Why David Stearns Will Get Another Year to Fix the Mets Despite 2026 Struggles

The Mets have had a messy year in 2026. It shouldn't, however, cost David Stearns his job as the team's President of Baseball Operations.

President of Baseball Operations David Stearns has gotten heat from Mets fans over the team's dismal year. That doesn't mean it's time to pull the plug on his run just yet. | Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images

It certainly feels like the past 377 days have been a year of hell for Mets President of Baseball Operations David Stearns. Watching the 2025 team collapse was a unique kind of pain, but the bottom appears to have fallen out on the 2026 Mets as a combination of injuries, poor performance, and crushing losses has left the season on the brink of disaster before July.

While the standings and mediocre nature of the National League Wild Card race suggest there is still a chance to turn things around, anyone who has watched the team on a day-to-day basis knows the Mets will need to increase their level significantly to contend. There is plenty of blame to go around when a team with a payroll north of $350 million is in last place, but Stearns certainly deserves a lot of it.

David Stearns deserves his fair share of blame for how the Mets' season is unfolding. | Jim Rassol-Imagn Images

Re-making the team's core after another underwhelming season in 2025 was a defensible call, but the way Stearns attacked the offseason was questionable. Failing to adequately replace Pete Alonso's power production and banking too much on bouncebacks from the rotation members that failed them have played a large part in the Mets' current predicament.

A lack of accountability also hasn't helped, as many of the Mets' underperforming players have gotten too much rope to drag the team down with them. Many of these failings fall at Stearns's, but he has done some good things on the job, including revamping the team's player development apparatus that has set up A.J. Ewing and Carson Benge as potential core players.

In other words, it's too soon to turn the page.

Why David Stearns will get more time to fix the Mets

The general sense around baseball is that owner Steve Cohen still has faith in his hand-picked people to get the job done with the Mets. The Athletic's Ken Rosenthal made a strong argument for why the Mets will likely keep Stearns past this season on "Foul Territory," noting that Stearns has done some good things and deserves a bit more time to figure it out.

“If you change your head of baseball operations, and you’re kind of starting all over again,” Rosenthal said. “Maybe that’s the appropriate decision here, but I’m not sure it is. ... If he proves incapable of (good decisions), if, for instance, they have another bad offseason and they don’t improve next year, then I think you’re talking about something else. But Steve Cohen has invested a lot in David Stearns, signed him to a huge contract. That was the guy they wanted all along.”

Moving on from David Stearns because of this season might not be the appropriate move, says @Ken_Rosenthal.

"You've had some good things happen under him. He just needs to make better decisions." pic.twitter.com/nEXD3o9Hee

— Foul Territory (@FoulTerritoryTV) June 22, 2026

Prior to Stearns' arrival, the Mets' front office situation had been a merry-go-round of primary decision makers dating back to when Sandy Alderson stepped down due to cancer treatments in 2017. The list, including the interim trio of decision makers when Alderson stepped down, between 2017 and 2023, is as follows:

• 2017: Sandy Alderson to John Ricco, J.P. Ricciardi and Omar Minaya
• 2018-2020: Brodie Van Wagenen
• 2021: Jared Porter (Offseason Only), Zach Scott and Sandy Alderson
• 2022-2023: Billy Eppler

That is a group of eight different men making decisions over a seven-year span. Those same men have also employed five different managers: Terry Collins, Mickey Callaway, Carlos Beltrán (who didn't even get to manage a game as a result of his ties to the Astros' cheating scandal), Luis Rojas and Buck Showalter.

That kind of turnover in the lead baseball roles makes it hard for an organization to sustain success. To be fair to Cohen, he did try to hire Stearns once he took over as the primary owner after the 2020 season, but he had to wait until Stearns' contract was going to expire with the Brewers after being denied permission by Milwaukee to interview him.

Filling the chief baseball decision-maker role has been like pulling teeth for Cohen, who was repeatedly turned down interview requests or denied permission to speak with executives in each hiring cycle. Cohen didn't wait almost three years to hire Stearns to move on after three years, especially when the first season the pair worked together saw them come within two wins of a pennant.

Mets owner Steve Cohen has too much invested in David Stearns to give him the axe just yet. | Brad Penner-Imagn Images

Firing Stearns now would create a chilling effect on the Mets' job, which may be viewed as toxic around the league (fairly or unfairly) due to Cohen's high expectations for winning. Creating some type of stability in the position and giving Stearns a fair runway to build a winner, which he has shown the capability of doing during his tenure in Milwaukee, is a good way to avoid the type of churn that plagues bad franchises across sports.

Stearns has done good things with the Mets, such as signing Clay Holmes to be a key member of the starting rotation, as well as modernizing the team's player development approach. The Mets entered the year with one of the best farm systems in the league, which is a saving grace for Stearns, as his ability to allocate Cohen's money wisely has been his biggest weakness.

Hiring a helping hand

One potential solution here could be for Cohen to have Stearns hire a general manager to work underneath him. Stearns has his hands in a lot of cookie jars, trying to fix an organization that had fallen behind the times at the end of the Wilpon era, but he has not hired a GM to work under him despite having three offseasons to do so.

Adding a GM with more of a background in pro scouting could be a good fit for Stearns, allowing him to augment one of his biggest weaknesses in New York. Despite operating with the largest payroll available to him in the league this side of Los Angeles, Stearns has been a bit thrifty with his free agent picks, picking the kinds of players he would have success with in Milwaukee on shorter-term deals.

Those players aren't always up to the task of performing in the New York market, as evidenced by the Frankie Montas fiasco last year. Finding the types of players who can succeed in New York is a bit different and more expensive, so this is something a GM could help Stearns with in a very critical manner.

Cohen knows a lot has gone wrong for Stearns this year, but he also knows that mistakes have been made in roster construction here. Mendoza is likely to pay the price for this year's struggles, but Stearns is likely to receive one more opportunity to fix the Mets, likely with a GM in tow.