Winter meetings: Mets' David Stearns' flexible philosophy is the wild card this week
Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns speaks alongside owner Steve Cohen at Citi Field on Jan. 25. Credit: Jeff Bachner
There may be no front-office executive with more pressure on him going into Major League Baseball’s winter meetings than David Stearns.
The Mets’ president of baseball operations will be in Orlando this week with a monumental task in front of him: bandaging the wounds of a disastrous 2025 season, balancing a roster with numerous holes and building a more durable, more reliable pitching staff than the one that keyed their second-half collapse.
It's a long checklist and one born out of necessity. Last year’s failures, along with key losses in player personnel, mean that the Mets are very much an incomplete team.
But Stearns has two things working in his favor: a professed willingness to learn from his mistakes and a big-spending owner who isn’t shy about allotting the capital necessary to address those errors.
There are four glaring areas of need for this team — starting pitching, outfield help, first base and a reconstructed bullpen.
Stearns got ahead of that final element this past week when he signed Devin Williams to a three-year, $51 million contract. The former Brewers and Yankees reliever struggled in 2025, but his peripheral numbers, along with a strong second half, indicate that he has the ability to return to his All-Star form.
Beyond that, the signing also might have shed some light on how Stearns plans to approach this offseason.
In the past, Stearns has tended toward bullpen flexibility — not married to the idea of assigning specific roles and preferring to take a chance on a slew of cost-efficient options rather than spending big on one premium arm and praying it stays healthy and productive.
There’s plenty of precedent for this throughout baseball. Some teams opt to go through a bevy of bullpen arms, see what sticks and quickly part ways with pitchers who don’t.
This idea had served Stearns well before last season, when unreliable relief pitching and a slew of injuries helped doom the Mets. Williams’ signing, though, points to two things. 1. Stearns was being honest when, during last month’s general managers’ meetings, he professed at least an openness to spending serious money on improving the unit, and, 2. He intends to be philosophically flexible with his transactions, probably not just with the relief corps.
“You generally get good free agents when they’re in their 30s,” Stearns said at the GM meetings. “And to get good free agents, sometimes you have to extend them into places in their career where performance isn’t always going to go up.”
That, though, hasn’t been Stearns’ modus operandi in his first two years at the helm. Though the Mets were in on Yoshinobu Yamamoto, their only long-term free-agent signing in two seasons has been Juan Soto. They also balked at signing Pete Alonso to a long-term contract last year despite what the slugger has meant to the organization since earning Rookie of the Year honors in 2019, including breaking Darryl Strawberry’s franchise home run record.
If you take Stearns at his word, though, his comments at the meetings might open the door for Alonso’s return or a reunion with Edwin Diaz.
Alonso projects at a six- or seven-year deal, which would bring him into his age 37 season. Diaz is expected to net four or even five years, bringing the closer to age 35.
Both still have plenty of prime left, but if those projections are close to correct, whoever signs them may have to be OK with at least a year of diminished returns by the time the contracts expire.
There are reasons Stearns might go that route: Alonso and Diaz are by far the best available free agents at their positions. The market for them will be competitive, but after last year’s debacle, the Mets can’t really afford to shop in the bargain section.
If Stearns decides to step away from Alonso and/or Diaz, it’ll be fascinating to see where the Mets pivot.
They could take the money they would have spent on Diaz and essentially try to recreate his production in the aggregate while hoping that Williams truly can return to form, though that carries considerable risk (notice how much the Mets struggled when they lost Diaz for the season in 2023).
Instead of Alonso, they could look to find a stopgap and hope prospect Ryan Clifford pans out, platoon Mark Vientos and Jeff McNeil and pray that Vientos hits this year, or go in heavily on Cody Bellinger, who can play the outfield and first base.
The Brandon Nimmo trade for Marcus Semien also shows that Stearns will continue to eschew sentimentality and that — aside from Soto, Francisco Lindor and maybe one or two pitchers — it might very well be open season to trade anyone on the roster.
Regardless, this coming week should be a good indicator of which way the wind will be blowing for the Mets. One thing is certain, though — for this team, nothing right now is certain.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
