New York Mets president David Stearns has been hailed as a conquering hero, one who has been the rumored target to run the team since owner Steve Cohen bought the franchise three years ago. Stearns has an excellent résumé from his time as general manager of the Milwaukee Brewers along with training in the Cleveland Guardians and Houston Astros front offices after a brief stop with the Mets early in his career.
But for all the hype that comes with taking over in New York, which Stearns will officially do in early October after the regular season ends, there is also the reality that running the Mets will be more complicated than running the Brewers was for some very clear, big-picture reasons. He will now be working in baseball's biggest media market, managing the sport's biggest payroll, running a veteran team and making decisions for a club with a number of potential paths forward coming off a disappointing 2023 season.
There are some potential challenges here for Stearns that go beyond the strategy that he and Cohen decide to pursue as he moves from a small-market club with a small payroll, few stars and little pressure to the exact opposite kind of environment. On top of that, Stearns now inherits someone else's players and front office personnel (though there are some open spots he'll get to fill this offseason) and will have to make all of this work with a demanding owner peering over his shoulder.
Here's how I think Stearns might attack the various mandates that could come down from Cohen, or, if he really has been given total control, potential options Stearns himself might choose to pursue:
1. Attempt to win 90-plus games in 2024, at any cost
Since this is a big-market team, there will always be win-now expectations, so let's start with what taking an approach focused solely on putting the best possible team on the field in 2024 would look like. I don't think this is the most likely plan given the reporting coming out of the Mets' trade deadline overhaul, but let's walk through it as an exercise.
If we assume key roles/starting spots for Francisco Alvarez, Pete Alonso, Ronny Mauricio, Francisco Lindor, Brett Baty, Brandon Nimmo and Starling Marte, there are still a few additions needed to shore up the lineup. On the pitching side, Kodai Senga, Jose Quintana and David Peterson constitute the Nos. 3-5 starters of a playoff rotation. Edwin Diaz is one of the best closers in baseball and should remain in that top tier when he returns from injury -- but the current bullpen is last in baseball in bullpen WAR.
Everyone would love to sign Shohei Ohtani, but that doesn't seem super realistic right now for a number of reasons, including that it's unclear what the price will be and what exactly his role on the mound will be going forward, so I'll leave him out of this. I don't think the aim will be to just go to the top of the free agent market at every spot of need, even in this hypothetical go-for-it approach, but I also don't think trading prospects for big leaguers will be Stearns' plan, so targeting a wider group of mid-to-upper-market free agents makes the most sense.
RHP Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who just turned 25 last month, is the youngest pitcher in the upcoming free agent class and produced dominant numbers in Japan for several seasons. He will draw a wide group of suitors due to his age and because signing him will not require any draft pick compensation. If the Mets offer $125 million (plus the posting fee to his NPB club), I think they would land him while still adhering to the trends of last offseason's approach: Don't give long-term deals to older players, especially pitchers, and don't give up draft picks as compensation.
Filling that other top-end starting pitcher spot is trickier, but there are some options further down the market, including Sonny Gray, Michael Lorenzen, Shota Imanaga (an NPB left-hander who won't require a posting fee), James Paxton or Tyler Mahle. (I'll exclude Blake Snell, Aaron Nola and the next few best options because they will require longer-term deals in the $75 million to 150 million range for pitchers in their 30s, with many requiring draft pick compensation.) Peterson could also move to a long reliever role, opening up a slot to sign two pitchers from this group in addition to Yamamoto.
When it comes to upgrading the bullpen there is one easy answer: Josh Hader is the best reliever on the market and a clear fit -- but it would take a Diaz-level contract plus a surrendering comp pick to land him. This move would be an exception to last year's plan, one that I'd imagine Stearns (who had Hader in Milwaukee) could be open to making. Adding more relief help, excluding Jordan Hicks (execs think he'll get a four-year deal), brings in a number of player options who are likely to get one- or two-year deals for $6 million to 12 million per year: Will Smith, Craig Kimbrel, Aroldis Chapman, Reynaldo Lopez, Yuki Matsui (another NPB free agent like Imanaga), David Robertson and John Brebbia, among others.
For the lineup, I think a veteran infielder to provide cover for Baty and Mauricio makes sense, with options including Jeimer Candelario, Whit Merrifield, Amed Rosario, Donovan Solano, Brian Anderson and Gio Urshela. You could argue the existence of Luis Guillorme and Jeff McNeil means the Mets won't need one of these players and that there are more pressing concerns at the two outfield spots and DH, currently projected to be Marte, D.J. Stewart and Dan Vogelbach, with Mark Vientos another option.
I'll assume Cody Bellinger (likely getting close to, if not more than, $100 million) isn't a great fit given the above reasoning, so the focus then shifts to good-not-great options: Jung-hoo Lee (likely to be posted from the KBO), Michael Conforto, Harrison Bader, Jorge Soler, Joc Pederson, Tommy Pham, Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Teoscar Hernandez, J.D. Martinez, Kevin Kiermaier, Adam Duvall, Michael A. Taylor, Jason Heyward and Hunter Renfroe. Adding two of those players makes sense. Of course, with no payroll limits, the Mets could give up another comp pick and $100 million-plus for Bellinger and that would largely solve the problem.
If the Mets did a version of this plan -- signing Yamamoto, Imanaga, Paxton, Hader, Smith, Lopez, Solano and Bellinger -- it would add something like $120 million in additional payroll to the roughly $250 million it would cost to just bring back the current club next year, for a CBT figure roughly around $370 million. For reference, that's basically where the Mets started the 2023 season -- so by leaning hard into free agency at a hefty cost, this team could land in the range of 90-95 wins on paper and be among the best in baseball entering 2024.
2. Win 90-plus games in 2024, but first you must have a CBT payroll under $300 million
While entering the new season with a team projected in that 90-95 win range might sound nice, starting another season with a payroll approaching $370 million seems unlikely -- especially on the heels of everything that went wrong for the Mets this season.
Instead, searching for value and working within clear financial parameters is probably more realistic for the Mets and also more comfortable for Stearns, as that's essentially specifically what he has succeeded at that landed him this job in the first place. Trimming $70 million from the above scenario isn't that difficult, though you run the risk of win projections putting the 2024 Mets in the mid-to-upper 80s and in need of some luck to get to 90 wins. Of course, after all of the bad luck New York endured this season, maybe the Mets are due for things to bounce their way next year.
With this objective, we'll replace the big contract for Bellinger and instead sign J.D. Martinez to fill the DH spot, drop Solano and downgrade Hader to Hicks. That gets the Mets about halfway to their desired payroll while also dropping two five-plus-year deals that Stearns would likely rather avoid anyway. They can get the rest of the way down to that $300 million by changing the third starting pitcher signing (Paxton) into a reclamation project or injury gamble like Brad Keller or Luis Severino and then letting go of some pitchers due for arbitration raises. Instead, Stearns would find some strong replacements on minor league deals, which is exactly the kind of thing the Brewers excelled at when he was in Milwaukee.
This approach might yield a 2024 roster that is more playoff hopeful than true World Series contender, but it would allow New York to remain competitive while attempting to build something even better for the years to come.
3. Be competitive in 2024, win 90-plus games in 2025, but set up a perennial power that doesn't rely on league-high payroll
The overarching idea of our second option is to create enough limitations to allow Stearns to bring some of the magic from his time in Milwaukee to New York. The real way to do that, though, is by doing the "under the hood" stuff that takes place in front offices that most fans aren't aware of -- and that is what the last part of our final directive is all about.
Setting up a team that can win big without needing to rely on huge payrolls to do so is what I believe Cohen, Stearns and GM Billy Eppler are most looking to accomplish in New York, but getting there goes deeper than just a winter's worth of moves. Instead, this means delving into front office personnel, remaking departments and focusing on the bigger picture with a unified franchise-wide philosophy. The specifics of this kind of remake are hard to describe since teams guard these plans closely, but the idea is to develop a philosophy that morphs into a competency that eventually (hopefully quickly) becomes a competitive advantage.
This is where turning the Mets into something resembling what worked for Stearns in Milwaukee comes into play. The Brewers don't really pay a retail rate for players in free agency because they can't afford to, similar to how Tampa Bay operates. Both of these organizations try to populate their big league rosters with players on their minor league teams, even if they trade for them in the minors, rather than signing big league free agents. But when they dip into free agency, they look for players who are undervalued, whose weaknesses are things they tend to be good at developing, and thus their outcomes have wide ranges. This means they either get a free agent on a cheap contract who turns into a core player, or they release/bench that player for little cost. Signing a one-win backup for $7 million is a giant waste of money for them, but that's often what big-market teams set out to do.
That ability to turn trade throw-ins, veterans on minor league deals and free agents who'll sign for less into real players is what the Mets are trying to create by hiring Stearns. Once the hiring for key departmental heads is completed in the next month or two, that will help Stearns decide which areas he can look to the bargain bin to for free agent signings because that's the area where scouting, analytics and development will create value.
That might sound hypothetical, but here are some specifics. Freddy Peralta, William Contreras, Brandon Woodruff, Corbin Burnes and Josh Hader all had moments in their careers, maybe just a few years ago, when they had little-to-no value, and they all turned into key players for a playoff team in Milwaukee. Go through Brewers or Rays stats the past few seasons and every year there are a couple of random players who pop up with two-plus WAR seasons. Sometimes it's a breakout of the aforementioned and sometimes it's a veteran on a minor league deal putting it all together once and only once.
As hard to pinpoint as that competitive advantage is, that's actually the thing that turns micro-payroll teams into perennial contenders. It's not because they can turn a seventh-round pick into a big leaguer a little more often than their rivals, it's because over the entire organization for hundreds of players, you're going to see more arrows up than arrows down, and every day they're adding more players like that than they lose. This is what allows an organization to make the best team it can for under $300 million, a team that on paper might be an 86-win team but in reality will churn out 92 wins more often than 80 wins.
As much as you'd like to think money can buy that seemingly magical ability every team is trying to grasp, only a handful of organizations have actually pulled it off and continue to year after year. We're about to find out if Steve Cohen is the kind of owner who can make this happen with Stearns steering the ship or if he just has very deep pockets.