Stearns has only ever wanted one thing for Mets, even as an 11-year-old fan

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. -- As David Stearns recalls it, there was little wiggle room in the rules. No television on weekdays. Radio only. This was the ’90s, Stearns growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, his childhood universe just across the river from Queens. Alone in his room after bedtime, Stearns rebelled the only way he could, by switching on a Sony Walkman and tuning the AM receiver to Mets games.

“It’s been a part of me as long as I can remember,” he said.

Born a year and a half before the Mets won their most recent World Series in 1986, Stearns was too young to remember that feat. His first favorite player was Kevin Elster, whose career stretched into the early ’90s. A shortstop himself in Little League, Stearns eventually grew enchanted by Rey Ordóñez, at least until Mike Piazza became everyone’s favorite.

His teenage life revolved around the Mets. He and his grandfather watched Todd Pratt’s walk-off in the 1999 National League Division Series from the mezzanine high above Shea Stadium’s third-base line. The rain that soaked NL Championship Series Game 5 resulted in some empty seats, allowing Stearns to drop down to field level in time for Robin Ventura’s grand-slam single. When Kenny Rogers walked in the winning run to clinch the NLCS for the Braves two nights later, Stearns watched, dejected, from his living room. When Luis Sojo bounced an RBI single past Al Leiter in the ninth inning of 2000 World Series Game 5, Stearns stared from his bed into a 13-inch TV.

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“When you follow a team that closely,” he said, “I think you have a sense of remembering both the good and the not-so-good moments that accompany it.”

For Mets fans of a certain age, such remembrances are not unique. What’s distinctive about Stearns is that he rose from that background to become one of the two people on Earth with the greatest influence over the Mets’ future success. Since becoming the organization’s president of baseball operations, Stearns has heard from childhood friends and acquaintances who share much of his history, his hopes, his desires, his dreams. Like so many other Mets fans, they look to him as a potential savior.

To be clear: Stearns is far from the first to accept that sort of baseball responsibility, but he is one of the few with this kind of birthright for the job. In the front office at Citi Field, Stearns is a perfectly round peg in a perfectly round hole. People tend to remind him of that.

“The message,” he said, “is sort of, ‘Don’t f--- it up.’”

***

Commuting to Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School on the Upper West Side required Stearns to take the M86 crosstown bus to Central Park West, where he would walk the remaining blocks north. His city upbringing blessed him with both early independence and a keen knowledge of the transit system.

It also resulted in perhaps a bit too much confidence one day in 2004 when, after spending his spring semester at Harvard writing letters to anyone with a P.O. box, Stearns scored an internship interview with the Brooklyn Cyclones. What he didn’t realize was that earlier that year, the W line had stopped running to Coney Island. By the time Stearns rerouted and made it to the stadium, he was 20 minutes late.

The Cyclones took him anyway in what became a formative experience for the 19-year-old Stearns. Given the choice between a game-day internship and a stadium operations job, Stearns chose the latter because it afforded him more hours at the ballpark. There, he did everything. Stearns power-washed the bathrooms. He painted grates on the floor. When it rained, he pulled tarp.

“You name it, he did it,” said Gary Perone, then a marketing director with the Cyclones. “We come along a lot of people who want to work in baseball. He had his eye on where he wanted to be and where he wanted to go. He followed his passion and made the right moves at the right time.”

Stearns’ next step was to Pittsburgh, where the Pirates offered him his first exposure to a big league front office, then to the Arizona Fall League after graduating from Harvard in 2007. Eventually, Stearns made it full circle to New York, where he accepted a baseball operations internship with the hometown Mets.

Back in the city as a young adult, Stearns took the 7 line to Shea Stadium daily in what he called a “pretty damn cool” experience. He worked under general manager Omar Minaya, a fellow New Yorker who grew up in Queens and had become, in many ways, the model of what Stearns wanted to be. The two developed a mentor-mentee relationship, keeping each other updated on their families and lives, chatting about the Knicks and other hobbies as freely as they did their jobs.

Minaya also exposed Stearns to all aspects of a front office -- not just the administrative work Stearns had done in the past, but scouting and other areas of baseball operations.

“He was inquisitive,” Minaya recalled. “Opinionated at times. The best way I can describe him is … he’s the same guy today as he was when I hired him as an intern.”

For Stearns, the Mets internship helped him land a full-time job in Major League Baseball’s league office, where he commuted to and from a rented apartment in Long Island City. He reviewed contracts and worked on negotiation teams, slowly gaining all the requisite experience a GM needs.

By the time Stearns made it back to the team side with Cleveland and Houston, he was ready to take on larger roles within those front offices. As an assistant general manager in Houston, Stearns helped take the Astros from 111 losses to a playoff berth in only two years. As a GM in Milwaukee, Stearns inherited a roster that finished 32 games out of first place and, in just his third season, guided it to within a game of the World Series. That was the first of four consecutive playoff appearances for the Brewers, who never featured even a league-average payroll during that time.

“We thought we were going to be in Milwaukee forever,” said Eduardo Brizuela, who became one of Stearns’ right-hand men in Milwaukee.

But Stearns was growing restless. He no longer felt quite the same pull of running a baseball operations department. Stearns consulted for a year and took pleasure in spending more time with his family -- simple joys like grilling outside or going on a trip. He considered options for his future, which didn’t generally include the idea of running another team.

“A lot of things,” Stearns said, “had to line up for me to do it again.”

***

As Stearns was busy building his career brick by brick, the Mets were in flux. The hiring of Brodie Van Wagenen late in 2018 set off a years-long turmoil in which the Mets cycled through five GMs and four managers in a half decade. During the middle of that run, Steve Cohen purchased the club from the Wilpon family.

Immediately, Cohen looked to hire a young, established head of baseball operations. Stearns was the prototype.

“As I began to own the team, I kept hearing his name come up,” Cohen said in a telephone interview. “People would come up to me and go, ‘God, this is someone you ought to consider in the baseball world.’ I heard it enough where it certainly was on my radar.”

By that point, Stearns had earned a president of baseball operations title in Milwaukee, which essentially blocked other teams from hiring him. (Clubs often give executives permission to interview for jobs that would qualify as promotions, but not for lateral moves.) Cohen’s path was barred. It was not until three years later that the Mets again found themselves with an opening just as Stearns’ contract was expiring. Call it kismet; call it luck: as soon as the sides were legally able to talk, they did.

In Stearns, the Mets saw a potential redeemer. In the Mets, Stearns eyed a near-perfect situation. He could return to New York, run a team with greater resources than he ever had in Milwaukee, perhaps finish the task that, as a child, he had longed to see someone else complete.

He accepted, because of course he did. During his first months on the job last winter, Stearns had breakfast with Darryl Strawberry. He secured David Wright’s phone number and gave him a call. An 11-year-old fan’s fever dream became Stearns’ reality, even as he understood the separation of church and state. His charge was not to schmooze with Mets legends. It was to build out a baseball operations department, streamline the organization, create a roster capable of sustainable contention.

“He’s got his work cut out for him,” Strawberry said. “He has a lot to do, and he has a lot on his plate, because it’s New York you're playing in. You’re the Mets, and the Yankees are on the other side, and fans don’t have a lot of patience sometimes.”

Midway through the offseason, Stearns and Cohen boarded a flight together to Japan, where they attempted to woo free-agent starting pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The sales pitch did not work; Yamamoto signed with the Dodgers instead, and the Mets opted for a more muted offseason, collecting upside plays on one- and two-year deals. But during that flight, the two men bonded -- “for 30 hours,” Cohen quipped, “you start singing camp songs” -- by chatting about the team and their lives.

Cohen likes the idea of Stearns as a sharp-minded executive more than he necessarily cares that he grew up a Mets fan. But it’s not lost on the owner, who was raised on Long Island, that his new hire has a chance to do something unique. Stearns himself notes that he understands, intellectually, “how ridiculous this all is” -- a chance to run his childhood club, to shape it, to make it his own, maybe even to win with it.

“In my lifetime, my recalled lifetime, I’ve never experienced a Mets world championship,” he said. “There are a lot of people my age and younger who are Mets fans who are in the same boat. So our objective is pretty darn clear: It’s time to end it.”