arbitration to Mike Pelfrey and to Angel Pagan.

There’s a bunch of other stuff they should do, too. We’ll figure that out as it goes along.

Hey, Jose Reyes: You really don’t want to move. Trust me on this one, bro. Moving sucks so hard.

Even if it makes financial sense to move, it’s still going to be a terrible experience. And I know we’re not exactly in the same income-tax bracket, and you’ve got the resources to hire an army of people to help you transport your stuff anywhere.

But the bottom line is it’s your stuff, so you’ve got the most invested in it. And it’s going to be on you and your family to determine where it goes in the new place, not to mention what to keep and what to throw out. Boxes to unpack and all that. Really, no matter how rich you are, there’s just going to be a ton of mental and physical stress involved with moving.

And moving in the winter? Forget about it, Jose. I purposefully moved in late October just to avoid dealing with winter weather, and you know what happened? Six inches of snow the morning I was set to go. I had to shovel when I should have been packing, then the U-Haul place lost power so I couldn’t get the truck I reserved.

I had to scramble to find another one last minute. In the process I very nearly got into a car accident when some guy in a Volvo spun out of control in the Home Depot parking lot. It was just a miserable, terrifying experience, Jose. And with the way the weather has been around here these last few years, man, I just don’t know of any time before the summer that it’d be safe to plan a move without the threat of a blizzard.

And so expensive! Holy hell do those costs add up. I didn’t calculate the total, but I bet it came to something like, I don’t know, 40 million dollars. Yeah, 40 million dollars. It’d be worth staying in my old place unless I stood to make more than 40 million dollars by moving.

Oh, and then you have to wait for the cable guy! Do you remember how much that sucked last time? They give you a four-hour window, then you just have to sit there like some sort of chump until the dude shows up to plug in the box. You can’t even watch TV while you’re sitting there, because you don’t have cable yet. Jose, it’s awful.

So that’s basically my advice to you, Jose Reyes: Do not move no matter what. Isn’t your current home great?

Yeah, moving’s probably the best way to play that one.

I don’t. I should note that my sense of reason is probably skewed a bit by my appreciation for Reyes, so maybe this is me rationalizing my desire to see him back in a Mets uniform.

But the way I see it, elite 28-year-old free agents don’t hit the market all that often, and especially not elite 28-year-old free agents who play one of the positions you most need to fill.

If Reyes stays healthy, he should still be very productive for the next several seasons. A five- or six-year deal may very well mean a couple of seasons on the back end where Reyes makes more than he’s worth. But if the Mets believe that Reyes can stay productive and that they’ll be in position to compete in 2013, 2014 and 2015, then, well, go for it.

Actually, it’s not a terribly different situation than when the Mets signed Carlos Beltran before the 2005 season. The team was not quite poised to compete that season, but reaped the benefits of Beltran’s awesome 2006-2008 campaigns and stayed in the thick of the pennant race each year.

Of course, Beltran was a year younger than Reyes when he signed and didn’t have anything like the injury history. And it’s easy to look back on Beltran’s contract favorably now, in hindsight.

Point is, though, I don’t think signing Reyes would be a win-now move so much as a win-in-the-next-few-years move, and teams with the Mets’ payroll should never be more than a few years from contention. And by the time Reyes’ contract becomes an albatross — as so many free-agent contracts do — the Mets should (hopefully) be well-enough constructed to shoulder the financial blow and still remain flexible.

On his first day of freedom after a grueling five months in an Egyptian jail, Queens native Ilan Grapel got his cruelest punishment — being told the Mets won the 2011 World Series.

Grapel, expected to fly home to Queens today from Israel, was celebrating his release at a press conference in Tel Aviv, flanked by his mother Irene and Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-Queens), when he was pranked.

– Andy Soltis, N.Y. Post.

Wait, that really happened? This dude just got out of Egyptian jail and people just immediately start messing with him?

That’s like waking up from a coma to have someone like, “Good news, Jim! Your dog’s coming to see you. Just kidding: He’s dead.”

It’s not even a good prank. A good prank would be convincing the guy that in the five months he was in jail, the entire borough of Queens suffered from an epidemic that turned half its population into flesh-starved zombies, then having his dad come surging toward him in zombie makeup when he lands at Laguardia.

Actually that might be going too far.