If you think of baseball’s off-season as a night out at a shady bar, the evening has just hit the point where sleazy guys in tight trousers can be seen scouring the premises for potential companions who are so drunk they’ve forgotten their own names, while their more upstanding peers are squinting pretty hard trying to pretend that ugly people are beautiful. One can personalize the metaphor a bit more. Seattle general manager Bill Bavasi, for instance, is not only buying drinks for degenerate barflies but actually pulling out his wallet and pressing cash into their hands, while Boston honcho Theo Epstein has jumped into a limousine and is on his way to a sophisticated after-hours spot. Our local executives, meanwhile, are quietly chatting with one another in a corner, whiling away the hours until they go home to pleasant surroundings.

Good for them. The pickings are slim in shady bars, and one’s time is generally better spent elsewhere. They might take a minute to talk to a few people, though; they have a bit more work to do. Both the Mets and the Yankees look good right now, and if neither team makes another move before spring training, they’ll both enter the season as favorites to win their divisions. You can always improve, though, and there’s never any reason not to try.

Leaving aside Barry Zito — neither he nor his agent are to be found in a sketchy tavern — the player still on the market who should interest the New York teams the most is Jeff Suppan, last seen in the World Series with his St. Louis Cardinals. That’s not because he’s especially good, but because he’s exceptionally reliable. Suppan has the exact same season every year and has since 1999. He throws 190 innings, puts up an ERA at or better than the league average while relying on his defense to haul in a fair number of fly balls, and wins a dozen or so games. He’s basically a solid pitcher along the lines of Jon Lieber or Steve Trachsel, and that’s more valuable than it sounds, as Suppan annually ranks among the top 60 or so pitchers in the game. Having a top-grade no. 3 starter to plug into your rotation is handy, and considering that Suppan is likely to make no more than no. 5 starters like Gil Meche and Adam Eaton, who are paid handsomely because there’s a slim chance they might perform as well as Suppan usually does, he’ll probably even be something of a bargain.

Another unglamorous player worth a look right now is Aubrey Huff, who spent many years as the only good player on the Devil Rays and finished last year with Houston after a midseason trade. Huff is something like the Suppan of position players, an average performer who starts to look appealing when you consider that players not much better than him, like Carlos Lee, are pulling down huge contracts. Huff would be useful for the Yankees, because he’s about equally proficient at third base, right field, and first base, and accustomed to shifting between them during the season. As a league-average hitter who could soak up 450 atbats playing first base, DH, and the outfield corners while serving as a power bat off the bench the rest of the time and providing insurance for Alex Rodriguez, he’d be about as good a fit as one can imagine for the role the Yankees have kept Bernie Williams in the last couple of years.

The player on the table who’d be the best fit on the Mets would be Marcus Giles, the Braves’ longtime second baseman, who was nontendered this week after a disappointing season in which he failed to slug .400. Giles, 28, is likely to go to the Padres, as he’s from San Diego, his brother Brian plays there, and the team needs a second baseman, but his power potential is so intriguing that you’d like to see Omar Minaya throw money at him until he couldn’t say no, not least because the Braves could use a good kick in the shins.

Surprisingly enough, that’s just about it for what’s left on the market. There are plenty of pitchers like Jerome Williams, Tony Armas, and Joel Piniero, who used to be prospects, but they’re horrible, and have gone unsigned for good reason. There are also plenty of scrappy guys like Darin Erstad and John Mabry kicking around, but neither New York team much needs one of them.

While there’s no grand lesson to be drawn from this paucity of talent, it may be a sign that teams are getting shrewder than they used to be when dealing with marginal talent and midtier free agents. Even a few years ago, it was an iron rule that the best deals to be had on the market were either high-priced superstars or the kind of barrel scrapings available at this time of year. This year, as last year, the high-priced superstars generally haven’t looked so good, and the barrel is looking a bit thin around the bottom. The better GMs are taking the advice of all romance columnists and leaving the bar scene alone. It’s a sad time to be stuck out at three in the morning, nursing whiskey, and looking for someone to spend money on.