If you thought your family’s Thanksgiving table was complicated, wait until you pull up a chair to the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee meeting. Sixteen people seven Hall of Famers, nine executives or assorted powerbrokers, and at least three who probably still hold grudges from a 1987 arbitration hearing will gather in Orlando this week to sift through the latest ballot of baseball greats who, for one reason or another, still need a permission slip to enter Cooperstown. And of the eight names on the ballot, three have Mets ties that’s 37.5%, or as we call it in Flushing, “a solid Mike Piazza caught-stealing percentage.” The voters include Hall of Famers Ferguson Jenkins, Jim Kaat, Juan Marichal, Tony Pérez, Ozzie Smith, Alan Trammell, and Robin Yount, joined by executives and others such as Mark Attanasio, Doug Melvin, Arte Moreno, Kim Ng, David O’Donald, Theo Epstein, Alex Rodriguez, and Dave Stewart. That’s not a committee it’s the guest list for the most confusing fantasy draft of all time.

The Contemporary Era Committee convenes every three years, which is basically the equivalent of waiting for the next season of Stranger Things to finally arrive.This year it’s the 1980-onward class, and the ballot is built like a Firebird Trans Am—V8 swagger with a hood decal you can see from space. The eight candidates average 74.1 career bWAR, which tells you everything you need to know about the caliber of this group The group includes Barry Bonds at 162.8, Roger Clemens at 139.2, Gary Sheffield at 60.5, Jeff Kent at 55.4, Dale Murphy at 46.5, Carlos Delgado at 44.4, Don Mattingly at 42.4, and Fernando Valenzuela at 41.4. For the uninitiated, bWAR—Baseball-Reference’s version of Wins Above Replacement tries to cram a player’s entire baseball existence into one neat little number. It blends together everything: the hitting (measured with fancy tools like wOBA that tell us how much a guy actually helps his team score), the baserunning (because taking an extra base or stopping at second can swing a game), and the fielding (using Defensive Runs Saved, which is one of the big things that separates bWAR from FanGraphs’ UZR-based system). It also factors in positional difficulty so a shortstop gets more credit than a first baseman who mainly contributes by pointing encouragingly at foul balls—and even bakes in pitching value using a runs-allowed model based on what actually happened, not the FIP-driven “what should have happened” approach of fWAR.

All of that gets stacked up against the mythical “replacement-level” player, the kind of readily available AAA call-up who’d help you win roughly 29% of the time. Every WAR point above that baseline represents a win your team can thank the player for.

And this matters—especially on a Hall of Fame ballot—because bWAR has become one of the go-to ways to size up a player’s career. A typical Hall of Famer usually lives somewhere in the 50–70 WAR neighborhood, the inner-circle legends cruise past 100, and analysts generally start whispering “Cooperstown” once you hit the 60–65 range, depending on your position.Naturally, the press has spent the run-up gushing over Mattingly—whom Yankees fans celebrate like a federal holiday—and Murphy, whose fan base is so dedicated they built a website featuring documentaries narrated by Jason Aldean and Ernie Johnson. I assume Garth Brooks handles the bonus features. But the real story is Bonds, Clemens, and Sheffield, three men whose stats say “first ballot,” while their steroid-era baggage says, “Sir, step right over to the TSA's secondary screening.”

As if the conversation weren’t dramatic enough, a rule change has turned the stakes into something high enough to require oxygen masks. Beginning this year, any candidate who doesn’t get at least five votes out of the 16 will be kicked off the next ballot for a full three years, and if it happens more than once, they’re out for good. Permanently. As in, “Thanks for playing, please enjoy our parting gifts: a Derek Jeter gift basket.” So if Bonds, Clemens, or Sheffield don’t hit that magic number in Orlando, their Cooperstown path will be narrower than the combined strike zone of Laz Díaz, CB Bucknor, and Bruce Dreckman.

But enough about the national drama. Let’s talk Mets. Because of course we’re going to talk Mets here on the Korner. Three of the eight candidates—Jeff Kent, Gary Sheffield, and Carlos Delgado—wore Mets colors at some point. That’s 37.5% of the ballot with a Flushing connection, proof that even if Mets history sometimes feels like a blooper reel narrated by Bob Uecker, we’ve somehow managed to produce or host a not-insignificant portion of Hall of Fame-caliber talent. And in the spirit of fairness—and because Mets fans love a good argument almost as much as we love a good lefty reliever it’s only right to lay out the Hall of Fame cases for each of our guys as objectively as possible.

Jeff Kent, who hit .290 with 377 home runs, 1,518 RBI, and 55.4 bWAR over his career, posted .279 with 67 homers, 267 RBI, and 9.7 bWAR as a Met from 1992 through 1996. The case for Kent starts with the fact that he is statistically the most productive offensive second baseman in Major League history. That’s not opinion it’s just math, the coldest, least sentimental thing in the universe besides Alex Rodriguez’s apology scripts. Kent hit more home runs than any second baseman ever, drove in runs like he was being paid by the RBI, and from 1997 to 2005 became a roving RBI machine . He won an MVP, made five All-Star teams. And yes, he became a superstar after the Mets traded him, which by the bylaws of Mets fandom automatically makes him a Mets legend. The case against him is simple: defense, or as the metrics politely describe it, “Oh no.” Add to that a prickly reputation—writers called him ‘surly’ and ‘difficult,’ and he even once got into it with Barry Bonds in the Giants’ dugout—and suddenly Jeff McNeil and Francisco Lindor look like Bert and Ernie. None of this should matter for the Hall, but committees are small and memories are long—somewhere, a voter is steaming like Frank Costanza over George Steinbrenner trading Jay Buhner.

Gary Sheffield, who hit .292 with 509 homers, 1,676 RBI, and 60.5 bWAR in his career, spent 2009 with the Mets, hitting .276 with 10 homers and 43 RBI and—most memorably—slugging his 500th home run while wearing orange and blue. The case for Sheffield rests on the simple fact that if Barry Bonds was the Hulk, Sheffield was the guy who designed the gamma-ray machine. He had the fastest bat in baseball history, a terrifying combination of hand-eye coordination and “I dare you to throw that again.” He hit 509 home runs with a .907 OPS, walked more than he struck out, made nine All-Star teams, and in an age of wild swings and strikeouts, showed the plate discipline of someone playing chess while everyone else played Hungry Hungry Hippos. And because he hit number 500 as a Met, that moment belongs permanently in the Flushing scrapbook alongside the black cat, Swoboda's catch, and Bartolo’s home run. The argument against Sheffield centers on two words: BALCO adjacent. He was never suspended, never convicted, but he was in the neighborhood like a guy borrowing sugar from Victor Conte. And his defense was so rough that advanced metrics still wake up screaming.

Carlos Delgado, who hit .280 with 473 home runs, 1,512 RBI, and 44.4 bWAR in his career, batted .267 with 104 homers, 339 RBI, and an .857 OPS in three seasons as a Met. His case begins with consistency, power, patience, and leadership, and at his peak he was so intimidating that pitchers crossed the street to avoid him. As a Met, he delivered one of the greatest second halves in franchise history in 2008, and his 38-homer 2006 season helped take the Mets within one curve ball (too soon ? ) of the World Series. Career-wise, he finished just shy of the magic milestones that supercharge Hall cases, but 473 homers, more than 1,500 RBI, and a .392 OBP during his prime still place him among the best hitters of his era. He is also arguably the greatest Puerto Rican first baseman of all time. The case against him is that despite all of that, his totals sit just below traditional Hall benchmarks. He never won an MVP, made only two All-Star teams, and injuries shortened what could easily have been a 550-homer career. He may ultimately fall into that frustrating category known as the Hall of Very Very Good, which is wonderful company but doesn’t come with a plaque.

If I personally had three votes—and Cooperstown has repeatedly denied my application on the grounds of “excessive sarcasm”—I’d usually be tempted by Bonds and Clemens, because let’s be honest: the idea of excluding baseball’s all-time home run king or one of the top five pitchers ever feels like building a museum about space travel and then banning the moon landing. I go back and forth on it constantly, and between you and me, a previous run-in with Barry that got a little… ugly, makes me even more hesitant.

So for this cycle, I’m passing on Bonds and Clemens. My three votes go to the players who check every other box: Carlos Delgado, Jeff Kent, and Dale Murphy—the three highest-WAR guys on the ballot without any steroid allegations. As a Mets writer, my ballot-heart still bleeds blue and orange: Kent absolutely deserves serious consideration, Delgado is a longer shot but more than worthy of the conversation, and Murphy while not a Met, well, let’s just say he’s a national treasure. Three Mets, on one ballot, and enough controversy, nostalgia, and Thanksgiving-week indigestion to carry us all the way until pitchers and catchers report.

Now it’s your turn: who would get your three votes? Drop your 3 choices in the comments below and see how your picks compare to other readers!