FanHouse Ramon MArtinez

Footprints in the Snow is FanHouse's look at the paths to be forged by MLB teams this winter as they look ahead to 2010.

At $149,373,987, the New York Mets had the National League's highest payroll in 2009. Their fourth place finish in the NL East, 23 games back in the standings, might suggest that the cash Omar Minaya dished out wasn't money well spent. A closer look reveals a team harassed all season by injuries and a group of hitters that could never find a long-term answer to produce runs.

In the outfield, Carlos Beltran had a potential All-Star season broken up, playing in only 81 games due to a knee injury. In fact, only Jeff Francoeur amassed more than 500 at-bats among Mets outfielders, and he was a mid-season import from the Atlanta Braves.

The infield wasn't spared either as mainstays Carlos Delgado and Jose Reyes had their seasons cut extremely short due to injuries. Even staff ace Johan Santana ended his season early with elbow issues.

The good news is that most of these players are expected to be healthy and ready to go for spring training.

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MLB Power Rankings: Where MLB FanHouse's editors, writers and bloggers team up to break down the who's who and the what's what in the baseball world.

Sorry for the delay, kiddos, on the Power Rankings. I'm sure you spent the entirety of Wednesday wondering "WHERE IN GOD'S NAME ARE THEY??? WITHOUT THEM I'LL HAVE NOTHING TO BANTER SENSELESSLY ABOUT TO MY CO-WORKERS!!!1" Or something like that. Either way, it's time to debate the worthlessness of your favorite baseball team in numerical form once again. Do enjoy.

"The Mets injury woes are becoming so comical that from now on I'm just going to imagine that Snoop and Chris Partlow are bringing starters one by one into vacant homes and shooting them in the head." - Matt W., on the Progressive Boink forums

The important thing to remember here is that now is when the Mets are supposed to be great. They don't start getting bad until the middle of September. If they can hurry up and be bad NOW, maybe they will be good at the END of the season. Or they will be so bad that Major League Baseball demotes them to AAA.

Tonight's Dugout is after the jump.

Poppin' out the box scores and right into your cubicle, the Roto Rush is your double espresso shot of fantasy baseball advice every weekday.

Big Apple, we have a problem. And one that could be a major concern in fantasy baseball leagues, too.

Jose Reyes, undoubtedly a top-10 fantasy pick, left Wednesday's game against the Dodgers after aggravating a right calf injury while trying to leg out an infield single. Reyes had missed five straight starts with the injury, and it looks like a trip to the disabled list is a possibility at some point. The Mets can consider alternatives to watching Ramon Martinez twirl his toothpick bat -- like the versatile Mark DeRosa -- but the solution isn't so simple for fantasy owners relying on his speed.

A long, long time ago when I was a teenager ESPN was actually a network that was dedicated to showing sports. The showcase of the network was SportsCenter, which every day showed highlights from every single game played in the country, without any interruptions from Coors Light or their cold, hard previously scripted opinions. It was during these halycon days of ESPN that the world was introduced to the duo of Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann.

Eventually Olbermann would leave the network, instead choosing to spend his time talking about politics on MSNBC, but you knew that much like the mafia, just when he thought he was out, the sports would pull Olbermann back in. It all started with his work on NBC's Sunday Night Football, and now Olbermann has taken the next logical step in his return to the welcoming arms of the sporting world. He's become a baseball blogger.

And gee, what a shock that would be. The team was at odds with Scott Boras over his client, JD Drew, opting out of his Dodgers contract, and hasn't dealt with him much since then. That is, until now potentially. Boras is reportedly upset with the team for demoting Tony Abreu to the minors when Abreu incurred an abdominal injury. Boras would've preferred the team simply placed him on the DL.

By being put on the disabled list Abreu would continue to draw a big league salary and accrue major league service time, becoming eligible for arbitration and free agency earlier.

A similar dispute between the Marlins and pitcher Anibal Sanchez led to a grievance's being filed by the players' union on behalf of Sanchez, who says he was demoted to the minors despite a shoulder problem that led to season-ending surgery in June. The demotion is costing Sanchez more than $1,400 a day in salary, said union attorney Jeff Fannell, who also said demoting an injured player is a violation of the collective bargaining agreement between baseball and the players' union.

This is certainly a valid complaint for any player and agent to have -- they obviously don't want to get stiffed when it comes to money. And of course all teams will protect their interests at all times by keeping that service time clock from ticking. I'm guessing Boras would have a strong case to make against the team if it came down to that. Meanwhile, the Dodgers have been using the slugging Ramon Martinez in a role Abreu most likely could have filled. Seems pretty fishy to me.

Previously at FanHouse:
Did the Red Sox Tamper With JD Drew