Thoughts on how the Mets should proceed with David Stearns

Stability with the Mets has been lacking under this ownership, and with uncertainty in the game ahead, that needs to be a primary consideration

Friday, June 26, 2026 has unquestionably become a pivotal and critical junction point of this era of the New York Mets.

The owner and General Manager/President of Baseball Operations/whatever you want to call him have fired their on-field manager, Carlos Mendoza. This comes about eight months after the Mets completely turned over the rest of their dugout staff and left Mendoza with a completely new crew he had to learn and build working relationships with, six and seven months after they decided, in the words of Stearns, not to run the same team back from 2025 into 2026.

All of those moves were perhaps fair and reasonable considering how sour things got for the 2025 Mets on or around June 13 of last season.

Think of it on these terms.

On June 12, 2025, the Mets had just won their sixth straight game, were 45-25, held a 5 1/2 game lead in the National League East, and were the sport’s best team to that point in their season.

Since that date, the Mets are 72-101, 29 games under .500 over their last 173 games dating back to June 13, 2025.

That number just seems almost impossible to believe. But these are the Mets right now, a team unable to get out of its own way, literally.

Now, sure - we can talk about how bad the starting pitching has been since that date, how bad the offense has been, how bad the defense has been, the complete dismantling of the team without any sort of meaningful path forward short of trying to throw money at the problem and hoping for a quick fix. We can talk about the since-departed manager, the President of Baseball Operations, and all of his clear and apparent blind spots when it comes to roster building, the current owner’s inexperience in actually owning a baseball team, a bad franchise-wide culture, and the general fan allowing themselves to be blinded by the amount of money said owner has and thinking and simply expecting he can just throw money around at problems and buy the championship he wanted over the first five years of his stewardship.

It’s probably all of that, inclusive of the owner and GM perhaps succumbing to the pressures they created for themselves.

Over the last few hours, since the Mets dismissed Mendoza, I’ve had an opportunity to think about the state of the Mets. Now, I don’t ever pretend to be a subject matter expert in owning a team, running a team, and managing the expectations that come with all of that. I am and have always been just a guy who knows a little bit about baseball, has covered the team for a long time, and has seen one regime change after the next with the Mets specifically.

The one thing I will say is this - the Mets should’ve fired Mendoza last fall. He didn’t deserve it then, he probably didn’t deserve it now, especially since he didn’t build the roster, he didn’t hire this coaching staff, and the role of the field manager is generally diminished compared to that from years past that the person in that role’s primary responsibility is to keep the room full of players cool and execute the roster in the way that it has been designed by the manager’s superiors.

For all intents and purposes, I think Mendoza did that to the best of his ability. Again, I don’t know what the true temperature is in that room of players, but there isn’t anybody and there hasn’t been any reason to believe that Mendoza wasn’t well liked and well respected by those people.

And, I am willing to bet no player today will say this was his fault.

But, that doesn’t mean the front office doesn’t need to hold people accountable, and the right people and all of the people accountable when a team underperforms. That’s true of a baseball team just like it’s true in corporate America. That doesn’t mean they’re not good people, they aren’t well liked, etc. They are - but there must be a line in between what’s good for business and our opinions of people, and I think that got a little blurred when the Mets decided to keep Mendoza, and fire everyone else last fall.

But, what’s done is done. And whether I, you, the owner, or the GM thinks firing Mendoza was deserved, it’s time to really think about what is next for this franchise. We are back once again in a period of turmoil with the Mets, a familiar albeit uncomfortable position of uncertainty.

The popular opinion is for ownership to can Stearns. Some think it should happen now, some think it should happen in October, some think it should’ve happened last October. Some didn’t want Stearns in the first place. And I don’t think there are a lot - if any - that think Stearns should be given more time.

The opinion is justified. There has been one misstep after another over the last two years with the major league roster. There has been a ton of corner cutting, there have been poor player evaluations, there have been too many rolls of the dice with broken players they’ve tried to resurrect and extract value from, and too many rolls of the dice with position changes and willful chaos on a daily basis.

The nadir, to me anyway, was two nights ago when the Mets committed six errors, got shellacked by the Cubs, and the fans at Citi Field were chanting, “PETE ALONSO!”

And, the buck unquestionably stops with Stearns. He is the last and overriding decision maker in the room. He is the highest-paid executive in the room. What has happened with this franchise over the last 13 or so months is on him and his group of front office leaders. Not the manager, not the players, not anything other than them.

Over the first 81 games of this season alone, Mendoza was forced to use 5 different first basemen, four of which aren’t first basemen, six different third basemen, five different shortstops, 11 different left fielders, four different centerfielders, and seven different right fielders.

Please, enlighten me - how is any of that his fault? Sure, some of it is injury-related, but honestly, most of it is due to underperformance and flat-out incompetence from the players combined with the front office’s clear unwillingness to make necessary changes to help his dugout staff.

I’ll put it to you another way.

Brett Baty owns a -0.3 fWAR. Mark Vientos a -0.8 fWAR. Not only are they generally playing every day, and now playing in positions completely that were completely foreign to them heading into the year, but among those with at least 200 plate appearances, those are the 13th and fourth worst marks in all of Major League Baseball, respectively.

And yet, when Francisco Lindor came back the other night, the Mets not only retained both of them, but they both started in that very game.

How is that even allowed?

At any rate, I am going to express a very unpopular opinion right now, but I want everyone who reads this to just hear me out.

I don’t think David Stearns should be let go now or even after this season.

Not yet, anyway.

Make no mistake - this is all on him. This is his roster, letting Alonso go for what is now five misfit first basemen was just a baseball crime, although it makes it clear exactly what Stearns and the front office thought of Alonso. Not to mention the fact he has failed to properly construct a starting rotation arguably in every season he has been running the team.

Among other things, for sure.

He has been bad at running the Mets over the last 18 months. That’s just a fact and a reality.

Now, I am not going to be someone who tells you the Mets have been brilliant organization builders under Stearns, either. Once again, they’re 72-101 over the last 13-ish months, and you’re as smart as your record says you are. Their minor league system has generally regressed in 2026 from a very promising 2025 season. They’ve essentially graduated two position player prospects to their big league roster and, to be fair, the jury is still out on both of them. They appear to have something in Nolan McLean, but it hasn’t exactly been a smooth ride for him overall, as promising as he looks.

Aside from them, that’s it, and that’s not enough considering how much this farm system has been pumped up over the last two years, and an inability to graduate impact players to the major leagues unquestionably has hindered this organization, no matter what they say or will have you believe.

To be fair, that has been a problem pretty much since 2019 when they graduated a prolific right-handed first baseman who went on to set the franchise mark in home runs.

But, the problem with firing Stearns now or in four months is they would have to essentially find a new head of baseball, find a new manager, and probably a new dugout staff yet again.

A byproduct of having to find a new head of baseball operations is that it inevitably comes with a new front office and a rebuild of the entire organization from the ground up with different ideas and methodologies, all of which take a lot of time to cultivate.

And, to do that again, three years after jettisoning Billy Eppler, his front office and dugout staff, which was two years after Eppler relieved Sandy Alderson, who relieved both Zack Scott and Jared Porter in the same year (and this is just since 2021, mind you), who relieved Alderson in his second term as head of baseball, would just be another stain on this franchise they don’t need and won’t be able to get out.

Do the Mets need to undergo a complete rebuild, again? Can they withstand that, again? Does the owner have an appetite for that, again? I think I know what our readers might say about that, for sure.

Think about it for a second - if Cohen were to fire Stearns now, why would any quality baseball executive want to take the job? They’re averaging a new head of baseball operations every 1.2 years as it stands right now. And again, with every new baseball executive comes a new front office, and generally comes with a new manager.

There is zero stability here, not to mention very little success at the major league level under Cohen.

Cake on the uncertainty with the next collective bargaining agreement and no known path forward until that’s resolved (it just doesn’t seem like it’s going to end well for teams like the Mets, for what it’s worth), and no one in their right mind would take the job, or at least take the job and buy real estate in the greater New York area.

No, I think it would be wise to see this through with Stearns to the end of his contract. Make no mistake - he doesn’t have much, if any, currency left here. I can’t sit here and say that much of anything has gone right for this club under Stearns short of four months in 2024 where the Mets accidentally got hot and made a run.

But I also believe that stability is paramount for the Mets right now, even if Stearns ultimately proves to be a failed baseball executive here.

The Mets cannot afford to go back to the drawing board again, as bad as things are for this franchise right now. It doesn’t mean Stearns should be given a runway beyond 2027, or whenever there is baseball again after this season. But firing Stearns and starting over could prove to be a worse move than keeping him and affording him the chance to bring the right people in and get this organization back on track.

Remember too that Stearns was Cohen’s white whale. He waited years for Stearns to fall into his lap. He believed in him before he ever put on his Mets quarter zip. To bail on that not three years before hiring him would just label Cohen as a loose cannon and Steinbrenner-esque to a degree.

The Mets need to be reputation building now, not further tarnishing it. And keeping Stearns - for now anyway - might be the best way to do that.

If we are still having the same conversations a year from now, obviously Cohen will have no other choice but to let Stearns go. But that’s then to me. It’s now time for Stearns to demonstrate to his boss why he hired him in the first place.

And the clock starts right now.