David Stearns Is Cooking

Up until about 72 hours ago, the 2026 Mets offseason felt like the final season of Stranger Things. Sure, David Stearns and Steve Cohen were making things happen, albeit somewhat strange things, but the overall scope of the offseason looked to be leaning towards an unfinished and unplanned concept of a finale that would lead fans like myself pleading the show runners for another chapter.

That chapter, which was due to commence after a winter in which the two-time defending champion Dodgers fortified their dungeon with more expensive reinforcements, was destined to fail. The team out west added while David Stearns and the Mets subtracted substantially enough to flay the minds and hearts of many fans including myself.

Home run king Pete Alonso traded strip steaks for crab cakes. Brandon Nimmo sprinted all the way down to Texas. Jeff McNeil and his 75 golf clubs got shipped to Sacramento. Edwin Diaz exchanged his loud trumpets for the smooth strings in the hotels of California.

I was angry. I was sad, I was paranoid and I was confused. The main cast of characters that climbed within two games of a World Series just over a calendar year ago was gone. This couldn’t be how the second-richest team in baseball ended its offseason.

It wasn’t.

David Stearns woke up.

The smoke that Steve Cohen promised during the negotiations for star outfielder Kyle Tucker (who, like Diaz, chose California) arrived and quickly blazed into an angry fire infused with a trio of molotov cocktails.

The first came when Bo Bichette and his .294 career batting average came to the conclusion it was sunnier in New York than Philadelphia. Not even 24 hours later Luisangel Acuña was shipped off to Chicago for center fielder Luis Robert Jr, giving New York an extremely high upside player at a position that generated next to nothing offensively last year.

New York could have thrown the starters from the FDNY vs. NYPD charity baseball game in center and gotten close to the same production. Heck, newly crowned Hall of Famer Carlos Beltran at his current age of 48 years old would probably do better than the 7 home runs and .223 average manager Carlos Mendoza received from that spot on the lineup card in 2025.

Robert is not a perfect player by any stretch of the imagination, but even if the 28-year-old can replicate last season’s slash line of .223/.313/.455 with 14 homers and 33 stolen bases it’s an upgrade.

Bichette and Robert, along with the prior additions of second basemen Marcus Semien and second baseman, who by all reports is now a first baseman (surely that will go great) Jorge Polanco, are projected to give the Mets nearly three more wins above replacement in 2026 than the previous contingent of Alonso, Nimmo, McNeil and Cedric Mullins.

Emotional connections aside, that’ll play.

Now for the big move.

I had been clamoring for the Mets to make a run at Freddy Peralta all offseason. For as much as the Dodgers are ruining baseball with differed dollars and deep pockets, teams like the Brewers are equally to blame for their complete unwillingness to pay premium talent.

That opened the door for Casino Cohen and the Mets to swoop in and make a deal for Cy Young Award contender Freddy Peralta. New York managed to not only land Peralta, but also acquire young flamethrower Tobias Meyers for a pair of prospects not named Jonah Tong, Nolan McLean, or Carson Benge.

With Peralta, the Mets now have a 1-2 punch at the top of their rotation as good as any in baseball. The band of misfit toys with questionable elbow ligaments occupying the spots on the roster behind Peralta and the aforementioned McLean is a worry, but much less of a worry now.

All in all, this offseason has not so quietly become a very good one for David Stearns and the New York Mets. It’s going to hurt not seeing Pete, Brandon, Jeff, and Edwin on the Opening Day roster, but I’m starting to finally believe in the direction of my favorite ball club once again.

Hopefully they do enough to get me writing again. Just be better than whatever that product was last summer.

LFGM.

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