NEW YORK — The honeymoon is officially over.
David Stearns’ first season with the Mets exceeded most any fan’s expectations, delivering the club’s first postseason advancement in nine years and getting within two wins of a pennant. It was an unmitigated success.
But, as Stearns has suggested, the lessened expectations of 2024 — derived from last summer’s deadline selloff and exacerbated by a conservative winter and brutal start to the season — end here. And the Mets’ proximity to doing something really special — and the days you spent thinking they really would — have raised the bar even further for 2025.
The Mets can’t go into next spring training downplaying their chances of winning the difficult National League East. The focus can’t be just on reaching October and rolling the dice; it has to be on setting themselves up to finish the job once there.
Stearns knows this. He was the one who said last November there should never be a reset year in New York, and he was the one standing in an alcohol-drenched clubhouse in Milwaukee declaring, “This is the standard.”
His manager, Carlos Mendoza, knows it, too. Mendoza’s postgame answers Sunday night hit on three points repeatedly: “We faced a lot of adversity. I’m just proud of the group,” he said. “And now we raised the bar. This is what we should strive for every year.”
New York’s team leaders know this.
“I really think that this is kind of the jumping-off point,” said Brandon Nimmo. “We want to set this as a standard now. But it’s hard to get here. There’s no surprising people. People are going to be a little more wary of us next year to start things off.”
“The organization got better, for sure,” Francisco Lindor said. “(But) nothing is promised in this game. I am sure they are going to put an extremely high amount of energy and effort into the offseason to continue to make the organization better. So should the players. The players should continue to work as hard as they can, including myself.”
That task will not be easy. The National League was as open as it had been in some time, with no team winning 100 games. The Dodgers, believe it or not, figure to be better next year when they have a rotation again. Atlanta will bring back Spencer Strider, Ronald Acuña Jr. and Austin Riley. The Phillies retain the core of a team that won 95 games. The Padres will mostly return a group that looked like the sport’s best team for two months and that had the Dodgers on the ropes in the Division Series.
Nimmo understood that.
“You don’t want to think, ‘Oh, well, there’s always next year,’” he said. “Because I think you should try and take advantage of the opportunities you have in front of you. And you don’t know when the next one is going to come.”
Indeed, teams typically don’t follow a linear pattern, advancing one round further with each passing year. The Phillies snuck into the postseason in 2022 and won the pennant; they’ve been ousted one round earlier each of the last two years. The Yankees made a surprising trip to the ALCS in 2017, and it took them seven more seasons to finally get to the World Series.
Before Game 6, Mendoza was asked about his old team and his managerial mentor, Aaron Boone, taking that next step.
“I’m proud of him,” Mendoza said. “Even since year one when he took over, they won 100 games and they were still calling for his head. It’s not an easy gig.”
Is he ready for those expectations?
“Every year,” he said. “This is a good place to be with high expectations. That’s where you want to be. You want to have it that way. And here we are.”
The Mets have one thing going for them that they haven’t had lately.
“It’s going to be good to have some stability,” Nimmo said. “We know the core, we know the front office, we know who’s in charge, we know what kinds of standards we are setting now.”
Over the last several years, Octobers in Queens had generally been spent seeking out new leadership. The club hired a new head of baseball operations after the 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2023 seasons. It hired a new manager after the 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2023 seasons.
“We have the right people in place,” said Nimmo. “We have everybody that we need in order to make this work and finish the job.”
And that might be the biggest and most encouraging takeaway from 2024. Stearns showcased how he improves a team’s depth and never stops making it better during the season. Mendoza showed how well his personality and temperament meet the challenge of managing in New York.
So much of the joy for the 2024 season derived from the unexpected — from the way the Mets exceeded expectations and advanced farther than anyone thought possible. The new challenge, of meeting heightened pressure and of building on that already strong performance, starts now.
(Top photo of the Mets after NLCS Game 5: Al Bello / Getty Images)
