Still time for Mets to complete offseason makeover

If the Mets are a television series right now, they are the baseball version of “Extreme Makeover.” Other teams have changed since the end of last season. Not like they have.

David Stearns is the Mets' president of baseball operations. If this were Hollywood, he’d be called the showrunner for this particular show. It is his job to turn the 2026 Mets into a hit as he rebuilds them this way on the fly. And there might be an even bigger job for Stearns than that: Gaining the trust of his fanbase.

Or regaining it, depending upon how much credit Mets fans still give Stearns for the 2024 Mets -- his first season working for owner Steve Cohen -- making it all the way to Game 6 of the National League Championship Series. The Mets were 22-31 that season before having a record as good as anybody’s the rest of the way. Even with all that, they didn’t earn a Wild Card berth until the last day of the regular season when they came back to beat the Braves, 8-7. On the heels of that, they came back in the ninth inning of Game 3 in their Wild Card Series against the Brewers (Stearns’ old team), and finally won their NL Division Series against the Phillies before running into the Dodgers.

And guess what? None of that looked like some kind of fluke when they started out 45-24 last season, the best record in baseball at the time. From that point forward, though, maybe you’ve heard they weren’t a hit TV series. They were closer to a flop. They finished 38-55 and only four teams in the sport had a worse record: the Rockies, Nationals, Twins and White Sox.

You have a right to wonder now if this makeover would actually have begun a year earlier if Pete Alonso hadn’t hit that ninth-inning, Game 3 home run against then-Brewers closer Devin Williams, who just happens to be the Mets’ new closer. But the Polar Bear did take Williams out to right, and just like that the Mets were on one of the great October rides in their history.

But now the guts of that team are gone, for better or for worse, with no one knowing what other changes Stearns plans to make with the Mets between now and pitchers and catchers. Alonso is with the Orioles. Brandon Nimmo, almost as popular of a figure as Alonso with Mets fans, is with the Rangers. Edwin Díaz -- at his best the best closer the Mets have ever had -- signed a free-agent contract with the Dodgers. Former batting champ Jeff McNeil got traded to the A’s.

Williams has replaced Díaz. Jorge Polanco, who has played about five minutes at first base in his career, looks like he could at least partially replace Alonso at first base. Marcus Semien, who came from Texas for Nimmo, is going to provide the run prevention that Stearns speaks about so frequently, at second base. There have been other minor -- and Minor League -- moves. But to say that the Mets are a work in progress as close as they rare to Port St. Lucie, Fla., is to say that Alonso hit lots of home runs while he was still with the team. Or that the trumpets used to blare for Díaz.

Extreme Makeover: Citi Field Edition.

There have been reports that Stearns is interested in getting Cody Bellinger to switch baseball boroughs in New York the way Juan Soto did a year ago -- in a season during which the Mets did get Soto, and saw him hit the way he did, and still fall down in the standings the way they did. There were reports on Thursday that Stearns was trying to sign free agent Kyle Tucker on some kind of front-loaded short-term deal.

“We need to create a roster that fits together better,” Stearns has said.

So that is what he has set out to do, even if it meant watching Alonso, the best home run hitter in Mets history walk out the door along with Diaz, Nimmo and McNeil.

Still: A long way to Opening Day. Tucker isn’t the only premium octane free agent still in play. So, too, is Bellinger, and Alex Bregman and Bo Bichette. On the pitching side, Framber Valdez, Ranger Suárez and Zac Gallen are still out there. And, who knows, maybe the Tigers would be willing to listen if Stearns backed up a truck into his highly rated farm system and took a swing at Tarik Skubal. Imagine what that would do to Stearns’ approval ratings.

Listen, Stearns had a right to think the Mets’ core players had taken him far as they were going to. As good as 2024 was, that same core formed the centerpiece of disappointing seasons in '21, '23 and '25. And as much as Stearns’ pitching staff fell apart over the second half this past season, those core players -- Soto included -- couldn’t keep the Mets from falling down the way they did and never really getting back up.

Now we see if they can get back up this season, with whomever else Stearns brings in. Everybody knows how much New York loves a comeback story. Maybe with the ’26 Mets, the biggest comeback of all would be by David Stearns. He just better be right as he tries to make things right at Citi Field.