All I Want for Christmas

(Note: A piece by Sip and our weekly Section 423 column follow this post.)

Sip wouldn't know anything about this, but I've had a hard time making a Christmas list this year.

There's just not a whole lot that I want, really. I could use a new computer, but I want to wait for Vista to drop. I could use a new bookshelf, but I don't really have any good place to put it. Matt Cerrone suggested some books for me, but I've already read one of them, and the other, well, the other could happen I guess.

But what I really want for Christmas, what I desperately want for Christmas, is an ace for my Mets. A week ago I was certain Barry Zito was the guy. I didn't think there was a chance in hell he went anywhere else.

Then Tom "Money Talks" Hicks got involved. For those of you who aren't familiar with Hicks, he's the guy who basically bid against himself to ink A-Rod for 10 years and $252 million.

Hicks has one big thing going for him: Texas doesn't have a state income tax, so $100 million there goes farther than it does in, oh, I don't know... picking a state out of a hat... New York, for example.

That's important because Hicks has one big thing going against him: Texas sucks. Or well, it may not suck (I really wouldn't know), but it doesn't have any of the cache that New York or California has.

I bring this all up because earlier this week I told the Hound that if the Mets signed Zito, I wanted a blue Zito t-shirt under the tree. That was big for me. See, I have a policy of not getting a player's t-shirt until he's put in some time as a Met and proved he deserves it.

(I've violated this policy twice: the first time with Jose Reyes, the second time with Pedro Martinez. Both validated my investment in short order.)

Anyway, at the time I made my request for a Zito t-shirt, I thought him signing with the Mets was basically a formality, now I'm not so sure.

For all we've heard about how crazy the market has been this offseason (and god knows it has been), look at the deals that ace pitchers have signed in the past several months. Roy Oswalt, 5 years, $73 million. Chris Carpenter, 5 years, $65 million.

Frankly, Zito deserves less than either of these guys. He's going to get more, and I'm OK with that, I can accept the market for what it is, but there's gotta be a limit.

My limit is 5 years and $85 million. That's $17 million per season, enough money to pay for basically the next two, maybe three generation of Zitos, assuming those damn, dirty liberals don't extend their lustful preoccupation with taxing hardworking folk past their graves.

And yet somehow I have this creeping suspicion it won't be enough. There's the Boras thing. There's the fact that he really doesn't deserve this much money to begin with, so why leave money on the table when it probably won't be there 5-7 years from now? There are the rumors that Hicks is talking 7 year/$102 million.

And perhaps most importantly, there's the fact that no matter how much success our team enjoyed in 2006, I'm still, at my core, basically a pessimistic Mets fan. I can't possibly get all I want for Christmas can I? Stay tuned...

Oh and Hound, I appreciate the thought, but you can hold off on ordering my Ambiorix Burgos t-shirt for the time being. I like the move (I don't think it would be possible for a back-end starter to be lower on a depth chart than Brian Bannister had come to be on ours), but let's just say the proven Met policy extends to young Ambiorix.

Speaking of the Bannister deal, before I go I want to touch on just two more topics: Julio Lugo, and these rumors that keep circulating about the Mets and A's working on some mega-deal.

Lugo first: thank god he ended up in Boston. I asked some people on MetsGeek yesterday what I was missing with this guy and didn't get any really compelling answers.

A 1- or 2-year deal? Fine. Four years for a guy who isn't even a second baseman, after committing $3.8 million to Jose Valentin? Sorry, not interested.

Mets-A's mega-deal: I'm pretty long on Rich Harden. He's had injuries, but he's still young (25), still throws gas, and if he could be had in a package centering around Lastings Milledge and Aaron Heilman, that's worth looking in to.

The thing about both Lastings and Heilman is that they have more value to other teams than they do to the Mets -- Lastings because there's no centerfield vacancy for him here, and Heilman because other teams view him as a starter.

For that reason, I'd be somewhat hesitant to ship them both off in the same deal, but given that my protectionist zeal for Mike Pelfrey, Phil Humber and All-or-Nothing Ollie Perez currently knows no bounds, we might not have any choice if we really want Harden.

My bet? All this Harden-to-Mets talk materializes to little more than hot air.

If I'm wrong, well, it wouldn't be the first time.

- A.F.O.M.G.