David Stearns spoke for more than 31 minutes in his end-of-season press conference on October 23, when the New York Mets president of baseball operations, like most of his peers, once again proved a master of uttering a lot of words without necessarily offering any clarity to his short- and long-term plans.
But there were 20 words that declared this was a brand new era for the Mets.
“We’ve got financial flexibility. It means that pretty much the entirety of the player universe is potentially accessible to us.”
This doesn’t mean you’ll be seeing Juan Soto patrolling right field in Queens for most of the next 13 or so years. But it means the Mets are going to be players for Soto—whom Stearns and owner Steve Cohen are expected to visit this week in California—as well as every other major free agent.
To some degree, this is a no-duh statement. Cohen is one of the richest people in the world and has made no secret of his desire to build the Mets into the east coast version of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The concept of the Mets chasing an in-his-prime Hall of Fame-caliber player is jarring, in the most positive of ways, after the Wilpons spent decades either pursuing the wrong big-ticket players, coming up with excuses for why they didn’t want a superstar, or ignoring difference-makers entirely in favor of perusing the bargain aisle.
Following the 1991 season, the Mets made Bobby Bonilla the best-paid player in baseball (at $6 million per season, be still your beating heart!) one winter before Barry Bonds hit the free agent market. Sure, Bonds and New York would have been a relationship made in tabloid back page hell (or heaven, depending on your viewpoint). But unlike Bonilla (30.2 career WAR, per Baseball-Reference), at least Bonds (162.8 career WAR) would have offered some insane production along with his churlishness.
After a stirring run to the World Series in 2000, the Mets were overwhelming favorites to land 25-year-old shortstop Alex Rodriguez as a free agent. Rodriguez even grew up rooting for the Mets and Keith Hernandez (this was before we all knew that Rodriguez had a knack for saying a lot of things convenient for whichever narrative he was trying to establish). But the Mets didn’t make a bid for Rodriguez after general manager Steve Phillips declared him a “24-plus-1” player who wanted his own office, among other perks, at Shea Stadium.
The Wilpons didn’t even bother making up excuses once the Bernie Madoff scandal impacted the Mets’ payroll. After the 2018 season, Jeff Wilpon said the Mets—due to pay about $50 million to Yoenis Cespedes and Robinson Cano—wouldn’t pursue free agents Bryce Harper or Manny Machado because “…I don’t know how many teams have two $30 million players.”
Cohen proved such things were possible in 2022 and 2023, when the Mets’ roster featured three $30 million players apiece (Justin Verlander replaced Jacob deGrom alongside Francisco Lindor and Max Scherzer in 2023). But that spending spree felt a bit ethereal, especially when Cohen dealt Scherzer and Verlander in the midst of a disappointing ’23 season, and 2024 was established as a reset year under new arrival Stearns.
That reset ended with the Mets finishing two wins shy of the World Series and tens of millions of dollars in dead money wiped off the payroll, which leaves Cohen and Stearns well-positioned to address areas of need. Like, say, right field, a position from whom the Mets got 14 homers and a .709 OPS this season.
Soto, who had 41 homers and a .989 OPS while playing mostly right field, would solve that problem into the 2030s while giving the Mets their first Cooperstown-track 20-something since Tom Seaver.
Of course, simply desiring Soto and having the ability to write him a gargantuan check is no guarantee the Mets will land him. But if the Mets don’t get Soto, it finally—incredibly —won’t be for a lack of money or desire.
