According to Matt at MetsBlog, SI.com’s Jon Heyman told WFAN.com that the Mets are looking for a solid innings guy who doesn’t get hurt.

Here’s the thing: Good luck with that.

It strikes me that there are very, very few pitchers who reliably throw more than 190 innings in a season. Jon Garland is one of them, and he and the Dodgers have a mutual 2010 option on his contract. So he could be a free agent. Jason Marquis is another, and he’s already campaigning to join the Mets.

Both Garland and Marquis are groundball guys, for what it’s worth, so the Mets would probably need to do something about their infield defense to make those investments pay off. I’m looking at you, Luis Castillo.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. The point is that there has to be a huge value in starters who can simply pitch a bunch of innings reliably, even if it’s only at a Major League average level. Longer starts, obviously, save a bullpen, and durability helps a team avoid the need for a below-average replacement pitcher.

It seems, from a cursory look around the league, like a bunch of the guys who can throw 190-220 innings a season consistently are also excellent: CC Sabathia, Dan Haren, Roy Halladay and the like. Of course, that makes sense, since better pitchers go deeper into games more frequently.

But there’s something to be said for pitchers like Garland, Joe Blanton and Bronson Arroyo, who teams can count on to amass innings. (Livan Hernandez, my colleague Mike Salfino likes to point out, does not truly eat innings. Innings eat him.)

I’m not sure there’s any metric out there that weighs a pitcher’s reliability. Part of that is probably because so few pitchers are reliable, and even the ones that seem reliable will eventually crap out or need arm surgery.

Still, it feels like there should be some statistical way to credit a guy like Javier Vazquez who basically has not missed a start since the turn of the Millenium. I guess it’s easy enough to just click around on a guy’s baseball-reference page, but I’m extremely lazy.

That’s all. Just sayin.