Fifteen years ago, a 23-year-old Mets fan showed up for his first day as an intern with his hometown team. He was a year out of Harvard and already had two summers’ worth of experience in the Pirates’ baseball operations department, plus a stint as the assistant director of baseball operations for the Arizona Fall League. He so impressed his bosses, among them general manager Omar Minaya, that they stumped for the team to make his role permanent. They believed he had the potential to become one of the best young executives in the game. But owners Fred and Jeff Wilpon reportedly did not want to pay for the additional full-time position.
So David Stearns became one of the best young executives in the game—for other teams. He moved on to become a manager of labor relations at the commissioner’s office, a director of baseball operations with the Guardians, the assistant general manager of the Astros and the general manager and then president of baseball operations of the Brewers. Last October, with a year left on his contract, he announced he would step down and serve as a consultant to his successor, Matt Arnold.
And finally, after two years of courting by New York’s new owner, Steve Cohen, Stearns reportedly agreed to terms on Tuesday with the Mets to return as their president of baseball operations. The move is a dream one for Mets fans—among them Stearns’s mother, who still lives in New York. The Mets got their man. Now he has to be the man they expect him to be.
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Cohen said when he bought the team in 2020 that he wanted the Mets to look like the Dodgers, who under president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman reside on the cutting edge of scouting and player development while also maintaining the resources to outspend nearly everyone else. The result has been division titles in nine of the past 10 seasons, three World Series appearances in that span and a title.
The Mets have not quite matched that track record. Cohen has infused the team with cash that even Mark Walter, who owns the Dodgers, cannot match: New York this year boasted the highest payroll in North American sports history, $331 million. But Justin Verlander, who spent the first half of the season in Queens before being traded back to the Astros at the deadline, reportedly lamented that the team’s processes were behind those in Houston, and Cohen has been displeased enough in the system that he signed off on the firing late last month of high-ranking scouting and player-development employees. And the major league results have been dreadful. The Mets spent $264 million last year, second in the sport only to L.A., just to let the division slip away in the final month of the season and then limp out of the playoffs in the first round, and this year they may well finish in last place.
Enter Stearns. He dragged the Brewers from punching bag to perennial contender, executing shrewd trades to propel the team into the playoffs four years in a row. And he did it for about a third of the payroll he will have in Queens. This is roughly the path Friedman followed: He made the low-budget Rays an industry standard, then decamped to Los Angeles to see whether his theories worked with real money. They did. Will Stearns’s? His Brewers teams struggled to evaluate amateurs—other than ace Corbin Burnes, none of Milwaukee’s current stars were acquired in the draft or as international amateurs—but that has also been true of Friedman’s Dodgers. Where Friedman and Stearns have both excelled is in trades, both blockbusters—center fielder Christian Yelich for the Brewers, right fielder Mookie Betts for the Dodgers—and moves around the margins. And it has been those moves that have propelled Los Angeles to such success. Anyone can tell that Freddie Freeman would be a good addition to a team. Not anyone can see that Justin Turner, released by—you guessed it—the Mets, is a swing change away from stardom.
Those are the moves the Mets will need to hit on. They can outspend everyone in free agency, but that didn’t get them very far this year. They need to identify young talent that others might have overlooked and they need to help it grow. And you can be sure Cohen will be willing to pay for the extra full-time position.
