Back when I rooted for the Mets, which was a long time ago, 1963 to about 2006 or -7, whenever Willie Randolph was completing his comical mismanagement regime, I had the thought that I’d seen a lot of GOATs over the years. If not The Greatest of All Time, then legitimate candidates for the GOAT, players who, if you brought them into the conversation about the GOAT pitcher, or GOAT best-hitting catcher, or GOAT best-fielding 1b-man, you would be taken seriously by whoever you were conversing with. I thought it was interesting, how many GOAT candidates I’d actually seen in a Met uniform.

Not just Tom Seaver, or Mike Piazza, or Keith Hernandez, who are strong candidates for the above-described titles, but I’d also seen good candidates for the GOAT base-stealer, the GOAT best-fielding shortstop. the GOAT best defensive catcher, the GOAT best pinchhitter. Again, I’m not claiming that Rickey Henderson, Rey Ordonez, Jerry Grote, and Rusty Staub would win these titles in some imaginary bar-room argument, just that I could make that case for them and not make an idiot of out of myself doing so. Oh, yeah, one other pickup who might qualify for the GOAT, period, Willie Mays, though obviously not during his Met-uniform stage. (The Giant Mays is still my GIESP candidate—Greatest I Ever Saw Play.) Some of these guys, like Mays and Henderson, also qualify in other GOAT categories: best leadoff man, for example, or best all-around centerfielder.

Think of your team, and which GOAT candidates you can come up with, in whatever categories you choose to conjure up. I suspect that, with a broad enough conception of categories and candidates, you will come up with a few that might surprise you. Considering how long baseball has been played, and the rarity of GOAT candidates, I find it sorta amazing that most of us have seen the greatest all-time anything in history, but I think most of us may have seen just that, with our own eyes: the single best human being at some large or small skill who ever lived.

Some of these, particularly the fielding designations, are particularly open to irresolvable debate, since we seem to be decades behind quantifying "fielding" compared to where are in quantifying batting, pitching and even baserunning. Ordonez and Grote, to use my examples, are mostly subjective choices—I have no body of evidence, nor do I know of any I would consider dispositive, to show their greatness. I’ve seen each of them make unusually dexterous plays many and many a time, far more often than I’ve had a chance to see with non-Mets players, but do I know for a fact that their fielding measures up to Ozzie Smith’s or Yadier Molina’s? Of course not, and I don’t see how I could, other than having simultaneously been a nutty Cardinals’ fan, watching hundreds of their games at the same time I was devouring Mets’ games.

More so than with any other facet of the game, fielding stats can only be used to approximate, not to establish, absolute inferiority or superiority. Every stat of every stripe can be argued against: the all-time leader in any category is always performing in a time or place, and often both, that works in his favor. Cy Young was pitching  in an optimal period to rack up Wins, Nolan Ryan strikeouts (hey, I saw his first few hundred Ks as well!), Bonds HRs, and there are always well-reasoned arguments, often winning arguments, against anyone as the GOAT in any category, fielding most of all. The clincher for Keith Hernandez’s goatiness at first base would be his eleven Gold Gloves, except that Hal Chase and Frank Chance and whoever else you’d care to nominate from the depths of history had no chance to chase Gold Gloves and, besides, the game changes enough over time that other metrics Bill and others have devised to quantify fielding probably don’t apply to all contenders equally.  A few years back, Nap Lajoie might have been considered a strong contender for the GOAT fielding second baseman, but Bill pretty much blew a gaping, smoking hole in that argument for me, and the same goes for Andruw Jones, whose stats in center field argue in favor his primacy but for the argument that Jones, like Lajoie, might have been more of a ball-hog than a ball-hawk. Whether or not you’re persuaded by such arguments is what makes such arguments ultimately subjective.

So all we’re left with is various arguments, strong ones, weak ones, ludicrous ones, and brilliant ones, for each GOAT nominee. Limiting your best argument to the one team you’ve watched the most, and the most closely, can anyone top the baker’s dozen GOAT-candidates I’ve personally seen play in my decades as a Mets fan? To wit:

1)      GOAT pitcher: Tom Seaver

2)      GOAT strikeout pitcher: Nolan Ryan

3)      GOAT hitting catcher: Mike Piazza

4)      GOAT fielding catcher: Jerry Grote

5)      GOAT fielding shortstop: Rey Ordonez

6)      GOAT fielding first baseman: Keith Hernandez

7)      GOAT basestealer: Rickey Henderson

8)      GOAT leadoff hitter: Rickey Henderson

9)      GOAT centerfielder: Willie Mays

10)   GOAT pinch-hitter: Rusty Staub

11)   GOAT catcher: Yogi Berra (a bit of a stretch: Yogi had 9 at bats as a Met))

12)  GOAT left-handed pitcher: Warren Spahn (who played many more innings than Berra as a Met, and in whose case I don’t actually believe, but sincere belief is not a requirement here, just the ability to make a respectable argument)

13)  GOAT fielding centerfielder: Richie Ashburn (Mays, too, but Ashburn’s range factors in the same period as Mays are off-the-charts. Don’t actually remember Ashburn—I was eight years old for the first part of the ’62 season, and  more of a Yankee fan than a Mets fan—but I might have seen a few innings on TV or something.)

The rules to this contest are:

You are limited to players for one team only

You must have actually seen (or as with Ashburn, plausibly seen) each player play at least one MLB game for that one team

You must be willing to make a sincere case for that player as the GOAT in whichever category you are naming. If challenged, you must make that case.

Penalties for failing to make plausible cases range up to being mocked and remembered as "That guy who thought Kent Tekulve was the GOAT relief pitcher in history"

No absurd invented categories will be recognized (i.e. GOAT urinal-smasher) as entries, though they may be mentioned in passing if designated as such.

You must have fun making up your list of GOATs

Baaah, baaah!