There are three baseball seasons played on the field: The first one starts around the 1st of April and the second one starts on Aug. 1 after the trade deadline, when baseball execs get their annual do-over. Finally, of course, there is the postseason. But before all that is the very serious business — a different kind of balling — of the offseason, which symbolically begins this week in Orlando with the Winter Meetings.
Around here, this one will absolutely be one which Yankees fans and Mets fans want — need? — their general managers to knock the ball out of the park. Or, because this is New York, they’ll be demanding their guys do that. The fans frankly want Brian Cashman and David Stearns to be stars the way Aaron Judge and Cody Bellinger and Juan Soto and Franciso Lindor and Pete Alonso starred on the field last season.
You better believe Cashman and Stearns are very much on the line now, more than ever. They are on the line the way their players will be on the line once the games count. Really, the two of them are on the line as much as any other executives in baseball, expected to do a whole lot more than Trent Grisham and Devin Williams and Marcus Semien.
When you add it all up, Cashman and Stearns both fell short last season as much as their teams did. At least Cashman saw the Yankees win 94 games — tied for most in the American League before the Yankees couldn’t make it out of the second round; before they were lucky to even get a game off the Blue Jays.
It was far worse for Stearns, whose own team fell flat on its face over the last few months of the regular season, and who got no help from him at the deadline. Then the Mets barely showed up the last weekend of the regular season in Miami and missed the postseason entirely. Again, and again: Because of the money spent on the 2025 Mets, they were one of the great financial failures in the history of their sport. Or any sport. For the first time in three decades, the Mets had turned back into The Worst Team Money Could Buy.
It means Stearns is going to have to do more between now and the real Opening Day than talk about “run prevention,” those two words starting to sound like a trigger to a drinking game with him. And Cashman is being asked, once again, to put together a team that can beat everybody, at long last.
We know how much power men like Cashman and Stearns now wield in the modern world of baseball. They have their all their analytics, to the point where you believe they have almost completely forgotten what the great Joe Torre’s always said about the game’s “beating heart.” But both men are allowed to spend a fortune on baseball players, really as much as anybody except the Dodgers.
Still: Cashman hasn’t been able to produce a World Series winner in 16 years, and just one in the last 25. Stearns just watched the team he left — the Brewers — not only end up with the best regular season record in baseball, but have the general manager who replaced him, Matt Arnold, be voted Executive of the Year.
With these big jobs in the big city, come big expectations, and the fans — and their dear friends in the media — taking big swings at them. Cashman has been around much longer, sometimes making you think he’s been around longer than the internet. But his early years was more about sustaining the team he had inherited, because of a foundation long since built by Gene Michael. The ’09 team, though, that was his. Well, Cash’s and $450 million of Hal Steinbrenner’s cash for CC Sabathia, Mark Teixeira, A.J. Burnett.
It was very big stuff. If you don’t count Aaron Judge, CC turned out to be the most important free agent signing he ever made. The Yankees couldn’t have gotten across the line without Alex Rodriguez, of course. But more than any of them, CC was the one who took the Yankees from uptown all the way downtown to the Canyon of Heroes.
It is different with Stearns, who has no reserves with Mets fans on which to fall back. The Mets team that went to Game 6 of the 2024 National League Championship Series was largely built by his predecessor, Billy Eppler. Then it was the owner, Steve Cohen, who signed Soto, and the owner who brought back Alonso. Even though the Mets didn’t have enough in the end, Soto and Alonso produced 81 home runs and 231 RBI last season. They did their part.
Now it is Stearns responsibility to produce enough pitching, and particularly starting pitching, to make the Mets the kind of World Series contender they were supposed to be last season, because of the way they pushed the Dodgers in October of ’24. For the time being, and even with the promise of all those kids we saw in the second half of last season, the Mets need an ace at the top of the staff. And don’t have one. Maybe this week.
Again: Cohen went after Stearns as if he were some kind of front-office Soto. But we just saw what happened with the first Mets team that really bore Stearns’ signature. And over the second half of last season, the Mets produced an extended collapse that ranked with any September collapse in the history of the team, ever. Now it isn’t Cohen’s job to fix things, it’s not Carlos Mendoza’s job, it is the job of the man in charge of baseball operations. Maybe Stearns is selling a long-range vision of the Mets that will turn them into an East Coast version of the Dodgers. But try selling some kind of 5-year plan to Mets fans.
There is the same kind of urgency for Cashman to make enough right moves going into next season. But there is a crucial difference between his circumstances and Stearns: Steinbrenner the Son has endless patience with his general manager. If you believe that Cohen will bless Stearns with that kind of patience, you also believe Cohen’s new casino next to Citi Field is going to be a form of giving for Uncle Steve.
Cashman thinks he’s going to have enough starting pitching once Gerrit Cole and Carlos Rodon are healthy. Maybe he will. But guess what? The Blue Jays think they have more. If Bellinger does go somewhere else, Cashman is going to need a Plan B, you bet. And you know that despite what the Yankees are saying in public about Anthony Volpe, they are thinking hard about who they want their next shortstop to be.
Cashman has work to do. Stearns may have more. Here comes what feels like Opening Day of the baseball winter. Play ball. Moneyball, in their case.
DONNIE BASEBALL DESERVES HALL CALL, LYIN’ LANE KIFFIN & SCHOEN A FEW PIECES SHORT …
Donald Arthur Mattingly ought to make the Hall of Fame on Sunday when the vote of the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee is announced.
He ought to make it for everything he was at Yankee Stadium when he was young, even if he was there at the wrong time, on his way to being the greatest Yankee who never played in a World Series.
He ought to make it for his offense and defense and grace, and because there was a time when his peers voted him the best player in baseball, an honor never accorded to so many players who have made it to Cooperstown.
His back gave out on him, far too soon, after he was an MVP and batting champ and won one Gold Glove after another.
His career was shortened in a way Sandy Koufax’s was when his left arm gave out.
Donnie Baseball wasn’t Koufax, not saying that.
But he was a Hall of Famer once.
We know because we saw.
Remember the one from Lane Kiffin about how they tried to run his car off the road in Oxford when he was on his way to the airport to go take the LSU job?
Bailey Holloway, a spokeswoman for the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, told Mississippi Today that Kiffin had a safety escort from the state’s Highway Patrol when traveling to the airport that day. And that the agency’s officers have no record of any automobile trying to push the coach’s car off the roadway.
So, like, at this point you wouldn’t believe Kiffin if he told you water was wet.
But say it again: You can start the clock now on when you think Pick a Lane leaves Baton Rouge for the NFL.
If the Knicks do sign Chris Paul, who played as if older than the earth when he did get on the court for the Clippers this season, it will tell you how fixed they are to have someone who can get a pass into the post, if only for 10 minutes a game.
Speaking of drinking games, there should have been one at Joe Schoen’s media availability the other day, just for every time he said, “I appreciate your question.”
Here’s the disconnect between Schoen and Giants fans at this point:
Those “pieces” he says the Giants have in place?
He thinks there’s more of them than his fans do.
You know who’s a baller?
Jaylen Brown is a baller.
I’ve looked at all the metrics, head-to-heads, strength of schedule.
All that.
And here’s my conclusion about why I think that CFP Committee is going to put Notre Dame into the tournament:
Because they’re Notre Dame, that’s why.
Season 5 of “Slow Horses” just kept getting better, the way Gary Oldham does as Jackson Lamb.
Giannis, Giannis, Giannis.
There you go.
I didn’t want you to think I’d forgotten him.
That FIFA Peace Prize awarded to the president at the World Cup draw the other day — does that come with cake?
Mike Lupica’s new Spenser novel, Robert B. Parker’s Showdown, is on-sale now.
