The last-ever episode of The Nooner went up today on SNY.tv.

For a variety of reasons, I can’t quibble with the decision to pull the plug on the show, but I still find it a bit sad.

It’s sad because I spent about the first two hours of every workday for the past 22 months writing jokes for the show, and that’s a whole lot of energy to invest in anything. And getting paid to write comedy has long been a dream of mine, and since writing for The Nooner became part of the job for which I’m salaried, I was able to convince myself that I was, indeed, paid to write jokes.

And it’s sad because we had such high hopes at the start, and I fear we failed on them at least partly because too often the show wasn’t funny enough.

I wrote it in conjunction with Jeff, the show’s producer, and though I’m certain we came up with a good deal of actually funny jokes over the nearly two-year run, it was really, really hard to churn out three minutes a day of entertaining material every single day given how little time we had to create it and the limitations on our content created by this network’s (totally reasonable) standards on decency.

Jeff insists the show worked to a point, and that the fact that it ran for nearly two years and had sponsors for most of that time means it was a success. He’s probably right. It was something good that ran its course, I guess.

But the process grew increasingly tiresome as it became clear that the show was not blowing up like we hoped it would. We found ourselves repeating material a ton, which is a cardinal sin in comedy writing. We wrote so many damn fat jokes about Eddy Curry, then CC Sabathia, then Rex Ryan, then Bengie Molina.

Brittany Umar, the host of the show, was awesome throughout. I don’t know that she had much of a background in comedy before she started working with us, but she picked it up amazingly quick. She’s also incredible at reading a teleprompter, which I can attest is much harder than it looks. Plus she put up with so much of our nonsense, and was game for absolutely everything we asked her to do on camera.

Anyway, the upside to the show’s departure is that the extra couple hours every day should benefit readers of this blog, since I should have a lot more time to think and process what to write in this space. I’m excited about that.

It’s just a little depressing to see a lot of hard work just sort of drift off into cyberspace.

James Kannengieser reacted to some news out of San Francisco that outfielder Fred Lewis could get cut by the Giants with a nice post to Amazin’ Avenue about how Lewis would be a nice upgrade in the Mets’ outfield.

It’s true, and I agree with James, so read his post.

But since I couldn’t figure out why the Giants would cut a player like Lewis, I figured I’d catch up with official TedQuarters San Francisco insider Dailey McDailey for more insight.

Or maybe I just opted to publish a partial transcript of our online discussion. Here it is:

TedQuarters: Word is the Giants are going to straight-up cut Fred Lewis.

Dailey McDailey Honestly, I’d rather he be on a team that would let him play. Bruce Bochy will never give him a chance.

TQ: Bochy doesn’t like him?

DM: Bochy only likes old catchers.

TQ: That makes sense. But aren’t they going to carry like six people significantly worse than Fred Lewis?

DM: More like 10. He was No. 2 on the team in OBP last year. But Andres Torres is a “real” lead off hitter. Eugenio Velez had three good weeks. But he can’t play defense either, because he’s a second baseman. I hate my team. I’d like to [deleted for decency] Brian Sabean, [deleted for decency].

TQ: So their plan to upgrade their offense was to part ways with the guy who was second on the team in OBP last year?

DM: Then [deleted for decency] Bochy’s face. Nobody in the Giants front office knows what OBP is. They know batting average, which doesn’t apply to Molina, because he’s clutch.

TQ: Makes sense.

DM: It’s a team run by old sportswriters, and it makes me want to die.

TQ: It makes me feel better about the Mets, if that means anything to you.

DM: It doesn’t. The Mets have won a world series in your lifetime.

TQ: Yeah, but I only barely remember it.

DM: I remember losing to the trashy team from across the bay because a [expletive] earthquake leveled the city, and then losing to the trashy team from down the state because our manager wouldn’t let our best pitcher go in Game 7. Then I remember pissing away the prime of the best player ever. Then I remember pissing away the prime of the best pitching combination to come up together since Koufax and Drysdale.

TQ: Life is good, huh?

DM: We had one owner retire and another die, and Sabean still survives. WHO IS BACKING HIM? I WANT ANSWERS!

TQ: Can I publish portions of this conversation, tastefully deleting but alluding to the parts where you say what you’d do to Sabean and Bochy?

DM: You can publish every word if you want.

Adam Rubin reports that Jerry Manuel “appears to prefer” going with 20-year-old Ruben Tejada over Alex Cora in Jose Reyes’ stead.

Though Rubin’s usually on top of these things, it’s just a report and so I don’t want to overreact. And I’m bored of killing Omar Minaya for signing Alex Cora to the deal he did when he did.

But if that’s true, that means that this offseason, coming off a season in which their starting shortstop got hurt, the Mets signed a backup shortstop that their own manager was not comfortable starting if their starting shortstop got hurt.

One more time: If that’s true, that means that this offseason, coming off a season in which their starting shortstop got hurt, the Mets signed a backup shortstop that their own manager was not comfortable starting if their starting shortstop got hurt.

I suppose that’s slightly overstating the case. For all I know, Manuel’s perfectly comfortable starting Cora and just happens to think Tejada’s great.

That’s a stretch, though, considering Tejada didn’t exactly light the world on first at Double-A last year, and he’s 20, and…

You know what? Screw it. No more on the Great Alex Cora Debate until the season starts, I promise. I’m certain you’ve already made up your mind on the matter anyway.

Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap.

Look at Mark Sanchez:

This is from some Samsung event showing off new 3-D TVs, apparently. That’s what the glasses are about.

The burgeoning handlebar mustache, though, is all Sanchez.

!!!!!!!

I’m speechless. This might be the best day of my life.

The quarterback… OF THE FUTURE.

The Mets signed skinny lefty Mike O’Connor to a Minor League deal. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for him since he tossed a great start against the Mets in his second career outing in 2006. Probably an organizational depth signing, though.

One of the world’s leading crocodile and alligator experts died, but not in the way you’d guess. Sad.

The Big East Tournament has been predictably nuts, and Brendon Desrochers is holding it down.

Alex Nelson remembers Pete Schourek. I remember that Pete Schourek spoke at my Little League dinner and totally threw David Cone under the bus. I think he might have even called him a pervert. It was weird, and my memory is hazy because I was 12 or something, but I’ll consult my dad.

“Don’t get so caught up in the [Spring Training] stats, because we’re asking guys to work on certain things,” Girardi said. “It’s not fair if you ask them to work on something and then say we’re going by stats.”

So I spent some time on Omar Minaya’s conference call with reporters earlier this afternoon, and found out that Jose Reyes will be home “watching movies with his family” for the next 2-8 weeks and cannot elevate his heart-rate or perform any baseball activities until his thyroid levels stabilize.

That’s bad. Not downright terrible, I suppose, given how strange the whole vague thyroid news was, especially since Reyes’ agent Peter Greenberg stressed that the condition will be treated without medication and that doctors are certain everything will stabilize soon enough.

But it’s bad because a 2-8 week setback means Reyes will very likely miss Opening day. And the problem is compounded by the fact that, instead of having one of the best shortstops in the Majors hitting third and prowling the middle of their infield, the Mets will most likely have Alex Cora there.

Maybe they could weather Alex Cora’s weak hitting if he could save them some runs on the field. Or maybe he could make up for all those extra grounders he lets roll by if he knocked a few balls out of the park.

None of those things is likely to happen, though. Instead, Cora will just go on being the league’s most overpaid and overplayed replacement player.

But hey, great guy.

The other option — and one Minaya alluded to on the call — would be to call up young Ruben Tejada to fill in at shortstop until Reyes is ready.

Tejada’s only 20 and he’s not a hugely regarded prospect, but he held his own in Double-A last year (especially considering his age), posting a .289/.351/.381 line and by most accounts exhibiting decent range in the infield.

The young Panamanian would complete the Seven-Nation Army situation I speculated about a couple of weeks ago, but I fear he wouldn’t hit very much at all. As decent as he was in Double-A last year, and even accounting for some improvement as he ages, Tejada’s only a year removed from a brutal .229/.293/.296 line in High A ball in 2008.

CHONE projects a .291 on-base percentage and a .316 slugging for Tejada in 2010 and a .318 OBP and .338 SLG for Cora.

Is Tejada better enough than Cora on defense to make up for the difference offensively? I don’t know. I can say that after seeing a couple of Spring Training innings with Cora and Luis Castillo in the middle infield, I’d rather see just about anyone else out there when Citi Field opens in April, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Mike Pelfrey feels the same way.

It’s a bit more complex than that, of course. Tejada would have to be added to the 40-man roster, and though the Mets have an open slot now that Jay Marshall’s been sent back to Oakland, they may have been hoping to use it for someone like Hisanori Takahashi or, ugh, Jenrry Mejia. And I’m sure there are plenty of other mechanics at play that I’m not even considering.

Of course, none of that would matter if the Mets had signed a backup shortstop who could adequately back up shortstop. Certainly, no one could have predicted Reyes would miss time with a thyroid condition, but predicting Reyes to miss time didn’t exactly require a great soothsayer after the way his 2009 went down. And the Mets signed only Alex Cora to back him up.

But hey, great guy.

So Adam Rubin — who is usually spot-on about stuff like this — reports that Jenrry Mejia will work as a reliever in big-league camp for the remainder of Spring Training and, even if he is sent back to the Minors to start the season, will not be stretched out to start games by Opening Day.

Fantastic.

I’ve said my piece about why I think using Jenrry Mejia in a Major League bullpen role is a bad idea (twice, actually), but I figured I should consult some people who know more than I do about prospects and player development before I continue beating this drum.

John Sickels writes the excellent MinorLeagueBall.com for SB Nation. Back in January, he ranked Mejia tops among Mets prospects, and wrote:

He needs to refine his breaking ball and a full year of Double-A/Triple-A is necessary in my view, but he also has number one starter potential. I hope they don’t rush him.

I followed up with him earlier this week to see what he thought about Jerry Manuel’s Major League bullpen idea and all that. I e-mailed John a general overview of my thoughts on the matter, and he responded:

I agree with your take on it. He had just 10 starts in Double-A last year with spotty results, and I think he needs more work with his command before being pushed into a major league role, even in the bullpen. He’s only 20 and I think he needs at least another 10 starts in Double-A and 20 more in Triple-A before being fully ready for major league action, for the reasons you mentioned.

Cool. Good to know I’m not crazy.

Next I e-mailed my colleague Toby Hyde, who you might know from MetsMinorLeagueBlog.com. Toby’s obviously been following the situation pretty closely, and he wrote me this:

Look, if he’s clearly one of the six best relievers in camp, he should be on the big league roster.  The Mets’ first goal is to win games at the MLB level, and if the staff decides that Mejia is decidedly better than the final guys competing for bullpen spots like Kiko Calero and Clint Everts, then Mejia should break camp with the team. Otherwise, he should go back to the minors to refine his craft.  I don’t think he’s at a point yet where he’s ready to contribute, and bringing him up as a reliever now will at best delay, and at worst halt the development of his secondary offerings that he’d need to be a successful MLB starter, or even elite reliever and realize more value down the line.

There’s no question his fastball is awesome.  It lives in the mid-90s and has wicked movement.  He can cut it or sink it.  In the fall, he often could not command it.  His command looks better this spring, but what will happen when batters start really getting their timing down and learn he’s really a one-trick pony with a damn good trick?  For every good curveball he throws, there are a few bad ones.  This is why the minors exist.

Oh yeah, he’s 20.  How many 20-year olds have been really good big leaguers?

So Toby’s mostly on board, and I might even quibble with his first point a bit.  Certainly the Mets’ goal should be to win games at the big-league level, but I wonder exactly how many more games they can expect to win with Mejia in the bullpen over one of the men he would replace.

Even if Mejia would legitimately post better numbers in the bullpen than one of the Mets’ other options, do the few extra runs the team will save by carrying him in the bullpen make it worth hindering his development as a starting pitcher, not to mention starting his arbitration clock early?

I’d say no. There’s a ton of uncertainty, of course, and I recognize the argument that says all young pitchers are a safe bet to get hurt and so teams should cull the most possible value out of them as soon as they can. But if Mejia’s got the potential to be a frontline starter, the team should do everything in its power to let him achieve that potential.

The Mets’ history of organizational myopia is what weakened their farm system in the first place. Now, when it looks like they may finally be crawling their way out from all that, they appear to be considering a quick-fix decision with the best prospect in their organization. Amazin’.

Joe Posnanski thinks Jose Reyes and the Mets are due for something good.

Lenny Dykstra (allegedly) just keeps making things worse for himself.

Awesome, awesome use of a dateline.

“When possible he likes to enter a game to the head-pounding beats of heavy metal music.“

Stuff like this makes my head hurt.

I hate even linking to it because I hate sending even a tiny bit of traffic in that direction, but I feel like this jackass needs to be called out just for his utter lack of originality. Seriously? We’re still asserting that people who employ certain metrics to evaluate baseball players are virgins and Star Wars fans?

Also, I invite any Red Sox fan frustrated with Theo Epstein’s allegiance to sabermetrics to come join me in following the Mets for a season. Don’t worry, you’ll never have the same concerns here. And I promise you, Jerry Thornton, by September you’ll go running back to Boston to immediately open up a spreadsheet and start calculating the breadth of Epstein’s geeky awesomeness.

And for the millionth time, just about every damn team in the league uses one stat or another to evaluate players, and so does every writer. Don’t tell me you’re not going to check out some dude’s RBI and batting average when you’re writing some dumb column about why he is or isn’t the MVP come August, Jerry Thornton. So because some people choose to measure players by stats that more accurately assess those players’ value to their teams, we should be dubbed “mouth-breathing, grease-stained Gollums”?

I was a Teenage Stats Geek, too, Jerry Thornton. I was also the captain and MVP of the football team. These things are not mutually exclusive.

Sabermetric stats are not a lifestyle choice. They’re just tools. Not something far-fetched, not something unreasonable, just tools. Tools some people use to better understand and enjoy baseball games. Tools some baseball executives use to better understand their industry.

Tools like Jerry Thornton.

Here’s the really clever part of the column:

So as a public service to all like-minded fans, concerned Red Sox citizens worried about the direction the Nation is headed, I’d like to put my ex-Stat Geek skills to us and offer my own formula for judging all statisticians. Let’s call it the NSGR/MMUSRI (Nerdy Stat Geek Ridiculous/Meaningless Made Up Statistic Rating Index). You take any new, obscure baseball evaluation stat and you start with the weight of the guy who invented it, times how many days he’s been wearing the same “Han Solo Shot First” T-shirt, divided by how many times he’s had sex in his life, multiplied by how often his mom cooks his meals add how many days a month he sees the sun times the percentage by which he throws like a girl.

BURN! Take that, Tom Tango. Maybe if you give up on your pesky allegiance to stats, you can move out of your mom’s basement and become surrounded with women like Jerry Thornton always is.