Once Steve Cohen bought the Mets he seemingly couldn’t wait to hire David Stearns away from the small-market Brewers. Once David Stearns was hired by Cohen as Mets President of Baseball Operations, he couldn’t wait to fire Buck Showalter.
Now, after two years together, all Cohen has to show for this relationship is two less-than-90-win seasons, with last year also reportedly punctuated by a deteriorated clubhouse environment, and a disastrous winter meetings, which featured the free agent defections of Pete Alonso and Edwin Diaz, along with the Mets No. 1 front office player evaluator Tommy Tanous.
For Cohen and the Mets fan base the hits have just kept on coming this winter as Stearns presided over the departures of three of their most popular players ever, Brandon Nimmo, Alonso and Diaz.
The Nimmo-for-Marcus Semien trade with Texas was based on Stearns’s obsession with “run prevention,” and time will tell how that works out. And even though Alonso is both a huge loss in terms of “runs created” and the same kind of clubhouse popularity as Nimmo enjoyed, there were no teams in on him beyond three years except the Orioles, who needed desperately to land a top-of-the-market free agent to save their credibility with their fans.
Alonso’s agent Scott Boras clearly recognized that in immediately accepting the Orioles’ five-year/$155M offer instead of his usual posture of delaying to squeeze every last dollar of the bidding team.
On the other hand, the Diaz defection to the Dodgers was mystifying in that Stearns allowed him to bolt for what was seemingly a difference of only three million, but there were a number of underlying factors.
For one, the Dodgers aggressively pursued Diaz with a top-of-the-market offer right out of the shoot of three years, $69 million, while Stearns, after signing set-up man Devin Williams (without giving a heads-up to Diaz) for three years, $51 million, approached the negotiations passively and was caught off guard when Diaz didn’t give the Mets a chance to beat or equal the Dodger offer. In addition, Diaz was said to be extremely upset at Stearns’ firing of pitching coach Jeremy Heffner. So on this one, it’s fair to say Stearns is solely responsible for driving Diaz and Tommy Trumpet’s “Narco” out of town.
Making matters worse, if Stearns had ideas of pivoting to the second-best closer option on the market, National League saves leader Robert Suarez, Braves GM Alex Anthopolous beat him to it, reeling in the 34-year old righty for a three-year, $45 million deal on the last day of the meetings to serve as their set-up man for Raisel Iglesias.
As for the reported tensions in the Met clubhouse last year, especially between Francisco Lindor and Juan Soto, I don’t know how exaggerated those reports may be, but what I do know is that it would not have been an issue if Showalter was still the manager. If Showalter had one overriding strength it was his ability change the clubhouse culture everywhere he went and the Mets players had immense respect for him because of his one-on-one approach with them.
It says everything about Carlos Mendoza’s tenuous status as Mets manager now that he was never consulted by Stearns on the Nimmo trade and didn’t find out about it until the day it was announced.
Meanwhile, although he’s not a household name, the biggest loss the Mets suffered at the meetings may have been the defection of Tanous, Stearns VP and Special Advisor, who was hired away by new Rockies president of Baseball Operations Paul DePodesta to be their assistant general manager under Josh Byrnes. The departure of Tanous, who’d been with the Mets through numerous GMs since 2011 and worked alongside DePodesta who was Mets VP of Scouting and Player
Development from 2010-15, had the meetings abuzz as he was widely recognized for overseeing drafts that produced Jeff McNeil, Dom Smith, Luis Guillorme, Michael Conforto, Pete Crow-Armstrong, David Peterson, Mark Vientos and Andres Gimenez, and was responsible for international signings Francisco Alvarez and Ronny Mauricio.
Without the input of Tanous Stearns is now challenged to put the Mets back together again with his army of analytics “yes men” – and even as Cohen maintained last week “there’s a lot of offseason left to put together a championship team”, the Mets’ needs are lengthy, starting with a closer and a first baseman and on to a top-of-the-rotation starting pitcher and an outfielder to replace Nimmo.
It is not Stearns’ style to get involved with expensive long-term contracts, so I don’t see him suddenly engaging with Cody Bellinger, Kyle Tucker or Bo Bichette, and he has not shown himself to be very creative in the trade market. He should be happy that Cohen is currently preoccupied with his new casino project and probably doesn’t realize the Mets are presently a fourth-place team in the NL East.
IT’S A MADD, MADD WORLD
It was gratifying to see the Contemporary Era veterans committee wasting no time in rectifying a grievous mistake by the Baseball Writers Association by electing Jeff Kent to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility with them. Kent, the all-time home run leader by a second baseman, the NL MVP in 2000 and author of 2,461 hits and eight 100-RBI seasons, was eminently deserving and a better candidate (in my opinion) than any of the players on this year’s BBWAA ballot…Have to believe Mike Yastrzemski’s two-year/$23 million signing with the Braves at the winter meeting brought a smile from his granddad, Hall-of-Famer Carl Yastrzemski, who earned an estimated TOTAL $1.6 million in 23 years in the big leagues with the Red Sox.
