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Delgado is 35, coming off a disappointing season and suffering from a hip injury similar to the one that sidelined him briefly last September. He swings at fastballs now like the bat has a donut on it. Lefties have become his Rubik's Cube. The train is off the tracks and heading over the cliff. The only question is whether the Mets can squeeze one more league-average season out of him before he crashes and his ashes get scattered to the wind.

Plans B (pinch-hitter Marlon Anderson), C (Cuban import Michael Abreu) and D (trades for either Texas' Ben Broussard or Cincy's Scott Hatteberg) are being fully vetted.

While I've written about the wisdom of crowds in the past, I'm a skeptic by nature. Just about every observer now believes Delgado is done. And crowds are hardly ever right about anything.

Baseball Prospectus pegs Delgado at .265/.344/.471 (AVG/OBP/SLG) over 491 at-bats, with 21 homers and 75 RBIs. Bill James, in the Bill James Handbook predicts .269/.373/.508 over 520 at bats with 30 homers and 101 RBIs. Dan Szymborski's ZIPS projections over at BaseballThinkFactory.com say Delgado will go .257/.349/.476 with 26 homers and 93 RBIs over 506 at bats.

Szymborski calculates the average first baseman goes .274/.353/.437.

All the projections have Delgado in 2008 as at least slightly above average at the position, but certainly not what the Mets bargained for when they assumed his $16 million '08 salary (and at least a $4 million '09 buyout).

Still, every Mets fan and even Omar Minaya likely would sign up for any of those projections right now; that's how bearish the Delgado market has suddenly turned.

I'm going to remain bullish like last summer when Delgado was mired in a slump that made his season totals look lofty by comparison.

Entering July, Delgado was hitting .220 with 11 homers and 42 RBIs.

I used BaseballReference.com's similarity scores, which are based on Bill James' time-tested formula, to find Delgado's most similar players. Keeping in mind a similar methodology is also the basis of all of Baseball Prospectus's player projections, the idea is that if you find players most like Delgado, then Delgado's career has a reasonable chance of progressing as theirs did.

These were the top-10 comparables, in order: Jim Thome, Frank Thomas, Fred McGriff, Jose Canseco, Jeff Bagwell, Juan Gonzalez, Willie McCovey, Reggie Jackson, Rafael Palmeiro and Duke Snider.

Thome, McGriff and Jackson all had dramatic rebounds after being written off for dead at age 34 or 35. So the idea that sluggers who performed at a Hall of Fame-level at their peak got only a dead-cat bounce after cratering is simply not true. Sometimes that cat still has some life left.

Let's look at McGriff. His career OPS is about 34 percent above the average hitter. At ages 33 and 34 he was at six and 11 percent above average, respectively, and looked like he could never again play first base for a good team (remember, first basemen, collectively, hit well above average).

But at age 35, McGriff went .310/.405/.552 -- 42 percent above average in an offense-heavy season. After declining again the next year to the barely-above-average range, McGriff exploded again at age 37: .306/.386/.544. And there are no sample size problems with either of these big, late-career years; McGriff had about 600 plate appearances during both seasons.

Thome is a similar example. And Jackson was written off by George Steinbrenner at age 35 before bouncing all the way back the next year for the Angels: .275/.375/.532 with 39 homers (back when 39 homers really meant something).

Of course, this doesn't mean that Delgado isn't finished. Certainly, he's shown signs of decline and at age 35 you have to consider the possibility that he will only get worse, not better. However, the conventional wisdom is that aging players never rebound. That's simply not true.

In fact, Delgado rebounded last year. After I wrote that July piece, he went .285/.375/.469 in the second half. Not great, of course, but not bad. And, in limited September action due to the hip problem, he was .321/.383/.566 (60 plate appearances).

But he can't hit lefties, right? Hasn't had a OPS above .770 against them since 2004. Yes, but Delgado didn't hit lefties in 2001 and 2002, either, before exploding against them in 2003.

Just for fun, let's see what McGriff did against lefties late in his career. For context, consider his career OPS against lefties was .792 (newsflash: lefties can't hit lefties very well). He slugged under .400 against them in his age-33 and 34 season. At 35, he bounced back to .446 and at age 37 he pounded southpaws: .550 slugging with 11 homers in 165 at bats against them.

Clearly, the ability of once-great lefty hitters to hit lefties does not necessarily decline with age.

Here's my Delgado projection: 525 at bats, 34 homers, 115 RBIs. Let's call it .275/.375/.555. Remember, this is a contract year. The effect of that is something I am not skeptical about.

Furthermore, Delgado was just unlucky last year on flyballs: 13.7 percent of them cleared the wall, according to our friends at Baseball Info Solutions (courtesy of The Hardball Times). The prior two seasons, nearly 24 percent of them did. Normalize Delgado's rate to about 20 percent in 2008 and you get 35 bombs. Not even the naysayers believe that a slugger's raw power declines appreciably at age 35. So expecting Delgado's rate of homers on flyballs to more or less normalize does not unduly stretch reason.

If I'm right, these same Mets fans wringing their hands over what to do with Delgado in 2008 will be losing sleep over what on earth they're going to do without him in 2009.