Let’s give Omar Minaya some credit for quick thinking. Late Sunday night he learned that setup man Duaner Sanchez had been involved in an auto accident and that his shoulder was badly injured. He managed to keep the news from leaking and to quickly trade someone he didn’t need — right fielder Xavier Nady — to the Pittsburgh Pirates for something he, and every team in baseball, can use — pitching. Mets fans can feel free to bring this deal up any time someone claims that all Minaya is good for is convincing ownership to sign fat checks for star players like Pedro Martinez and Billy Wagner; faced with a problem, he didn’t panic or overreact and brought home the goods.

There are three separate moving parts here, which need to be treated independently. The first is the injury to Sanchez and how that affects the bullpen; the second is the question of young Oliver Perez, and the third is the right field situation.

Sanchez’s injury is, depending on how you look at it, either not all that big a deal or a very big deal indeed.It’s not going to affect the Mets’ season at all, really, both because they have such an insurmountable lead (replace Billy Wagner with Mel Rojas and Willie Randolph’s men still take the flag) and because Sanchez is not an irreplaceable pitcher. Darren Oliver has been better, and Wagner and Chad Bradford as good.That being said, replacing Sanchez with Roberto Hernandez is a step backward, and assuming Sanchez had continued to pitch as he had been and Hernandez continues to pitch as he has been, it will be worth something on the order of six runs over the last two months, but it’s difficult to conceive of how that could do real damage.

The argument for this being a very big deal is equally simple: You need a good set-up man in October. Bradford is an excellent situational guy and Oliver a superb long-man, but neither really fits the profile of what you’d like to see in the eighth inning against the heart of the Cardinals’ lineup. Hernandez, despite his glorious 2005 run with the Mets and his shiny 2.93 ERA, isn’t what you’d like to see there either; his 33/24 K/BB ratio tells the tale of his diminished command and velocity. Sanchez, who can pitch multiple innings at a time and never needs a day off, is not just an excellent regular season player but one ideally suited for October. It’s a problem, and one this trade doesn’t solve.

The real solutions are probably already with the team. Aaron Heilman hasn’t adjusted to the league adjusting to his fastball/changeup combination yet (it’s hard to believe there are still people pimping him as a starter), but he’s certainly capable of dominating the backend of a baseball game. If Mike Pelfrey is put in a short relief role and told to just throw his fastball, he could astonish.And I’ll never understand what the Mets have against Heath Bell; he’s been dominating in the minors for years and performed quite well in 16 games earlier this year, showing himself to be durable, resilient, and possessed of very good stuff. He’s a better pitcher than Hernandez right now, and I’d sooner see him grab that set-up role.At any rate, having Hernandez around certainly doesn’t hurt; he’ll be useful in the pen, and it won’t be his fault if Randolph passes over better options in favor of his special brand of veteran moxie.

The key to this deal is Oliver Perez. Two years ago there weren’t 10 players in baseball you could have traded for him. At 22, he led the National League in strikeouts per 9 innings and finished sixth in ERA with a 2.98 mark. Since then, things have not been good. Last year he racked up a 5.85 ERA in just over 100 innings and injured his toe kicking a cart, and this year he’s gone 2–10 with a 6.63 ERA and brutal peripheral numbers — 61 strikeouts, 51 walks, and 13 home runs in 76 innings. He’s been just as bad in Triple-A, with a 5.63 ERA in six starts.

All of this makes it an ideal time to grab the talented lefty.Pitchers with this kind of talent just don’t come on the market. He has quite a few problems, most notably that his fastball isn’t touching the high 90s anymore, and his breaking ball doesn’t have the same snap. Theories abound. Some say the Pirates altered his delivery for the worse in trying to make him more effective against righties. Some think he’s injured. Some think Pittsburgh’s just a bad organization that doesn’t help players develop, and that a change of scenery will do him well. Whatever the case, it’s more than worth it to take a risk on him, because he has the potential to make Mets fans forget Scott Kazmir. If it’s a mechanical problem, an untended injury, a psychological issue, or something getting a fresh start can fix, all the well.If he’s just done at a young age, as happens, it was worth the chance.The Mets didn’t really give anything up to take it.

That brings us to the third moving part here — right field. Xavier Nady came through in the clutch an awful lot during his brief time with the Mets, but the truth is he was exceeding expectations and still wasn’t even an average hitter for a right fielder. He just doesn’t hit for high enough average or draw enough walks to make up for it; for every dramatic home run there were five times he chased at some ball a foot off the plate. He’s the kind of player you can carry if you have MVP candidates at defensive positions like shortstop and center field, but especially given his unbelievably brutal defense (has any man ever been so poor at coming in on the sinking liner?), he’s really an overstretched bench player. When you can get needed bullpen help and a reclamation project with Perez’s potential for a player like this, you don’t even think about it.

Who should take up the slack? Many will call for Lastings Milledge, but I don’t see why.As was predicted here (to much scoffing from normally level-headed Mets partisans), when recalled earlier this year Milledge hit like the bad Jose Reyes. He’s not ready. Further, the Mets have a nice in-house option — Endy Chavez is a truly exceptional defender, and advanced defensive statistics like those researcher Chris Dial has posted at baseballthinkfactory.org support the idea that Chavez’s defense is enough to make up the gap between his feeble bat and Nady’s average one.The Mets should stick with Chavez for a month and call up Milledge when rosters expand. It won’t hurt him, or the team, a bit.

In all, this was a fine bit of maneuvering to get out of a bad predicament. The Met got by far the most valuable player in the trade, and the only area in which they’ll lose on the field is the one that wasn’t under their control. Minaya (one supposes) didn’t run down Sanchez’s cab, but he has put together enough good arms that Randolph should be able to make up for Sanchez’s loss. It’s a better day than trading for Victor Zambrano.