I mention the Mets’ need for outfielders pretty frequently here, what with the Mets desperately needing outfielders and all. What I haven’t discussed since the offseason is their need for relief pitchers, mostly because relief pitchers should be easier to find on the cheap than outfielders.

The way I figure it, as it currently stands the Mets’ Opening Day bullpen would include Frank Francisco, Bobby Parnell, Josh Edgin and four pitchers from a group that includes Greg Burke, Jeremy Hefner, Collin McHugh, Elvin Ramirez, Robert Carson, Jeurys Familia, Jenrry Mejia, and Gonzalez Germen.

So youth is on their side, at least. And I don’t think that group would necessarily make for as bad of a bullpen as it looks on paper, given their lack of Major League experience. Hefner and McHugh can both throw strikes in a long-relief role, Burke and Ramirez both succeeded in Minor League bullpens last year, and Carson, Familia and Mejia all throw hard. I know next to nothing about Gonzalez Germen.

But neither Burke nor Ramirez has done much in the Majors yet, both Familia and Mejia should probably be starting games in Triple-A at the season’s outset, and Carson looked pretty hittable in the Minors in 2012.

Still, I’m finishing this post with a different conclusion than I thought I’d reach. The Mets probably need one steady bullpen arm and maybe a few guys on non-roster invites to compete for a job to create a reasonable big-league bullpen, but not the complete revamp I figured. Parnell’s good, Francisco underperformed his peripherals in 2012 and should bounce back a bit, and Edgin appears promising. Burke’s dominance in the Minors in 2012 suggests he can probably hold down a big-league job. So if the Mets brought in just one guy they can be reasonably confident will be a good reliever in 2013, they could let Hefner and McHugh battle for the long-man job in Spring Training, set Familia, Mejia and Germen for starting roles in the Minors and throw the remaining job up for grabs among every other pitcher they’ve got in camp.

Of course, last year the Mets brought in several guys they were reasonably confidence would be good relievers and it didn’t work out very smoothly. Going with a group of mostly younger guys, in-house options and scrap-heap finds seems apt to serve them at least as well without costing them most of their offseason resources.

I tried my best to keep up with all the talk from the Winter Meetings, I promise. But I had some other stuff to do today and spent about an hour not feverishly refreshing MetsBlog, MLB Trade Rumors and Twitter, and it got away from me.

At some point, something’s going to happen with R.A. Dickey. Or nothing will happen, and the Mets will have an awesome pitcher on an extremely favorable salary and the flexibility to try to trade him or re-sign him later in the season.

The Mets are also reportedly working on a trade for an outfielder that does not involve Dickey, which is good because the Mets don’t have many outfielders. Maybe the deal will be good or maybe it’ll be bad, but we’ll certainly find out all about it when it happens. That is assuming it happens. If it doesn’t happen, we may still hear about it or not, but it won’t really matter.

Which is all to say that I’ve come to the hour of my annual Winter Meetings fatigue, the moment when I give up on looking into the sausage factory and just start waiting for the sausage.

Here’s an exhaustive Winter Meetings rundown: Maybe the Mets trade Dickey, maybe they don’t. Maybe they trade Jon Niese, maybe they don’t. Maybe they trade someone else or maybe they make no trades at all. Maybe they sign Dickey to a contract extension. Maybe they sign a free agent or two. Maybe they don’t. That all could or might happen, and it’s certainly all stuff the Mets have considered.

And we’ll definitely know what they’ve done come April, when the Mets start playing games and a bunch of guys in blue and orange uniforms trot out to the field. Until then, there’s really no rush for the Mets or us.

This is nothing new, of course. And it’s not like I’m planning to stop tracking the rumors when they come. The frustrating part, I suppose, is merely how worked up so many of us allow ourselves to get over rumors that sometimes seem based on the most tenuous of information. Grant Brisbee said it well at Baseball Nation:

[T]his sequence makes you step back, slowly take off your sunglasses, and mutter, “My god. This is what just about every rumor is, isn’t it?” The explanation allowed for a peek behind the curtain. There’s no sliding scale of importance, no way to make a rumor directly from a GM’s mouth show up as a special green color in Twitter. Rumors come from agents looking to spread disinformation when it benefits their clients, teams looking to spread disinformation when it benefits their negotiations, and I’d wager that more than a few come from offhand comments from low-level people that make a rumormonger think, well, I gotta tweet something this hour.

This is all nonsense.

This makes me think of people sitting in a theater at the turn of the 20th century, excited to watch the moving pictures that everyone was talking about, and then freaking the hell out when they thought a train was going to come out of the screen and kill everyone in the theater. Except people got used to that technology. But the freakouts keep happening with Twitter. Over and over, at every trade deadline and every Winter Meetings.

Those of us following nonsense and linking to nonsense and retweeting nonsense are about as guilty as those dishing it out, since it is served for our benefit and we wolf it down. And every year it’s fun for a while, then every year it all turns into tiresome noise. Here we are.

Maybe the Mets sign R.A. Dickey to a contract extension. Maybe they trade him. Maybe they don’t. Same as last week.

Rumors have it the Mets would be willing to sign Ryan Ludwick to a two-year deal, for whatever that’s worth. Ludwick hits right-handed, has power, and plays the outfield, so he’d fill a lot of the Mets’ most pressing needs. And he’s coming off a very nice year for the Reds.

But Ludwick is 34 and only one season removed from being essentially a replacement-level player. Twitter fellow and thinking baseball human Marc Normandin suggested Ludwick especially struggles in pitchers’ parks, which seems difficult to prove but would explain why he cratered upon joining the Padres and revived his career in Cincinnati. And it doesn’t speak well for the Mets’ pursuit of Ludwick unless they plan on bringing the walls in even further.

Moreover, Ludwick is the success story I typically trumpet when arguing on behalf of so-called Quad-A mashers, guys who always seem to destroy Minor League pitching but never get prolonged looks in the Majors. Ludwick didn’t settle into the Cardinals’ lineup until he was 28, and the Cardinals were the fifth organization for which he played.

So it seems to me that the Mets would be better served trying to identify the next Ryan Ludwick rather than committing two years’ worth of guaranteed money to the current Ryan Ludwick. Somewhere, almost certainly, there’s a guy the Mets can have for nearly nothing who can serve as an effective right-handed half of an outfield platoon in the Majors. Maybe he’s not likely to hit as well as Ludwick did in 2007, but it’s far from a safe bet Ludwick will, either.

With some quick searching, I found my horse: Andrew Brown. The 28-year-old Brown notched 112 unspectacular at-bats with the Rockies in 2012, then elected free agency last week after the Rockies removed him from their 40-man roster. Brown bats right-handed, has experience in all four corners, and has hit .296/.373/.551 over the last two seasons in Triple-A with a .314/.416/.564 line against lefties.

Brown’s presented here more as an archetype of what the Mets should be looking for than a specific guy the Mets should be signing, and for all I know there are 10 teams currently bidding for Andrew Brown’s services. But if Brown’s looking for Major League playing time, it’s hard to figure a better spot for an unproven righty-hitting corner outfielder than Queens right now.

Naturally, this all flies out the window if the Mets trade for Wil Myers and re-sign Scott Hairston.

A few items of note:

Alderson asks for Bradley and Bogaerts: Sandy Alderson produced a lot of Internet LOLs and incredulity when he asked the Red Sox for prospects Xander Bogaerts and Jackie Bradley, Jr. in a trade for R.A. Dickey. But if you’re going by what Dave Cameron reasoned through yesterday, that is exactly what Alderson should be requesting for Dickey. Per Jonathan Mayo, Boegarts and Bradley are the Sox’ No.1 and 3 prospects, respectively. Asking for that much at the beginning of negotiations hardly implies any sort of dark Mets conspiracy to keep Dickey drawing fans to Flushing in 2012. Alderson’s merely setting the bar high, as he absolutely should. If the Sox ultimately counter-offer with one of those two guys and a couple of slightly lesser (but closer to Major League ready) prospects, maybe there’s a deal to be made.

Wil Myers deemed “flavor of the moment:” This isn’t to target Andy Martino, merely the lines of thought expressed in his Tweet that seem somewhat common among Mets fans and media. Thing is, sometimes the flavor of the moment is really good. Has anyone had the seasonal Coffee and Doughnuts custard at Shake Shack? Outstanding.

More importantly, I don’t know that the Royals’ apparent willingness to move Myers should necessarily imply anything about his prospects. For one thing, the Royals are the team that signed Jeff Francoeur to a three-year contract, so it’s difficult to attribute much logical thinking to their front office. For another, if they’re really dangling him for pitching, they’re only doing the same thing a lot of us want the Mets to do: Trying to deal from an organizational strength to address an organizational weakness. If the Mets are taking calls on Dickey and Jon Niese, does that mean they’re down on Dickey and Niese? Sure doesn’t seem that way.

Scott Hairston deems his return to Mets “probable:” Good. Hairston’s return seemed unlikely as recently as a few weeks ago, when the Yankees were supposedly hot and heavy for the outfielder. But Hairston fits the Mets’ needs as well as anyone, and if he could be had on a reasonable deal, he should have no trouble finding the at-bats and playing time he’s looking for at Citi Field. Hairston was the Mets’ second best hitter last year, and he seems to hit awesome home runs at the awesomest times.

Nats sign Dan Haren for one year, $13 million: Oof. Seems like a strong move for the already pitching-rich Nationals. There are some red flags surrounding Haren — his struggles and diminished fastball velocity in 2012 first among them. But Haren was one of the best pitchers in the Majors just a couple years ago, and he still pitched like a quality back-of-the-rotation starter this season — which is all the Nats really need him to be. The deal’s not unlike the one Edwin Jackson signed last offseason, benefiting the team as the pitcher tries to prove he’s worth a multi-year contract the next year. Haren’s got more upside than Jackson, though, and a rotation of Stephen Strasburg, Gio Gonzalez, Jordan Zimmerman, Ross Detwiler and Haren makes the Nats appear the early favorites to repeat in the N.L. East.

Everyone wants Dickey: Jon Heyman reports that at least eight teams have contacted the Mets about R.A. Dickey. Of them, it’s hard to find great fits beyond the ones we most frequently talk about — the Royals, Red Sox and Blue Jays. But there might be something to be done with the Dodgers, who have a whole slew of moderately interesting players at positions the Mets need who crushed the ball in Triple-A last year. None of them is terribly young, though, and the Dodgers’ Triple-A home in Albuquerque might be the best hitting environment in affiliated baseball.

Me talking about all this stuff: I’m calling in to MetsBlog Radio at 12:15 p.m. ET to talk Winter Meetings and whatever else comes up. Check it out.