We’ve got four or five guys that I would call ‘above the line,’ that we could go into the season with, in the rotation.

– Sandy Alderson.

This comment led to a lot of speculation about where exactly “the line” is. I doubt Alderson was letting us on to the team’s internal calculations or whatever. He probably just meant the Mets have four or five guys they consider Major League starters — Jon Niese, R.A. Dickey, Mike Pelfrey, Dillon Gee and Johan Santana.

And obviously that’s got people fired up, because people want to argue that Mike Pelfrey is less than a viable member of a Major League rotation. Pelfrey had a bad year, but for reasons discussed three months ago, he should be offered arbitration and brought back in 2012.

Is that rotation a great one? Hardly. But is it so bad it will single-handedly prevent the Mets from competing in 2012?

Not at all. If you’re looking for an example of a team that can win with a good offense and a bunch of innings-eater types, look no further than the reigning World Champions.

I know Chris Carpenter has the “True No. 1 Ace Bigtime Frontline Show-Pony” label everyone craves in a pitcher, but Carpenter posted an 105 ERA+ in 2011. The Cardinals’ best pitcher on the season was Kyle Lohse, who sported a 107 ERA+.

Mostly, the Cardinals got innings from their starters. Lohse, Jaime Garcia and Jake Westbrook each turned in over 180 frames, and the 36-year-old Carpenter was good for 237 1/3. By ERA, Cardinals starters were eighth in the National League. The Mets’ group finished 10th.

The Cardinals made the playoffs because they had by far the best offense in the National League and a pitching staff good enough to keep the team in games. Remember: The object is only to score more runs than your opponents. There’s no real set formula for the way you have to do that.

So yeah, while the Mets’ pitching staff could stand to improve, signing free-agent starters is almost always a terrible idea. And since any upgrade available via trade would likely cost the Mets a ton in terms of young players, their best approach for 2012 is to try to improve the team’s offense and defense and hope the pitching holds together.

Of course, it’s going to take a lot of work and a couple of big bounce-back years for the Mets’ offense in 2012 to hit anything like the way the Cardinals did in 2011. But that’s at least easier to imagine than Niese, Pelfrey and Gee pitching like Halladay, Hamels and Lee.

Moving sucks and everything hurts. I’m back in the office today, trying not to think of all the boxes piled up in my new apartment waiting to be unpacked.

While I was without the Internet, the Mets apparently announced they’re reconfiguring the Citi Field walls. Presumably you knew that already. But maybe you haven’t yet checked out Gerard Schifman’s work at Roosevelt Avenue Rant, investigating Citi Field’s effects on line-drive hitters. His big finish:

You’ll notice that as LD% goes up, less home runs are hit both on the road and at home.  On the road, Slugging remains fairly constant, slightly decreasing as LD% increases.  But at Citi Field, as LD% goes up, fewer home runs are hit and Slugging hugely decreases.  So no, it doesn’t appear that the Mets have regained any total bases as a result of the ballpark’s dimensions, further justifying the forthcoming changes.  The BABIP and Slugging differences show us that the ballpark is currently the punchless hitter’s dream.  Hopefully now, with reconfigured dimensions, the Mets can channel their inner Ike Davis a little more than their inner Luis Castillo in 2012.

Originally posted July 27, 2011:

I started and scrapped this post a couple times. To be honest, I tried to pre-write it the way newspapers do with celebrity obituaries, though by the time I got around to actually doing so the news of Carlos Beltran’s trade had already started to leak out. And I meant to hold off on publishing it until the deal was made official, but now Beltran is out of the Mets’ lineup tonight and it sounds by all accounts like the announcement is a mere formality.

The first draft included an introduction explaining how real sadness is universal and comes in near-infinite supply, and how in that context Beltran’s departure is not really sad at all. But that’s patronizing. Presumably you know that sadness is a relative thing, and you can distinguish sadness for actual tragedies from the sadness we feel when a favorite baseball player is traded across the country to play out the final few months of his contract with a new team.

There’s no good reason to dwell on it now regardless. Any Mets fan paying attention the last couple of months has heard about and likely reasoned through Beltran’s being moved, a deal that makes a whole lot of sense for a club with little chance of a postseason berth in 2011.

In the trade with the Giants, Sandy Alderson reportedly scored Zack Wheeler, a young player better than the ones many – especially me – expected the Mets would get in return for Beltran. Wheeler is a Single-A pitcher so he’s still a ways off from contributing in the big leagues, but he’s a former first-round draft pick twice ranked in Baseball America’s top 100 prospects and with over 10 strikeouts per nine innings in the Minors.

And Beltran’s exit provides one final excuse to celebrate the man’s career in Flushing. In his tenure with the Mets, Beltran played 831 games. He hit 148 home runs, drove in 552 runs, stole 100 bases, and posted an .867 OPS. Statistically, his 2006 campaign stands among the very best seasons any position player has ever provided the club. He ranks in the team’s all time Top 10 of too many categories to bother listing.

That feels like it’s somehow understating it though, no?

Not long ago, a Kansas City Star reporter wrote, “If you want to know how to approach the game, teammates or life, watch Jeff Francoeur.” Though the author was merely upholding the rich journalistic tradition of writing ridiculous things about Jeff Francoeur, the comment rightfully inspired a ton of hilarious Internet snark.

Swap in Beltran for Francoeur, though, and the guy has a much better point.

And I don’t mean in terms of off-field stuff. We only think we know baseball players from what little they reveal of themselves to the press and the fans: We heard Terry Collins rave about Beltran’s leadership this year, we read about his charitable efforts and saw the professional way in which he handled every single one of the incessant questions about his future, but for all any of us know Beltran punts puppies on his home from the ballpark.

Let’s accept that we don’t really know Beltran as a person and just think about the ballplayer. Could you imagine what the world would be like if we could all do everything the way Beltran plays baseball? If we demonstrated that same elegance and efficiency in our morning commutes, our jobs, our yardwork? What if we could all stay so calm and so patient under pressure, and remain so humble upon success? What a place that would be!

Or would that entire world be mistaken for joyless?

Oh, whatever. I made it this far without mentioning the infernal haters, and it’s probably best to just leave them stewing in their pathetic corners, pissed about whatever it is they’ve chosen to be pissed about next. Let’s applaud Beltran now, not waste time defending him from those that will never understand. Know this: People who don’t appreciate Carlos Beltran by now don’t deserve to.

I’m going to rehash the point I made in regards to Jose Reyes earlier this summer. I apologize for repeating myself: What we’ve seen from Beltran is ours to keep forever, no matter what team he’s playing for tomorrow. Carlos Beltran playing baseball at the peak of his ability is a beautiful sight to behold, and we got to watch it hundreds of times.

The sad thing about baseball is that greatness is fleeting. The awesome thing about baseball – or one of the many, at least – is that more great players and great moments are always on the way. Who knows? Maybe Zack Wheeler is one of them.

So Beltran is off to San Francisco to put the Giants’ putrid offense on his shoulders, and we’ll watch him in the playoffs then hear unsubstantiated and likely fruitless rumors that the Mets are pursuing him in the offseason.

I’m not sure how to wrap this up. Last time through I had some dumb story about the old-man version of me, 30 years in the future, describing Beltran to some punk kid. But it sucked and now I’ve got a train to catch. So we move forward.

Originally posted June 15, 2011:

A white-haired couple got on the train yesterday and stepped toward the first pair of open seats while I fumbled with my headphones. The woman sat first, across from me, then grabbed her husband’s hand and steadied him down into the seat next to mine.

“It just hurts sometimes,” he said. Then he leaned toward me and smiled. “Never get old.”

“Hey, beats the alternative,” I said.

———————————————————————————————————

My brother would have loved Jose Reyes. Who could blame him, really?

Hold up. I’m going to get to the personal part of this post in a minute, but I want to focus on Reyes first.

Let’s pretend for one moment that we could all manage to successfully tune out the constant speculative noise surrounding Reyes, and that we have the capacity to put everything else aside to just appreciate the things Jose Reyes is doing on baseball fields around the country.

Holy hell. Have you ever seen anything like this?

There’s Jose Reyes lashing a liner in the gap, bounding out of the box. Jose Reyes stealing second, stealing third. Jose Reyes diving to his left to stop a hard grounder, Jose Reyes firing the ball across the diamond from deep in the hole.

Jose Reyes is dancing off the base, in the corner of the pitcher’s eye and the front of his consciousness. He’s chasing down a pop-up near the foul line in left field. Jose Reyes is celebrating in the dugout and he’s looming on deck. Jose Reyes just smashed a frozen rope past your office window and now he’s sprinting through your backyard. Look to your left: It’s Jose Reyes. Now to the right: Jose Reyes. Jose Reyes, Jose Reyes, Jose Reyes.

This is your summer blockbuster: The Jose Reyes Spectacular.

Only they don’t often make movies this grand and this good, the type you can watch over and over again and still find new details to appreciate: minor plot points, aesthetic intricacies. It is a production massive in scope and so richly rendered in every particular, like the work of a great auteur afforded an unlimited budget and – oh dammit, there’s that money thing we’re avoiding.

My brother Chris loved triples, even more than most. He had what you might call the triples mentality, if not the requisite speed. The way Reyes aims for third base so brazenly on hits that seem certain to be doubles, the irrepressible gusto of it – that was the approach Chris took to pretty much everything.

And I know he was my big brother and I probably aggrandize him a bit, especially now that he’s been gone almost nine years. But when I run into his old friends, they practically tell Bill Brasky stories about the guy: about his exploits in sports, in frat-house shenanigans, even in school.

Apparently, he once took a class at MIT in which teams of students were charged with creating the best design for a machine to lift panels of sheetrock. At the course’s outset, the professor joked that any student who could lift the sheetrock on his own would be excused from the assignment. So Chris – according to the story – marched down to the front of the lecture hall, lifted the sheetrock above his head and carried it out of the room. He returned for the next class and his team ultimately won the contest.

I have no way of verifying if the story is real or apocryphal, and a quick Google search tells me panels of sheetrock weigh about 80 pounds – unwieldy, perhaps, but certainly well within the range of normal human strength. But regardless of its accuracy, the story sums up my brother pretty nicely. He was competitive, cocky, funny, brilliant, ox-strong and doorway-wide.

He was the type of dude it would have been easy to envy if he weren’t always so damn awesome to me. Other than his abject refusal to let me win at anything, Chris provided me everything an older brother could, from guidance and big-picture life lessons to mixtapes, and beer when I was underage (sorry, mom).

More than anything, though, he gave me baseball. He taught me the rules, players and teams. He bought me cards and taught me how to scale them. When he was old enough to drive, he took me to games. Tons of them. Though eventually Chris and I differed on certain finer points, he is responsible for the very fundamentals of how I watch and appreciate the game. After all, he’s responsible for me watching and appreciating the game.

Late in the summer of 2002, Chris moved from his home in Boston to my parents’ house, to a hospital bed set up in our living room. What started as melanoma on his shoulder had spread through his body and into his brain. We knew – though we never said it out loud – he was dying, and it became clear it was easiest for everyone to let him do it there. Weird time.

The best I can figure it was Saturday, Aug. 31, when I watched my last game with my brother. Baseball-reference tells me the Mets lost a 1-0 tilt to the Phillies, an unlikely pitchers’ duel between Randy Wolf and Steve Trachsel.

I can’t recall any of it. All I remember is that I was charged with carrying my brother from a wheelchair to the easy chair in the den where he would watch the game. And I remember how light he was, how frail he felt – this guy who weighed 230 pounds just a year earlier, the football stud with the broad shoulders, my big brother. And I could feel the cancer just under his skin, invasive little bumps. It was everywhere, and terrifying.

The next day I packed up my car, told my brother I loved him, and headed off for my senior year of college. He died two days later.

I skipped the Mets’ home opener in 2003, the first I missed in 16 years of being a Mets fan. Soon after I graduated and moved back home, the Mets called up their top prospect – the 19-year-old shortstop, you know the guy.

It is only now, eight years later, that I realize Chris never saw Reyes play. Or David Wright, for that matter, but he would have hated Wright – that’s a different story. A whole generation of Mets players have come up and grown up before me without him there to share it. And now, maybe, they’re going away. It’s… well, it’s strange to think about.

But he would have loved Reyes. Of that much I am sure. Hell, we all love Reyes.

We love him. We watched him develop, and we have seen so many of his trials and triumphs. We know the way he gets when he’s happy, when he’s sulky, when he’s angry, when he’s jubilant. He feels, well, almost like family.

Note that I say almost like family, which is very different than actually being family. We are not actually related to Jose Reyes and the love we feel for him as fans is not the love we have for our real-life loved ones. Obviously. And the prospect of losing Reyes, weighing so heavily on the minds of Mets fans these days, is not the same as losing a family member. You don’t have to remind me.

But it is, on the orderly plane that baseball provides for us to try to sort some of these things out, some distant, more palatable version of that. Here is someone you love. And now, due to circumstances beyond your control, you might lose him too soon.

So understandably, Mets fans gather on blogs, in the airwaves and out on the Shea Bridge on Friday nights desperate to show the world their love for this great player, underscoring the pain we will feel if he leaves for some other green pasture elsewhere.

I can’t say if Reyes will be a Met at the end of this season or the beginning of the next one. Few can. And while I’m not as resigned to his departure as many in the media and fanbase, I know this for certain: He’ll be gone someday. Everything goes away eventually. If not next year for Reyes, then five or seven or ten years down the road.

We can lament the hand Reyes – and all of us, really – has been dealt, with so many of his best years wasted by a subpar front office, bad players around him, crappy bullpens, mishandled injuries, everything. Not to mention his contract coming up now, with the Mets in financial flux and hamstrung by a slew of bad deals. That all sucks, no doubt.

But we should celebrate, too, that we have this right now. No matter what happens with Reyes later this year or after the season, the special things Reyes has done and is doing every night this season are some we can carry forever. It is an awesome spectacle, a confluence of immense talent and pure joy on the baseball field, with the churning legs and flying dreadlocks and beaming smile. This is ours to keep.

And I can sit here now regretting that my brother never got to see this, knowing how much he would have loved it. But that’s useless. Besides, I carry with me my brother’s love of baseball. I carry him every day, and it’s not traumatic; it’s awesome. He exists now as an inextricable part of me, a part I can celebrate.

We are alive and we get to enjoy Jose Reyes playing baseball. It beats the alternative.