Entering year 4 as Mets' POBO, Stearns faces crucial offseason ahead

This story was excerpted from Anthony DiComo’s Mets Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

NEW YORK -- About a half hour after the 2026 World Series ended, Brewers president of baseball operations Matt Arnold stood on the field in a championship T-shirt, his voice already hoarse, and reflected on the long road that led to Milwaukee’s title.

“There’s so many people that have been involved in this from Day 1,” Arnold said. “This is not something that happens overnight. It takes years and years of investment of people’s lives.”

One of those people was David Stearns, the Brewers’ top baseball operations decision maker from 2015-22. Under Stearns’ watch, the Brewers traded for Christian Yelich, who became the captain of the 2026 team. Stearns drafted Jacob Misiorowski, Sal Frelick, Brice Turang, Garrett Mitchell, Logan Henderson, Aaron Ashby and others. He signed Jackson Chourio. And he established the roster-churning strategy that helped make the Brewers a sustainable force, trading Josh Hader for prospects in the midst of a playoff push.

Though the Hader move was widely panned at the time, it produced fruit in the acquisitions of Robert Gasser and, eventually, World Series MVP William Contreras.

“If you study businesses and organizations, you want to have good succession planning,” Brewers owner Mark Attanasio said during the World Series. “I’d make the point that before you get to even Matt and Pat Murphy, you had David Stearns and Craig Counsell, who really got us up the next leg in terms of not only bringing a winning culture to the club here, but also started to put infrastructure in place, which Matt in particular has really enhanced. What we’ve done in baseball ops the last five years is extraordinary.”

So why hasn’t Stearns been able to replicate that success in New York? When the Mets hired former A’s whiz kid Paul DePodesta as a lieutenant under Sandy Alderson back in 2010, DePodesta famously referred to the strategy he planned to use as “Moneyball with money.” The idea was that by bringing the game’s brightest small-market minds into the nation’s largest media market, there would be little chance of failure.

But Alderson’s Mets made just one serious playoff run, in 2015, which proved unsustainable. Following some additional years of turmoil, Stearns came on board with a similar goal: to take his time-tested Brewers strategies, infuse them with big-market cash and reap the fruits of that labor. Once again, it simply hasn’t happened. Though the Mets made it to the National League Championship Series in Stearns’ first season, they’ve gone backwards ever since, winning 83 games in 2025 and 79 this year despite a historic run of payroll largesse. The latter performance resulted in the dismissal of Carlos Mendoza, a manager Stearns genuinely liked and did not wish to fire.

With all that as background, Stearns, who politely declined comment for this article, is about to enter a critical offseason. Three years ago, Stearns hit on Sean Manaea, Luis Severino and others in free agency, pulling the levers necessary for rapid improvement. Two years ago, he signed off on a 15-year, $765 million deal for Juan Soto, who has produced some fine individual stats but zero postseason appearances. Last offseason, Stearns blew up the core of Pete Alonso, Brandon Nimmo, Jeff McNeil and Edwin Díaz, only to admit afterward that he had probably changed too much of the roster too quickly, resulting in an “uncapped downside scenario.”

Owner Steve Cohen, for his part, verbally guaranteed Stearns’ job until the end of his contract, which runs through 2028. If Stearns cannot build a winner this offseason, however, it’s hard to believe he’ll maintain such security. Cohen values cohesion and stability in a front office. He also values winning, and his team has done precious little of that.

Over the next few weeks, much of the rhetoric surrounding the Mets will center on Tarik Skubal, who’s a candidate to land the richest contract for a pitcher in baseball history. It’s unclear if Stearns, who has shied away from handing out long-term deals for pitchers throughout his career, will alter his strategy with the Mets in such a sensitive place. Landing Skubal would certainly win Stearns points in the court of public opinion. But would it be the right deal? Or -- like trading Hader -- would the Mets eventually benefit from doing the unpopular thing?

The bottom line is that Stearns, a wildly popular hire at the time of his onboarding, is now far removed from the honeymoon phase. This may be the most crucial offseason of his career -- and he knows it.

“I’m always under pressure,” he said last month. “My job is to put a winning team on the field every single year. That hasn’t changed from the day I sat up here for my introductory press conference to [how] I’m sitting up here right now.”