Mets Hot Stove starts tonight at 7 p.m. on SNY, and there’s a poll up on the Mets Hot Stove web page that you can vote on. It asks which position you think the Mets should focus on this offseason, and starting pitching is thus far winning in a landslide.

OK, so I recognize that the first two installments of Culture Jammin’ have now focused on Aerosmith, but whatever. That’s not the plan for this series, but I’ll stop writing about Aerosmith when Aerosmith stops being hilarious.

They’re back together, by the way. Or maybe not. Whatever.

The reason I bring up Aerosmith is that I wanted to talk about the Cryin’ video that featured Alicia Silverstone (plus a young Josh Holloway, better known as Sawyer from Lost) a little more.

It was all over MTV for like two years and I’m certain it won a bunch of MTV Video Awards, but man, who thought it was a good idea? I would have loved to have sat in on that prod meeting between Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, who I just assume make all of Aerosmith’s aesthetic decisions.

“OK, so we’ll have this hot chick, and she has all these problems with her boyfriend. Get it, like she’s ‘Cryin”, like the name of the song?”

“Yeah, that works — and then at the end, she kills herself!”

“No, dude. That’s too heavy. Too real. How ’bout we just make it look like she kills herself, but then, ahh… what could we have her do?”

“Oh, DUDE! She jumps off a bridge, but then it turns out she’s just bungee jumping!”

“Perfect! Oh my god, it’s so ironic I can’t stand it! And then… then she’ll give the guy the finger!”

“Aerosmith f@#$ing rules!”

When did Alicia Silverstone put on the bungee-jumping harness in this video? It’s not even clear she’s got one on when she’s first standing on the bridge. And how’s she going to get back up? And why did she… oh, nevermind.

Watch it yourself.

Chris asked for an explanation on a couple of stats in the comments for the last post, and I started responding there, but the post got really long and I figured I’d throw it in the main feed here instead.

Anyway, Fangraphs.com and baseball-reference.com have pretty extensive glossaries, so I urge you to read (way, way) more about the subject there.

I normally use stats to inform my writing more than drive them, but the stats Chris asked for all might very well come up here, so here goes:

Briefly: WAR stands for Wins Above Replacement, and uses both offense and defensive stats in an attempt to determine precisely how many wins a player is worth to his team above the replacement-level player at his position (think Alex Cora).

WAR relies on UZR, or Ultimate Zone Rating, to measure a player’s defense. UZR is a pretty complicated metric, but it essentially tracks how many outs a player converts on balls hit within his “zone of responsibility.” A 7.6 UZR would mean a player saved his team 7.6 runs defensively over the replacement defender at his position over the course of a season.

OPS+ and ERA+ are just versions of OPS and ERA that are scaled a bit differently. Essentially, they’re park- and league-adjusted to better compair players of different eras and ballparks, and they’re weighted so the average is 100 and higher numbers are better. So a player with a 160 OPS+ hit 60 percent better than the average hitter would in his same situation.

The good general point of reference those two stats — and they’re two of my favorites, since they’re quick and easy but still fair for comparisons — are SAT scores, since they’re weighted the same way and the range is usually about the same. The worst players in the league will score around 60 and the best around 160, though there are always a few outliers.

BABIP refers to batting average on balls in play. It is mostly used to measure luck, because a player’s BABIP usually remains around the same level across his career, and years in which it is abnormally high or low might signify good or bad luck. It’s a bit more complex than that, of course, because BABIP corresponds pretty closely to line-drive rate and a player might be getting more hits on balls in play because he’s actually hitting the ball harder.

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.

Given the way things have gone for both the Mets and Venezuela in 2009, I’d say it’d be a good call to bring Josh Thole home. There are other winter-ball leagues, and Thole is hitting .419 with a .538 OBP down there, so they might as well find someplace safer where he could be challenged more.

Everything Chad Ochocinco does is art. Marvin Lewis needs to get on board or stand aside.

Alex Belth at Bronx Banter aggregates some of sportswriting’s greatest ledes. Ahh, Belth? You forgot “Val Pascucci exists.”

James at Amazin’ Avenue elucidates how much better Matt Holliday is than Jason Bay at playing the outfield. But James, he took one in the junk the one time I happened to take notice of his defense!

Derek Jeter’s next contract negotiation, whenever it may come, will be an interesting one. His defense was much better than normal this year statistically, but at some point he’s not going to be able to play shortstop anymore, and I suspect Brian Cashman realizes that. It’ll be very interesting to see how that plays out.