What time is it?! 
For most Mets fans, the rhythm of a baseball season has always been familiar and comforting. The offseason is where the team is “built.” Spring Training is where the plan is validated. Opening Day is where certainty is supposed to arrive. If April looks stable, the season feels legitimate. If it doesn’t, something must have gone wrong.
That expectation isn’t irrational. It’s how most of Major League Baseball has operated for decades. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Mets are no longer running on that calendar.
What looks like hesitation, passivity, or even indifference from the outside is better understood as something else entirely: the Mets are no longer optimizing around the league’s annual industry cycle. They are operating on a redefined internal organizational cycle, and the two are currently out of phase.
That mismatch is what fans are reacting to.
The Industry Cycle Fans Expect
The traditional MLB cycle is simple and deeply ingrained:
The offseason is where problems are solved.
Spring Training is confirmation.
April is stabilization.
The deadline is for patching holes.
September is about endurance and luck.
This cycle prioritizes early certainty. It treats veteran contracts as safety, prospects as future insurance, and April comfort as proof of competence. For a long time, the Mets followed this model aggressively, often paying a premium to remove discomfort early.
The problem is that this cycle only works when contracts, age curves, and player development timelines are aligned.
For the Mets, they no longer were.
What Broke the Old Model
Between 2021 and 2025, the Mets accumulated exactly the kind of misalignment that makes the industry cycle dangerous:
Aging core players entering decline windows at the same time.
Long-term contracts overlapping reduced durability.
Prospects blocked too long, then rushed under pressure.
“Depth” preserved in theory, spent in panic.
By 2025, the illusion collapsed. Early-season comfort was bought at the expense of late-season flexibility. Decisions delayed in March reappeared in August, only under worse conditions and with fewer options.
At that point, the question wasn’t how to improve the roster within the industry cycle. It was whether the cycle itself still made sense for this organization.
It didn’t.
The New Mets Organizational Cycle
Under David Stearns, the Mets appear to be running a different clock entirely, one organized around internal constraints rather than external expectations.
That cycle looks more like this:
Contract Realignment
Reduce commitments that no longer match age or performance curves. Avoid long-term deals that crowd the roster and payroll before youth timelines clarify.Youth Synchronization
Allow multiple prospect timelines to overlap. Preserve 40-man flexibility. Stop forcing binary judgments before readiness data exists.Early-Season Evaluation
Accept ambiguity in April and May. Use major league games as live inputs, not verdicts. Absorb variance without panic pivots.Midseason Commitment
This is the real offseason. Decisions are made with information, not anxiety. Roles are clarified. Resources are allocated with intent.Deadline as Accelerator
Buy into strength, not desperation. Or stand pat with clarity. Avoid repairing structural mistakes under time pressure.Sustained Contention Loop
Contracts, age curves, and development cycles remain aligned. The organization becomes less fragile year over year.
This cycle does not eliminate risk. It redistributes it.
Why This Feels So Unsettling
Fans are still watching the industry calendar. The Mets are no longer optimizing for it.
That’s why the offseason feels unfinished. Why roster spots appear intentionally open. Why April uncertainty is tolerated rather than eliminated. Why the real leverage seems to be shifting toward June and July instead of March.
None of that aligns with decades of Mets muscle memory.
But it aligns perfectly with an organization that has decided it can no longer afford to buy early certainty at the expense of late-season flexibility.
April Isn’t Devalued. It’s Reframed.
This is not about dismissing April wins. Every win counts the same in the standings. What has changed is the cost calculus.
A “good” April is no longer one where nothing goes wrong. It’s one where things can go wrong without forcing philosophical reversals. Where injuries don’t demand immediate external fixes. Where young players can struggle without being written off or blocked by sunk costs.
In this model, early discomfort is not evidence of failure. It is often evidence of restraint.
Why the Comments Sound the Way They Do
The reaction from fans makes sense. When an organization stops resolving uncertainty on the expected timeline, it feels like drift. Like indecision. Like “nowhere plans.”
But once you separate the industry cycle from the organizational cycle, the behavior snaps into focus.
The Mets aren’t waiting. They’re sequencing.
They’re spacing out commitments to match age curves. They’re letting youth arrive in clusters instead of trickles. They’re moving the decision weight from March to June. And they’re preserving leverage for when the season actually tightens.
That doesn’t guarantee success. Nothing does.
But it does signal something important: the Mets are no longer borrowing against their future to feel comfortable in April.
They’re building for the season that follows it.
And that difference explains almost everything we’re seeing right now.
24 comments:
Ticket sales will be down, the only question is how much. One thing that could prevent that to some degree would be the Soto factor. He had the pressure adjustment of an huge contract in the Flushing pressure cooker. In early 2025. A great last 4 months. He won’t have that adjustment to make this year, although he won’t have Pete and Nimmo in the lineup to protect him either , to hit before him or after him. I am nonetheless,hoping for the best year of Soto‘s career. That could lift all boats, especially early in the season.
That said, I agree with much of what you say here.
A few things...
1. I used to really love long term deals. Lock up your top guys for 5+ years and build around them. But I've done a 180 on this. Sure, lock away young, super talent, but end it there.
2. I too believe ticket sales will be down, but
a. not it they win
b. not when McLean pitches
c. not on home games when Pete, Jeff, Edwin, or Nimmo come to town
d. eventually not when Tong pitches
3. I don't see Soto being a factor here. He's old news.
4. The Metroliner will stay busy... Nats and Phillies fans will flock to Citi to buy up choice available txs to watch their fav team when they come to town
Here is the problem with the Mets’ approach: they are acting as if they are deaf to the noise but playing in NYC you don’t avoid the noise. In a winter that both the Yankees and Mets are vacationing together the whole winter at some overseas resort, the fan base has nothing to talk about and it makes then jittery and unwilling to prepare financially, which the team would like.
So, around and around we go waiting for Stearns, as he waits for the agent to be pushed by his client. Has anyone signed Jordan Montgomery yet? Boras screwed him good a couple of years back.
Extremely well expressed as usual. I have a very similar interpretive framework I bring to characterizing and assessing the organization's decision making strategies, which I find illuminating. It has two organizing components.. The primary goal is to optimize expected positive outcomes over a particular time horizon. The second is basically a corollary of the first, and can itself be divided into two components: optimize total risk over the chosen time horizon and distribute risk to minimize its overall impact on particular periods within that time horizon.
Brief explanation of the two components, and points of contention in each. As to the first, there is a difference between maximizing and optimizing strategies.
To maximize is to aim at geting the most you can relative to what you have to spend, i.e. your budget. To optimize is to get the most you can at the least cost or risk, again relative to your budget. The latter always involves assessing the trade-off between value of what you seek and what you risk or give up in order to obtain it. Rational decisions typically pursue optimal, not maximal strategies.
Most of the anxiety that fans have expressed about what the Mets appear to be up to actually reflects differences in the appropriate time horizon, and a bit less so on the very idea that the Mets are operating with a budget constraint at all.
The fan's time horizon is more often than not somewhere between 1-2 years, depending on how they respond to the 2025 collapse. The FO time horizon is significantly longer and they treat 2025 as evidence of the importance of optimizing risk and its distribution over time.
In this regard fans are like politicians. They are biased to the present and are inclined to push risks/costs to the future. The older the fan, the more rational the preference for NOW.
I discuss the second principle in the next brief comment.
Jules, I have had this exact conversation with my Boards of Directors nearly every strategic & operating plan cycle: balance optimal/maximal plans to deliver outcomes that exceed baseline expectations. This is a universal principle & constant trade-off play.
RV, well said.
Mack, I know you are going to kill me for this, but this is the same team building framework that I have supported (ranted) since I have joined the group.
There are just so many long term contracts that a team can support before setting back the organization for years.
Gus, attendance will definitely decline but the fans will come back if we at least compete for a playoff spot.
Hopefully, the next long-term contract will be for McLean if he becomes the pitcher, we hope he is.
I know this idea is foreign to the traditional way of thinking, but I for one can get behind this plan. My ideal team is a mix of veterans and younger players. Hopefully, this year we will see several of our prospects reach the majors.
The second principle focuses on risk and its distribution. When you think about risk it is sometimes helpful to use your auto policy as an illustration.
Your auto policy is a thrid party insurance. It protects you against costs you are liable for as a result of harms you have caused others. You enter the policy contract and are placed in actuarial category: a group of people who are roughly as likely as you to cause an accident in a certain period of time. The actuarial category is established with the use of data. What the insurance policy does is basically distribute each person's risk over the set of persons in the. same category.
It is designed primarily as a way of distributing risk among persons and over time. It is not a vehicle for reducing risks. In fact, insurance often has the result of individuals taking on too much risk and not taking appropriate precautions in advance. This is the problem of moral hazard.
The thing about most corporations is that they are self-insurers. They don't buy insurance in a market place (except for directors and officers of the company). So a company who makes elevators pays out of its pocket for injuries on its elevators that can be shown to be the result of either design or manufacturing defects.
They are thus incentivized to some degree to adopt precautions and to make their products safer in order to avoid large payments in lawsuits. They have one mechanism for spreading their costs over persons which is to tack on their lawsuit costs to the price of their elevators thus spreading them among the purchasers. But their ability to do that depends on how competitive the market is for elevators, and so on. The more competitive, the less able to do so they are; the less competitive, the more they can shift the cost from them to purchasers.
What they can do in either case is distribute the risk over time. (I leave out several complicating factors).
The general principle they follow is this: Minimize the sum of the costs of mistakes and the costs of avoiding mistakes.
The best way to illustrate this principle is an example. If a mistake in design leads to a million dollar accident that will occur only one time going forward but is certain to, then it is not rational to spend 5, 4, 3, or even 1.5 million dollars to prevent it, because the cost of avoidance is greater than the cost of the accident, i.e. 1.5 is greater than 1, and so on. But it does make sense to invest in precaution if the cost is less than a million..
This holds whenever the company has to bear the costs they impose on others by their defective products.
Now switch to a baseball team like the Mets (and sorry, but in this example, we are not including the suffering of fans as a cost they are imposing :-)). It is just an illustration, though painful enough as we can all attest.
The Mets goal is to optimize positive outcomes on the field (which has the positive additional outcome of spreading happiness and joy among fans) over a time horizon. They make decisions that always involve potential benefits and costs. Typically the benefits and costs have time horizons of their own.
Imagine two extreme possibilities. In one all the benefits are immediate (over the coming season) and all the costs and risks are pushed to the future (3 years from now). In the other all of the costs are experienced now and all the benefits accrue down the road.
Let's assume you are the Mets front office. Neither of these options is desirable. The question is two fold: What outcome or set of possible outcomes is desirable? and What resources do I have for increasing the likelihood of the set of desirable outcomes.
If you assume the budget constraint is roughly the same, you actually have the following set of resources that you 'control': the number of players on your team, their contract money and time (and the distribution of both), your minor league players, their contracts.
You have information about performance of each individually and an idea of how any particular group of them will perform together. Let's be honest, this is dependent on scouting, assessment and the quality of your organization's development, etc. There is a lot of uncertainty.
You do what you can to reduce uncertainty but in every situation you are always asking yourself questions about distributing the risk over time and over players at various positions, and so on.
It hardly seems worth the effort. Why not just get the best players now and though there will be some mistakes just cover that up with money.
This is de facto the attitude of some fans. It's not their money. It's his.
To be sure, money makes for a real advantage, but it is not a solution as even a wealthy person in Cohen's position has other things he wants to use his money for. Some of us would want to spend a fair bit of comparable riches to reduce poverty, famine and the like, even more than owning yet another deKooning painting; I assume Cohen is no different. I would make no such assumptions about everyone of course, e.g. our President.
Two things: once you accept the idea of a budget constraint, every decision you make is one that involves the chances of achieving your goal, the actual time line you are working under and the risks you are taking.
Two, once you realize you cannot simply avoid issues surrounding optimization and risk management, doesn't it make more sense to develop a rational strategy for doing so.
The Mets bet: Developing a rational strategy alone provides a competitive advantage, but developing resources that reduce the uncertainty in executing that strategy provides a sustainable and organizational comparative advantage for the team.
That is the best an organization can do. The rest depends on, as they say, playing the games. And because the season is so long especially when compared to, say, football season, the strategic advantage is even more important. There is no assurance of success, but the organization should put everything in place that IT can to contribute to that success. And that is what RVH and I, and presumably others, interpret them to be doing.
I like the idea for McLean
Cohen doesn’t extend easily. He’d rather wait and pay market price, if a player deserves it. As we know extensions don't always pay off. And since players don't like giving team friendly deals, screw them: let them wait until free agency.
I always built into my yearly budget for the corporations I either ran or owned a percentage alloted to both bad debt but also insurance payouts
Cohen doesn't operate this way
In his mind, everything is in one basket
The basket is going to operate deep in the red for at least the next three years based on the cost of building the casino complex.
Sure, bank loan support will defray out of pocket $ but nothing the Mets can do will turn Cohen Enterprises into the black... unless the Dow hits 55,000 and the Hedge Fund soars
Jules — I agree with your take and the way you frame optimization vs risk over time. One added layer I’d call out is how the Mets are using financial flexibility itself as an asset post-Stearns. Cohen’s ownership lets them absorb payroll inefficiency during the transition, manage down legacy commitments, and stay competitive while talent synchronizes — while still retaining the ability to spend big when the timing actually aligns.
@Mack&@RVH: Mack-- smart man; RVH -- I agree about financial flexibility is an asset of its own. And it is a resource that the league rules allow you to employ for two year periods, I believe, as the really penal aspects of it, arise in the third year (though I could be wrong about this).
I continue to learn a great deal each time I read the posts and comments.
Today I learned another surprising fact: so many of our group own and run (or have owned and run) large companies/corporations. I thought that was the exclusive province of the Yankee fan base. Live and learn. :-)
@Mack -- I have no insight as to how Cohen's mind works and therefore cannot tell whether he lumps all assets into one basket. I do have a view about how one should think about one's life as well as its constitutive elements, including assets and debits. And that is this:
At some point and for many purposes, it is helpful to think about one's life and its constitutive parts holistically -- as a balance sheet, or as having an overall trajectory, or as being explicable by an integrated and hopefully coherent narrative.
But it would be shame if one only looked at life that way, and failed to segment particular moments or assets and debits, successes and defeats, wins and losses, on their own, and to respond to them with the appropriate emotions: to take joy in wins and achievements, to appreciate and feel fortunate for assets secured, vulnerable and responsible for mistakes made, sad for losses, and so on, each in its context.
Just as we do not want to lose sight of the forest for the trees, we do not want to risk missing the pleasures of focusing on the individual redwood before which we stand at a particular moment in time.
I hope that whatever mechanism Cohen employs for his financial accounting ledger, he is able to use a more differentiated one for his psychological, emotional and moral health.
As should we all. As long as we are Mets fans, doing so will be essential to our well-being -- both in good times and bad.
And I learned... Again... you continue to ignore my request for you to email m so we can discuss your future participation here
Five writers so far have expressed their desire for you to join our team
FIVE
Come on, Jules
Just email me. It's just words:
macksmets@gmail.com
I do know how his mind sort of runs
Important
His net worth was in the 9-11 Billion range when he bought the Mets
Now?
Over 21 billion
Some people have dogs as a pet. Steve and Alex has the Mets
His original 5 year plan was only based on winning the World Series, not getting rich getting there
Personnel mistakes caused that plan to fail
Enter Stearns with his 5 yr plan
New plan. Same dog
You can always watch the David Wright SNY special for the 27th time. Not me. I want a winner - and kids - in 2026. That is a tough ask.
“LOCK THEM UP, LOCK THEM UP” to cheap long term deals as soon as guys show they truly deserve it. McLean will be the first, I agree, unless Alvarez is signed long term before him.
Jules, I frequently turned my longer comments into articles, because more people see the articles than see well-developed and interesting comments buried in a comment sequence. So…consider cut-paste-tweak some of these comments into articles. I think Mack might agree.
Yankees fans own baloney businesses. And Fruit Loops franchises.
Mack, speaking of dogs, we are all hoping Mets are big weiners in the years ahead…WS trophies and bursting concessions sales to sold out crowds.
@Tom-- Thanks. I am in touch with Mack. I never received any of his prior emails to me. I even checked my Trash and Spam boxes on both of my email accounts and while I received a number of unusual invitations there, and some urgent messages from, among others, Barack Obama and Muhammed Ali, I could find nothing from Mack. I did respond to his most recent note. Thanks for your suggestion! I genuinely appreciate it.
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