In breaking up the Mets core, team president of baseball operations David Stearns and team owner Steve Cohen invited the heat.
Over the course of these next two months until spring training, there will be a megawatt spotlight pointed directly on Mets leadership to replace the players that left New York with enhanced, proven competitors capable of taking the team to the World Series.
Otherwise, what was the point?
The new Mets – whomever they will be – cannot miss the playoffs like they did this past season. They will try to avoid that disaster without one of the game’s best sluggers, after longtime first baseman Pete Alonso signed a five-year contract worth $155 million with the Orioles on Wednesday.
They will try to deliver wins without Edwin Diaz, arguably the best closer in baseball, after he chose to fly west to pitch for the defending-champion Dodgers for only $3 million more than what the Mets were offering him.
They will try to adjust to new leadership in the clubhouse without Brandon Nimmo, regarded as a co-captain alongside Francisco Lindor, after the outfielder was asked to waive his no-trade clause and, as such, departed for Texas.
The amount of turnover, both on the Mets roster and coaching staff, has been dizzying. It’s the response to a baffling 83-win season from a Mets team with a $340 million payroll that was supposed to be good enough to beat the Dodgers, if not enjoy another deep playoff run after the success of 2024’s trip to the NLCS.
At the end of the 2025 season, Cohen apologized to Mets fans. The Mets owner said the “result was unacceptable,” and promised that the organization would do better. Since then, Cohen, the richest individual owner in professional sports, has watched three long-tenured and popular players leave the organization, with two of them departing for more money than he put on the table. He’s seen the outpouring of frustration and sadness from the same fans he said he’d serve better. So how will he respond now?
Mets president David Stearns and team owner Steve Cohen have big decisions to make. (Photo by Thomas A. Ferrara/Newsday RM via Getty Images)
The Mets had the second-highest payroll in MLB in 2025 and, to public knowledge, Cohen hasn’t bungled away his estimated $23 billion net worth in that time. His ambitions to build the Mets into a champion as soon as possible haven’t changed either. So the money has to go somewhere, and most of the top-tier free agents are still available for the taking.
Revamping the roster will be a challenge, but it is doable. It will take spending oodles of money on marquee players, executing blockbuster deals, and maybe even engaging in an improbable trade for the American League’s back-to-back Cy Young winner, Tarik Skubal.
That’s how high the Mets have set the bar for themselves after being indifferent about losing three valuable players in Alonso, Díaz, and Nimmo, and after Stearns expressed optimism about the direction of the Mets offseason. He and Cohen know they have to respond to such drastic measures with equally robust improvements.
How will the Mets give their fans something to cheer about this winter? It starts with becoming better on-paper, and the best way to proceed might be by spreading their resources. A year ago, at this time, the Yankees pivoted from superstar Juan Soto’s decision to sign with the Mets by aggressively retooling. They signed Max Fried to the largest contract ever issued to a left-handed pitcher. They upgraded their bullpen and lineup by trading for Devin Williams and Cody Bellinger. After all of that, they didn’t miss a step. The Yankees recorded identical records (94-68) with and without Soto in the 2024 and ’25 regular seasons.
For all the movement, the Mets still have a dynamic duo in Juan Soto and Francisco Lindor. (Photo by Ed Zurga/Getty Images)
Will the Mets follow a similar blueprint after their own stars walked away? This past season, the Mets finished fifth in the major leagues in home runs, and in addition to Soto’s team-leading 43 homers, Alonso’s principal skillset was a major component of the team’s production; he hit 38 jacks en route to becoming the all-time franchise home-run leader this year. How do the Mets replace Alonso’s dingers?
Kyle Schwarber, whom they were interested in signing, is off the board after re-signing with the Phillies. The next best free-agent slugging option is third baseman Eugenio Suarez, who crushed 49 home runs and recorded 118 RBI (fourth-most in MLB) playing for the Diamondbacks and Mariners in 2025. Suarez, entering his age-34 season, would also line up with the Mets’ preference for shorter-term deals. If Suarez plays the hot corner, where does that push Brett Baty, with Marcus Semien occupying second base?
That’s not all. There are holes everywhere. First base. Left field. Center field. The bullpen. Most crucially, starting pitching.
There are so many roster decisions to be made, and the work Stearns needs to do is only mounting. Evidently, he enjoys operating under an overwhelming amount of pressure. Otherwise, it would’ve been easier to spend Cohen’s money and bring back Alonso on a contract that outbid Baltimore’s offer. But the Mets were not willing to match the length of Alonso’s contract with the O’s. Instead, they preferred the blank slate.
Could a big swing to trade for ace Tarik Skubal be in the cards for the Mets? (Photo by Jane Gershovich/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
The unknown of the Mets offseason can be exciting, but it requires trust. The Mets owner trusts his head of operations to get this right, even at the expense of parting ways with fan favorites. Stearns was Cohen’s white whale for years before he finally plucked the top executive from the Brewers ahead of the 2024 season. Stearns is signed through the 2028 season, and his marching orders involve building a sustainable World Series contender.
By taking a wrecking ball through the Mets core, months after the team missed the playoffs in one of the most disappointing seasons in franchise history, he is sending the message that mediocrity will not be tolerated. Of course, a large chunk of their poor results came from unpredictability and ineffectiveness in the starting rotation, a weaker area of the roster that has not yet been addressed.
But, as an offense, the Mets failed to record even a single comeback win when trailing after the eighth inning in 2025. They went 0-70. It was unfathomable. At the end of the season, Stearns said he couldn’t make sense of it. The lack of late-game heroics had to be a factor when he decided to break up the core.
There are also rumblings within the industry that the Mets had clubhouse issues this year. When asked about it at the Winter Meetings in Orlando this week, Stearns attempted to address that topic by saying:
“I think we had a pretty good clubhouse last year, and I know a lot of you were in our clubhouse regularly, and maybe some of you would disagree with me, but I don’t know that many of you would walk in there on a daily basis and feel like this was not a good clubhouse. We have good people who play really hard, who want to win. We didn’t play well for the last two months of the year.
“And when you don’t play well for the last two months of the year, people get frustrated, as we should. People hold each other accountable, as we should. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good group. That doesn’t mean it was a group that didn’t care about each other. I think we did. We just didn’t play well for the last two months of the year, and everyone was very frustrated by it.”
Stearns and the rest of Mets leadership have channeled that frustration by breaking up the band. In the seven seasons that Alonso, Diaz, and Nimmo played together, the Mets recorded eight playoff wins in two trips to the postseason. It wasn’t good enough. It has to be better. The Mets need to stack wins. In order for that to happen, sentimentality has taken a back seat to business only.
OK, who are the Mets kidding? Sentimentality has been removed from the ride altogether. It’s an approach that might take a while to get used to, but time marches on.
First came the disappointment. Then came the frustration. Next came the intrigue about what the Mets will look like on Opening Day.
Now, it’s time for the pivot.
Deesha Thosar covers Major League Baseball as a reporter and columnist for FOX Sports. She previously covered the Mets as a beat reporter for the New York Daily News. The daughter of Indian immigrants, Deesha grew up on Long Island and now lives in Queens. Follow her on Twitter at @DeeshaThosar.
