With every other star player off the market, it’s finally Barry Zito’s time. After months of speculation as to where the star left-hander will be going, it seems that a decision is near. The Rangers, Giants, Mariners, and Angels have all been linked to Zito, with several of the teams having sent emissaries to California to meet with the pitcher and make initial offers. A signing could come as soon as next week.

This is interesting in its own right, but of course in New York what people care about is the fifth team in the bidding, the Mets. General manager Omar Minaya and the son of owner Jeff Wilpon went to California this week to show Zito how serious they are. Fans are split, with some figuring the Mets could use a good pitcher, and others figuring that while they could, Zito isn’t it.

One thing is clear — the Mets’ supposed offer of five years and $75 million isn’t even close to what it will take to get a deal done. Two star pitchers have signed this off-season — Daisuke Matsuzaka and Chris Carpenter. Matsuzaka, between the fee the Red Sox paid to negotiate with him and his actual salary, costs about $17 million a year. Carpenter earned a five-year, $65 million extension, but given that the Cardinals had him under contract for two years and $15 million, that deal is more realistically viewed as a threeyear, $50 million extension. So it looks like the going rate for an ace-type pitcher is roughly $17 million a year.

Might Zito expect at least that much? I can’t see why he wouldn’t. Matsuzaka, as fine as his scouting reports and statistical records look, has yet to pitch in America. Carpenter doesn’t have a track record as extensive as Zito’s and had no negotiating leverage because he was under contract for two more years at a ridiculously cheap price. That $17 million figure looks a bit more like the floor for a top-grade starter’s salary than it does the going rate.

The rejoinder here might be that Zito isn’t as good as either pitcher, that he’s a no. 3 starter masquerading as an ace in a weak market. This is nonsense. One of the better sabermetric dictums is that you should focus on what a player does, rather than how he does it, and by that standard, Zito is a great pitcher. On a per-inning basis, it’s true, he’s not an elite pitcher. In each of the past two years, he’s posted an ERA+ (park adjusted ERA, indexed on a scale where 100 is average) of 116, a fine but hardly overwhelming number, on par with what Tom Glavine does in a typical year at this stage of his career. Pointing to that sort of number as evidence that he’s not much, though, is silly, because it ignores how much he pitches, which is also important. By VORP, a Baseball Prospectus statistic that accounts for quality and quantity of pitching, Zito ranked as the 13th best pitcher in baseball this year: 29th last year, 51st the year before, and 13th the year before that. He hasn’t been a dominant, Roger Clemens-type ace, but at his absolute worst he’s been a fair no. 2 starter. Comparing a player to Tom Glavine is not a good way to denigrate him.

The past is not a guarantor of the future, though, and more granular statistics provide cause for alarm. Zito’s rates of line drives, fly balls, and home runs allowed have all been fairly stable over the years, but his walk rate did rise a bit this year to around four walks per nine innings, and his strikeout rate did drop a bit, to around six a game. This doesn’t mean he’s about to implode. What it does mean is that he’s likelier to decline next year than he is to improve.

This is where you have to judge him against what he’s done. If Zito puts up a season in line with the worst he’s ever had, he’ll still be one of the 50 best pitchers in baseball, or a solid no. 2 starter. That’s not a bad downside. Pitchers whose absolute upside is as a no. 3 starter are getting $11 million a year these days.

The final bit of the puzzle with Zito is how he actually pitches. He bases everything on a big, slicing curveball. Where most pitchers use their fastball to set up their other pitches, Zito works the other way, making hitters look like fools with the hook and then spotting a modest fastball that he’ll toss at 83 to 85 mph. Anonymous scouts have been caught murmuring in the papers about how he can’t keep things up with this sort of repertoire. They may have a point — but then, Zito has been pitching in the big leagues with the same stuff and the same pattern since 2000, and hitters still haven’t quite figured it out. Unless one thinks that for some reason he’ll prove unable to keep throwing that curveball — and Zito is a very sound, consistent pitcher mechanically — there wouldn’t seem to be much cause for concern. Not everyone has to throw 95 mph to be effective. Some pitchers just throw a nasty sinker, some can spot the ball within the strike zone well, and some have a nasty curveball and a rubber arm. There’s more than one way to skin a cat or get hitters out.

Given all this, I expect that Zito will sign, at minimum, a six-year, $100 million deal. You only need one team to agree to pay the big dollars, after all, and Zito’s agent, Scott Boras, is pretty good. I further expect that so long as he doesn’t go to a park that will exacerbate his bad traits, like giving up lots of fly balls, while masking his good ones, like his ability to induce shaky, tentative swings (read: Texas), he’ll be a solid, Glavine-type starter for the life of his deal, a Cy Young candidate in seasons where everything goes just right and a quality no. 2 starter in his lesser years.

The Mets really ought to sign him, not so much because they need the help — their rotation was pretty bad this year, and they were fine — but because Glavine’s pretty old and because they have the money. Zito might not throw hard, he might walk too many batters, and he might not even be much better than SteveTrachsel per inning. It doesn’t really matter. It’s what you do and what you’re worth, not how and why, that count — doubtless the message a gleeful Boras will be pounding home to the executives of five teams this weekend.

tmarchman@nysun.com