HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
For as long as most Mets fans can remember, seasons were quietly built with one moment in mind: Opening Day. Not just as a celebration, but as a validation. The roster needed to look complete in March. The rotation needed to feel safe. The lineup needed recognizable answers. If April felt stable, the season felt justified.
That mindset shaped far more decisions than we ever admitted.
Veterans were trusted early because they were known. Prospects were delayed because they were uncertain. Depth was defined by experience rather than readiness. The goal wasn’t explicitly short-term, but the bias was clear: reduce early discomfort, even if it meant paying for it later.
2025 broke that pattern.
Not because the Mets chose to, but because the old approach finally ran out of room to hide. Early-season comfort produced late-season desperation. By the time injuries mounted and performance slipped, the organization wasn’t choosing between paths. It was reacting to constraints of its own making.
That experience appears to be reshaping how the Mets are approaching 2026.
The shift isn’t about being younger for the sake of it. It’s about time horizons. Building for April assumes you can smooth out problems later. Building for August and September assumes you can survive early imperfection in exchange for flexibility when it actually matters.
Those are very different philosophies.
When teams optimize for April, veterans feel safer than prospects, even when their margins are thinner. When teams optimize for the full season, readiness begins to outweigh reputation. Durability starts to matter more than familiarity. And development doesn’t stop at promotion, it accelerates after it.
One of the quiet lessons of 2025 was that delayed decisions don’t disappear. They compound. Prospects held back eventually arrive anyway, often under worse conditions. Veterans leaned on early and eventually wore down. Pitching depth preserved in theory eventually gets spent in panic.
What’s different heading into 2026 is not the promise of immediate dominance, but the acceptance of early ambiguity. That’s uncomfortable for fans and organizations alike. April struggles are loud. September ones are fatal.
You can already see the recalibration in how the Mets talk about internal options. Less about timelines, more about preparedness. Less about insulating young players from failure, more about supporting them through it. Less about solving the season in March, more about preserving choices for later.
This doesn’t mean the Mets are punting the start of the season. It means they’re redefining success in it. A good April is no longer one where nothing goes wrong. It’s one where the system absorbs stress without collapsing. Where injuries don’t force philosophical pivots. Where alternatives exist before urgency sets in.
The best teams in baseball rarely look perfect early. They look adaptable. They have options. They don’t need to chase fixes because they’ve already invested in flexibility.
For Mets fans, this requires a mindset shift as well. Some early-season discomfort may not be a failure of planning. It may be evidence of it. Not every young player struggling in April is a problem to solve immediately. Not every veteran absence requires an external answer.
The payoff for this approach isn’t measured in April wins. It’s measured in September leverage. In having decisions instead of demands. In being able to adjust without abandoning structure.
2026 will not be defined by how clean the Mets look on Opening Day. It will be defined by whether they still have room to maneuver when the season stretches, injuries accumulate, and the margin tightens, as it always does.
For the first time in a long time, it appears the organization understands that difference.
The Mets are no longer building for April.
They’re building for the season that follows it.
10 comments:
Rob
This is a vaguely veiled plan to be 💯 competitive in 2027, not this year.
Period
A good start does buy you opportunity and time if things go south later. While having one of the worst records in MLB for three months, the Mets still almost made the playoffs - and should have! I understand your point, but as the Mets said often last year, wins in April count as much as wins in September do. Hopefully Stearns can learn to accept the signs of struggle instead of stubbornly double down on it. Yes, an executive needs to show confidence, but how long will you allow bad results before making a change? That was unforgivable last year.
Good points. I expect our team to start slow and pick up steam as the season progresses.
How can we start slowly, when McLean and Tong will be co-rookies of the year?
At the rate they are going, they will be the team to beat. And they will get beat a lot.LOL
Yea, every win matters. 100%. That said, every opening day roster looks different by the end of the season for every team as well (even the Dodgers). I suspect they will play ~.500 ball thu May (assuming additional moves this offseason) & then incrementally improve if things break their way (players develop, rookies are somewhat productive, pitching is relatively healthy). Need to minimize unproductive starts (or maximize more quality starts), keep the lineup moving (RISP & 2-out hits), with Soto & Lindor having strong years.
I’m no asking for much here :)
RV, very well said. Yes, every win is important but isn't it better to be firing on all cylinders come September, than to hang on to barely make the playoffs.
162 games is a very long season. How many times have we seen second half collapses because we burn out the team and pitching staff chasing early wins.
My prediction for the season can only be assimilated once I know the team. Right now, they are a 83 win team. I say that because despite the offensive losses, thw pitching can only be better. A stud right handed hitter, and the balance of the lineup screams 90 wins. A stud left handed hitter means 88 wins.
Absolutely Joe! The only way any 2026 Mets team is successful is if a sufficient number of young players are up & contributing. If they eke out a playoff appearance without said qualifier, it’s more of the same. If things work well, they build momentum, make th playoffs with a balance of youth & experience ci tribute & - maybe - thy make a playoff run. Resources need to be spaced out throughout the year to have enough in the tank for October. That would be the definition of success in 2025 IMHO
Excellent RVH and good point TexasGus. Taken together the post and comment exhibit the difference between two approaches that can apply both on a game by game basis and over a season of games.
How many times have we heard a manager defend a late inning decision to keep a pitcher in the game or to bring in the closer who had pitched the previous two days in a row by saying 'this game was there for us to win, and I did X to ensure the win, and I'll worry about the next game tomorrow.' More often than not, fans applaud the decision, especially if it banks a win.
For each such decision in every game in which our team finds itself in a similar situation we should expect a similar response, right?
Well, no. It certainly couldn't possibly be the right decision in a world in which this were to occur a 162 games in a row.
It's a bit like the so-called lottery paradox. Suppose a million tickets are bought in a lottery that will have one and only one winner. I buy one ticket that has over a 99% chance of being a loser. Thus, the evidence is overwhelming that my ticket will not win. In that case, so it is rational to believe that I will lose.
If it is rational for me to believe that my ticket will win, it must be rational for me to believe that each ticket will lose since every ticket stands the same chance of losing as mine does. If it is rational for me to believe that each ticket will lose, it must be rational for me to believe that no ticket will win.
But the rules of the lottery require that one ticket be chosen as the winner. There is a 100% chance that there will be a winning ticket, so it must be rational for me to believe that one ticket will win. So now I appear to be in the unenviable position of rationally believing both that one ticket will win and that no ticket will win. Not just unenviable but irrational.
It can't possibly be rational to believe that one must do all that is possible to win each game in which the circumstances I present above obtain and at the same time that it is not rational to do this over the course of the season, should it turn out that every game is exactly as the first one.
The analogy is far from perfect, but I use it for illustration only.
One might say that the difference between the lottery paradox and the game by game vs. the whole season decision is down to what the 'same circumstances' amounts to. In other words. the second game in which the situation looks exactly the same as it did in the first actually differ in a meaningful way.
When we play the second game, I have already won the first game, and while i still face many games going forward, I face one fewer game. Whatever the value of winning the first game may have been, it diminishes just a bit the importance of winning the second, as so many games remain to be played.
And that is true even though a win in the second game counts as much in the won/lost record as does the first; and it is equally true that whether or not a team makes the playoffs is determined by the number of their wins.
True, but what follows from that? Nothing really when it comes to the strategy that one should follow, for banking games can have an impact on how many wins you are capable of winning later on in the season because the decisions made in the earlier games can effect the health of your team; and your decision to win early to maximize what you have in the bank as insurance against all that will surely impact the team you put together at the outset.
Presumably, not only do games won in August and September count as much as those you win in April, they also indicate how well you are playing going into the playoffs.
You surely don't want to go into the playoffs having played your best ball in the first half of the season, limping in as it were.
What strategies do as help you determine the plan. And the strategy should be to have a portfolio of ways of winning games and making adjustments in season. You don't want to rely on too many players who are fragile and risk breaking down over the course of a full season any more than you would want to rely on players who are prone to go into protracted slumps, and so on.
You want optionality in your plans and you want people making decisions game by game who you trust to do that well.
The strategy sets the framework, and the framework helps define the risks that you are prepared to take and those you feel you must guard against. You can't eliminate risk, but you can identify the risks you face under different plans and courses of action that you undertake. And you want to distribute risk over the course of a season and over several seasons that minimizes its impact.
That's what the Mets are trying to do at this point. They are looking to find a strategy that optimizes the possibility of year by year success but not by imposing undue costs on the goal of optimizing long term relatively continuous success.
I don't expect them to be perfect; nor do I expect them even to get it right the first time. I think you want to start by going in the right direction and giving yourself opportunities to adjust as information and opportunities arise.
This isn't the way fans think and I fully understand that. Hell, I don't know how much longer I can watch the Jets lose football games the way they do. I feel the Mets are in good hands. Money helps, but there is no substitute for good judgment.
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