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Maybe I should get on a regular publishing schedule.

I had that thought this week, as I watched Andy Green call out Mark Vientos, saw Good Fundies Brian and Pete Hoffman post some dumb takes on social media, and rejoiced as Juan Soto returned to the lineup.

No one wants to hear a hobbyist newsletter writer say that they don’t have time for their hobby because of actual responsibilities, but I, a hobbyist newsletter writer, don’t always have time to react to every stupid media scandal and Mets move.

So instead, how about we make this a weekly read?

Going forward, I’ll do my best to get you all my Mets thoughts on Sundays — barring a major trade or interview or Jon Heyman tweet. It’s been fun trying different things out this summer, and I hope you’ll want to stick around through the off-season and forthcoming lockout. Tell your friends — especially if they like David Stearns as much as I do. The more people who do subscribe, the more I’ll be incentivized to try out some fun stuff — videos, chats, you name it.

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Now, on with the show.

Accountability Department

I hate to reference things I got right (lie), but I must return to my thoughts on where Carlos Mendoza failed as Mets manager, given how much success Andy Green has had in the same role with a diminished team.

I like Mendoza. He’s a good dude, and I think his baseball mind is sharp. But this team did not play for him. It didn’t play for him in 2025. It didn’t play for him in 2026. I posted this on social media, but when Mark Vientos blew through a stop sign in April amid the Mets’ 12-game losing streak and was thrown out at home plate by a country mile — and then he dared to say after the game that his “instincts” were more important than the third base coach throwing up a stop sign… well, when Mendoza didn’t publicly read him the riot act that was the end of things.

There is no accountability on this team.

There never was.

Mendoza claimed at the time that this was “addressed,” but there was little evidence of any such addressing. Instead, Vientos continued to play selfishly and poorly — and while I wouldn’t blame him for the entire team’s bad play during the Mendoza months, Vientos often felt like a poster child for their failure.

Contrast this entire episode with how Green spoke about Vientos last week, as his rehab stint following a hand fracture continues.

“I don’t know,” Green said when asked what role Vientos might play when he’s activated. “I was very forthright with him when he started the rehab assignment that a lot of that will be dictated by how others perform and also by how he performs. Still think there’s a very bright future for him out there if he wants to grab a hold of it. That’s on him.”

That’s on him.

“When he gets back in the box, take advantage of the at-bats you do get. Prove you deserve more at-bats,” Green continued. “I think people get into different phases in their career at different points in time. He has all the talent that he possessed in ‘24 when he was hitting close to 30 home runs and didn’t start the season with the big league club. It’s all right there. It’s on him for that to come out.”

Prove you deserve more at-bats.

It’s on him.

“We certainly want to see it come out,” he said. “It’s not going to be a perfectly laid path for him, though, when he does come back.”

This is probably the end of the road for Vientos.

It’s deserved.

Green had the guts to say it in public.

“He is very honest. He’s not afraid to push people to get better, but at the same time, he’s very encouraging and uplifting. He has a way of letting people know how good they are, and it’s not fake,” Bo Bichette said of Green. “I don’t think he’s saying it just to give someone more confidence. I think he says it because it’s true in his mind, and obviously, that’s going to have more impact on us. He genuinely sees what we could be better at and our potential and lets us know that. And that’s powerful.”

In the wake of his stone-cold realism about Vientos, there was a lot of chatter about Green remaining the Mets manager next year or perhaps becoming the team’s general manager as he returns to the front office. Hey, why not? Either would be great! But regardless of what happens, it’s clear as day that Mendoza simply did not have the juice to manage a team through adversity. I never got the sense that the players were motivated by Mendoza — just watch the games from June 2025 to June 2026 for proof — and that impression has only increased since Green became the manager.

So when Sal Licata or Laura Albanese tell you Mendoza was dealt a “bad hand,” you know what to do.

One more note here on Green, from our “friend” Good Fundies Brian.

“Relegate” Stearns to his job as president of baseball operations, the lead position in an organization.

For reference, “relegate” is a verb that means to “assign someone or something to a lower, less important rank, position, or place.”

Bad grammar, Brian.

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Reading the Tweets

Some dumb social media takes of the last week.

1.

Jeff McNeil has the lowest WAR (wins above replacement) of his entire career at 0.5, and his OPS is tied for his lowest ever (.679 OPS) while playing in the most hitter-friendly park in the American League.

Nimmo has his worst WAR (wins over replacement) since 2020.

And, uh, Alonso. Well, I’ll take the loss again on him — that darn accountability and all. This is his best season since 2022.

2.

Not the brightest, I know. Just a couple of things here: players are placed on waivers all the time — the Reds just did this with a couple of their failed guys. That’s what happens when bad teams don’t get to trade some of their players at the deadline.

“Another bad move by David Stearns.” Was it? Luisangel Acuña has been one of the worst players in baseball (-0.3 WAR); Robert is at 0.9 WAR even with all his injuries and poor play. He’s basically replaced Tyrone Taylor since the deadline. He’s a guy who is extremely valuable in a part-time role, with the upside of an MVP.

Love to contextualize your dumb take. Always something that shows it came from a place of strength and logic.

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A noun, a verb, and asking about David Stearns’ job security — this is the life of New York Post reporter Mike Puma.

“What is your commitment to David and the front office right now?” Puma asked New York Mets owner Steve Cohen on Wednesday, before the Mets beat the San Diego Padres — the team’s 11th win in 15 games

“I’m committed to David, I’ve said that before,” Cohen replied. “We’re going to move forward. I thought we had a great trade deadline. Listen, David is smart. He knows what he’s doing. He’s very adaptable. He learns from mistakes. That’s what I want in a leader.”

“What mistakes do you think he made this year?” asked Puma.

“Listen, I could argue,” Cohen said before a long pause. “We might have taken too much risk. As far as — when you look at the changes that were made, and whenever you make significant changes, sometimes it takes a while to integrate. Those are the things I’m looking at as an example of where we can do better.”

Cohen later added, “I just think when you add new players, when you add a coaching staff. Maybe adding players with an injury history. When you add risk upon risk upon risk — one risk alone, but when you add enough risk to something, all of a sudden you can have a dispersion of results. It doesn’t mean that it had to turn out bad. It just means that you have dispersion of results, and maybe the possibility of an undesirable result is more of a possibility because of the risk you’re taking.

“I equate it to running a portfolio,” he continued. “The more risk you take in a portfolio — yeah, it can have major upside, but also your downside can be bigger. And so you can have bigger variance in results. I think that’s what happened here.”

Here’s how Puma — who previously asked Stearns if he should quit — relayed these comments to the New York Post readership.

Are the “expectations” in the room with us? If so, blink twice.

Now, if you thought Cohen’s comments sounded a bit familiar — and not just because Stearns haters espouse this stuff on social media every day — that’s because a key figure in the Mets front office had already said something similar three months ago.

His name is David Stearns.

“We absolutely have to look at our risk assessment on injured players or players who get injured once they’re here,” Stearns said in May. “We know we are taking a level of risk when we bring players in with injury histories.

“We are feeling that risk right now, and it hasn’t helped that a number of our players have gotten hurt at the exact same time,” he added. “It’s not something we necessarily anticipated. But I think that’s a fair question and something we need to look at.”

Puma didn’t mention these remarks in his story, of course. He was too busy inventing the narrative that Cohen reprimanded Stearns and set new expectations.

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Injury History

Cohen’s comments to the press came the day the Mets finally announced Jorge Polanco was being put out of his misery: a season-ending injured list stint and surgery on his troublesome ankle.

Even for a player who has been labeled as “injury-prone” in his career, Polanco had averaged 118 games in the five previous seasons heading into 2026; this year, he played in 37.

The Polanco flame out coincided with Pete Alonso’s best stretch of the season. In his last 28 games, Alonso is hitting .330 with eight home runs (nine if you count the one he hit against the Yankees on Wednesday night that was ruled foul).

To all the Alonso fans who told me I was an idiot for thinking Stearns made a reasonable choice in letting him go, this is for you.

Still, I’m not out on Polanco yet. He’s had washout seasons before — as recently as 2024 when he hit .213 with an OPS under .700. If you told me he was a valuable piece for the Mets in 2027 as a DH and part-time contributor (120 games), I would very much believe it.

But I thought of Polanco — an infielder with a spotty injury history on the wrong side of 32 — when my good buddy Good Fundies Brian decided to again tweet something stupid:

Good questions you’re no doubt asking:

1. Why do I do this to myself?

2. Don’t I have anything better to do?

I get it.

But I cannot abide by phony, disingenuous grandstanding.

This guy, who has made a meal out of finding things to criticize Stearns about, thinks the Mets should get checks notes Ketel Marte?

A couple of data points here:

1. In the last four seasons, Marte’s games played has droped every year: 150, 136, 126, 118.

2. This year, he quit on his team — like he literally just didn’t show up to a game. “It’s still a complete mystery. It’s just bizarre,” said Arizona Diamondbacks president and CEO Derrick Hall. “I was on the road with the team, I can tell you on Sunday night at the hotel in Boston, he appeared just fine. And then he was just a no-show, as you know. Just bizarre, and we’ve tried to get answers.”

There is no three.

So instead, I will leave you with this tweet:

Good Fundies Brian should listen to this guy.

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Gentrifier Class

New York magazine publishes a bunch of troll stuff that is designed to generate “conversation.”

This story from two years ago was one of the worst:

Love a dual byline — a take so bad, two people needed to come up with it.

At the time and ever since, one of the biggest cheerleaders of the thesis was this guy:

He just loved posting the smugest, stupidest bullshit:

Anyway, gonna leave this one here:

At least the Mets snark was wholly his own.

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I’m old enough to remember how it was David Stearns’ fault that Carlos Mendoza got fired.

“Even the best managers are only as good as the players on the roster, and while yes, the Mets have immense, and expensive, talent on their roster, the cracks in the foundation eventually exposed its subpar construction,” wrote New York Daily News reporter Abbey Mastracco on the day Mendoza was fired.

“The Mets knew that a change was needed, but Stearns wasn’t about to fire himself, and he couldn’t overhaul the roster,” she added.

“Two things can be true: Stearns appeared legitimately upset at the firing; it’s clear he has deep respect for Mendoza and that he took no joy in letting him go,” Newsday’s Laura Albanese wrote the same day. “But Mendoza was just another loose brick in this rapidly deconstructing game of Jenga, and although it was nice for Stearns to say the failure was his own, his news conference did little to indicate in what specific ways he intends to take responsibility for it.”

So I had to laugh today when reading Albanese’s latest column, where she credits Andy Green for his personnel moves — while carefully making sure to avoid the suggestion that Mendoza just wasn’t good at his job.

Going into Monday’s game, Green has managed the Mets to a 22-22 record despite a poor start, little to play for, a coaching staff he had nothing to do with assembling, and a roster that was set on fire during the trade deadline.

Some of it certainly comes down to the players getting hot at the right time, as well the emerging rookie core that can give fans reasons to hope. But you can also credit his emotional intelligence, a seeming ability to know when to challenge his players and when to back off, and that contagious sort of fearlessness that the Mets were sorely lacking for so much of this lost season.

None of this is an indictment on Mendoza, who was undoubtedly dealt a bad hand. But Green’s appointment maybe highlighted some blind spots that Stearns can look to address.

Mendoza was dealt a “bad hand” by Stearns, but Green winning games with “a roster that was set on fire during the trade deadline” and without Juan Soto in the lineup is a straight flush.

Those little shots at Stearns will always set me off. Take this part of her piece, where she suggests Green is maybe the one who decided to use Kodai Senga as the closer and continually pitch Sean Manaea in the rotation.

And you need someone who isn’t afraid to take a risk. It’s unclear whether the decision to move Kodai Senga to the closer role came from the coaching staff or the front office, but regardless, Green has shown a willingness to take a big swing and see if it works. So far, the Senga experiment is a success, and one that may continue to pay dividends next year. He took a risk when, in July, he publicly challenged Scott to go longer in games. He took a risk when he continued to believe in Sean Manaea.

So Stearns was at fault because he gave Mendoza a shitty team; now that the same shitty team is playing well, with previously shitty guys thriving in new roles, Green gets the credit — not Stearns. But, crucially, none of this indicts Mendoza.

Got it.

I shouldn’t care about this stuff when the Mets are playing well, and all indictations point to a stronger 2027 — or 2028, depending on when baseball is even played again.

But you subscribe to this newsletter because I do.

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Billy, this is Kyle Tucker. He’s a right fielder. He is one of the highest-paid players in baseball. His defect is that he absolutely sucks.

The Los Angeles Dodgers don’t need anyone’s sympathy. But with the team scuffling lately, it’s becoming more and more apparent that Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman spit the bit in the offseason. I’ve already celebrated Edwin Diaz’s failure, and it’s clear Tucker just didn’t work out either.

The Dodgers paid him $240 million over four years (with an opt-out, deferred money, and a huge signing bonus because the Dodgers love nothing more than employing “creative” accounting when signing players).

His WAR (wins above replacement) is 0.3 WAR, 0.2 points worse than what Luis Robert Jr. has accumulated for the New York Mets (Robert is at 0.5).

We call that “suboptimal.”

But instead of celebrating Tucker’s failure — especially because he spurned the Mets to go to Los Angeles in the first place — or using the Tucker and Diaz signings to illustrate how challenging it is to build a baseball team even for the literal best front office in the sport, Mets Twitter is writing stuff like this:

I don’t know this guy, but because social media algorthims are designed to generate as much rage as possible, I see his stuff all the time. I’m sure the Twitter/X true believers would blame that on user error: I look for Mets content and I have engaged with his account before, and so now the algorthim pushes this stuff to me — which I engage with anew. It’s a brutal, self-fulfilling prophecy where the only answer is to completely disengage from the platform.

Maybe in another life.

In this life, I have to read these tweets. To his credit (“credit”), this guy was against the moves David Stearns made in the off-season from the jump, especially trading Brandon Nimmo for Marcus Semien.

No doubt, Semien has been bad: His WAR went from 3.2 in 2025 (higher than Nimmo’s WAR last year, for what it’s worth) to -0.5. Nimmo, meanwhile, has produced a 2.0 WAR and mostly performed fine. His OPS is higher than in 2025 or 2024, but his power has shifted — fewer home runs, more doubles. Nimmo will probably end up with his lowest home runs and RBI totals since 2022.

But I don’t need to relitigate the Nimmo trade — although if you want to know what his value to the rest of the league was because of his onerous contract, just look at the return the Mets got for him. I’m here to dunk on this tweet.

In the reality of this tweet, the two-time defending World Series champion signed the top free agent in the offseason — a player the Mets offered a contract to as well — and because he’s bad, it’s proof David Stearns is an idiot.

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Context Is King

Nobody reads anymore but I must note any suggestion that Kyle Tucker wasn’t coveted in the offseason is just wrong.

Here’s an article by MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand published on Jan. 7:

From the moment free agency began in early November, Kyle Tucker has been the consensus No. 1 player on the market.

Here’s another MLB.com article from the following day, ranking the teams that needed to sign Tucker (the Mets ranked sixth). Emphasis mine:

That he’ll get a nice long contract isn’t in dispute, nor is the fact that he’ll help whichever team he ends up joining. (He’s never played on a team that didn’t end up making the playoffs, for one thing.) If not quite in the recent Ohtani / Judge / Soto stratosphere of “best free agent available,” he’s still a reliable 4- to 5-WAR player every single year. Don’t skip past that part; over the last five seasons, only nine position players have been more valuable. By at least one projection system, he’s expected to be a top-20 player yet again in 2026, with a tidy 4.5 WAR to go along with it.

Kyle Tucker has been very bad for the Dodgers. He might never be good again. But in January and February, he was the top player on the free agent market, one with a track record that placed him in the league’s upper echelon.

If he wasn’t “Plan A” for a front office looking to win the World Series this year, then that front office wasn’t paying attention. The teams most linked to Tucker? The Mets, Dodgers, Blue Jays, Yankees.

But, yes, listen to Good Fundies Brian.

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Green Day

I know he’s not going to be the manager next year, but Andy Green has done a lot to prove how poor Carlos Mendoza was at his job.

I’m not talking about the moves Green is making with the lineup and bullpen — managers look smart when the players do good stuff, they look stupid when the players don’t. Green has been fortunate that his time as the Mets’ manager this year has coincided with the team’s best play of the season.

But that fact also doesn’t happen in a vaccum.

Everyone loved Carlos Mendoza. We know that from the fawning media coverage he received after being fired for helming the worst year-long stretch in Mets’ recent history. We know that because the players all said how much they loved him.

But what Mendoza never did was hold players accountable.

Green does — and in ways that lead with what I’d call positive reality.

Green said this about Scott after he pitched five shutout innings against the Kansas City Royals.

Can you imagine Mendoza daring to push a player in this way after a positive statline?

Green’s handling of Kodai Senga has been similar. After the Mets announced Senga was going to be used as a high-leverage reliever (the equivalent of the team throwing up its hands), Senga expressed belief that he was still a starting pitcher longterm — but also said he couldn’t really complain about the decision because he’d been so bad for so long.

Two weeks later, as Senga has thrived as the team’s closer, Green was asked about the earlier comments.

“I was really glad he felt confident and confortable voicing what was important to him; what he wants to do. We want players to do that. Then also, a ton of respect for saying whatever the team asks me to do I’m going to do it with everything I’ve got and do it the best I possibly can. And he’s done that,” Green said. “How much joy he’s taking from doing that? That’s a question for him. He seems to be enjoying it; we’re all enjoying what he’s doing right now. He’s been huge for us in that I think every single player wants to mpact winning, and he’s done that in a profound way in the last 10 days.”

It’s just little things like this, every single day.

It helps build a winning culture.

And it’s a lot more helpful than a manager saying daily how he believes in the guys in the clubhouse to turn it around.

Look, I liked Mendoza, too. But the further away we get from his ouster, the more I believe so much of this season would have gone differently if he wasn’t the manager on Opening Day.

If you want to actually kill Stearns’ “Plan A,” bringing back Mendoza as a lame duck has to be at the top of the list.

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The New York Mets are the best last-place team in baseball.

The Mets are 14 games under .500, but playing like playoff contenders.

The Mets are fun again.

Saturday’s walk-off win wasn’t just a game they would have lost last year. It’s a game they would have lost in July of this year.

But it’s also a game that shows how different things feel with this team right now. Because even after Francisco Lindor made another boneheaded mental error in the field — getting thrown out at second base on a questionable wild pitch with nobody out in the eighth inning of a one-run game — when he came up with the winning run on third and one out in the ninth, it was clear the game was over.

And then it was.

I’ve spent most of the year fighting back against the anti-intellectual Mets fans and beat reporters who want David Stearns to drop dead because he values analytics over the eye test — so I realize the irony here before I even type this next thought. But, right now, the Mets pass the eye test.

You can feel it in the ballpark, too. I was at the game on Friday night, and the crowd — not a sellout in terms of attendance, but certainly not the kind of empty misery usually associated with a last-place team in August — was supportive and having fun. We love this team again.

Maybe because the fairweather fans and outrage merchants have long since abandoned ship.

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Take a Seat

Leave it to Mike Francesa to say something arrogant and stupid.

But he did a few weeks ago on his podcast — one of only a few episodes he’s released this summer. (He must be on the Howard Stern schedule.)

While once again trashing the Mets, Mike suggested not only was the season over after the trading deadline — but no one will care about the Mets.

“Maybe you’re a diehard, and you care what A.J. Ewing’s OPS is, or how many games the baby pitchers [win] … fine, you’re a diehard,” Mike said. “You’re going to have to be a diehard to go to the ballpark. Tickets are going to be available, that’s for sure. Once the trade deadline is over, there’s nothing to discuss with this team. Nothing.”

I love using “diehard” as a pejorative; as if loyalty to a team is bad. If you listen, his tone suggests that if you are a diehard fan, you’re a fool.

Only an idiot would care about the Mets.

In some ways, I guess I understand that perspective: Mike roots for the New York Yankees, and few teams in sports history have had more worthless fairweather “fans” under their tent.

But, of course, Mike’s dismissive comment has coincided with the best Mets run of the season — and with a fan base that’s active and excited rather than looking for new ways to say Stearns is a moron.

It’s why I had to laugh on Saturday when I saw multiple Stearns haters mocking the Mets’ president of baseball operations for trading away St. Louis Cardinals rookie Joshua Báez, who hit three home runs in his first-ever game.

The only problem? Stearns traded Jesús Báez to the Cardinals as part of the Ryan Helsley deal last summer. Joshua Báez was drafted by St. Louis.

Now that the Mets are playing good baseball and the minor leaguers Stearns acquired at the deadline are already showing great promise — all while the replacement relievers he developed in the minor leagues all season have stepped in and not missed a single beat from the arms he dealt away — the fans with this mindset are running out of fuel. They’ve got to make shit up about Stearns, or keep tweeting about Pete Alonso and checks notes Jeff McNeil until their eyes bleed.

These are the people who tell you the Mets are irrelevant, that Stearns is stupid, that the team has no hope.

It’s Mike and these dumbasses.

Don’t be like Mike.

Now, no, I don’t think the Mets are going to make the playoffs. Not anymore.

But 26-12 over their final 38 games gets them to .500.

Let’s get stupid all over again?

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One Last Thing

The vibes are through the roof.

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The New York Mets are 6-4 in August. Since Andy Green took over as the manager, the team’s record is 18-20. They’re now within six games of fourth place in the National League East, coming for a fading Washington Nationals team.

But what’s more important than the record is the games — over the last few weeks, the Mets have passed the eye test: They’re playing better defense; they’re getting better pitching; they’re hitting in key spots; they look like a team.

This is the worst thing to happen to the anti-David Stearns wing of the fan base since Pete Alonso left.

“Infuriating outcome,” “hard to make too much,” etc. When it doesn’t fit the narrative, it cannot be allowed to exist.

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Lindor Speaks

You know I’m not paying for the New York Post extra sports subscription to read what Mike Puma and Jon Heyman have to write, but thankfully other people do.

Since these guys love to stir stuff up, Puma asked Francisco Lindor about staying with the Mets beyond this season. Lindor was adamant that he wanted to be here and threw cold water on the suggestion that the Mets were in a rebuild.

“We have the right guys,” Lindor said. “Stearns is the right guy. That is No. 1. We have one of the best owners in sports history, because [Cohen] is going to go always with the energy that needs to be put into the team. When you are in a big market there is not such a thing as rebuilding. There is a little bit of transition; that is it. You can’t afford to rebuild in big markets, so I think we are working toward the right place. We have not taken a step backward.”

On the rebuilding comment — let’s just say, Lindor and I can agree to disagree.

I personally don’t think it’s bad to say you’re rebuilding in New York, and I don’t think being in the middle of a rebuild means teams can’t also compete at the same time.

Still, that’s small potatoes. The big potato is whether Lindor actually stays on the team next year. “The plan is to be here for my contract,” he said. That’s the plan, yes; but plans can change.

If the media had its way — with Lindor and Juan Soto as the Mets’ Hatfields vs. McCoys — Lindor would be gone. We’ve seen that all summer from the likes of Mike Francesa, Heyman and Puma.

But the Mets don’t really have any reason to trade Lindor: He won’t net a premium prospect, and he’s clearly still a good player.

So, yes, I expect him to be part of the solution here next year or in 2028, whichever comes first — and I could see a larger conversation happening in the off-season about where he moves next; maybe third base, maybe second base.

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Strictly Business

David Stearns gets a lot of shit for valuing player performance over player humanity.

Part of the reason I started this newsletter is that I felt like Stearns is being singled out by an aggrieved wing of Mets fandom that hated him because of his intelligence — when he often just acts like every other modern baseball executive.

Case in point: Brian Cashman.

Smart Yankees fans hate Cashman because, in his capacity as the team’s general manager, he doesn’t go the extra mile — his patience is a virtue and a curse. He’s content to build a winning team, but not the winning team that stands above the 29 other clubs.

But, unlike Stearns, Cashman is almost never criticized for how he perceives players.

So allow me this trip down memory lane to get at why Derek Jeter doesn’t come to the Yankees’ old-timers’ day.

It’s no secret that Cashman and Jeter don’t get along — Jeter and Alex Rodriguez very publicly criticized the Yankees’ front office just last year for feeding Aaron Boone the lineup every night, a comment that even drew a response from Cashman.

But to understand why these two don’t like each other, let’s go back to when Jeter was playing. Following the 2010 season, as Jeter became a free agent for the first time in his illustrious major league career, he wanted to get paid by the Yankees.

Cashman saw the market differently.

From Inside the Empire: The True Power Behind the New York Yankees by Bob Klapisch and Paul Solotaroff — bold emphasis mine.

Nonetheless, Jeter wanted to get paid like the player he’d been in his middle twenties. In the fall of 2010, he became a first-time free agent at the age of thirty-six. He’d had a bad year at the plate and a worse one in the field, but he demanded a max contract into his forties. Cashman pushed back, declining to bargain against himself. The terms he set and stuck to — $51 million for three years — pricked Jeter’s damaged pride. “Jetes sent messages through his agent that we were f—ing him when no one was willing to pay what we offered,” says Cashman. “I’m like, ‘How much higher do we have to be than highest?’ ” He invited Jeter and his agent, Casey Close, to go out and shop the deal. Jeter returned to the table smarting; no one had come close to the Yankees’ bid. Close even suggested a stark concession for his client: a piece of either the YES Network or the team. “At the meeting, Derek said, ‘What other shortstop would you want playing here?’ and I started rolling off names,” says Cashman. “I got, like, three names down and Casey said, ‘Stop, this isn’t productive.’ Then Derek got up and goes, ‘You guys finish this! I don’t want to go anywhere else, but I don’t want to be in here either!’”

Jeter re-signed with the Yankees.

Look, as I’ve defended Stearns for detaching the personal and the professional, Michael Corelone-style, I must do the same for Cashman. He was right to hold the line on Jeter, who wasn’t worth a big contract at the time due to his age and diminished play — and it’s hilarious that he told one of the greatest living Yankees that there were multiple players he’d rather have on the team.

Jeter, by the way, hit six home runs in 607 at-bats in 2011, and other than a zombie bounce season in 2012 (.315 batting average, 15 home runs, and a 2.2 WAR in 740 at-bats), he was largely a negative player for the Yankees as his career wound down.

How does this relate to Stearns today? You’ll notice that it was Jeter who wanted to stay with the team. To do so, he accepted the deal he didn’t love.

Alonso could’ve done the same thing. But he chose to opt out, which is his right, rather than take a contract he thought was beneath his skills — a middle finger to what the “formulas” said.

Good for him, but don’t blame Stearns for operating like baseball executives for time immemorial.

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One Last Thing

Old man shouts at clouds.

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It gave me great joy to see this highlight in my feed on Saturday morning.

If you’ll recall, in the offseason, Edwin Diaz opted out of the remaining two years and $38 million on his contract with the New York Mets — and then signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers for three years and $69 million. He didn’t even come back to the Mets to see if they might increase their offer — which was reported to be for three years and $66 million.

“I did find that one perplexing. Not sure exactly how Edwin arrived at that decision,” Mets owner Steve Cohen said after Diaz bolted for Los Angeles. “Obviously, it’s a personal decision on his part, and I thought we made a pretty respectable bid.”

According to ESPN reporter (“reporter”) Jeff Passan, Diaz was apparently upset the Mets didn’t give him a courtesy heads-up about signing Devin Williams — this despite the fact that Diaz opted out and was not an employee of the team at the time of the Williams signing.

“It wasn’t easy,” Diaz said of leaving the Mets. “I spent seven years in New York. They treated me really good. They treated me great. I chose the Dodgers because they are a winning organization. I’m looking to win, and I think they have everything to win. Picking the Dodgers was pretty easy.”

Diaz’s first season with Los Angeles has been a disaster of “oh no, the Mets!” proportions. He missed three months after undergoing elbow surgery and was also embroiled in an illegal cockfighting scandal that somehow didn’t matter to Major League Baseball or the professional class of Twitter trolls who think David Stearns is the devil.

So, yeah, you know what? I’m thrilled to see Diaz fail for the Dodgers — and while I did want to resign him at the start of the offseason, it’s nice that not bringing him back worked out just fine for the Mets.

Too bad other Mets “fans” don’t agree.

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Good Night, and Good Luck

For a great team that could conceivably three-peat as World Series champions, the Dodgers make a lot of bad moves.

I’m old enough to remember when the best teams in baseball coveted Kyle Tucker. Now, even with a recent hot streak in August, he looks like one of the biggest busts in a long time: $240 million over four years for a 0.7 WAR (win over replacement) — a quarter of the WAR Carson Benge has accumulated for the Mets in his rookie season.

Of course, the Mets were deeply in on Tucker in the off-season — a move that many hailed as necessary and important for Stearns.

Now that Tucker sucks, however, it’s still Stearns’ fault.

So Stearns is bad for the moves he made, and he’s also bad because the best team in baseball beat him to a player who is now bad. Got it.

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One Last Thing

Fun with small sample sizes.

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The New York Mets swept the Cleveland Guardians on the road this week, a team that’s an ostensible playoff contender that bought at the deadline.

I’m not foolish enough to think this is the start of a miracle run — the Mets are still 16 games under .500 and 11 games out of the last Wild Card spot with seven teams ahead of them. But anyone who watched the games this week saw something encouraging: a loose team playing for each other and not themselves, and just a general sense of enjoyment.

Without question, the vibes are trending up. The Mets are 16-19 under Andy Green, who seems to say the right thing every single day, and if they play .500 for the rest of the season, they can avoid 90 losses.

Hey, it’s the little things.

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A Lot to Like

As you might recall, the other day I suggested that David Stearns wasn’t really expecting the Mets to compete in 2027 — the team will be better, yes, but not championship-caliber. Instead, it seemed like he was eyeing 2028 and 2029.

But as I’ve written before, the speed with which baseball windows open can surprise. If even half of everything that went wrong for the Mets in 2026 goes right in 2027 — let’s say, Jorge Polanco is healthy (ha ha ha), Sean Manaea is a serviceable fourth starter for the entire season, Kodai Senga is a rosterable reliever (lol, Chris, you are stupid!), and Francisco Lindor and Juan Soto don’t miss literal months of the season — well, the Mets might have a 2027 window.

That potential for a positive regression in luck extends to Stearns, too.

Maybe it already has started.

In the wake of the trade deadline that detonated the roster, the minor leaguers Stearns acquired are doing stuff like this…

… and this…

… and this:

Meanwhile, the players Stearns jettisoned are doing this…

… and this:

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Verbal Kint

The Usual Suspects is a great movie that’s also super canceled, but I couldn’t help but think of it while watching Huascar Brazobán inexplicably put into a position to try and close out the Boston Red Sox last night in that video above.

The White Sox already have a closer-adjacent pitcher on their roster in young Grant Taylor, who set up Brazobán with two scoreless innings. Brazobán came in to end the eighth inning and then went back out for the ninth. He then blew the save.

Why did the White Sox think Brazobán could close? I think for the same reason the Rays wanted Freddy Peralta.

A lot of these teams believe the LOLMets bullshit spun by the media. They accept that the Mets are stupid and weak. The Mets are Verbal Kint from The Usual Suspects, continuously underestimated and ignored. So rather than the players being the issue, it’s the Mets who are failing to unlock their potential.

Brazobán is not a pitcher who should be in high-leverage spots; Peralta is just plain bad. I know these things from watching the games and not reading the tweets.

I guess the White Sox and Rays didn’t get SNY.

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One Last Thing

For 17 years and counting, it’s never Brian Cashman’s fault.

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New York Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns traded eight major leaguers off the team’s failed roster, including David Peterson in June, and brought back 13 minor leaguers — including the team’s new top prospect (infielder Jefferson Rojas, acquired from the Chicago Cubs) and nine overall new prospects in the club’s top 30.

I’m old enough to remember when Mets “fans” were irate because the farm system had regressed as top prospects Nolan McLean, A.J. Ewing, Carson Benge, Zac Thornton, and Christian Scott became invaluable contributors to the team’s present and future. Weird how that happens.

So I’m not surprised the general tone of the fan base is that Stearns should just drop dead — and that this deadline was a disaster, even as he restocked the farm system that had everyone really unhappy last month.

The fan base is past the point of no return.

It’s the media, too, of course. Here’s how SNY contributor John Harper framed the Mets’ sell-off. Emphasis mine:

Whether this is the start of rebuilding his reputation, then, remains to be seen. Fans likely wanted more high-profile prospects in return, as Jefferson Rojas was the only player on any of the various Top 100 lists, but such rankings aren’t always a true indicator in judging deals, and scouts I talked to had a favorable view of at least the more notable trades.

Harper gave Stearns’ moves a cumulative B- grade, while repeatedly pointing out that scouts — the people who are in baseball and don’t just complain about it on social media — really liked certain players acquired, especially top-100 prospect Jefferson Rojas and Sammy Stafura, a former Pittsburgh Pirates top prospect who immediately becomes the future Met I’m most excited to see in the major leagues.

But I get it. Stearns’ reputation is dead. The fans will never forgive him, former team employees (Adam Ottavino, Eric Chavez) hold a grudge against him, and the media can’t wait for his ouster. (A conspiracy theory I believe about the media’s anger: This is because Stearns doesn’t leak stuff to the Jon Heymans and Mike Pumas of the world as Brian Cashman’s front office does; yes, yes, the Yankees are going to get Mason Miller and Ryan Jeffers, definitely something that’s happening!)

But none of those people should worry. Stearns will be gone after the remnants of the 2027 season come to an end, fired by Steve Cohen as all the loudest and dumbest people on social media and working for the New York tabloids cheer.

And then the Mets will be the best team in baseball in 2028, led by many of the young players Stearns acquired on Monday.

And the fans of whatever team Stearns goes to next will cry about how the Mets got better after he left.

Because fans are children who have no patience and are treated as such.

But what if they weren’t?

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Say What You Mean

When the Mets talk about their core players being Juan Soto (27) and the kids (McLean, Scott, Thornton, Benge, and Ewing), and they have players like Mitch Voit tearing up AA, and then they acquire a bunch of players succeeding in the lower minors (A, A+, AA) — it should be clear this is a team that’s loading up to compete in 2028 and 2029, right before Soto can trigger his opt-out (which the Mets could potentially erase by giving him more money before he hits the open market).

But that means the obvious: This is a rebuild, not a reload.

Isn’t it worth Stearns and Steve Cohen saying as much?

I understand the instinct to avoid the term “rebuild,” especially after this season. But the Mets have been tracking toward this point since Stearns was hired, as I’ve said before. If Pete Alonso doesn’t hit the home run off Devin Williams, the 2024 team is the end of the “core”; Stearns would have started the rebuild he was brought in to accomplish — first by allowing Alonso to leave during that offseason — and the Mets would be closer to competitive than they are right now.

But that didn’t happen, and Stearns was forced to split the baby: rebuild while pretending to compete.

You can see that with the contentious, fan-exploding Alonso decision. If the Mets were targeting a 2028 window, signing Alonso to a five-year deal in 2026 is, frankly, stupid. You don’t allocate $33.5 million in 2028 salary on a 33-year-old first baseman and designated hitter and expect to be a serious winner.

Besides, leaving a void at first for a couple of years allows for the possibility that eventually, in 2028, the position will be open for Soto, who could transition to first just like Bryce Harper did as he turned 30. (Now, of course, Harper is back in the outfield; more on this in a bit.)

I’m not saying this is exactly what they have planned, and I’m not trying to move the goalposts. But if you really step back and look at the last year of roster decisions — and you believe that Stearns is a well-respected baseball executive and don’t listen to anonymous accounts on social media or a former player 40 years past relevance — it’s clear the Mets’ focus is on the future. The present is just an obstacle in the way of that, and not the ultimate goal.

If it was about today, Alonso probably is still playing first.

So the problem isn’t the process; it’s the communication.

Stearns, even in his press conference on Monday, reiterated the team’s plans to compete in 2027 — this while booting controllable relievers Huascar Brazobán and Luke Weaver and not extending Clay Holmes. If the Mets were actually going to try to win in 2027, wouldn’t those players still be on the team?

I get why Stearns can’t be honest. As long as I’ve been alive, the narrative is that New York teams do not rebuild. The New York media won’t allow it. The fans won’t either. So you don’t rebuild; you just reload and play to the status quo. It’s why Brian Cashman is the perfect New York executive: he found the level of acceptance from the fans and media (90 wins and playoff appearances) and stays there. You don’t ever actually win (17 years and counting for the Yankees), but you never lose.

But wouldn’t it be refreshing to be honest? What does Stearns have to lose here, when everyone already hates him? Would it be so bad to hear that the goal is to win in 2028 and 2029, and that most people internally expect 2027 to be a little better by sheer luck and further player development from the kids?

That seems reasonable to me.

It should seem reasonable to you, too.

It’s just too bad no one in this situation — not Stearns, not the fans, certainly not the media — can admit it.

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One Last Thing

While Stearns gets killed by the media, Cashman continues to coast.

After weeks of hearing the Yankees were going to get Miller, Jeffers, and several other significant players, they got platoon players Heliot Ramos and Luis Garcia Jr.

And to get Ramos, they gave up one of their top pitching prospects — a left-handed starter, because those are never valuable in the American League East.

I know better, however, than to wait for Mike Puma to ask Cashman if he should resign, and for Jon Heyman and Joel Sherman to write anything negative about the Yankees’ baseball leadership. It won’t happen, because they love Cashman.

Fortunately, there are many who aren’t afraid to speak truth to power.

Back to Harper here for a second. The Phillies are kind of the Sliding Doors version of the 2026 New York Mets. Rather than blow up their core, they ran it back; rather than stick with a lame-duck manager, they fired him early in the season; rather than sell at the deadline, they packaged a bunch of top minor league talent to make incremental improvements.

And for all that, they’re still clinging to the final Wild Card spot — and now playing multiple people out of position.

With the acquisition of second baseman Luis Arráez, the Phillies basically reset their entire infield midstream: First baseman Harper switched back to right field (he hasn’t played there in years); third baseman Alec Bohm is now playing first; second baseman Bryson Stott is at third.

It’s fine, because these people are athletes and have played those positions before. But it did make me laugh because of all the grief Stearns got for suggesting Polanco, Mark Vientos, and Brett Baty could play first base — with a full spring training to boot — or that Bichette could transition to third. It’s why I have a tough time with the Stearns haters, who seem to operate in a world where Stearns is the only executive making decisions like this and that it’s not the entire league doing it. (See also how the Yankees played José Caballero in the outfield.)

Again, Stearns has made a lot of mistakes — Polanco, Frankie Montas — but he gets attacked for decisions and strategies that every other team employs as well. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

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I’ll keep this one short.

Overnight, the New York Mets traded A.J. Minter to the Minnesota Twins for a pair of minor league infielders: Billy Amick and Bruin Agbayani.

I’m not a prospect scout, and don’t pretend to be on social media, so I don’t actually care about the haul David Stearns received for two months and roughly 20 innings of Minter. Are the players he got in exchange for Minter still breathing? Then it’s probably fine.

But what’s fun about this trade is that it puts an Agbayani back in the Mets organization. Bruin, 19, is the son of Benny Agbayani, a hero of the Bobby Valentine era who did stuff like this.

When Benny was on the Mets, he earned the nickname “Hawaiian Punch,” because of his proclivity to sock the ball and the fact that he was born in Hawaii.

So, of course, this is how the beat writers framed Bruin’s organizational homecoming.

If you read those and thought it sounded wrong, you’re onto something. As most probably remember, the “Flyin’ Hawaiian” nickname belonged to Philadelphia Phillies’ outfielder Shane Victorino.

Here’s a news report on Victorino from earlier this year:

Here’s another report from a local Hawaiian news channel. “After 12 seasons of making incredible diving catches, it’s obvious why Maui’s Shane Victorino was nicknamed the ‘Flyin’ Hawaiian.’”

Hey, mistakes happen. Take the loss and move on.

Or, you know, don’t.

I don’t have a perfect memory — and while I don’t ever remember Benny Agbayani being called the “Flyin’ Hawaiian” on the Mets’ broadcasts, I’ll give Laura Albanese the benefit of the doubt here. Maybe, at some point during his Mets’ tenure, he was referred to as the “Flyin’ Hawaiian” by the announcers. (Someone in her comments suggested it was Fran Healy who would say it; sure, I’d believe it!)

But to “well, actually” the “well, actuallys” by pretending these are “ancient texts” that, I guess, real fans would remember is a true leap — mainly because the actual “Flyin’ Hawaiian” is a well-known player from the Mets’ own division and Agbayani’s real nickname is well documented. (That Heyman piggybacked off her 40 minutes later is its own hilarious example of his limitations.) At the very least, it’s a poorly worded tweet that, without additional context, leaves the even the biggest Mets’ fan with an inaccurate takeaway. I’ve been there just this week.

Sometimes, you can just admit you missed the mark; it doesn’t cost you anything.

The alternative is that you can double down and tell people they’re wrong even when you made the error.

I hear there’s a real future in that.

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I did something stupid on Tuesday.

I tweeted about Pete Alonso.

Loyal readers know my thoughts on the New York Mets’ decision to let Pete Alonso walk away in the offseason. The tl;dr: I understand it from a baseball perspective, but because fans are bad, they should have just kept him to shut everyone up. The $155 million cost could be chalked up to “customer relations.”

I wrote as much here, taking the obvious bait from Mike Puma and trying to provide context in a tweet.

That was my first mistake.

There are countless others.

My other mistake was an actual mistake.

Alonso doesn’t have the worst OPS of his career so far — it’s his second-lowest mark. His OPS+, which adjusts to ballpark and league-wide offensive production, is 127 — a shade below his 134 OPS+ career mark and better than his final OPS+ numbers in 2023 and 2024. It is well below the 142 OPS+ mark Alonso put up in 2025.

I’ve mentioned this in another post, but his defense has also improved significantly. After being the absolute worst defensive first baseman in 2025 with a -8 Fielding Run Value mark, Alonso is now tied for second-best in the entire sport at +4 FRV.

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Take the L

If I’m going to call out the New York media for posting stupid takes and articles like the one that prompted me to tweet additional context about the Alonso decision, I have to note when I miss the mark. Too many Mets fans — several who seemed actually literate and in good faith and who didn’t use a slur to tell me how dumb I am — didn’t understand the point of my post.

That’s on me for failing to communicate a thought properly.

So let me try this again:

• Yes, the Mets should have kept Pete Alonso — especially because it would have shut the fans up.

• No, I don’t think it was the smart baseball decision in the long term, especially when the Mets are already paying Juan Soto and Francisco Lindor.

• Yes, I feel confident in saying that because not a single team offered Alonso a five-year deal.

• Yes, he’s having a solid offensive year — and his numbers have been much, much better than the Mets’ first base options, who have combined for 15 home runs and 52 RBI.

• No, he’s not having a great offensive year compared to his own standards.

• Yes, that shows he’s been an elite player throughout his career; one of his down years is better than most great years in terms of power production.

• Yes, his defense has been stellar — I don’t think even the most aggressive Stearns hater would have seen that coming.

I don’t have a crystal ball. I can only judge baseball players on their past performance and historical precedent. I know a healthy Pete Alonso is all but assured of hitting 30 home runs and knocking in 100 runs in a full season of 162 games.

I also know he’s aging. I also know his barrel percentage is tied for the lowest mark of his career at 12.3 percent. That’s still incredibly good, but it’s going down.

Maybe that’s nitpicking too much. Maybe Alonso will go on a hot streak in August and wind up with 40 home runs, and I’ll feel stupid.

And even if that doesn’t happen, and he hits 32 home runs for the lowest mark of his career in a full season, who cares? A good Pete Alonso is still a good Pete Alonso.

But there are signs that he isn’t great right now — despite what the New York media wants to tell you — and there are still four years and $124 million left on his contract.

Is that worth it?

As I have said and will say again: When it’s Pete Alonso and the fans treat him like a family member, yes, it is.

When the Mets are paying Jorge Polanco $20 million for nothing, yes, it is.

But on a baseball field in a bubble — no, probably not.

Too bad David Stearns can’t operate in a bubble.

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I’m old enough to remember when the New York Mets left lifetime minor league Matt Seelinger out on the mound to get pounded by the Kansas City Royals in a game where they were short on relievers. It led to stuff like this from the fan base:

On Monday, in a similar position with a gassed pitching staff, the Atlanta Braves allowed rookie pitcher Connor Thomas to give up 11 earned runs in 2.2 innings. The beating made Mets’ broadcasters Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling audibly uncomfortable; at one point, Hernandez said he was “sick to my stomach.”

I’ll keep an eye out to see if Pete Hoffman or Glenn Thrush post about how Braves president of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos doesn’t treat people with compassion.

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Garbage Man

Please do not watch this video of Michael Kay, broadcasting his radio show on AirPods like a true professional, complaining that Juan Soto has thrown two of his “prime years” in the “trash bin” because he didn’t re-sign with the New York Yankees.

If you’re wondering why Soto lives rent-free in the open space of Kay’s mind, it’s because rather than sign with the Yankees to help them win a World Series, Soto signed with the Mets. Upon doing so, one of the reasons Soto gave for his choice was the Mets’ future.

“The Mets are a great organization,” Soto said during his introductory press conference in 2024, “and what they have done in the last couple years, showing the ability to keep winning, to keep growing, to try to grow a dynasty is one of the most important things to me.”

He added, “The future this team has had a lot to do with my decision.”

Say what you want about the Mets — they’re bad!

But Soto’s not entirely wrong — even if Michael Kay and multiple fans disagree.

The Mets’ future that Soto talked about in 2024 and that’s on the field right now looks pretty good: a core of Nolan McLean, Christian Scott, Zac Thornton, A.J. Ewing, and Carson Benge — plus Soto and Francisco Lindor? You can win with that.

But Kay’s comments weren’t really about Soto or the Mets’ youth. It was more water-carrying for the Yankees general manager and senior vice president Brian Cashman. Sharp Yankees fans — they exist! I think! — know the Yankees needed Soto, especially with Aaron Judge aging (he’s now 34) and their top prospects like Anthony Volpe, Austin Wells, Jasson Dominguez, and Spencer Jones underwhelming or worse.

Instead, despite having all the resources in the world, the Yankees let Soto go to the Mets — and Cashman replaced his star hitter with what has proven to be a somewhat middling Plan B: Max Fried (who gagged in the playoffs last year and is now coming back from an elbow injury; he still has six years left on his contract) and Cody Bellinger (who is now out for six weeks and also struggled this year to replicate his sterling 2025 season; the Yankees have him for four more years).

Sounds like something David Stearns would do.

One more thing on Kay, who is very concerned about Juan Soto, 27, wasting years in his prime.

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Center, Right?

Count me among the sickos who think the Mets should just keep Luis Robert Jr. — a group that includes Luis Robert Jr.

“To be honest, I’d like to stay here,” Robert said through an interpreter to MLB.com. “I don’t like those types of moves or trades that just happen in the middle of the season and you have to move around fast. But at the end of the day, that’s out of my control. That’s out of my hands. The people making those decisions, they’re the ones that have to make those decisions, and I have to accept it, whether it happens or not.”

On social media, the comments under the story about Robert’s plea to stick with the team were typically well-mannered and thoughtful.

Does he know that? I’m not so sure.

To recap: Robert has a $20 million team option next year, or a $2 million buyout. He’s three years removed from a 38 home run, 20 stolen base season — good for a 5.3 WAR (win above replacement). In the years since, Robert has been less successful: 240 games across three seasons with 32 home runs and 2.9 combined WAR.

But isn’t it worth $18 million to roll the dice again on this guy making it work? Does that cost really seem out of whack for a guy like Robert? Bear in mind: Harrison Bader signed with the San Francisco Giants in the offseason for two years and $20 million; the Yankees are paying Trent Grisham, who sucks, $22 million after he accepted the team’s qualifying offer. In that market for center fielders, Robert would likely command something close to what he’s on the books for in 2027 ($18 million, because you’re paying the $2 million either way). So bring him back, and if he doesn’t hit or gets hurt again, what’s the big risk? A team owned by Steve Cohen should not be sweating $18 million — and Robert could play a mix of left field, center field, and designated hitter as part of a rotation with Soto, Benge and Ewing.

Plus, a guy who wants to be here is more valuable than someone who doesn’t; it’s why I think the Mets should make every effort to keep Clay Holmes and Luke Weaver on the team beyond this season as well.

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One Last Thing

While one of the dumb WFAN hosts was out there saying Stearns shouldn’t use injuries to forgive this season…

…I was reading this great article by Max Goodman for NJ.com that autopsies the Mets’ failure. Here’s one key section that’s worth thinking about, emphasis mine:

The starting lineup that Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns reconstructed this past winter with five new lineup regulars has rarely been at full strength. There have been only six games this year in which Soto, Lindor, Robert and Polanco have all started in the lineup together. Five of them came during the Mets’ first seven games of the year. Because of injuries, Lindor and Soto have been in the starting lineup together for 28 games, 27% of the Mets’ season.

“I honestly think that if this team that was put together didn’t get hurt as much, things would be completely different,” Lindor said. “The first week was so good for us. Then guys started to get hurt after that. It’s uncontrollable stuff, that’s what it comes down to.”

You can call that making excuses, or you can exist in reality and understand the Mets’ injuries had a catastrophic cascading effect on the entire team — a new group that needed to gel but didn’t because major players weren’t active at the same time.

Lindor missed almost all of spring training; Soto got injured on April 4 and missed three weeks, enough time for the team to lose 12 games in a row; when Soto returned, Lindor was immediately sidelined for months; Robert and Jorge Polanco went down too, also for months each, and then Marcus Semien was hurt for good measure — plus Francisco Alvarez for his yearly IL stint.

If baseball is about camaraderie, about unity, about guys pulling in the same direction and playing like a team — well, it’s hard to do that when you’ve got several new faces, many of whom are injured and not playing. Even without Soto, it’s no surprise to me the team is showing some life since Andy Green took over as manager (“some” doing the heavy lifting there; the Mets are 11-15 under Green); they’re finally mostly healthy.

Should Stearns have known Robert and Polanco were injury-prone? Of course he did. But if you think Stearns penciled Robert and Polanco in for 550 at-bats each, I have a lovely bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

The Mets were built to weather some injuries; they weren’t built to weather all the injuries. (I didn’t even mention how Jared Young missed several weeks, and Mike Tauchman is still out.)

It’s why, while I know they’re going to sell, I hope Stearns manages to thread the needle and keep a competitive roster set up for 2027 or 2028, depending on the labor wars ahead. Because whenever baseball is played after this season, the Mets’ bounce-back is going to be extreme.

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David Stearns held a press conference on Friday afternoon.

The fans were thrilled.

Fans are bad. But this fan base, in particular, won’t be happy until Stearns is shot out of a cannon.

In fact, the reaction to Stearns’ anodyne press conference was so strongly negative that I do think he’s going to get fired sooner rather than later. Steve Cohen didn’t “listen” to the fans when he let Pete Alonso go; with the fans in an outright mutiny, I don’t think he has a choice but to listen to them on Stearns.

Sometimes, you have to let children get their way.

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Broken System

I’ve demonstrated time and again that there was a method to Stearns’ roster choices this past year. On paper, almost everything makes total sense, and his game plan was really no different than how other teams operate — analytics-first, a focus on distressed assets, and a premium on roster flexibility.

I’m old enough to remember when Boston Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow was the biggest idiot in the sport other than Stearns. Now, the Red Sox have won 15 of 16 and are on a collision course to play the New York Yankees in the Wild Card round — all without Alex Cora, the guy everyone said the Mets should hire to manage, in the dugout.

So, baseball is funny and front offices largely act in similar ways. But a story I saw on Friday did make me a little leary of the Mets’ operation.

Paul Blackburn stunk for the Mets. Acquired in 2024 to help bolster the back of the rotation, Blackburn was either hurt or terrible or both during his time in Queens. He pitched to a 6.00 ERA across 12 games and 9 starts in two seasons.

Now that he’s on the New York Yankees, Blackburn has gone from a mop-up guy to a key long reliever. He’s got a 2.00 ERA across 43 games since joining the Yankees.

To be clear, I don’t think Paul Blackburn is any good — and if the Yankees pitch him in a big spot, I have no doubt he’ll falter.

But he’s also pitching well — something he never did with the Mets.

Here’s how Blackburn explained the change:

“I had some outings out of the pen with the Mets last year, but I was never told that,” he said to the New York Daily News. “It was like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna put you in the pen this time around, you might start next time around,’ so it was a lot of uncertainty.”

He added, “I felt like we were just playing a video game. Like that’s not how it really works.”

I’m not typically pro-player, and I take things ex-players say with a grain of salt — especially when they left the team after being an outright failure.

But this one felt different, because it’s a piece of a trend. Recall how the Mets also handled David Peterson this year, jerking him between the rotation and the bullpen — and also tinkering with his pitch selection.

From a story on Peterson in June:

“We relied on the sinker and changeup too much and allowed hitters to kind of sit over the plate,” Peterson said. “In my eyes, it’s more about usage than it is execution.”

Since joining the Chicago Cubs, Peterson has pitched to a 5.57 ERA; that stinks.

But he’s also pitched exclusively as a starter and gave up 10 runs in one start to skew the numbers.

In the other three starts, he’s pitched 17.1 innings and given up just 3 earned runs; it’s a 1.56 ERA.

Then there’s this:

What are the Mets doing here? It didn’t bother me when Jeremy Hefner was fired as pitching coach after the season because the Mets staff last year was not good — too many walks, poor approach.

This year, it’s been the same.

While the fans complain about Brandon Nimmo and Stearns’ reticence to sign starters to bad contracts, the real issue is the organization’s entire pitching approach (don’t even look at Jonah Tong’s stats in AAA). I don’t know how to fix it; I’m not a baseball executive. But it would be nice if anyone in the media asked Stearns about this. Not that he’d answer, but I think you’d get a better sense of things than whatever this “grieving” question was:

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The New York Mets have five outfielders on their roster — six if you want to include Jared Young. Four of those guys are arguably elite defenders: A.J. Ewing, Luis Robert Jr., Carson Benge and Tyrone Taylor.

So, of course, infielder Brett Baty played right field on Wednesday, and did this:

Baty later hit a solo home run, but it didn’t matter. Thanks to his error, the Mets lost 4-3 to the Milwaukee Brewers.

There were understandable reasons Baty played right on Wednesday afternoon:

• Juan Soto is nursing a calf injury, and the Mets wanted to give him two consecutive days off

• Robert was only activated off the injured list this week after missing multiple months because of a back injury, and they didn’t want to play him again after two consecutive games

• Taylor, a right-handed batter, struggles against right-handed starters like Logan Henderson

But in the end, all that matters is that an infielder played the outfield and couldn’t catch a fly ball.

This is run prevention.

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Central Intelligence

“Run prevention is where we fell short this year. It’s where we need to get better.”

That’s what president of baseball operations David Stearns said during his press conference at the end of last season after the Mets collapsed and missed the playoffs.

The Mets’ defense in 2025 was pretty ugly. The team finished 19th in Statcast’s Fielding Run Value (-5), including -15 in infield/outfield runs. According to Fielding Bible’s Defensive Runs Saved metrics, the Mets had the second-worst first base defense in baseball (-10) and finished 15th overall as a team with 25 total DRS.

Run prevention isn’t some magic bullet; the Seattle Mariners were terrible last year in this space (-30 FRV), and still managed to come within a bad managerial decision of making the World Series.

But good teams typically prevent runs, and defense is important.

Last year, the team with the best FRV was the Toronto Blue Jays.

Still, when Stearns dared to even mention “run prevention” to New York’s beat writers and the fan base, he might as well have been Romany Malco in The 40-Year-Old Virgin telling Kevin Hart that they’re going to move forward “amicably” during a contentious sales interaction.

Check this out: You’re throwing too many big words at me. Now, because I don’t understand them, I’m going to take them as disrespect.

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Defensive Maneuvers

Now, saying the Mets were bad at run prevention in 2025 — an objective fact — and then creating a team that is better at run prevention in 2026… well, that’s where Stearns lost.

This year, the Mets are 22nd in FRV — and have the same -15 FRV in infield/outfield defense that they did in 2025.

They’re up to ninth in DRS, and have vastly improved defense at first base using that metric — -3 DRS for the motley crew of first basemen who have replaced Pete Alonso vs. the -10 DRS that Alonso was responsible for last year. But Alonso has seemingly gotten better, too; the Baltimore Orioles first basemen are only -1 DRS this year, and Alonso has played the lion’s share for them at the position.

The Mets have also committed 69 errors this year, third-most in baseball. Last year, the team only (“only”) made 79 errors.

As has been a theme here for Stearns — he properly identified an issue with the ballclub, and then his fixes (including shifting Soto to left, replacing Alonso and getting overall better defense at first base, etc.) haven’t worked. Baty isn’t an outfielder, the Mark Vientos first base experiment was a flop, and Gold Glove-winning players like Robert and Marcus Semien have greatly underperformed in the field (when they’ve been there at all). If even one of these bets paid off, the Mets defense would look a lot better.

But asking people to carry two thoughts simultaneously has historically been a challenge, especially in New York and particularly when it comes to Stearns.

Run prevention will be the first line of his obituary.

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Catching Strays

Of course, the alternative here is that — infielder or not — Baty simply could have caught a lazy fly ball to right field.

“I felt I had a good read on it and then got back to the track and it just tailed on me a little bit more,” Baty said after the game, before taking ownership of the mistake. “That play has to be made.”

Not that it’s his fault

The players are never at fault.

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Freddy Peralta is absolutely horrible.

With a 5.01 ERA, he’s one of the worst starters in baseball this season.

He hasn’t completed six innings in a start since June 9.

He’s made exactly one start where he didn’t surrender a run.

He’s given up 10, 7, 6, and 5 runs in various bad starts.

In a contract year and off a fifth-place finish in the National League Cy Young Award voting, Peralta has all but razed his long-term value. A guy who wanted to get Max Fried money as late as June (eight years, $218 million) will be lucky to get Sean Manaea money (three years, $75 million).

But David Stearns still made the right move to acquire him before the season, and it’s revisionist history to suggest otherwise.

And yet…

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Blame Stearns Again

During the 2007 Democratic presidential primary debates, Joe Biden — the then-candidate and future vice president and president — ethered former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

“Rudy Giuliani, there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and 9/11,” Biden said.

I apply the same metric to the New York Mets’ beat writers: a noun, a verb, and David Stearns.

As such, I wasn’t surprised that after Peralta’s ill-fated homecoming to Milwaukee on Monday night (5.1 innings, 7 earned runs, and a standing ovation as he left the mound), Newsday’s Laura Albanese wrote that the blame for Peralta’s heinous season lies at the feet of the Mets’ beleagured president of baseball operations.

Emphasis mine:

No, this is more an indictment of the pitching acquisition strategy that got the Mets here in the first place. While president of baseball operations David Stearns has said he is open to all sorts of potential transactions, we can only trust what we’ve seen so far: Other than a failed bid at Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Mets front office has been loathe to offer pricey, long-term contracts to starting pitchers.

It’s an understandable approach: Pitchers get hurt and overpays are almost inevitable. But there’s also a reason teams are still willing to shell out for players like that, even with the knowledge that the cost won’t necessarily be commensurate with the yield: It’s because you need them to win.

And just because Stearns’ approach has occasionally worked out for the best, both in Milwaukee and in Queens, it doesn’t mean it’s the right one for a franchise that’s known little more than misery and collapse over the past two years, despite their gargantuan payroll. After all, no GM should approach player acquisition the same way twice, because seasons, players, and the game itself isn’t static.

It is baseball beat writer law that when a player is bad, beat writers are not allowed to blame the player. Chalk it up to access, or the hope for access; call it misplaced sympathies or a drive to see workers of the world unite. What it really comes down to, however, is a rejection of Lester Bangs’ signature rule: these people are not your friends.

So Peralta’s flop season is an “indictment” of Stearns because while Stearns’ “approach” to building a staff — his desire to avoid long-term commitments to pitchers — is “understandable” and “has occasionally worked out,” it’s, uh, wrong.

Besides, Albanese wrote, Stearns shouldn’t have even acquired Peralta in the first place because he’s not the front-line starter they needed.

Emphasis again mine:

But while it’s certainly a down year, prior to 2025, Peralta didn’t fall into “ace” category, anyway, instead better profiling as a No. 2 or a very good No. 3. Expecting length from a pitcher who, since converting to a starting role in 2021, has averaged 5 1/3 innings per game is unrealistic.

So, despite a 2025 where he pitched a 2.70 ERA, and was named an All-Star for the second time in his career, you did have to pause when Stearns categorized him as the team ace. It became a more dangerous gambit when you simply assumed that McLean wouldn’t stutter a little out of the gate, as most pitchers do in their sophomore seasons.

One of the things Stearns haters online love to do is say that the Milwaukee Brewers got better once Stearns stopped running the team. It’s trueish. The Brewers have been one of the best teams in baseball for the past three seasons (the true), largely with many players Stearns previously acquired or developed (the ish).

So going off that, let’s look at how Peralta fit into one of the premier teams in the sport.

In 2024, the Milwaukee Brewers won 93 games and the National League Central in the team’s first season without Stearns in the front office. Peralta led the team in starts (32), innings pitched (173.2), and strikeouts (200). He was second in WAR (wins above replacement) among the team’s rotation to Tobias Myers. (Whatever happened to that guy?)

In 2025, when the Brewers won 97 games and had the best record in baseball, Peralta led the team in wins, WAR, ERA, innings, starts, and strikeouts by a significant margin.

In both seasons, Peralta started Game 1 of the playoffs for the Brewers.

But now, we’re supposed to believe that Peralta “didn’t fall into ‘ace’ category” and was really “a very good No. 3” before Stearns acquired him in the offseason.

Two things can be true at the same time: Freddy Peralta was the ace of the pitching staff for one of the best teams in baseball two years in a row; Freddy Peralta has not been that this season.

It doesn’t matter that Jett Williams has regressed (he’s hitting .234 in AAA) or that Brandon Sproat has scuffled (his ERA is over 5, but I assume he’ll pitch a shutout against the Mets later tonight) — Stearns unequivocally lost this trade.

He acquired an ace to be an ace, and he’s been worse than a fifth starter.

But the approach remains sound — especially as guys like Fried and Carlos Rodón sit on the injured list with arm issues and several years remaining on their pricey deals.

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Who Else?

Another part of Albanese’s column that irked me was her suggestion Stearns should have done more to fix the rotation. “Coming off last year’s collapse, the Mets needed to go for broke when it came to their starting pitching.”

But she doesn’t provide any actionable details that would have been better.

So, let’s do that.

Who should the Mets have signed in the offseason to top the rotation instead of trading for Peralta?

Obviously, it would be great to have Dylan Cease on the team. He’s been lights out and is moving toward his sixth straight season with 32 or more starts and at least 214 strikeouts. But I don’t get the sense the Mets were heavily involved in Cease, and I don’t think a seven-year deal for a 30-year-old starter with a ton of mileage on his arm will end up being a good signing. But talk to me in 2032.

The rest of this list?

The Mets tried for Michael King, and it didn’t work out; he’s great, but he’s also not what I’d consider an “ace” — especially if Peralta is not an ace. King averages less than six innings a start and missed significant time last year with various injuries.

I’d say the same thing about Ranger Suárez, who was the third or fourth starter on the Philadelphia Phillies last season and has been a five-inning pitcher for the Boston Red Sox this season (when he’s been healthy).

I won’t go through the rest, but suffice it to say, Stearns didn’t have a lot of great options in the market — and if Peralta were available as a free agent in the offseason, he would have ranked third in WAR among these names following Suárez and Framber Valdez and ahead of Cease.

So, yes, to me, trading two top-100 prospects for a pitcher with Peralta’s track record is a sign that Stearns was willing to “go for broke” to improve the staff.

Unfortunately, Peralta thought he meant go broke.

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One Last Thing

I was wrong about Joe Davis.

From this past weekend:

It triggered the usual dummies:

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Adam Ottavino should team up with Eric Chavez.

The former New York Mets reliever, who hasn’t pitched in the major leagues since last year’s brief stint with the New York Yankees, has a YouTube channel now — and when it goes viral, it’s typically because he says something bad about the Mets.

Here’s Ottavino last fall — one year after the Mets bid him farewell following an ineffective 2024 — complaining about how Carlos Mendoza deployed a bullpen wrecked by injuries and accusing the manager of handling the players poorly.

“This is embarrassing; this is actually pathetic, like pathetic. I would’ve never let this happen if I were on the team last year,” he said, sounding very Trumpian (“I alone can fix this”). “At least half of these guys wouldn’t have blown out. I would have protected these dudes myself; I would have had to jump in front of them myself. Unfortunately, there was nobody willing to stand up and talk to Carlos [Mendoza] this year; it was just me, I guess. So a little bit of an issue there.”

Ottavino pitched three games for the Yankees in 2025 and hasn’t touched a mound since. Although he aspires to work in a major-league front office, Ottavino currently works for the YES Network, the Yankees’ television broadcaster.

But the Mets live rent-free in his mind.

This week, on his YouTube show, Ottavino threw the Mets under the bus for using AI in the dugout during games — following news that Major League Baseball announced new rules to curtail AI use.

“The Mets were actually the team, the main team, that got cracked down on,” Ottavino said. “They had an AI program that was very expensive, apparently, and they were bragging about it a little bit early on in this — the year. Some of the coaches that I know were talking about it from around the league, and they had basically an AI program helping them pick pitches and I think some other stuff.”

In online spaces, anything AI-related is considered bad and evil, and the Mets are a joke — so any opportunity for “fans” and members of the media to attack the team will be greeted with great interest and fervor.

This went predictably viral.

Here’s respected ESPN analyst Buster Olney:

If you’re wondering whether Buster Olney finds random accounts that trash other teams and shares those tweets, keep wondering. It’s not something he does for anyone but the Mets.

Even the original poster wanted Olney to go fly a kite.

Olney wasn’t alone, of course. The David Stearns haters got their digs in, as did New York Post reporter Jon Heyman. On Saturday morning, he shared a New York Post story on the AI crackdown with a declaration that there’s proof — a smoking gun, as it were! — that the Mets were “working to get an edge.”

Now let’s read the story.

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Intelligence Report

Reading is on the decline — I have first-hand experience of this phenomenon — so I’m not surprised the Mets have become the main villain of this story when Ottavino (an employee of the same holding company, Yankees Global Enterprises, that owns the Yankees; weird) and documented Mets haters Heyman and Olney are pushing that narrative.

But if you read the original story from The Athletic on this AI ban, here’s what it states — bolded emphasis mine throughout:

In a crackdown that has rankled some front offices across the league, Major League Baseball has effectively outlawed the growing practice of using league-provided dugout iPads to access generative artificial intelligence, which some teams had increasingly leaned upon to help shape in-game strategy.

According to a commissioner’s office memo obtained by The Athletic, teams were pushing the boundaries of guidelines governing the use of technology by “in many cases” installing custom apps that expanded the use of the iPads “beyond their originally intended purpose to include recommendations regarding substitutions, pitch calling, and other in-game decisions traditionally made by players and coaches.”

As much as a third of the league used the dugout iPads for at least one of these purposes, according to people with knowledge of the technology who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. The league memo was issued June 11 and gave teams more than a month to adjust before the ban took effect on Wednesday, in time for the start of the season’s second half Thursday.

The mid-season policy change has been met with frustration by some front-office members tasked with innovation. “It’s caused quite the stir,” said one high-ranking official of an MLB team’s research and development department. But even members of more data-friendly front offices say the trend raised eyebrows within the industry because of how many decisions made by managers and coaches could be aided by or even potentially replaced by technology, such as pitch calling or player substitutions.

MLB seemed to harbor similar concerns. The league’s review ultimately found “all clubs were compliant” with the league’s rules governing sign stealing and electronic-device usage, per MLB’s memo. The tech ban therefore did not come with punishment.

To recap: Some front offices for some teams — as many as 10, perhaps including the Mets — used league-approved hardware to access AI technology, which wasn’t outlawed, and now have stopped. No team broke the rules, no one was punished, and the AI usage in the dugout has been discontinued. The Mets weren’t mentioned by name.

The “proof” Heyman suggested existed in the New York Post story on this “scandal” is here:

The Mets were among the teams found to have exploited a loophole regarding the use of artificial intelligence for in-game decisions during the first half of the season, sources told The Post.

That’s it.

The Mets are mentioned once (one time).

The rest of the piece is a pure aggregation of the story from The Athletic. Heyman’s buddy and colleague, Joel Sherman, has a reporting credit at the end — presumably because he was told by “sources” the Mets were “among the teams” to have used AI. Whether that source was Ottavino or the same person who told Ottavino is, of course, not stated.

There is no proof beyond these mentions, and the league didn’t mention a single team.

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Pay Attention

I don’t want to get too high on my soapbox, but it’s important that we notice this stuff and call out the media’s agenda to make every story about the Mets as uncharitable and in bad faith as possible.

Now, do I think the Mets used AI in the dugout this season?

Absolutely!

I’m old enough to remember when Robert Stock made headlines for using AI to unlock velocity on his fastball in spring training.

But do I think it matters?

Well, the Mets have the fourth-worst record in baseball.

And this happened to Robert Stock:

Do I think the Mets are alone?

Well, no. We know as many as 10 teams were using AI in some capacity.

Were the Los Angeles Dodgers using AI?

Are the New York Yankees?

How about the Miami Marlins?

Maybe? Maybe not?

It would be interesting to learn about the other teams — it would give a clearer view of how AI has helped or hurt baseball teams this season — but because the beat reporters and baseball analysts only care about scoring LOLMets points, the story has stopped here.

AI has a future in baseball, and I’m honestly glad the Mets are using it — better to use it now than fall behind the rest of the sport — but maybe they need to blow on the cartridge.

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Winning Time

Speaking of Heyman, this tweet got under my skin.

Heyman wrote this pissy reply because one of his 2022 tweets about Yankees general manager and senior vice president Brian Cashman being reluctant to trade Anthony Volpe for Matt Olson went viral for showing Cashman doing something stupid.

Suggesting Cashman is above reproach because the Yankees have been winning for 28 years in a row is trueish.

The truth: The Yankees have actually not had a losing season since 1992, so it’s been 33 years since they finished below .500. Cashman took over from Bob Watson before the 1998 season — and he’s held the top role for 28 years. In that time, the Yankees haven’t had a losing record.

The ish: For most rational Yankees fans — and just normal people with a brain and not disingenuous sports writers who carry water for Scott Boras; ahem — the Yankees have not been winning for 28 years in a row.

In fact, in the last 25 years, the Yankees have won precisely once — the 2009 World Series.

It gives the team the same number of titles in that time frame as the Kansas City Royals, Miami Marlins, Anaheim Angels, and Chicago White Sox.

Does continued success matter?

Is the postseason just a roll of the dice every year now?

Yes, and sure.

But the goal of a baseball season is to win the World Series. One team does it; the other 29 go to Cancún.

The Yankees have gone to Cancún so much during Cashman’s tenure that, for his sake, I hope the team invested in a timeshare.

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“Now I am become Death, destroyer of teams.”

If you believe Mike Francesa and Joe Benigno, this is what David Stearns must say when he wakes up in the morning.

“Sterns thinks he can do a lot of things with the roster, and he’s proven that all he can do with this roster is destroy it, because he has completely destroyed this team,” Francesa said recently.

“He’s destroyed this team, bro. Destroyed it,” Benigno said.

Meanwhile, the beat writer class has absolutely reveled in this downfall.

“It’s a disaster, no question about that,” Jon Heyman said with a smirk on his podcast this week. “The fans are bloodthirsty; I get it. It’s been two bad winters in a row; it was a bad trade deadline last year. They need a better trade deadline this year. They need to sell. They are terrible.”

In baseball, the recall of fans and the old men who cover the sport is short, if it exists at all. Take Heyman there, for example. He claims the Mets’ offseason in 2025 was “bad” when they exited the winter with Juan Soto and re-signed Pete Alonso.

Heyman says this because he thinks you’re an idiot who doesn’t remember the Mets’ start to the 2025 season and how they were the best team in baseball for two-and-a-half months.

But I’m not here to write about 2025 or even 2026 — not exclusively. Today, I want to focus on the idea that Stearns destroyed the Mets.

And if he did, what is it he was actually destroying?

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Tear It Down

When the Stearns haters talk about the way he has failed the Mets and destroyed the team, they’re talking about the Mets’ core: Francisco Lindor, Pete Alonso, Brandon Nimmo, and Jeff McNeil.

The core formed in 2021, with Sandy Alderson as team president and Jared Porter briefly installed as general manager, when the Mets acquired Francisco Lindor. That season, the Mets went 77-85 — and now rather infamously sold Pete Crow-Armstrong for Javier Báez at the trading deadline.

In 2022, with Billy Eppler as general manager, Buck Showalter as manager, and Max Scherzer and Chris Bassitt atop a reformed rotation, the Mets won 101 games — the second-best total in team history behind only 1986. McNeil won a batting title, Alonso led the league in RBI, and Lindor and Nimmo both had WAR (wins above replacement) totals north of 5.

It was a glorious time.

Until it wasn’t.

That moment felt like the peak of the season.

The Mets didn’t collapse in September so much as the Atlanta Braves exploded. From this point forward, the Mets went 18-13; the Braves went 21-10, including a three-game sweep of the Mets in the penultimate series of the season, which all but clinched the division for Atlanta.

For all the promise of the 2022 team, they lost in the Wild Card round of the playoffs to the San Diego Padres.

The expectation was that the Mets would be back in 2023, even without Jacob deGrom, who signed with the Texas Rangers during the offseason. Besides, the Mets brought in Justin Verlander to offset the deGrom loss. What could go wrong?

Well, everything. The Edwin Díaz injury was a sign of things to come. Alonso hit .217. McNeil lost 56 points from his batting average and 3.5 points off his WAR. Even with the emergence of Kodai Senga at the top of the rotation, the staff scuffled: Verlander made just 16 starts due to injury before being shipped back to Houston; Scherzer was eventually dealt to Texas to join deGrom (and help the team win a World Series).

The team finished 75-87, in fourth place.

When asked why he was willing to waive his no-trade clause to leave the Mets, Scherzer said, “[Eppler’s] answer was that the team is now kind of shifting vision and that they’re looking to compete now for 2025 and 2026, and that 2024 — that it was not going to be a reload situation in New York, and that it was going to be more of a transition in 2024.”

This brings us to Stearns.

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My Guy

Steve Cohen didn’t waste a lot of time before bringing David Stearns to the Mets following the 2023 washout.

His introductory press conference took place on Oct. 2 — one day after the season ended and Showalter was fired.

“I’m really excited by this,” Cohen said. “I’ve been really patient looking for the right person. As David and I got to know each other, it’s clear we’re aligned in our thinking. When I was doing the due diligence on David, I’d never seen such universal congratulations, saying, ‘You’ve got to hire this guy.’”

Stearns took over a bad team (recall the 87 losses), and it stayed bad.

The Mets started the season 22-33.

But then we got OMG and Grimace.

Stearns’ imports, Sean Manaea and Luis Severino, pitched like All-Stars.

And even if Alonso stunk (he did) and McNeil was bad (an OPS under .700), and Nimmo couldn’t buy a hit (he batted .224), the vibes were pristine and the “transition” year that Stearns came in to manage quickly became something much greater.

An 89-73 record and a trip to the National League Championship Series.

In some ways, things were pointing in the right direction heading into 2025, despite that “bad winter” Heyman claimed had sent the Mets askew. I guess that’s what happens when you sign Soto and begrudgingly bring back Alonso (a player not a single other team made a competitive offer for, which is why he took a team-friendly contract with the Mets, with an opt-out following the season).

But in other ways, what were the Mets during this era of the team? Other than four months to end the 2024 season, the Mets’ core had hung up:

• A bad 2021

• A great season, but a disappointing end to 2022

• A terrible 2023

• A bad start to 2024, before euphoria

We know what happened in 2025: a hot start followed by four months of terrible baseball that carried into this season, where it’s somehow worse.

But this is what Stearns “destroyed”: A team that wasn’t good enough to win and enjoyed its brief moment of success before falling back to earth.

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Destroyer

To be clear, I loved the 2022 roster, and 2024 is a pantheon-level Mets team. That squad will go down as my favorite in the last three decades, alongside the 1999 Mets.

Still, the 2022 team might as well be from 100 years ago. (Do you remember that Eduardo Escobar and Mark Canha combined for more than 1,000 at-bats that season?) The 2024 team, meanwhile, is a clear outlier — and, truthfully, it shows the limit of analytics. Sometimes, teams just get hot. There is no rhyme or reason to it. Life finds a way, and so do baseball teams that come out of nowhere.

Remember what I said about windows? How, in baseball, they open faster than you think and close before you realize?

The Mets’ roster — the mediocre one Stearns inherited after the 2023 season and has tried to rebuild through right now — had its window.

Generously, it was 2022-2025. Stearns was here for the death rattle.

When the Mets collapsed for the final four months of last season, the window slammed shut, and Stearns couldn’t reopen it on the fly.

That’s where we’re at right now — with Stearns, now really just two offseasons into his Mets tenure, trying to build a better team.

Thus far, he hasn’t done that, I admit.

But if you think the Mets would be better off heading into 2027 with Pete Alonso (32 next season), Brandon Nimmo (34 next season), Jeff McNeil (35 next season), and Francisco Lindor (33 next season), well… I’d love for you to buy a bunch of paid subscriptions to this very newsletter — and I’ll throw in the Brooklyn Bridge for free.

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One Last Thing

This guy is paid to write about baseball. A fascinating grift.

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When a team is 17 games under .500 heading into the All-Star break, it invites the stupid takes.

I can’t even get mad at Keith Olbermann for writing something dumb like David Stearns has to be removed before the trading deadline; he’s Keith Olbermann. But I can blame Stearns for putting himself in this position. His mistakes in building the roster — especially in one key spot where he clearly valued analytics over eyes — allowed the anti-intellectuals to storm the castle with their heinous, stupid takes. This crew has been proven “right” because the Stearns Mets have failed; please ignore every other winning team in baseball that follows the same playbook.

That said, I get where Olbermann is coming from. Sunday’s loss (I was there!) might have been the worst of the season…

…because even after this unacceptable, awful, embarrassing, inconceivable error, the Mets still would have won if not for Devin Williams. He picked up Francisco Lindor by… walking the next two hitters to walk in a run, and then giving up a bloop single to blow the lead.

It was fitting that Williams folded under pressure the same day Zach Thornton gave the Mets one of their best starts in a month. While the WFAN callers are still crying about Pete Alonso and Brandon Nimmo, two of Stearns’ worst decisions played key parts in Sunday’s heartbreaking loss.

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Airball

Why is Devin Williams on this team?

I get it: His underlying metrics last season with the Yankees were great, despite a 4.79 ERA. His expected ERA (xERA) was 3.09. His FIP (fielding independent pitching) — which strips away pesky things like fielding and luck from a pitcher to provide a measure of his effectiveness based on the things he controls — was 2.68.

From Metsmerized:

From May 1 until the end of the season (52 innings), Williams posted a 3.79 ERA with a 2.56 xERA (12th in MLB), had the second-best xFIP (2.37), was second in K% 38.3 (ahead of Edwin Díaz), third in SIERRA (2.17), and second in K-BB (25%). Overall, he still posted elite swing-and-miss numbers. He was 95th percentile in expected batting average (.195), 97th in chase rate (35%), 99th in swing-and-miss rate (37.7%), 97th in strikeout rate (34.7%), and 85th in hard-hit rate (35.4%). All of these numbers align with his underlying numbers in Milwaukee, suggesting that some bad luck inflated his surface-level numbers last season.

For three years and $51 million, even if he wasn’t going to be the closer, Williams was a pretty solid bet…

…unless you ever watched him pitch for the Yankees.

Relievers either have it or they don’t.

Williams don’t.

I believe in baseball analytics and trust that, on a long enough timeline, players will perform to the back of their baseball cards. For stretches this year, Williams has been… pretty good.

But what are we doing here with this guy?

I was watching the screeners for Ted Lasso season four the other night. At one point, Ted recalls an anecdote his father used to tell him. I’ll paraphrase: You can polish a turd, but all you get is a smaller turd and a handkerchief that smells like shit.

That’s what it feels like to have Devin Williams on the Mets after his stint on the Yankees.

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Now What?

I do think Luke Weaver should be the closer — and I wonder if Stearns, rather than trading Weaver at the deadline, can move Williams.

Of course, it would mean he’d have to admit defeat on a move that many fans and pundits said would fail from the day it got announced.

So, maybe it’s fantasy. But consider this: Williams’ contract is fairly reasonable; he’s got $15 million in deferred money and already received his $6 million signing bonus. If the Mets agree to pay the remainder of his contract this season and the deferred money starting in 2036 ($1.5 million annually for 10 years), his deal becomes two years and $24 million.

Several teams want right-handed relief help, including the Seattle Mariners. Do the Mets do a distressed assets swap and ship Williams to the Mariners for Luis Castillo? That feels Stearnsy in the best and worst senses of the term. Castillo is a former good pitcher who has been absolutely dreadful this year (so he’d fit right into the Mets' rotation), but he has an interesting contract. Castillo gets $24 million next year, and he has a $25 million option for 2028 that vests if he pitches 180 or more innings. He’s been a workhorse historically, but a lockout will likely suppress his innings regardless of health — making the vesting option moot. So the commitment is light enough that even if Castillo is the pitching version of Luis Robert Jr. — injured and/or bad — it’s still worth rolling the dice.

At the very least, he couldn’t be worse than Kodai Senga.

Speaking of which…

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Another Fine Mess

Why hasn’t Zach Thornton been in the starting rotation for the last month?

Of all the Stearns roster shuffling — bringing relievers in off the street only to designate them for assignment 12 hours later, etc. — sending Thornton back to AAA after his start against the Philadelphia Phillies on June 26 was borderline malpractice.

Thornton doesn’t have the stuff of Nolan McLean or Jonah Tong, but one look at him on the mound and you can see he’s a pitcher. He just knows what he’s doing out there; he throws strikes, and he challenges hitters. If Thornton had pitched on Tuesday against Kansas City, the Mets would have probably won that laughable game; he put them in a position on Sunday before Lindor and Williams combined to blow it.

But rather than add Thornton to the mix in place of Senga or Tobias Myers, Stearns has instead chosen to let the team throw bullpen games where the Mets might as well forfeit.

Again, when you’re 17 games under .500, it’s not one move that killed you — it’s countless moves, multiple mistakes and lapses on the field, and just plain bad luck. Still, Thornton should be a part of the rotation going forward and penciled in for a spot in 2027 alongside Nolan McLean and Christian Scott.

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Trade Lindor

After his catastrophic error in the ninth inning on Sunday, the “trade Lindor” crowd got moving.

I… don’t disagree. As I wrote last week, Lindor just looks incredibly unhappy out there. He’s a 10-5 guy now, meaning he could veto any deal — but I still think he’ll want to get to a World Series, and if the Mets shipped him off to … the Yankees, the Dodgers (lol never but why not?) or even the Red Sox, he’d probably at least consider the move.

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One Last Thing

As you can see from the photo above, I was sitting across from Obsession breakout star Inde Navarrette at the game on Sunday.

A funny thing about this video:

They were going to come to her the inning before, but she got bumped for John Oliver and his kids.

Still, the road to an Oscar nomination starts in Queens.

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Juan Soto lives rent-free in the minds of his haters.

That’s a bad play. Major league outfielders should not drop routine fly balls.

But it happens.

There’s an idea out there that Soto is a bad fielder. I don’t think he’s great, but the metrics say he’s perfectly fine — and his defense in left field this season is vastly superior to what he did in right field last season.

He dropped a ball on Friday night.

On Tuesday night, he did this:

But the Mets don’t have Soto because of his defense. They have him because, arguably, he’s the best pure hitter in baseball. When I watch Soto at the plate, he reminds me of both David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez. His hit tool is elite, and the fear he strikes in opposing pitchers is beyond even that of Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani. Soto gets in the pitchers’ heads.

He’s also only 27.

This is why David Stearns didn’t keep Pete Alonso and Brandon Nimmo.

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Under Construction

Mets “fans” love to throw around roster construction when trashing Stearns.

But roster construction isn’t just about the current season; it’s about the seasons beyond.

Barring something completely unexpected and awfully stupid — like the Mets not voiding Soto’s opt-out after the 2029 season by adding $5 million annually to the remainder of his contract; but with this franchise, I would never rule out the stupid — the Mets will have Juan Soto on their roster to the end of his career. A significant portion of that career — maybe even starting as soon as 2028 — will be with Soto as the designated hitter.

Let’s say my suggested timeline there is correct — that after 2027, Soto decides he wants to become a full-time DH. If the Mets had kept Brandon Nimmo and signed Pete Alonso to the Orioles deal, the Mets’ roster would have had three DHs for one spot in 2028.

And 2029.

And 2030.

In other words, they’d be the New York Yankees right now.

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The Stanton Problem

How many DHs do the Yankees have? Aaron Judge should probably switch to DH soon, right? He’s 34 years old and dealing with a significant injury he sustained while playing right field.

Ben Rice should also be a DH. According to defensive metrics, he’s one of the very worst defensive first basemen in baseball — alongside now-injured New York Mets bust Mark Vientos and Milwaukee Brewers’ savior Jake Bauers.

Assuming he ever gets on the field again this season, Giancarlo Stanton has to play DH. He only took DH at-bats this season before hurting his calf (and then hurting it again during his rehab).

That’s three, not even counting Jasson Dominguez and the aging Paul Goldschmidt.

I’d call that suboptimal.

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Trade Winds

This is part of the reason the beat writers suggesting the Mets should be in teardown mode sent me into a small rage:

Do the Mets need to “break it all apart”?

Consider the guys all but certain to be in the 2027 lineup: Soto, Francisco Lindor, Carson Benge, A.J. Ewing, Francisco Alvarez. Throw in Luis Torrens to piggyback with Alvarez, and add Jorge Polanco as a depth piece. I could even argue that the Mets should pick up the option on Luis Robert Jr. — doubling down on the $20 million lottery ticket — and give him at-bats at DH and LF, and even CF when Ewing needs a breath. I assume Brett Baty will be there, too (sigh), and Jared Young (not bad).

Does Bo Bichette opt in? I feel like… maybe? He’s not my favorite player, and he’s too streaky — either one of the very best hitters in the league or a sub-.600 OPS — but I think the lineup would be pretty balanced with him in there for another year.

What I’m saying is that it’s a pretty good offense to build upon, even without Bichette. Not good enough to win right now, but good enough that with another piece or two, it can compete at a high level.

The staff is the bigger issue. But again, wearing some rose-colored glasses I borrowed from Margaret Qualley, it could work. Nolan McLean is a nice No. 2 with growth potential; I love what we’ve seen from Christian Scott; it feels like the Mets will keep Clay Holmes; and Sean Manaea is at least pitching like a fifth starter, now that he appears moderately healthy. If the Mets add an actual No. 1 starter (Tarik Skubal?), this is a group that can keep the team in games every week.

Chris, you shout at the screen, you’re out of your goddamned mind.

No argument here. But if you look at the talent the Mets have on their roster this year, and you look around the league — where the Miami Marlins are very good, and the Washington Nationals are in the playoff hunt — you can see a pretty quick rebound for 2027.

Now, that doesn’t mean Stearns should sit on his hands — I would move Brooks Raley and A.J. Minter immediately, kick Freddy Peralta to the nearest contender and trade Huascar Brazobán, too — but he doesn’t need to “break it all apart.”

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One Last Thing

Here’s a dumb tweet:

The Mets did lose. Was it one of the “worst losses of all time!!!”? Or just a routine defeat against one of the hottest teams in the American League with their ace on the mound?

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Maybe fans were a mistake.

At this point, the most charitable reading I can offer of someone who claims to be a “fan” is that they create such a connection to what they’re obsessed with that they feel a sense of actual ownership. It’s why The Pitt fandom lost its mind in the spring. It’s why right-wing chuds are mad about The Odyssey. It’s why Mets fans are posting stuff like this:

The uncharitable read is that fans are dumb.

Fans want service over authenticity. Fans want to get what they want, not what the story needs. Fans need to be humored, coddled, and fed.

And this is why David Stearns should have kept Pete Alonso.

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Read the Room

Mets fans have been yelling at David Stearns to keep Pete Alonso since 2025.

Now that Alonso is gone, they’re still yelling.

For his sake, I wish he had listened.

To be clear, I don’t think the Mets would be significantly better with Alonso in the lineup this season.

Better, yes.

But an additional six home runs and 13 RBI probably wouldn’t have put the Mets in first place.

In a bubble, Alonso is having a fine season. His 162-game pace has him at 35 home runs and 108 RBI. People like home runs and RBI! These are good numbers.

But the sport isn’t played in a bubble: 35 home runs would be Alonso’s second-lowest total ever for a full season; 108 RBI would be his third-lowest total ever. His current OPS (.809) is his second-lowest ever.

Overall, the only Alonso season worse than this one so far is his 2024 campaign — a season during which Mets fans (many of whom, I assume, are mad he’s gone) couldn’t wait to get Alonso off the team.

Until he did this:

In some ways, this is one of the best home runs in Mets’ history.

In other ways, this is the worst.

If Alonso doesn’t hit this home run, he walks away as a free agent, and the fans are happy he’s gone; Stearns rebuilds the team, and things move apace.

But he did hit this home run. He became a folk hero. And the fans demanded he stay to the bitter end.

Stearns had other ideas. I could argue he was right. He looked at Alonso’s stats and his age and saw not only numbers in slight decline but also numbers buoyed by his durability (which will presumably lessen as he gets further into his 30s). Alonso’s a future designated hitter, and designated hitters aren’t worth $31 million a year.

And, oh, by the way, Stearns wasn’t necessarily alone in this calculation. The only team willing to give Alonso five years and $155 million was the Baltimore Orioles. No one else came close.

But being right is not a bulletproof vest.

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Drop the Leash

“He is the typical modern GM. It’s all about the exit velocity; it’s about launch angle; it’s about WAR. It’s about a spin rate. All of this garbage,” Joe Benigno said this week on Brandon Tierney’s podcast.

Joe hates Stearns. It’s clearly personal. His mere existence causes outrage.

“This guy, he went to Harvard. This guy thinks he’s smarter than everybody,” Joe said, echoing the kind of anti-intellectualism that could get him a job at the New York Daily News. “This is a guy, David Stearns, and I can be wrong about this. This is my impression. He’s the typical geek. He had no athletic ability whatsoever, none. Probably barely could hit a baseball off a tee. Maybe he was on a chess team and a star there. But no athletic ability at all. I can’t play, so I’m gonna reinvent the game, and that’s the problem.”

Joe’s got some — well, let’s just say right-leaning political views. If you listen to him enough, it’s not hard to notice. Here’s his rant about Steve Cohen. Emphasis mine:

That’s this owner. This freaking owner, okay, with his damn ass hedge funds, counting his money. That’s all he really gives a damn about, okay? This owner, he comes out and says, ‘Well, there was an issue between between Soto and Lindor.’ How about what we’ve heard? And I know Francesa brought this up, too. How about the fact that Lindor… that there was an issue and that one of the reasons maybe they got rid of those guys, the three homegrown Mets — McNeil, Nimmo, and Pete, okay, who had a lot more in common than just being homegrown. That was political. Lindor’s wife’s working for freaking Mamdani. What the hell is that?

But politics and, um, outdated thinking aside, Joe’s overall comments generally align with the broader fanbase. During this interview, Joe suggested that losing Alonso was the worst decision in New York Mets team history. Worse than trading Tom Seaver. Worse than breaking up the 1986 team. Worse than giving up on Pete Crow-Armstrong.

Stearns and Cohen could’ve avoided all of this with a check.

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Paying Up

I don’t think Steve Cohen has done a bad job running the Mets. He’s spent a fortune on this team. He signed Juan Soto to a record contract. He offered huge deals to players like Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Kyle Tucker, both of whom signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He’s paying more than $300 million for one of the worst teams in baseball.

The money’s not the problem.

But when Cohen bought the team, one of the things I thought his money would allow was to pay for mistakes.

This is kind of how the New York Yankees operated when they were the Evil Empire. Brian Cashman could sign guys to big contracts, and if they flopped, it was a write-down; they could just sign someone else.

I figured that’s how the Mets would operate under Cohen — especially after he agreed to pay off Robinson Canó’s $45 million contract to get him off the team in 2022. But I was wrong. The Mets are still paying Kodai Senga ($15 million left on his deal next year, with another $15 million in an option if he were to have Tommy John surgery before 2028) and Marcus Semien ($46 million through 2028), which defies all logic to me.

From 2022:

As the Mets mulled Robinson Canó’s future over the weekend, general manager Billy Eppler gathered all the necessary info and relayed it to team owner Steve Cohen.

Eppler told Cohen that his baseball operations department believed the best course of action would be to designate the slumping Canó for assignment. Eppler also told Cohen that doing so would mean eating the roughly $37.5 million remaining on Canó’s contract. Cohen would need to pay those dollars one way or the other.

Cohen absorbed the information, then told his GM: “Make the baseball decision.”

“Make the baseball decision” implies that baseball is different from business. And, sure, sometimes it is: The Mets are going to play A.J. Ewing in centerfield even if Luis Robert Jr. comes back (ha ha ha) because A.J. Ewing is the better player — Robert’s salary be damned.

But sometimes a business decision is needed to inform the baseball decisions — especially when the owner has more than $23 billion in net worth. So, who cares if Alonso was a bad bet long term as a player on the field? In the end, for Cohen, $155 million is just…

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Let Them Win

It’s generally not considered good parenting to give a child what they want when they’re throwing a fit.

But how many times can you tell someone no before you have to turn it into a yes?

How many hills are there to die on?

Fans are a lot like kids. And after Mets’ fans yelled at Stearns and Cohen during the team’s Amazin’ Day fan fest in 2025 — and after Alonso broke the franchise record for home runs later that year — the Mets’ leadership duo should’ve just given fans what they wanted.

No, it wouldn’t have been smart — not in the traditional sense. I have great doubts that the $155 million deal that Pete Alonso signed with the Orioles will age extremely well, and I think by the time Alonso is in the fourth and fifth years of that deal, his performance will be league-average or worse — and the Orioles will have a $31 million albatross on their roster.

But Stearns and Cohen wouldn’t have been spending that money on Alonso. They would have been spending that money on fan outreach. On fan placating. On fan humoring.

In some ways, that’s priceless.

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One Last Thing

I thought this tweet was pretty dumb.

Two things can be true at the same time: The Mets played a terrible baseball game on Monday night in the middle of a terrible season and deserved public derision — and Joe Davis overreacted to an error in a game where the Mets were winning 5-2 (and eventually won), which was embarrassing.

I don’t think Joe Davis should be imprisoned for a stupid call, but admitting that he’s a Dodgers fan who doesn’t like the Mets is probably fair enough.

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