The Mets have signed free-agent right-handers Miguel Batista and Fernando Cabrera to Minor League deals and invited them to Major League camp. They also signed a light-hitting shortstop named Sean Kazmar, who will report to Minor League camp and not be mentioned for the remainder of this blog post.

Batista you know: He’ll be 41 by Opening Day, he writes poetry and mystery novels, he somehow manages to guile his way to a reasonable ERA every year despite lousy peripherals, and he pitched that two-hit shutout in Game 162 in 2011 that was entirely overshadowed by a first-inning bunt single. On a Minor League deal, he’s a hedge for the five starters penciled in to the Mets’ Opening Day rotation. The Mets will need a fifth starter by April 11, so if Johan Santana is not yet ready to go, Batista will likely be in the mix for early-season starts with Chris Schwinden and… I don’t know, D.J. Carrasco? Pedro Beato?

Cabrera is more interesting. He has thrown 175 1/3 mostly poor innings across parts of seven seasons in the Majors, nearly all of them marked by lots of walks, lots of home runs, and lots of strikeouts. But for the past three years he has mostly pitched in Triple-A in Pawtucket and Sacramende* and mostly been pretty good, striking out over 10 batters per nine in that stretch and maintaining a 2.77 K:BB ratio.

Given the Mets’ 40-man roster crunch it seems unlikely Cabrera will crack the club out of Spring Training, but if he continues to pitch like he has since 2009, he’ll probably wind up in Flushing for a stretch if and when anyone in the Mets’ bullpen gets injured or proves ineffective.

*- I was just struck by an interesting Google paradox. If you say anything about Google results in a big enough forum — like a joke on Arrested Development or a blog post that starts with “a Google search for the term _____ yields (however many) results” — you’re very likely to alter those Google results and thus render your statement inaccurate about as soon as you publish it.