Cautious Optimist -- How the Front Office Has Failed the Mets and Is there a path to Redemption?

 

Can the Mets become sustained championship contenders?

Or, is it possible to get from where the Mets are now to their explicit goal of sustained contention for championships; and if so what kind of time frame are we realistically looking at?

No one could blame you for concluding that there is virtually no way, short of a miracle, that the current Mets team could be transformed into a perennial contender  -- at least during our lifetimes, the conclusion of which, for some of us at least, is approaching at a faster than desirable rate. 

Ever the optimist, I have sought to investigate the question by looking more closely at various 'units' within the current team separately -- pitching staff, outfielders, infielders, catchers, manager, front office and prospects in the minors at all positions, and their timelines to the majors-- in the hopes of identifying where, if anywhere, a path to championship  level performance would reveal itself.

In this quest, I have so far discussed the pitching staff, outfield, infield and catching corps.  Of these groups, I argued that the pitching staff -- some pitching now at the majors, others in the high minors, some starters, others relievers -- is closer than is any other unit to achieving a level of excellence that could anchor a perennial contender.

I suggested that while the major league and prospects in the high minors ready to contribute is close to being championship quality, the outfield is thin in terms of replacements and redundancy but with one or two well chosen additions over the next year or two would be able to complement a pitching staff capable of anchoring a team regularly contending for championships.  

I am considerably less sanguine about the state of our infield and catching corps -- especially their prospects for providing high level performers within the time frame of both the pitching staff's and outfield's ability to do so.

I referred to the problem of having the major units of the team advancing or declining at different times as 'time alignment.' I argued that time alignment is a major, if somewhat under-appreciated, barrier to developing a plan for long term success.  It is also a problem that falls to the front office to resolve.

So it is only natural that we turn our attention to the front office, and assess whether they are up to the tasks that fall to them in fashioning a path forward from the pathetic present to a brighter future.

The dispersed talent pool and the funnel

It is easy to forget how many more operations a baseball front office has to manage than do front offices in the other three major team sports most popular in the US -- football, basketball and hockey.  Like baseball, all three rely on the de facto minor leagues of colleges, independent and professional leagues in other countries.  But unlike baseball that augments their professional team with an additional five affiliated professional teams or more, basketball, football and hockey have limited themselves to only one additional professional 'team' that each is fully affiliated with and largely responsible for staffing and funding:  a G-league team in basketball, an AHL team in hockey, and a 'taxi' squad in football. 

Baseball is faced with massive operational costs that the other leagues do  not.

It's helpful to see the process in terms of a funnel.  Every team in every sport creates a funnel.  Entrance to the funnel usually depends on drafts and other forms of permissible signings.  It is interesting that the three team sports other than baseball have only one additional layer of 'in-house' development even though there are radically different sizes of the teams involved: roughly 16 players under contract for a professional basketball team, 23 on the active roster of a hockey team, and 53 active players on a football roster.  Baseball, at 26, is closest to hockey, yet has five or so different tiers of potential development to identify the 26 roster players and the 40 who are eligible to play on any given day.

Baseball obviously introduces many more players into its funnel than do teams in the other sports, and oversees their development for far longer periods of time.  Because the top of the funnel has room for so many players, the costs of gathering information is going to be significantly higher, and because there are five tiers of development, the length of the funnel is going to be greater, and the costs of operating the funnel also higher accordingly. 

Focusing on the funnel helps to appreciate not just the magnitude of a baseball organization's operational costs, but also the different ways in which a team's financial and other resources might be distributed when determining how best to put a competitive major league team on the field. 

When figuring out how to develop their major league roster, all baseball teams can avail themselves of two different assets: financial and other resources, e.g. location, relationships, on the one hand, and baseball judgment on the other.

The key for each organization is to find an optimal mix of investing in nurturing baseball judgment and relying on financial and other resources.

The lineage of Money Ball.  

The original point of the Money Ball approach was in effect to compensate for a relative shortage of tangible resources not with better judgment as such, but by determining which factors contribute most to baseball success, and focusing on exercising judgment and investing resources on those while largely not investing either in developing or assessing other, less impactful attributes. 

Teams can decide to invest heavily in the drafting and development stages at the expense of investing in the major league payroll, for example, by implementing the following kind of strategy.  Draft well, develop even better, focus on great judgment about baseball talent, sort and advance wisely, then bring to the majors the best, test them at that level, and reward performance with long term contracts early in a player's career.  Develop the core this way, and fill in around it. Rinse and repeat.  

In my book, the Atlanta Braves have relied on this approach more than have other teams and with much greater success than others.  Their approach has influenced other teams, including, ironically if one is a Mets fan, the Milwaukee Brewers

The Tampa Bay Rays approach is a variant as they do not typically offer their best young players long term deals early in their careers;  and the most famous case in which did so backfired due to off the field issues, namely, a criminal charge of statutory rape.

Instead, the Rays have played the best of those they have developed for as long as they can do so cheaply, i.e. for as long as the players are under team control, and then they begin selling off what are then established players for minor leaguers they have identified as good bets and start the developmental process with those players; then rinse and repeat.

There are going to be a portfolio's worth of approaches, including those that rely less on investing in drafting and developing and more on free agency in the majors.  There is no reason to think that this would be unduly expensive either, especially if you choose free agents early in their careers that have been developed by other teams and so you benefit from the development costs others have incurred, and devote your savings into contracts at the major league level.  

What approach have the Mets adopted and how is it working out so far?

It's hard to be confident in characterizing the approach the Mets have taken, in part because they entered the fray saddled by approaches taken by previous regimes.  Faced with the choice of abandoning altogether the investments already made by previous ownership, under Steve Cohen the Mets attempted at first to layer a different approach on the one already in place.

The decision to layer a new approach on to an already existing one rather  than to restart afresh was no doubt influenced by Steve Cohen's promise  to bring a championship to Queens within five years. That effort failed and only made unwinding from a failed patchwork approach more difficult to implement. In the end it turned out to be little more than an exercise in throwing good money after bad. 

The Mets then went through a transition phase, which involved both correcting for the mistakes of the water and oil method, and transitioning to a more forward and systematic approach from which they have only emerged this year.  The corrective phase included trading the high priced pitchers for prospects and once that was accomplished the team could enter the transitions phase that has involved giving up on the Scherzers and Verlanders of the mixed strategy in favor of a forward looking strategy that also happened to require getting rid of a number of the core players developed during the previous administrations. 

The goal was to create a time aligned group of core players throughout the lineup by 2028 the would be augmented by an excellent minor league pipeline.  Part of getting rid of the core players, each with their own traits good and bad, was to provide a bridge to the future that left the team in a highly competitive place.  Good plan if it could work. 

Unfortunately it would work only if there were a set of first rate players waiting on the horizon and if the bridge group were capable of both performing to a high level (for the requisite shorter time) while mentoring their replacement. 

This second half of the transitional effort has been an abject failure in part because there is a natural tension bound to arise when trying to keep the current team successful by trading assets that would otherwise have been part of the future team you were hoping to have when the transition period ended. 

Nowhere was this clearer than in the trade deadline decisions Stearns made last year.  The trades he made depleted some of the minor league talent ostensibly in order to obtain pitching and CF help designed to help the team make the playoffs.  For the first time, but not the last, Stearns' half way approach led to a double failure by trading away assets that would have been useful, if only in trades aimed at 2028, not 2025, while his return on the trades he made failed to carry the Mets to the playoffs last year.  Compromising on long term ambitions for short term success that is intended only as a bridge anyway is a formula for failure. In this case, a double failure.

Whereas the deadline trades last year were designed to take the Mets into the playoffs, those made during the most recent offseason were designed to build a competitive/playoff team bridging the Mets to a long run as a contender beginning in 2028. 

The latter task, which had already been made difficult by the deadline deals of 2025, was made practically unreachable by several of Stearns' off-season moves, leaving the Mets' minor leagues virtually void of infield talent capable of contributing to a core of a championship contender in 2028.   

At the same time, the team they put together is embarrassingly unprepared to compete and will likely fail to play .500 ball this year -- or next.  Pursuing two goals simultaneously twice in less than a year had the net effect of failing at both - both times.

Three layers of failure and one overarching failure

The first level of FO failure is revealed by the composition of the current major league team.  This is simply not a competitive team.  The team literally cannot hit while being forced to rush players to the majors who might have benefitted from more seasoning.  I needn't go through the many examples of poor judgment and even worse decisions.  Let me just throw out a few names to remind you:  Montas, Manaea (extension), Robert, Polanco, Mullins, Semien.  

Peralta would have made sense if the team had established itself as a contender, but it has not done so. I wouldn't argue that the decision to acquire Peralta was a mistake, though it has turned out to be a case of throwing good money after bad.  An apparent area of excellence in the FO.

One of the costs associated with being in a decision-making role is that your decisions are reasonably judged from both the ex ante and ex post perspectives.  A trade or free agent signing that appears absolutely reasonable before it is made can turn out to be a disaster after the fact.  Both perspectives count in judging your performance.  And there is nothing unfair in being so judged, since you also get the credit for trades and other decisions that may have looked foolish at the time but that work out favorably.

The second level of failure is the consequential subtraction of prospect talent that accompanied several of the major league signings during this period.  Again, some names:  Acuna, Williams and Sproat.  The trades of Acuna and Williams contributed to the lack of infield and back-up outfield assets that would have been better deployed in pursuit of the 2028 goals.

The net result is that the capacity of the minors to contribute to the majors meaningfully, either by trade or performance has been adversely impacted by further hollowing out the infield and thinning out the outfield.

At the end of the day the first two layers of failures have combined such that no one, not even a Polyanna, could plausibly argue that the team the FO has constructed to bridge to the future while staying competitive is anywhere near as good as the team they were before the trades, or that the minor league prospects in the system now are any better, or that a future of sustained contention is any closer.  

The third layer of failure is the total collapse of developmental progress at the minor league level.  Part of this may be owed to drafting mistakes.  But from where I sit, the problem is that this is a team with a lot of tools: hitting and pitching labs, technology galore, but lacks the knowledge that makes the data useful, and also lacks the coaching skills that can create player specific plans and execute on them.  

I want to be clear here.  I am designing an hypothesis based on outcomes.  I have no direct view into the processes being used. I wish I did, but I have no access to that kind of information.  No one has offered me a visit to the hitting lab or time with the hitting coaches.

But I do know a fair bit about movement patterns involved in hitting, and I have seen close up in my area of expertise how technology that is not rooted in deeper understanding can, and often does, make matters much worse.  So that's my hypothesis and until I see evidence to the contrary, I will stand by it.

And, frankly, if I am right that is a major indictment of the FO.

The overarching failure of the FO can be framed as follows.  Either the FO doesn't really have a plan that can be executed, or they have recently brought in an entire slew of new coaches who are in fact not capable of executing a plan that is itself executable -- just not by them, or the FO is in general getting in its own way, and lacks discipline.  It is probably a bit of everything.  Whatever the answer, it's not reassuring.

A word or two about accountability

I was appalled when Stearns claimed that the team had not anticipated the injuries or their extent, to Robert and Polanco. I looked up the history and the evidence provided absolutely no reason to predict anything other than what has occurred.  In addition, the fact that Polanco's relatively free from injury 2025 season also took place while he was almost exclusively a DH, and you have to wonder how it is that Stearns thought he could simultaneously play Polanco at 1B full time and believe that he had no reason to expect that Polanco's injury history would repeat itself.  Claiming that there was no reason to expect that Robert would suffer injuries as a Met that he suffered more than once a year every year as a White Sox fails the smell test.

The after the fact explanations are either disingenuous, dishonest or reveal a level of self-deception that is remarkable.  But it gets worse than that frankly, for here we have a POBO allowing himself the freedom to project that Semien will return to the offensive player he was half a decade ago, in spite of the evidence showing a steady decline, while standing by a prediction that Alonso, coming off a very good year, will decline significantly after the next two, and would be unworthy of a longer term deal than that.

This is the same person who based on one half season's performance made a bet that Manaea would not revert to the pitcher he had been his entire career: He was so confident on so little evidence that he signed the pitcher to a 25mm/year contract for 3 years.  

And you know that had Manaea's second half of the 2024 season matched the 1st half, he would have been gone.  

So Stearns is no more exempt than are the rest of us to making irrational bets on limited evidence.  The problem is that the rest of us don't claim to be operating on the basis of what analytics reveal.  He does. 

And this raises the question of whether he is any better at deploying and interpreting analytics than are his coaches at deploying and interpreting hitting analytics.

You can't be so cavalier in the use of data and analytics and claim to be committed to analytics.  

Fast and loose, may be ok as a life style or a movie plot, but it is really no way to run an organization.

And I am a fan who wants to keep Stearns around, but over the course of my life in the many roles I have played, the one thing I am certain of is that everyone needs to be held to appropriate standards of consistency and integrity.  And if you won't hold yourself to those standards, you should expect that others should and will. 

And it's oK not to be perfect.  No one is.  It is not Ok, however, to demand less of yourself than you do of others. 

A few additional thoughts on the FO. 

The FO has failed completely to this point to create the time alignment that is necessary to compete as a contender for years to come.   

Beyond that, the wholesale change of coaching and development staff throughout the organization is at best off to a slow start.  We have three new players all of whom are faster than any players that preceded them on the major league squad, and yet they have collectively accounted for more CS than the entire team did throughout the summer months last season.  Maybe the 1B coach had something to do with that.  And maybe the FO undervalued his importance.  Maybe.

In fact, the only thing one can say for the FO at the moment is that they have done the right thing in not firing Mendoza.  What would be the point of firing him now.   Maybe he should have been let go when the rest of the coaching staff was at the end of last season.  Maybe he should have been let go when the Mets lost 12 in a row and there might have been a chance of creating a spark with a new manager.  I called for his being let go at the time.

Mendoza would have had no legitimate complaint had the decision to release him come on either of those occasions. 

But now, letting him go would be pointless.  It would only increase instability, and, worse, it would be both gratuitous and rightly seen as no more than a distraction, part of an unsavory attempt to dodge accountability that is theirs to bear.

How about a press conference in which the POBO gets up and says, 'It would make more sense at this point to fire myself than it would to fire Mendoza.  Neither of us have done our job well to this point.  The difference is that his ability to do his well depends on my ability to do mine well -- and I haven't."

What is the way forward?

For all of us the question is whether the team can get to where it aspires to be from where it is now, and do we have the right FO to steward that journey?

Who knows?

It's easy to think of reasons to be skeptical and examples that display the FO and management's inability to make good decisions or to change course as needed.  I know that I have used the same example far more often than you, dear reader, might want to hear.  I'm sorry, but I am not going to let go of the Alvarez situation.

We have all been privy to a near complete melt down of Alvarez as a potential power hitter over the past two years.  His mechanics are simply destroying him.  Maybe he refuses to listen or learn.  Maybe he hasn't had the right things explained to him.  Maybe the coaches don't understand the basic global principles of hitting.  Maybe, maybe, maybe.  He is such a clearcut example, but he is not a unique.  

Both Vientos and Baty have dropped off in power production and pitch selectivity.  Vientos's inability to recognize pitches will soon be legendary, and at some point he may even find himself swinging at a slider or curve  both in the dirt and even beyond the lefty batter's box -- perhaps even in the on deck circle. 

His ground balls and pop ups are like both fat and thin shots in golf: completely different outcomes that result from the same swing fault. In golf, the fault is an inability to control the low point of the swing, a fault that often results from a poor path.  At the plate, the fault is also related to swing path: when contact is made with the bottom of the barrel it's a grounder.  When it's made with the top, it's a pop up.  In both cases it involves a swing path that does not present the heart of the barrel to the ball.  

And Baty's long swing needs to be shortened.  It won't lessen his power.  In golf, among the best swings are those that have full load and short arm backswings.  It's always about efficiency for delivering energy.  Think John Rahm or Tony Finau in golf; in baseball, Jim Rice or Mike Piazza.

Where are the coaches in all this?

And I have to mention Semien.  No one who knows anything in biomechanics would allow him to continue with the extreme arch in his lumbar spine at set-up. This is a nightmare for any form of loading or rotation.  I could go on.  

But the proof that something is amiss is this:

Almost no one in the minors is hitting at all.

What's most troubling to someone like me, and others who understand ballistic movement patterns and energy transfer is that no one in the FO or among the coaches (or manager) gives us any indication that they recognize that there is something fundamentally wrong with what is being taught, or that there is something missing in the teaching approach.  

I've said it a million times (almost):  the technology produces data and data is the representation of an outcome.  The data the outcome represents does not reveal the outcome's cause.  To understand the data you need lots of interpretive principles: many drawn from biomechanics, others from neuroscience and cognitive science, and still others drawn from task performance methodology.  If you don't at least understand how all that works together, chasing numbers is like chasing pictures.  What you want are movement patterns not models or numbers.

Conclusion

I've gone from 'mad as hell' to 'it's too painful to care as much as I have.' Like others, I am beginning to experience my relationship to the fate of the Mets day in and day out as trending towards 'earned indifference.' 

Sure we can get from here to where we want to be.  Possible, yes! Likely? In my lifetime? Well today is my birthday, and the time i have remaining is not increasing with age.  Only the aches and pains are.

I will eventually die a blessed man, whether the Mets win another championship in my lifetime or not.  Even so, Mets fans have experienced too many broken hearts for too long.  In this world, there are a lot of people, including Mets fans, who could use a feel good story or two.