Omar Minaya traveled with the team to Philly and tempered expectations on the trade front. Basically, don’t hold your breath on a trade happening any time soon.

“It’s fair to say that, if you’re looking at reinforcements right now, we are hoping and counting on some of our DL guys being reinforcements. It’s also fair to say that we’re going to go out there and try to look around and see if we can do something that can fit. Of course, you’re kind of caught in-between.

“Look, I’m talking to clubs. But I’ve been around long enough to know that you can try to talk to teams, but trades have to work for both teams. We are going to continue to have dialogue, but it’s got to make sense. And our situation is that it’s not one player. If you were telling me that we just needed one guy, you could say, ‘Oh, we can go out there and get that.’ Right now, we’re looking at two starting pitchers (on the DL). One, hopefully, might be back, depending on how Oliver throws. You’ve got a bullpen piece (missing). You’ve got a shortstop. You’ve got a center fielder. You’ve got a first baseman. So there are a lot of different pieces that need to be filled.

He went onto say there are too many teams in contention right now that won’t be willing to trade, which is probably true. Eric Hinske was mentioned. We talked a little bit with them. We liked him some. But with some of the guys we have — whether it was a Murphy, whether it was a Reed, we’ve got Pagan coming back—I think we’re probably going to have a little bit of a surplus from the lefthanded side.” Omar did mention the Mets can take on payroll, so that’s a good thing.

I don’t have too much of a problem with Omar saying this right now, but if I hear this July 31st with the Mets within striking distance of first place, I’ll be extremely upset. If he doesn’t do anything to really improve this club for a third straight trading deadline with the Mets in contention then I’m sorry but we need someone who can put us over the top.

Personally, I would trade Bobby Parnell and Dan Murphy if it meant getting Adam Dunn. Look Parnell is a great young, hard thrower but bullpen guys are a dime a dozen. It’s extremely hard to get a 40 home run slugger that no ballpark can hold. Dunn is under contract, relatively cheap at about 10 million next season and will take care of 1st base when Delgado is gone in 2010. Dunn is also only 29 years old right now.