pete-alonso

David Stearns & The Process

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As days go in New York Mets history, the Mets losing on consecutive days Edwin Diaz and Pete Alonso via free agency is just another day in the neighborhood. Nothing to watch here. Move along.

In the history of the Mets, only two prominent players have spent their entire careers in the orange and blue: Ed Kranepool and David Wright.

Eddie Kranepool

That’s it.

Through different owners and various decision-makers in the front office, the Mets have repeatedly demonstrated a completely unsentimental attachment to homegrown players.

Brandon Nimmo and Pete Alonso were homegrown talents. Each grew up and achieved success as a Met. Nimmo and Alonso could handle the pressure and bright lights of the big city and perform at a high level. That should never be undervalued in the hardball locales of the Accela Corridor. Playing on the East Coast is different.

Mets President of Baseball Operations David Stearns viewed the results of the 2025 campaign and deemed that changes needed to be made. A course correction was needed. (I’m with him on that.)

Here’s what fascinating about Stearns’s purge of the Mets: Brandon Nimmo, Pete Alonso and Edwin Diaz all thrived in 2025. They weren’t the reasons for the team’s collapse. This trio of talent delivered.

  • Brandon Nimmo (5.8 WAR ranked 8th amongst MLB’s Left Fielders)
  • Pete Alonso (5.6 WAR ranked 6th amongnst MLB’s First Basemen)
  • Edwin Diaz (2.0 WAR ranked 9th amongst MLB’s Relief Pitchers)

(* WAR Rankings by FanGraphs)

Stearns would correctly point out that each of the three above players is the wrong side of thirty. That each of these Mets fan favorites is approaching the age of diminishing returns. Stearns was able to pass on Nimmo’s long-term deal, which runs to 2030, to the Texas Rangers for second baseman Marcus Semien (6.4 WAR ranked 5th amongst MLB’s Second Basemen). It appears Edwin Diaz desired to take his talents to the Dodgers, but Mets owner Steve Cohen possesses the ability to change minds with his deep pockets. And David Stearns allowed Pete Alonso to walk away with little to no interest in bringing the Polar Bear back to Flushing.

Folks have characterized Stearns’s moves or lack of moves as being unsentimental. But he did sign an old friend from his Milwaukee days, Devin Williams, to a three-year. $51 million contract to replace Diaz in the bullpen.

David & Devin meeting with the press to explain how Devin drunkenly injured himsef by punching a wall after the Brew Crew clinched the NL Central title versus the Mets in 2021.

As I’ve written previously, the deteriorating results in 2025 were the end product of a suspect pitching staff and a poorly constructed roster. These were both assembled by Stearns. In his end of the year press conference, Stearns repeatedly focused on the subject of run prevention. Run prevention starts with your pitching staff. A subpar defensive first baseman, such as Pete Alonso, and a left fielder who has lost a step in Brandon Nimmo were not the reasons for the Mets agonizing descent to as confusing a season as any in Mets history.

No one ever wants to use this dirty word when it comes to New York sports, but David Stearns is in the midst of a: REBUILD

What was that?

It’s a REBUILD.

The Mets are dangling their most consistent starting pitcher in 2005, David Peterson, as being available in trade talks. Peterson’s struggles in the second half of the season did not help the Mets’ playoff push. There is no secret that the idiosyncratic Kodai Senga is another starting pitcher the Mets have interest in moving. Senga was so messed up and confused with his mechanics (Senga is nearly always on a quest to “find” his mechanics.) that the Mets exiled him to the minors in September, where he continued to pitch like Hideki Irabu. Stearns has young arms on the rise (Nolan McLean, Jonah Tong and Brandon Sproat) and wants to make sure there is room for them on the major league roster.

Stearns cobbled together a bullpen that struggled for most of the year. His trade deadline acquisitions were mostly busts. An offensive abyss in center field plagued the Mets. Carrying Brett Baty, Mark Vientos and Ronny Mauricio — players who possess very similar skill sets and play nearly identical positions – was a questionable way to construct the roster.

The David Stearns solution is to purge the coaching staff and the players that were the nucleus of this team. The 2025 season has allowed Stearns to emphatically place his imprimatur on the Mets.

ALL HAIL, KING DAVID!

The Stearns & Soto LLC

Nimmo, Diaz and Alonso were not Stearns’s guys. Juan Soto is a Stearns guy. And now we will see who else is a Stearns guy as he makes further moves this offseason.

In the midst of the 2025 season, Red Sox Chief Baseball Officer Craig Breslow showed the baseball world that Rafael Devers wasn’t his guy by trading him to the San Francisco Giants. For the remainder of the year, the Red Sox DH by committee did not approach the offensive production of Devers, but Breslow finessed that fact by stating the lack of a full-time DH allowed every day players a day to rest and provided at-bats to keep role players fresh. Breslow was able to shed Devers’ long-term contract that his predecessor, Chaim Bloom, offered after being blindsided by Xander Bogaerts’ defection to San Diego. Breslow was able to cast aside Bloom’s mega deal to Devers.

All of these heads of baseball operations ultimately want their guys and their vision of the roster to manifest itself. Using nearly the same metrics and formulas, there is a groupthink at work to assembling a baseball roster. According to David Stearns, the Mets’ trade deadline acquistions were not failures because they were products of the vaunted process. Ultimately, the process will prevail though it took a lot of L’s in 2025.

Jorge Polanco — A Product of The Process

As I’m writing this, Seattle Mariners playoff stud, Jorge Polanco, has reportedly signed a two-year contract for $40 million to play mostly DH and first base for the Mets. The thirty-one year old Polanco put up a torrid second half of the season for the Mariners, but struggled in 2023 and 2024.

So, this is David Stearns’s answer to partially replacing the offensive production of Pete Alonso: Jorge Polanco

Polanco is now a Stearns guy — for two years. Polanco represents both roster flexibilty and payroll flexibility. Stearns must be orgasmic right now — unless Polanco hits like he did in 2023 and 2024. If that is the case, Stearns will bear a legacy with Mets fans of attempting to replace Pete Alonso with the up and down Jorge Polanco.

Stearns has definitively announced the Mets are now his team and it is his process at work.

Good luck with that, David.

162 Games Played

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A major league baseball season consists of 162 games. 81 games played at home and 81 games played on the road.

To play in all 162 games, a player has to be better than merely good. This player has to be a proven linchpin to his team’s success. You want this bad man in your lineup every goddamn day. You need this soldier in your lineup every day.

To these 162 men of iron, posting up is what they do. They show up at the ballpark every day knowing their name is going to be in the lineup. There are no days off. Days off are for chumps — not champs. These guys are heroes – not zeros.

For the 2025 season, only six players showed up every day, laced up their spikes and hunkered down at home plate to take their hacks. Six. (One of the six actually played in 163 games.) These guys didn’t take a night off because they went on a bender in South Beach and ended the night at Tootsie’s. They didn’t see Tarik Skubal scheduled as the next day’s starter and ask for the day off. These guys buckled up and showed out.

Here are 2025’s Iron Men:

  1. Rafael Devers (163 Games Played)
  2. Pete Alonso
  3. Elly De La Cruz
  4. Matt Olson
  5. Brett Rooker
  6. Kyle Schwarber

You might be asking yourself, how did Rafael Devers play in 163 games? After being traded from the Boston Red Sox to the San Francisco Giants, on June 15th, Devers picked up an extra game.

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Devers Aside: When the Chief Baseball Officer (Who makes up these titles in baseball? Is this a Tom Werner production?) of the Boston Red Sox, Craig Breslow, realized his relationship with Rafael Devers had cratered to the point of a JLo marriage counseling session, Devers was shipped to San Francisco for the mercurial flamethrowing reliever/failed starter Jordan Hicks, starting pitcher Kyle Harrison, minor league outfielder James Tibbs III since moved to the Dodgers for the rental of Tormund Giantsbane wannabe Dustin May, and minor league pitcher Jose Bello.

Before Devers’ plane could leave town, he was hit with the usual crap of not being a good teammate, he was lazy — out of shape. The guy only played in 163 games. 1-6-3!

And if Devers’ replacement at third base, Alex Bregman, decides that he’s not a Dunkin’ type of guy — the Red Sox will again be looking to fill a void at third base. I’ll allow Alex Bregman’s uber agent Scott Boras to explain how that works:

“In Boston, we learned a lot about Bregman in ‘25,” Boras said at last week’s GM Meetings in Las Vegas. “Because in Boston prior to ’25 they had a lot of lineup donut holes and certainly prior to ’25, Boston has been kind of a club that has dunkin’ well below the playoff line. So I think it was a bad roast in Beantown. Give the owners credit in ’25. They went out, spent some Starbucks to bring in a Bregman blend that led them to the playoffs. I’m sure the Boston fans don’t want this to be just a cup of coffee and no one wants a Brexit.”

Who knew that Boras was a former hack ad agency copywriter? Twelve-year-olds come up with better shit on TikTok.

Red Sox/Liverpool FC/Pittsburgh Penguins/RFK Racing/Boston Common Golf fans will revel in their schadenfreude at the fact that Devers was the only 2025 Iron Man not to be named an All-Star.

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All of this is mere artifice to get to my main point, which is; how do the Mets or the Phillies allow Pete Alonso or Kyle Schwarber to depart via free agency? These guys don’t grow on Pedro Martinez’s mango tree in the Dominican Republic?

Quick Elly De La Cruz Hug: But Elly De La Cruz did grow up in the Dominican Republic — not sure he ever sat under Pedro’s mango tree. De La Cruz played 162 games — almost exclusively at shortstop — and is the first Cincinnati Red to play 162 games since Joey Votto in 2017. De La Cruz played through the death of his sister and a nagging quad injury. Stole 37 bags. Absolute stud.

If you haven’t been paying attention at home because you’re mourning the death of Alice Glick, I write this stuff through the perspective of a Mets fan. And maybe this outsized passion and commitment to the Mets sometimes makes folks think I am an agoraphobic loser — not that agoraphobics are losers — but I do watch a lot of Mets games. In a Mets fan survey on The Athletic, one of the questions was: How many Mets games did you watch in 2025? I answered 100. Sounds about right — maybe a little more — but that feels like the number. For the folks who watched 140 or more games, that is sick. Also, it makes me think; is a baseball incel a subset of the larger incel populace?

All of this has been a touch of smoke and mirrors to get to this salient point: The Mets need to re-sign Pete Alonso.

The ability to post up and play every day is undervalued. Staying healthy is a talent and the ability to play through pain and minor dings should not be overlooked.

David Stearns bring back the Polar Bear. Changes are needed. But I’m not sure the right move is to move on from Pete Alonso. Yes, Alonso has defensive shortcomings but when did first base evolve into a defense first position? You want a guy who can bash the ball at first.

When you add it up all six of 2025’s Iron Men bring value to their teams. Can their true value be quantified? Does an opposing pitcher want to see A’s right fielder Brent Rooker step into the box or a guy that has been working the Sacramento and Las Vegas Aviators shuttle? Presence alone can make or break a lineup on a particular day. Pitching to Juan Soto and then having to face Pete Alonso ain’t no walk in the park.

Iron men are valuable. It goes beyond the stats.

(I forgot to give any love to Matt Olson. With all due respect, fuck the Braves.)

Run Prevention with the New York Mets

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I routinely have a chuckle or outright laugh at the lexicon used by the decision-makers that rule major league baseball. Possessed with MBA’s and Ivy League degrees, these stewards of the game have made a conversation about hardball into an ongoing symposium regarding the ecosystem of major league baseball and the market forces that impact the game.

In a nutshell, most heads of Baseball Operations sound like McKinsey consultants giving a Ted Talk on the “The Urge To Play is Greater Than the Urge To Fight.”

At the end of the Mets appreciably forlorn 2025 campaign, which saw the Mets slowly and heartbreakingly descend to a position in the standings where they would be playoff spectators, Mets President of Baseball Operations David Stearns mentioned in his post-mortem remarks that the Mets needed to improve their “run prevention” or to translate for the less erudite: Pitching & Defense.

At the age of 40, the Harvard-educated David Stearns has been labeled a baseball savant. Possessing a seemingly uncanny ability to sift through the reports of promising young talents and the flotsam and jetsam of journeymen pitchers, Stearns was able to construct a consistently competitive group with the Milwaukee Brewers. Enticed by the financial largesse of the deep-pocketed Steve Cohen, Stearns returned to his New York City roots to run his childhood team, the New York Mets.

It makes you a little verklempt. It’s a nice story.

But when I heard Stearns illustrate that the Mets need to improve in the area of run prevention, I did a double-take. El Presidente, you’re the baseball guru that assembled a 2025 roster that featured suspect starting pitching and a major league roster that had three players ( Brett Baty, Mark Vientos and Ronny Mauricio.), who share very similar skill sets. Mets manager Carlos Mendoza was handed a roster that had very little positional flexibilty and directly influnced the Mets’ efforts at run prevention.

The Mets headed into 2025 with a starting pitching staff composed of these mostly off-Broadway performers:

Sean Manaea

Kodai Senga

David Peterson

Clay Holmes

Griffin Canning

Tylor Megill

Frankie Montas

Paul Blackburn

There was no way anyone thought this collection of pitchers was going to be capable of positioning the Mets as an elite team, but for the first two months of the season, the quintet of Senga, Peterson, Holmes, Canning and Megill did exactly that. They struggled to go deep into games, which eventually decimated the effectiveness and health of the Mets’ bullpen arms, but this ragtag and ever-evolving roll call of starting pitchers worked until it unraveled and became a weight that slowly dragged the Mets out of the playoff picture and into the abyss.

Stearns assembled this group. He had to understand the chance he was taking with this group. If your desire is to win the World Series, this group was never going to achieve that. Did the analytics and forecasting models remotely suggest that this collection of arms was somehow going to supersede the run prevention constructs of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies? Both of these NL rivals headed into the 2025 season with a collection of arms superior to the Mets.

Stearns chose to enter the season with a starting pitching staff riddled with question marks. He was taking a gamble and that gamble failed miserably.

So, that’s the first part of the run prevention saga of the 2025 Mets. Now, here’s where the run prevention problem of 2025 could possibly further impact the Mets in 2026.

Sifting through Stearns’ run prevention comments, some observers have taken it as a possible sign that the Mets may be reluctant to re-sign Pete Alonso because of his defensive inadequacies. The Polar Bear is adept at picking errant throws out of the dirt, but Alonso has limited range and has a little bit of Steve Sax in him when he is asked to throw the ball. For the 2025 season, Alonso ranked 30 of 30 in defensive runs saved among first basemen and 29 of 30 in Statcast’s outs above average and fielding run value. Alonso’s defensive inadequacies should be mitigated by the fact that Alonso possesses a potent bat (.272/.347/.524), posts up every day — EVERY DAMN DAY — and has shown the ability to excel in New York.

@nypostsports

“I just zooted a routine play.” Pete Alonso reacted to his throwing errors this year on WFAN’s Evan and Tiki last week. ⚾️🐻‍❄️

♬ original sound – New York Post Sports

The run prevention issue facing David Stearns is real. The Mets need to improve their starting pitching, the Mets may lose lights out closer Edwin Diaz to free agency, and the Mets starting lineup is littered with subpar defenders such as corner outfielders Juan Soto and Brandon Nimmo.

David Stearns has a mess on his hands, but the run prevention problem is not going to be solved by seeing Pete Alonso play elsewhere in 2026. However, it appears it may involve Brandon Nimmo or Jeff McNeil playing elsewhere in 2026.

The 2026 Mets are not going to look like the 2025 Mets.