‘It has been nearly a full calendar year in which the New York Mets have been one of the worst teams in Major League Baseball, yet president of baseball operations David Stearns is not ready to wave the white flag on an underachieving roster that sits in last place in the National League East.
Stearns, the man responsible for building this current $380 million mess, said that no decisions have been made on how the Mets will approach MLB’s Aug. 3 trade deadline, though a 34-43 start certainly suggests that they should be sellers.
“We’re going to continue to give this team time to prove that we can get back in this in a very legitimate sense,” Stearns said on Tuesday before his team clashed with the Chicago Cubs at Citi Field. “…The cut-off is Aug. 3. The cut-off is the deadline, and clearly, you have to have a strategic direction at that point. We can prepare along parallel paths as we go through this, and we know we have to play better than what we’ve played right now, and we’re going to give this team a chance to do that.”
Practically every move that Stearns made during the offseason has not worked out. Bo Bichette is finally coming around, but is still batting roughly 70 points under his batting average last season. Marcus Semien’s offense continues to wilt, and Luis Robert Jr. and Jorge Polanco have been stuck on the injured list since April.
The offense has a lifeline coming in the form of Francisco Lindor, who is on the cusp of returning this week from a two-month absence stemming from a strained calf. He will return with a bit of a runway to help show Stearns and team brass that they should hold off on breaking it all up this summer.
“I think we’re at the point of the season where there’s a sense of urgency now,” Stearns said. “That urgency isn’t a week or two. We have a period of time here before we have to make any finite decisions about a trade deadline strategy, or anything like that. We’re also at a period of time where we have to start playing better baseball and win more games consistently. Francisco is a big part of that. We think he can help us. So I think it’s both, yeah, we got a sense of urgency throughout our team right now. We also can’t put everything on Francisco to come back at a time when he hasn’t been playing baseball very much and expect him to put us on his back.”
The biggest disappointment of this roster construction, though, remains the starting rotation. While ace Clay Holmes is out for the long haul with a broken leg, Freddy Peralta has failed to live up to his billing as a front-line starter. David Peterson has continued to regress from an All-Star showing in the first half of last season, and Kodai Senga has proved time and time again that he cannot be relied on in any sense.
Stearns admitted that when it comes to the rotation, he is performing on “a turn-by-turn evaluation.”
“We do need to see production there,” he continued. “We need to figure out a way to get ourselves later into games and in competitive positions.”
With next to zero legitimate depth, Stearns’ options to fill the voids have been remarkably slim, and the trade market has not presented many options.
“At this time of year, there generally isn’t a ton of external supplementation to do,” he said. “That’s always a part of it. Another part of it is we think those guys are more talented than we’ve seen so far this year, and throughout periods of their career, they’ve demonstrated that.”
But they have failed to demonstrate that in 2026, and for a Mets team that entered this season as a legitimate team to watch in the National League, the pace at which time is running out accelerates with every loss. If things do not take a turn for the better, we may very well be looking at the definitive example of the worst team money could buy — Steve Cohen’s worst investment yet.
“I think Steve wants us to certainly be better than we are,” Stearns said. “He’s frustrated. We’re all frustrated. Steve expects to do better than this; I expect us to do better than this. He, like me, is going to withhold judgment on any sort of trade deadline strategy until we have to make a decision closer to that time.”
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