So now Pete Alonso, well on his way to being the greatest home run hitter the Mets have ever had, is gone to the Orioles. It happens the day after Edwin Diaz, the best closer the Mets have ever had, is gone to the Dodgers. And after Brandon Nimmo, the team’s fourth-best hitter and one of the most popular guys on the team, is already long gone to the Texas Rangers for Marcus Semien, who hit .230 last season but is supposed to be aces at run prevention.
Semien, incidentally, is 35 years old. Alonso turned 31 this week. But the Orioles are reportedly giving Alonso five years and the Mets, we’re told, didn’t much want to go past three. So the Polar Bear goes. So does the Trumpet Guy. David Stearns, the head of baseball operations, is still here. And no worries there. Steve Cohen still wants Mets fans to believe that’s still a feel-good story at Citi Field.
Here’s a heads-up for the owner, who kept Alonso around for one more year than Stearns wanted to: Mets fans like Pete better. And Diaz and Nimmo, for that matter. Now they’re waiting for Stearns to start building a team for 2026 that makes them want to like him.
The Phillies sure didn’t get any worse this week when they re-signed Kyle Schwarber. The Dodgers, who just won the World Series and continue to show us they aren’t screwing around here, got better with Edwin Diaz.
How are the Mets doing in the early innings of the baseball winter, the one in which Stearns is supposed to make them a lot better next summer than they were last summer? Right now, this minute, Mets fans are about as happy with Stearns as Giants fans are with Joe Schoen.
Here is one of the things — one of many — Stearns said from the Winter Meetings the other night on SNY:
“As we look at our organization, we are very optimistic and confident about where we are headed.”
And you know who he must have sounded like in that moment, without saying that he appreciated the question about the 2026 Mets? He really did sound like Schoen of the Giants. Stearns then proceeded to give you the kind of word salad that could out-salad Schoen or any other executive in town. That’s with the exception of Leon Rose, of course, who speaks up about as often as a Trappist monk.
“We’ve got all the resources we need, all of the payroll space we need to put a really good team on the field,” Stearns continued. “That doesn’t mean it’s infinite, nor should it be. And so, every decision point — whether it’s a trade, whether it’s free agency — has constraints on it and we do our best to work with them in the context of what is a very heavily resourced and well-supported team.”
Stearns has certainly put more points on the board than Schoen has with the Giants, since it was just 13 or so months ago that the Mets got to Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, even if they did make it that far with a core of players assembled by Stearns’ predecessor. Now he is coming off a season when the Mets did something pretty remarkable:
They added Juan Soto and not only got worse, not only didn’t make it back to the NLCS, they didn’t make it to the postseason at all.
We’ve heard since Cohen hired Stearns away from the Brewers that the Mets’ short-range goal and long-range goal was to model themselves after the Dodgers. Cohen and Stearns have just watched Diaz head west on a new deal and Alonso — with his 264 career home runs for the Mets and his 126 RBI last season — get ready to head down the coast to Baltimore.
Of course, there’s still time for Stearns to hit some home runs of his own between now and Opening Day. But guess what? The next home-run-type deal he makes running the Mets will be his first. So far he hasn’t come close. And you know what Mets fans don’t want to hear, just on Edwin Diaz alone? That the Mets offer to Diaz was comparable to what he got from the Dodgers; that he never got back to the Mets after the Dodgers threw their money at him.
The fact of things to Mets fans is that he’s gone the way Alonso is gone. And Nimmo. If the Mets did want Diaz back as badly as we were told they did, they didn’t do enough, same as the team didn’t do enough last season, tripping over themselves after a 45-24 start all the way to the last weekend of the regular season.
Now they’re down a leftfielder. They’re down a first baseman. They’re down a closer who was a lot more elite than Devin Williams, the new guy, was for the Yankees. They don’t have a centerfielder, either. Or an ace for their pitching staff. That’s the short list. If Cohen’s baseball guru is going to start guru-ing, this would be an excellent time for it. And to show his fan base that he’s capable of doing the kind of work here — with a ton more money behind him — than he did in Milwaukee; capable, really, of doing more than tell Mets fans that he’s got a plan.
There is time, to be sure, for Stearns to start turning things around. He can make a run at Tarik Skubal. Or Cody Bellinger, or Kyle Tucker. Or Joe Ryan. There are nearly four months until Opening Day. But there was no executive in baseball, not one — and not even Brian Cashman — under more pressure in this off-season than Stearns. He is now under that kind of pressure to start fixing the Mets times ten.
Everybody knows Stearns was good at his job in Milwaukee. All he’s been good at in New York so far is making Mets fans mad.
