NEW YORK — And now we get to see what David Stearns can really do in New York.
Stearns just finished a terrific first season with the Mets, showing why the organization waited so long to hire him. In his first winter, he took smart short-term risks and shored up the club’s depth, then spent the entire season bolstering the roster day after day. By season’s end, team owner Steve Cohen was marveling at Stearns’ constant search for improvement.
This winter, Stearns will get the opportunity he never had in Milwaukee, the opportunity he didn’t quite have in his first offseason with the Mets: to take a team that is already good and improve it by spending significantly in free agency.
Most of the time, running the Mets isn’t that much different than running the Brewers. Most of the time, you’re still managing up and managing down, still evaluating talent and looking for whatever edge you can find, still scouring the waiver wire or discussing which minor-league reliever is the best to call up at this moment.
Will the @Mets go all-in for Juan Soto this offseason?@TimBritton weighs in on if they will try and add a new franchise cornerstone. pic.twitter.com/Hvgf6WAWLQ
— Foul Territory (@FoulTerritoryTV) October 22, 2024
And then there’s this time, where the job is very different indeed, when Stearns can think about how much he wants to offer Juan Soto or Corbin Burnes or Max Fried to be a Met for the next five or eight or 12 years. When, as he said Wednesday, “pretty much the entirety of the player universe is potentially accessible to us.”
“That’s an enormous opportunity,” Stearns said. “I envision us taking advantage of that opportunity and being aggressive in certain spaces.”
That opportunity also represents a challenge. When the “entirety of the player universe” is open to you, well, you’ve got to research the entirety of the player universe.
“(In a smaller market), there’s a section of the market you don’t spend as much time on, so that does give you some hours to do other things,” said Pirates general manager Ben Cherington, who had previously done the role in Boston. “In a bigger market, you’re just going to be more engaged at that higher end of free agency. There’s benefits to that, of course, since those are really talented players up there who impact your team. It often does require a lot of time to do it.
“Time is a resource. The more hours you allocate to this or that, it’s less time for other things.”
And the evaluations at the high end of free agency are more difficult, more complex and more time-consuming. It’s one thing to gauge how Luis Severino might perform for you in the very next season; it’s another to play out what a pitcher like Fried might do by the final year of a six- or seven-year contract.
And Stearns, almost exclusively, has limited his commitments to a year or two. With the Brewers, he signed 40 players to major-league free-agent contracts. Thirty-three of them were for one year, five were for two years. The exceptions were his five-year, $80 million deal with center fielder Lorenzo Cain and a three-year, $9 million deal for pitcher Josh Lindblom.
Even with the Mets last winter, eight of the nine major-league deals he signed were for one season. Manaea was the exception, and his deal included an opt-out he’ll definitely exercise. (The two-year, $28 million deal Stearns signed with Manaea is the largest commitment he’s ever made to a pitcher.)
In so many aspects of his job, Stearns’ track record is exemplary. In this one, signing big-ticket free agents, it’s TBD.
And, contrary to popular opinion, it can’t be assumed a good small-market GM will nail this aspect of being a big-market GM. Chaim Bloom didn’t succeed moving from Tampa Bay to Boston. Farhan Zaidi excelled at the smaller moves with San Francisco; he was let go for not winning the big ones.
Of course, the model here is the same as it’s been since the day Cohen was introduced: Andrew Friedman and the Dodgers. For the last four years, we’ve talked about the Dodgers model as spending in the short term while you build the farm system to become sustainable. But check out some key pieces for Los Angeles in beating New York to claim the National League pennant: There was Shohei Ohtani, the biggest free agent ever. There was Mookie Betts, acquired and extended for more than $360 million. There was Yoshinobu Yamamoto, signed for $325 million.
Stearns didn’t show many cards Wednesday, repeating it’s too early to speculate on payroll plans or potential targets.
“I would expect us to be active in free agency,” he said. “I would expect us to go out and try to improve this team.”
Just how good can Stearns be in New York? We’re about to get another chunk of the answer.
(Photo of David Stearns from Oct. 3: Morry Gash / Associated Press)
