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Mets All-Decade Team: First Base

Num Player Seasons PA WAR
1 Carlos Delgado 4 2,023 6.9
2 Doug Mientkiewicz 1 313 0.7
3 Jason Phillips 4 894 0.6
4 Todd Zeile 3 1,631 0.3
5 Mo Vaughn 2 654 -0.7

If you needed any more evidence that first base was a sinkhole for the Mets over the past decade, this list should help you sleep better tonight. Carlos Delgado was the only Met first baseman in the aughts whose collective contributions could be easily distinguished from those of a replacement-level player, and even at that his four seasons with the Mets were barely more valuable than Adrian Gonzalez's 2009 season with the Padres (6.3 WAR).

Things have been so bad at first for the Mets that Doug Mientkiewicz's glove in 2005 was enough to land him the silver medal in this embarrassing morass of ineptitude.

Todd Zeile was worth 2.2 WAR in 2000 and bupkis in 2001, and after spending time with the Rockies, Yankees, and Expos, returned to the Mets in 2004 and was just unspeakably awful. His .233/.319/.356 batting line -- split between third base and first base, plus two games behind the plate and one inning on the mound -- left him at -1.9 WAR for the season, knocking his career value with the Mets down to a measley .3 wins above replacement.

Mo Vaughn might have been about a win worse than some readily-available Quadruple-A first baseman, but hey, the Mets saw him hit in a batting cage in Massachusetts in December 2001 and deemed him fit for action despite missing all of the prior season.