In the comments section for my notes on free-agent second basemen yesterday, Tom wrote:

Felipe Lopez is not the answer. There are reasons why he keeps getting moved.

I’m not trying to go after Tom here because I’m certainly not in any position to alienate readers of this site. Plus I’m not entirely certain what Tom was getting at. Perhaps he has specific reasons in mind, though he didn’t elaborate.

I mention because I’m often faced with similar rhetoric from readers when I wonder about a player I perceive to be undervalued or overlooked.

“If Player X is so good,” they write, “then how come nobody wants him?’

Often the e-mails or comments or whatever are tagged with nasty insults about how there are also reasons I’m not a Major League GM or professional baseball player and how I clearly do not know what I’m talking about. I won’t argue those.

As for the other thing, though, well, yeah. In every case, there probably are reasons nobody wants a player. And maybe some of them are good reasons. But maybe some of them are bad, too, and I don’t have nearly enough faith in the system to assume that every decision made by a Major League front office is a good one.

That doesn’t just go for baseball, either. I don’t know that I’ve ever worked in any level at any job and been able to say confidently that the people in charge were consistently making the best decisions. And most of those businesses were run by very, very smart people.

But they’re people, and one of the main things about people is that they screw things up all the time.

I’m not saying I don’t, obviously. I’ve said it before: If my actions and decisions were monitored and documented as closely as those of a Major League player or general manager, I’d be booed on the streets of Manhattan.

And to some extent, I do believe in baseball front offices, because it’s pretty impressive that all 30 clubs, operating with various budgets, can routinely put together teams that win at least 40 percent of their games against big-league opponents. Certainly some front offices are better at compiling winning teams than others, but no team completely embarrasses itself year-in and year-out.

Still, if you blindly believe that every decision made by every Major League club is the correct one, you’ve probably come to the wrong place. I’m not going to discourage you from reading, because I appreciate your time and traffic, but you’re not going to be happy with a lot of what you read here.

So yes, there probably are a lot of reasons teams keep moving Felipe Lopez. But this site is for trying to figure out exactly what those reasons are, and, more importantly, whether they are enough to account for the difference between what Lopez and Orlando Hudson will eventually get paid.

Carlos Beltran will appear on the season premiere of Mets Hot Stove tomorrow at 7 p.m. on SNY.

Kevin Burkhardt will be back as host of the show. He’ll be joined by Newsday’s David Lennon, WFAN’s Ed Coleman, and Jon Heyman.

The series premiere of Mets Yearbook will follow at 7:30, featuring the Mets’ 1971 season in review. The show contains Old Timers’ Day footage of Satchel Paige pitching, which I’m guessing is awesome.

Video from Mets Hot Stove will be available shortly after the show on SNY.tv.

A lot of the offseason hubbub so far has suggested that the Mets will pursue free-agent second basemen, assuming, of course, they can find a taker for Luis Castillo.

That’s fine, I suppose, though I wonder if signing Orlando Hudson to a multi-year deal would be more akin to repeating the Luis Castillo mistake than undoing it.

There’s also talk the Mets could pursue Chone Figgins partly because of his ability to play second base, but though Figgins is a tremendous defensive third baseman, he hasn’t played more than nine games at second in a season since 2005 and even back then, in a small sample, he wasn’t overwhelmingly good at it.

And paying Figgins the rate he deserves as a Gold Glove-caliber third baseman just to move him to a corner outfield position, where his bat would be below-average, would be a blisteringly bad decision. He’s a good player, but a lot of his value is wrapped up in his versatility and strong defense at third. Planting him in left field absorbs most of that value.

The most baffling thing, I think, is that I have yet to see a single journalist link the Mets to Felipe Lopez. Maybe I’m missing something, but Lopez was actually better than Hudson this year and is two and a half years younger.

He’s been inconsistent across his career, which could scare the Mets off, but his only really terrible year at the plate came in 2007, when his BABIP was .036 below his career average. That means he was probably a bit unlucky.

I’m not advocating Lopez for the Mets, I’m just noting how surprising it is that his name hasn’t come up. If they actually can part with Castillo and Lopez’s demands are lower than Hudson’s, he seems — on the surface, at least — like a smarter pickup.

Adam Rubin wrote today that the Mets hope to re-sign Alex Cora, a player who probably inspires five times as much debate around this office as anyone else.

This debate, I should mention, almost always features me.

So much was made about what Alex Cora brought to the Mets’ clubhouse this year, and I’m not going to argue otherwise. By all accounts, he’s a nice guy and a smart player and will make a great coach someday.

The problem is he’s not very good at baseball anymore.

Cora played much of 2009 with torn ligaments in his thumbs, which might excuse the .630 OPS he posted in over 300 plate appearances. The problem is, that line is not really that far off Cora’s career .658 mark, and unsurprising given the expected decline of a 33-year-old player.

Moreover, depending on which metric you prefer, Cora played somewhere between average and below-average defense at second base and shortstop. To the eye, he demonstrated a lack of range that likely affected the Mets’ groundball pitchers like Mike Pelfrey and Sean Green.

The co-worker with whom I usually engage in this debate argues that Cora’s deficiencies on the field are more than made up for by his additions to the clubhouse, and claims that to build a winning team, the Mets need more character guys like Alex Cora.

Far be it for me to say a team doesn’t need character guys, but if it does, it should be able to acquire ones who are above replacement-level. And Cora isn’t.

I like to believe that, on a good and successful ballclub, character guys will surface and in nearly any group dynamic, leaders will emerge. In other words, I don’t think a team should be in the business of acquiring leaders or clubhouse guys. I think the team should focus on acquiring the 25 best players it can to fill out its roster rather than building a team on what Theo Epstein might call “psychobabble.”

If Alex Cora could be had at the league minimum, then sure, why not? He could be a helpful guy to have around during Spring Training and if he could prove he merited a spot on the roster, great.

But Alex Cora will not be had at the league minimum, and that’s the problem. Cora cost the Mets $2 million last season, and the Mets — as Rubin points out — are operating with a finite budget.

Every time I post this criticism, someone jumps down my throat and argues that $2 million is a drop in the Mets’ payroll bucket and should not be the difference between signing a bigger-name free agent or not.

Maybe that’s so, but consistently dropping $2 million on players of Cora’s caliber, ones that could by definition be replaced by someone earning the league minimum, adds up. It does. I know we all want the Mets to be able to spend like the Yankees, but until they do, we need to root for them to spend more efficiently.

Finally, with Jose Reyes still something of a question mark moving forward, the Mets should have a backup plan in place that’s better than Alex Cora.

Certainly the best-case scenario for the club would have Reyes playing 150 games at shortstop like he did every year from 2005 to 2008. But though Reyes is supposedly on the mend, his injuries have beguiled the Mets before, and it would behoove the team to have a backup in house who could at least defend the position well, if not also hit a little bit.

If the Mets are so gung-ho on Cora returning to their clubhouse, there’s a bench coach position still waiting to be filled.