David Stearns Must Have Successful Trade Deadline After Flops

Asked Thursday about his advice for New York Mets players who might be distracted by the trade talk swirling around the most underachieving team of all-time (at least in terms of payroll), Andy Green made the type of bold statement not usually associated with someone occupying a manager’s office on an interim basis. 

“We don’t want to be here as an organization in this position ever again,” Green said before the Mets’ game against the Miami Marlins. “So you want to do as much as humanly possible to whet the appetite, to have guys know that this is not a place we’re coming back to in the future in the Mets organization.”

Green’s words were bold not because of his position. He should have a large role with the club going forward, either because he unexpectedly remains manager or because he returns as planned to his position as the Mets’ vice president of player development, the spot he occupied before taking over for the fired Carlos Mendoza on June 26.

No, Green’s words were bold because they require David Stearns to be much better at his job than he’s been in nearly three seasons as the Mets’ president of baseball operations. 

David Stearns’ Disastrous Off-Season Has The Mets In Last Place

The biggest mess in baseball is entirely Stearns’ doing.

In just 22 months, the Mets have morphed from World Series contenders into the worst club the franchise has fielded in more than two decades. The Mets are eight games behind the fourth-place Washington Nationals in the NL East and on pace for 95 losses, which would be their worst finish and most defeats since 2003.

This, of course, stems from Stearns’ disastrous torching of the Mets’ core last winter, when he dumped Pete Alonso, Jeff McNeil and Brandon Nimmo while allowing Edwin Diaz to exit for the two-time defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers.

Stearns, bloviating about run prevention, replaced Alonso, McNeil and Nimmo with Jorge Polanco, Marcus Semien and Luis Robert Jr., who have combined for negative-1.9 WAR while playing just 155 out of a possible 336 games due to injuries.

Bo Bichette, one of the three shortstops playing a position other than shortstop all in the name of run prevention, has generated 0.1 WAR while batting .256 with a .666 OPS, figures that are 38 points and 140 points lower, respectively, than his career averages entering the season,

New closer Devin Williams has 16 saves but a 4.17 ERA and negative-0.3 WAR.

The good news is the Mets have a fielding run value of negative-9, per Baseball Savant — the seventh-worst figure in baseball and only five negative runs away from matching last year’s total with nearly a third of this season remaining.

Unfortunately for the Mets, last winter’s performance continues a trend for Stearns, whose 86 acquisitions since he took over in October 2023 have combined for 27.7 WAR. Almost one-third of that has been accumulated by Juan Soto (8.7 WAR), who was a Steve Cohen purchase, unless you think Mr. Short-Term Contract momentarily lost his mind.

So how, exactly, are the Mets supposed to believe Stearns can begin turning them around at the deadline?

Can the Mets Land Top Prospects at Trade Deadline?

The Mets are one of just seven teams more than five games out of a playoff spot entering today, so they’re seemingly in a good spot as one of the few obvious sellers heading into Monday’s trade deadline. 

But the Mets don’t have any big-time difference-makers amongst their likely trade candidates. To be fair, no one does, especially now that the Detroit Tigers have dealt Tarik Skubal to the Los Angeles Dodgers for the prospect equivalent of three Dodger Dogs.

Once Skubal was gone, the thinking was the Mets might have been able to extract more value for starting pitchers Clay Holmes and Freddy Peralta — as well as relievers Huascar Brazoban, Brooks Raley, and Luke Weaver, if contenders that didn’t get Skubal pivoted towards bullpen help in hopes of shortening games.

But the underwhelming return for Skubal (for the record, it was Zyhir Hope, River Ryan and Brady Smith, none of whom are Dodger Dogs) is a reminder of Billy Beane’s oh-dear-I’ve-created-Frankenstein’s-monster comment to The Athletic last month.

“This is not a criticism,” Beane said. “But by its nature, analytics generally are very conservative. We sort of saw ourselves as actuaries, right? Actuaries from insurance companies.

“In a very crude way, that’s what we were doing. Now they’re doing it in an even more sophisticated way. And what do actuaries do? They mitigate risk.”

They’ve actually been doing it for a while. Long gone are the days when a team could get future Hall of Famers John Smoltz or Jeff Bagwell for a mid-rotation innings-eater or a set-up man.

The 2016 trade deadline yielded just two players who collected at least 10.0 WAR, per Baseball-Reference, for their acquiring clubs. Gleyber Torres, a top prospect when the New York Yankees picked him up from the Chicago Cubs in the Aroldis Chapman blockbuster, posted 15.9 WAR in the Bronx.

Likely AL MVP and potential Triple Crown winner Yordan Alvarez has racked up 29.3 in WAR since the Houston Astros acquired him from the Los Angeles Dodgers in exchange for reliever Josh Fields.

That historically lopsided deal should provide some hope Stearns can pull off a steal over the next two days, or at least get a plentiful return in exchange for the likes of Holmes, Peralta, Brazoban, Raley and Weaver. But Alvarez was just six weeks removed from being signed as a teenage international free agent, so he was the very definition of a long-shot lottery ticket.

And baseball is a follow-the-leader, cookie-cutter sport run by people who are high on their own press clippings and the press clippings of prospect huggers writing about the spate of can’t-miss guys within their organization. Nobody wants to be the next guy to give up the next Yordan Alvarez, even if the odds of anybody having signed the next Yordan Alvarez over the last few weeks or months are remote.

Nor does anybody want to be the next guy to give up the next Pete Crow-Armstrong, which is what Zack Scott, one of Stearns’ million or so predecessors as a general manager-type under Steve Cohen, did for Javier Baez in 2021. It made some sense in real time for the Mets to go for it under a new owner by trading a former first-rounder player with six games of professional experience. These are the Mets, so it turned into a spectacular failure.

Thus, the Dodgers can afford to name their underwhelming price for Skubal because they know no one else — especially the small-market Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays, who really should be going all-in to finally win their first titles — is going to take the risk necessary to land Skubal.

Bad news for the Mets, who need to rebuild a meager farm system just three years after they tried doing that by paying down the contracts of Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander in exchange for a better haul.

But of the three players they got for the Hall of Fame-bound duo, only Luisangel Acuna (1.0 WAR and 16 stolen bases over parts of two seasons) made it to Queens before being dealt for Robert. Drew Gilbert was traded to the San Francisco Giants in exchange for Tyler Rogers at last year’s deadline while Ryan Clifford, the potential replacement for Alonso, is batting .185 with three times as many strikeouts as walks at Triple-A Syracuse.

Stearns’ first deadline deal this year — the swap Friday that sent left-handed reliever A.J. Minter to the Minnesota Twins in exchange for Bruin Agbayani (son of former Mets legend Benny Agbayani) and Billy Amick, neither of whom ranked amongst the Twins’ top 20 prospects — was a reminder the circumstances of the modern deadline will make it tough for even the best executive to generate a meaningful haul at this time of year.

Stearns, alas, can charitably be described as not the best executive. Good luck to the Mets as they begin trying to get out of the mess he’s made. They’re going to need it.