- Ike Davis, on Mets Hot Stove.

Well that’s just a cool quote. Also, I think “Pure Chaos” would be a cool nickname for someone, but probably not Ike Davis. Probably better for Murphy, actually.

I brought this up on the podcast last week but in case you don’t listen or didn’t make it to that hour: Willie Harris told Mets Weekly producer Joe Kraus, who sits right across from me in the office here, that Murphy knows more about hitting than anyone he has ever played with. Harris said he wants to be a manager someday, and he wants Murphy to be his hitting coach. So that’s… notable, I guess.

When we talk about the Citi Field walls coming in, the first players that come up are David Wright and Jason Bay — for obvious reasons. People seem to assume the walls will mean a couple extra easy homers for Ike Davis and Lucas Duda, but that those guys would hit them out anywhere. And Ruben Tejada and Josh Thole don’t have much power to speak of, so it’s hard to figure how the walls will really impact their onslaught of slapped singles.

Murphy gets lost in that discussion, I think. Part of that is that he hits left-handed, and the changes to the right-field side of the fence don’t seem as dramatic as those to the former Great Wall of Flushing. Plus, though Murphy has doubles power, he’s not a home-run hitter: He has all of 20 in 1030 Major League at-bats.

Do some of Murphy’s doubles become home runs with the new dimensions? Just based on his spray chart from TexasLeaguers.com, it doesn’t look like many of them do. And of course, the way defenders position themselves with the new walls affects which hits will fall in and which one-time doubles outfielders might now get to. But does Murphy — man of hitting science, impressor of Willie Harris — adjust somehow to try to hit for more power? Should he?

I suppose that’s something to ask him about come Spring Training. Which I suppose makes for a decent segue to this: I’m going to be in Port St. Lucie for a couple of weeks in early March. I’ve got some things I know I want to do already, but maybe there’s something Spring Training-related you want to know about that you don’t know about yet. I’ll probably ask this again, but use the following form for any suggestions you might have for Spring Training content you want to see:

Since Santana missed all of 2011 and appears unlikely to ever again be the pitcher the Mets paid for, and especially since due to circumstances unforeseen in 2008 Santana’s salary now accounts for more than 1/4 of the Mets’ total payroll, his contract looks like a pretty massive albatross in the Mets rebuilding/retooling/time-biding plans.

And again: No one’s saying Johan Santana’s not totally sweet, and no one is more psyched than me to see him pitching again at whatever capacity. We just can’t keep calling that deal “a steal” unless you mean it was some sort of art heist in which the Mets came away with some beautiful sculpture that looks awesome but takes up most of the room in their house and makes it difficult for them to add anything else to their collection.

Here’s this:

Hmm… April 1, a few days before the season starts. This will be an interesting Spring Training for Mets fans, since there won’t be many new faces or last year’s Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran storylines to distract the focus from the actual, underwhelming team. Still, I imagine some large portion of Mets fans — myself included, because I do it every year — will turn all optimistic in late March and start seeing the ways everything could go right for the 2012 Mets.

And in the Giants, now, there’s a convenient reminder of how everything can sometimes go right fresh in every New Yorker’s memory. There’s even the Philadelphia parallel, since before the season the Eagles looked like a dream team on paper and everyone figured Big Blue’s best hope was to gun for the Wild Card.

Of course, baseball and football are very different, and the NL East has a bunch of teams besides the Phillies that appear likely to be good. But I imagine many of us will be happy to ignore that come early April, when we’re eager to find some modicum of hope with which to approach the Mets’ 2012 campaign.

In 2012, only a pretty bleak one. As has been reported, Wright can void the option on his contract for 2013 if he is traded. So if Wright plays well enough in 2012 that other teams would want to give up prospects and pay his salary for his production, the Mets could — I believe — pick up his 2013 option after the season and trade him then, presumably fetching a larger haul for the full-season of Wright than they would at the 2012 deadline.

But then if Wright plays well enough in 2012 that other teams would want to give up prospects to pay him $15 million in 2013, there’ll should be talk of an extension — and whether the Mets could afford that type of thing. (Oof.)

My best guess, the way Wright does get traded in 2012 is if he continues playing the good but unspectacular brand of baseball he has produced since the Mets moved to Citi Field, some contending team finds itself in dire need of a third baseman and willing to take on Wright’s remaining 2012 salary, and the Mets find themselves out of contention, ready to move on from Wright and not eager to pick up his $15 million option for 2013 anyway.

When I write it down like that it doesn’t seem all that unlikely. I still don’t think it’s going to happen, but then I’ve been wrong about stuff before.

It’s difficult to come up with great sandwich comps for young players like Thole because a sandwich’s entire lifespan rarely lasts more than an hour. So there are very few sandwiches of which you could say, “Well, I don’t know exactly how good this sandwich is yet.” You get or make a sandwich, you take a few bites of the sandwich, you think about the sandwich, then you know how good the sandwich is.

But I would say Thole is a ham and egg sandwich, because right now he’s sort of a ham-an-egger of a Major Leaguer: He clearly deserves to be there, but he hasn’t done anything to distinguish himself. Since he’s still only 25 though, I’d say he’s a ham and egg sandwich that’s still under construction. And though we’re getting some clues as to how it’ll be we should probably give it some time to see if baseball’s Great Deli-Man winds up adding cheese or hot sauce or ketchup or something to bump Thole up to a higher tier.

I’ll take Pelfrey on that one. Pretty simple: He stays healthy. Santana’s no lock to pitch even a single game in 2012, and we have no idea how effective he’ll be when he does start. I’d guess he’ll be better than Pelfrey when he pitches, but I don’t think he’ll make enough starts to make up the difference in wins (though obviously there’s a massive randomness factor to it all). Plus, if Pelfrey’s pitching well, he could easily be traded to a contender when one of the Mets’ young starters is ready.

On iTunes here.

What Rubin didn’t point out (but probably knows) is that every other guy on the list besides is either already enshrined in Cooperstown, will be soon, or will render the whole place obsolete with his exclusion.

Burrell, in comparison, looks like just some guy: Undoubtedly a very good Major League hitter but by no means a superstar, a dude whose top baseball-reference comps include Greg Vaughn, Tim Salmon, Ryan Klesko and Danny Tartabull.

He will not be missed.

The following is skewed by the peculiarities of expansion and divisional play, I realize. List via Rubin’s post. Mays gets the asterisk because I didn’t count the home runs he hit with the Mets as part of his career total:

Zack Wheeler, who hasn’t yet pitched above High A, has 80 votes. Daniel Murphy, already a pretty good Major Leaguer, has 11. And two of Murph’s votes are from me.

To be fair, Wheeler is arguably the Mets’ top prospect and Murphy, at 27, probably isn’t getting much better. So maybe people are voting on ceiling. Plus the Mets will only control Murphy through 2015 and could control Wheeler through 2018.

But c’mon: Reese Havens, 25-year-old guy who cannot stay on the field, gets more than twice as many votes as Josh Thole, who is eight days younger than Havens and has already shown he can be an average-hitting catcher in the Majors?

I think y’all might need to temper your expectations.

Also, I’m pretty sure Patrick wrote about 1,000 words and came up with an interesting poll as an excuse to post that Ruben Tejada factoid. Flood is the anti-Sarris.

But it would especially suck — and Tom knows I feel this way — to go through that in the name of Olympic sports, which mostly suck. One guy runs faster than the others. Some judge finds some routine more compelling than the rest. Flags are flown and anthems are played, and then within a year no one outside the discipline really remembers what happens. Call me a xenophobe, but I’d rather watch a mid-August Pirates-Astros game every single time.

Badminton is pretty cool though.

To be honest, I don’t eat candy bars very often. When you eat as much fried food and starch as I do, you’ve got to make concessions somewhere to not be dead by now, and for me that generally means cutting out the most intensely sugary foods. Plus, it’s kind of a long and unfortunate story but I’ve been down on chocolate since this summer.

Bottom line, I’d take a piece of cake, a cupcake or some sort of Drake’s Cake over candy most of the time, and if I am eating candy it’s almost always going to be Gummi Bears — Haribo, if possible, and preferably frozen. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think candy bars are delicious. If I had to rank my top five of the ones , I’d probably go:

1) 100 Grand
2) Whatchamacallit
3) Twix
4) Take 5
5) Butterfinger

I guess I’m a big fan of caramel in candy bars. Also, that’s discounting Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Reese’s Pieces, since neither is a candy bar proper. Furthermore, Snickers are way better than Baby Ruths even though they have similar ingredients. Also, I really like Heath Bars crushed up in ice-cream concoctions, but I’m not sure I’ve ever had a Heath Bar.

Finally, I’d say David Wright is more likely to rebound than Jason Bay, Andres Torres, or Johan Santana.

If the Mets have concerns about Andres Torres’ ability to hold up in center field over the course of a season and Scott Hairston’s ability to back him up, then I guess Ankiel makes some sense. For whatever they’re worth, UZR pegs Ankiel as just shy of average in center field — no small feat — largely because his outstanding arm helps mitigate underwhelming range.

But if the Mets think Hairston can handle center and want Ankiel because he hits left-handed, then the only thing he’s really got over Mike Baxter is a Major League resume. Ankiel mashed righties to the tune of an .890 OPS in his renaissance year in 2008, but his offensive numbers across the board have plummeted since then. In 327 plate appearance against right-handers in 2011, Ankiel mustered only a .678 OPS. By comparison, in Baxter’s last full season of Triple-A play in 2010, his line against righties translates to a .769 OPS in the Majors.

That’s only one year for both players, of course. But if the Mets bring in Ankiel and Terry Collins maintains his insistence on platoon matchups, they could very well be assigning the bulk of their pinch-hitting opportunities to a guy that’s not really fit for them.

Though if you’re playing at home, note now that it’s Jan. 30 and I’m lamenting the way Terry Collins might use a player the Mets are speculated to be considering for the very last spot on their roster.

But hey, the Giants are in the Super Bowl!

Depends on how you define “prospect.” But unless you count Mike Baxter as a prospect — and I’m assuming you don’t — the odds look pretty long for all of them. Since all the starting jobs appear pretty well set and the front office is unlikely to pull up a well-regarded young player to be a bench player or eighth-inning mop-up guy, it’ll probably take an injury in Spring Training to get a prospect on the Opening Day roster.

But all that said, it’s probably Kirk Nieuwenhuis. Nieuwenhuis missed most of last year with a season-ending shoulder injury, but he has got a few advantages on his peers in the Minor League system: For one, he has about a half a seasons’ worth of Triple-A experience, more than anyone else you’d like call a “prospect” at this point. Plus, he’s 24, he hits left-handed, and he plays the outfield, where the Mets don’t have a ton of obvious contingency plans behind the guys penciled in to start.

Still, it’s unlikely to happen unless a couple things go wrong (and Nieuwenhuis is fully recovered, of course). The Mets will probably want to give Nieuwenhuis more time to develop and show he’s as good as he played in the first couple months in Buffalo last year before they challenge him at the higher level. But since he’s furthest along than the Mets’ trio of young arms and plays a spot where they appear pretty thin, I’d put him down as likeliest to appear in Flushing in April.