Until the roof caved in on the 2025 Mets season, or the bottom fell out — you pick — the Mets had gone 112-64 over just a bit more than a full season of baseball. It had started when they were 22-33 in late May of 2024 and ended with everything bad that happened after they were still 45-24 in June of ’25. But it is clear now that even then, and even after the Mets had made it to Game 6 of the ’24 National League Championship Series the previous October, that David Stearns didn’t particularly care for that Mets team. Or believe in a team that was not his own.
Looking back now, I happen to believe that Stearns thought the heady run that began on the last day of the ’24 season against the Braves, one that included Pete Alonso saving the season with a 9th inning home run against Stearns’ old team the Brewers, was simply one of those crazy heaters you get on in sports sometimes — a little like the one the Knicks gave us against the Celtics last spring — but one not sustainable in the long run.
Maybe Stearns was already starting to think about breaking up the core as soon as the Mets did lose to the Dodgers in the NLCS. If it had been up to him, I also believe, and truly, that Alonso would have been gone a year ago. And don’t think Stearns much liked his owner big-footing him when he brought Alonso back.
But these sure are Stearns’ Mets now and going forward, for better or worse. He clearly didn’t like the way Steve Cohen had been throwing money around before he got to Citi Field, particular with grampa pitchers like Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander. You even wonder sometimes how much he really wanted Juan Soto last winter at that price, and for this long.
So now Stearns will essentially start next season with three holdovers from the last weekend of last season, when the Mets couldn’t get the one more game they needed against the Marlins to get a wild card, and got passed by a Reds team whose payroll was more than $200 million smaller than the one being lugged around like a backpack by Cohen.
After Stearns had traded for Freddy Peralta the other day, the ace at the top of his starting rotation he desperately needed, he said this:
“We’ve got a really tough division. We’ve got some really good teams that are getting better. Until we win a division, we can’t claim that we’re at the top. So, we’ve got to keep going and we’ve got to keep working.”
What we know for certain right now, now that Peralta is here and Bo Bichette is here and two former shortstops like Marcus Semien and Jorge Polanco are over there on the other side of the Mets’ projected ’26 infield, is that after a baseball winter during which most of the conversation was about that Evil Empire 2.0 out in Los Angeles, everybody is suddenly talking about the Mets again. Stearns has suddenly won the most recent news cycle in baseball hands down. Of course it won’t be until Opening Day that we’re going to find out that after doing this kind of extreme makeover he’s built a team good enough to win something on the field, starting with a division for a change.
Do I think he should have kept Alonso for the same kind of money — and not crazy money — that the Mets just shelled out to Cody Bellinger? Yeah, I do. Do I think he botched his negotiation, such as it was, with Edwin Diaz? It’s hard to believe, knowing what he knew, that’s not exactly what happened with a closer as good as the Mets have ever had, one still in his fastball prime.
But in the aftermath of all that, Stearns has suddenly shown he can stand in there against the curve. As mad as Mets fans have been at him across so much of the offseason, they seem like the flurry of mad-scientist things he’s been doing to make amends and, in his mind anyway, make the Mets so much better than what they were when they came stumbling out of last season like drunks stumbling out of a bar after last call.
With everything he’s done, and all the changes he’d made, he has been the opposite of what the Yankees have been doing, also in real time. The Yankees were different than the Mets last season, obviously. They finally pulled out of their mid-season death spiral, ended up tied for the most wins in their league 94, won a wild card series against the Red Sox before being thrown down a flight of stairs by the Blue Jays. Now they’re pretty much going to run the same team out there again, apparently believing that getting 35-year-old Gerrit Cole back after Tommy John surgery is practically as if they signed him as a free agent all over again.
The Yankees last won a World Series in 2009, maybe you’ve heard. Since that time, the Mets have played in as many World Series as they have, even if they haven’t been to the playoffs nearly as many times. But the Yankees never make big changes, not really, apparently taking great consolation in the fact that they have pulled out of death dives the past two seasons, even making it back to the ’24 World Series.
Now they seem to take further comfort in Vegas picking them to win another pennant. And forget about the way their seasons have ended three times they did make it to the postseason:
They got swept by the Astros in 2022. They lost in five games to the Dodgers in the World Series. They only got one game off the Blue Jays last October. That is a record of 2-11 for them in those series. Against the Dodgers and then against the Blue Jays, the two games they got were elimination games. They continue to be a very good regular season team, year after year, one that is never good enough when the money is on the table. And please remember that when they did finally make it back to the Series, they beat two American League Central teams to get there.
We’re going to find out with David Stearns just how much runway he has with Cohen if these changes don’t work. The whole world saw how little help the ’25 Mets got from him at the trade deadline. He thought he got them enough bullpen help. He couldn’t have been more wrong about that, even in a season when one more win would ultimately have made all the difference.
This is his do-over and his makeover all at the same time. Clearly Stearns thought the team he inherited wasn’t good enough. What we now find out with him — better or worse — is that he’s not willing to settle for good enough.
And better be right, Or by next summer nobody is going to remember, or care, that he just won January.
HARBAUGH BRINGS CREDIBILITY BACK TO BLUE, DON’T FORGET THE UCONN STORY & TEARS IN BUFFALO …
As someone who grew up a Giants fan, I am happy in the extreme they just hired John Harbaugh.
If you look at the big picture — the one that takes in all the embarrassment of the past few seasons under Pat Shurmur and Joe Judge and even Brian Daboll eventually — they had no choice BUT to hire Harbaugh.
Not just hire him, but essentially put him in charge of everything football-related except tailgating.
Which they’ve clearly done.
You certainly see how much everybody wants this to be a new beginning for the Giants by the way Harbaugh is still being covered — sometimes breathlessly — as if by the school paper.
It’s reached the point, after the honeymoon week, you get the idea that the history of pro football can’t be properly discussed without discussing Harbaugh.
Again: The Giants had to do this because the moment he signed his contract they had credibility again.
So they have now made him as powerful in Jersey as Sean Payton — another coach with one Super Bowl on his resume — is with the Denver Broncos, and that is saying plenty.
But the guy we all do hope brings the Giants all the way back has won just four playoff games since he got that one Super Bowl — off his brother — back in 2013.
And is the same guy who never made it back to the big game even coaching a multiple MVP guy like Lamar Jackson in his prime.
Now we see if we can do better with Jaxson Dart.
And as well as Parcells and Coughlin did before him.
Shouldn’t the Nets just stop?
If you saw “Song Sung Blue” — and liked it as much as I did — you know how well-deserved Kate Hudson’s Oscar nomination is.
I know some Jets fans who are thinking about having some “Tomlin ‘27” bumper stickers made up.
Indiana University’s national championship is one of the great stories in the history of college sports, without question.
But tell me how it beats the improbable story of what’s happened in college basketball at UConn.
Start with what Geno Auriemma has done with his women’s team up there.
The men?
When Jim Calhoun got there, the school wasn’t so far removed from the Yankee Conference.
Now four decades later the men have won as many national championships as Duke has, and done that with three different coaches: Calhoun, Kevin Ollie, Danny Hurley.
And guess what?
Thinking Danny Hurley isn’t done yet.
I love the notion that Hal Steinbrenner just rolled Scott Boras on this Bellinger deal.
But only if you think teams were lined up to give Cody Bellinger five years.
So what’s the deal in Buffalo — your quarterback cries and you have to fire your coach?
Great week for the Jets with Sam Darnold and Robert Saleh.
Oh, wait.
