“Meet the Mets” is still the opening lyric of the team’s theme song, at least that much hasn’t changed between the end of last season and the beginning of the next one. But just about everything else has. There is an expression in baseball even older than that Mets song, the one about sometimes not being able to tell the players without a scorecard. Well, make sure to bring one along to meet the 2026 Mets.
The Mets are hardly an expansion team with the players they’ve added to replace the familiar -- and popular -- ones they’ve lost since the end of as disappointing a season as they’ve ever had in their history. But in so many ways, this feels like as new a team as they’ve ever had, and that does mean all the way back to 1962.
It now feels as if David Stearns, their head of baseball operations, has crammed an entire offseason into the first three weeks of the New Year. Stearns not only has turned the page on a Mets team that started out 45-24 last year and then fell apart from there, finally missing the playoffs on the last weekend of the regular season. He has written an entirely new book.
After losing Pete Alonso and Edwin Díaz to free agency, after trading away Brandon Nimmo and Jeff McNeil -- and after losing out on Kyle Tucker when he signed his own free agent contract with the Dodgers -- here is the dizzying pivot Stearns has made across this baseball winter:
Former Brewer (from Stearns’ former team) Freddy Peralta, who finished fifth in the Cy Young Award voting, is now the ace of the Mets' staff after Stearns’ most recent move on Wednesday night. He comes to New York along with another pitcher, Tobias Myers, in exchange for two top prospects, infielder/outfielder Jett Williams and right-hander Brandon Sproat. Bo Bichette, former Blue Jays shortstop, is the Mets' new third baseman. Another former shortstop, Jorge Polanco, is set to replace Alonso at first, at least for now. But since these are the ’26 Mets, that could be subject to change, as change as now become the order of the day. Marcus Semien, another former shortstop, is the new second baseman.
Luis Robert Jr., formerly of the White Sox, is the new Mets center fielder. Devin Williams, another former Brewer, is the new closer, with Luke Weaver, a former Yankee closer, right in front of him -- again, at least for now -- in manager Carlos Mendoza’s bullpen, which has also added Luis García.
There have been other additions, but these are the most prominent. After a season when the Mets fell apart the way they did, and the losing their fans witnessed got as old as it did as their team finally got passed for a Wild Card by the Reds at the end, everything is suddenly new again at Citi Field.
Of course the upcoming season will tell the story of how much better this version of the Mets will be, as we find out just how well all of the new guys -- or at least some of them -- react and respond to playing in New York. Williams was a previously a Yankee. So was Weaver. But we really will see about Bichette and Peralta and Robert Jr., from whom a lot will be expected, and that means an awful lot.
Still: An offseason that began with such frustration from the Mets’ fanbase, particularly as they watched Alonso and Díaz and Nimmo head for Baltimore and Los Angeles and Texas, has suddenly become a lot more interesting, and a lot more exciting. Mets fans really have gone from being as mad as they were at Stearns to now having watched a mad baseball scientist completely remake -- and reimagine -- their team on the fly.
No executive in baseball, not one, was under more pressure than Stearns once the Mets did suffer the losses they did in free agency -- and then even when Tucker became a player Mets fans felt as if they’d lost to free agency. But with pitchers and catchers about to report to Port St. Lucie, Fla., in a few weeks -- and with the players now assembled around Juan Soto and Francisco Lindor, their remaining stars -- people are suddenly talking about the Mets as much as they’ve been talking about the Dodgers.
“Acquiring Freddy [Peralta] brings another established starter to help lead our rotation,” Stearns said in a statement Wednesday night. “Throughout this offseason, we sought to complement our rotation with another front-end pitcher, and we’re thrilled we are able to bring Freddy to the Mets.”
This happens not so terribly long after Stearns brought Bichette to the Mets to -- hopefully -- provide the kind of batting order protection for Soto and Lindor that Alonso had. We sure are about to find out if all those shortstops are going to provide the run prevention that Stearns has been talking about, even though we know Robert Jr. will do that in center; and if the Mets do have enough starting pitching now.
The Mets needed to come back big after last season. Stearns is trying to write a comeback story of his own. No team has done more this offseason than the Mets have. Soon we find out if it was enough. Meet the Mets, greet the Mets.