New York Mets: All-time “all speed” starting lineup in franchise history

Speed can be deadly in the game of baseball. These New York Mets had such great wheels, they deserve their spot on the franchise’s “all speed” team.

The New York Mets have never been known as a speedy team in their existence, with only eleven players stealing 100 or more bases in their career with the team. Out of the eleven players to steal 100 or bases, only three of them ever reached 200 or more with the Amazins.

The game has changed a lot in recent years with not as many players stealing bases, but for a team that has been around since 1962 only three guys with 200 stolen bases on the team seems rather low.

For this all speed team, we are going to be considering the basic speed statistics such as stolen bases, triples, and doubles. Unfortunately, the technology we have today to help determine a player’s speed was not around years ago, so we can not pick the straight-up fastest guys by how many feet per second they can run.

We are also only looking at players stats while they played for the Mets, so guys like Rickey Henderson will miss the list since he only played a year and a half.

In order to determine who beats who in any close position race, we will look at games played for each player and how many stolen bases, triples, and doubles they had in comparison to each other. With the guidelines now set for the all speed team, let’s take a look at the all speed team for the Mets.

Pitcher – Orlando Hernandez

We are going to get the pitcher out of the way first for this team as they are probably the least important for speed. In an interesting case, we are going to give the edge to Orlando Hernandez over Tom Seaver. If it was anything else but speed I am sure Seaver would take the cake by a long shot, but Hernadez managed to steal three bases in 45 games compared to Seavers four bases in 420 games.

Seaver did have four more triples and fifteen more doubles, but he also played 375 more games than Hernandez for the Mets. If they had played the same amount of games and Hernanzed kept up that pace, he would pass Seaver in both without a doubt.

Catcher – John Stearns

The position with arguably the slowest man on the field in catcher, John Stearns was not that terrible with his legs. In 809 games with the Amazins, he managed to steal 91 bases, knock 152 doubles and log 10 triples. Averaging 18 stolen bases per 162 games for a catcher is definitely eye-catching for a catcher.

Stearns played in parts of 10 seasons with the Mets. Despite only played 90+ games in 5 of those 10 seasons, he managed to steal 10+ bags in 4 seasons. One of those seasons he actually stole 25 bases,  which is very impressive for a catcher.