The future is now for Mets, but which future?

Here is what Mets fans want as soon as the ball drops in Times Square on New Year’s Eve: They want next season to start for their team. At the same time they very much want their owner, Steve Cohen, and David Stearns, their new president of baseball operations, to not just ring out the old and ring in the new, but start showing them that next season is going to be a whole lot better than last season.

Once, a half-century ago, the rallying cry for the Mets, thanks to Tug McGraw, was “Ya gotta believe.” Now Mets fans just wanna believe the people in charge have a course set toward a World Series.

Across town, the Yankees made one of the most important trades they have made in years, for Juan Soto, even if there is no guarantee they will be able to keep him at Yankee Stadium past this season. The Dodgers just invested over $1 billion dollars in Shohei Ohtani, one of the most sought-after free agents of all time, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the most sought-after free agent pitcher on this year’s market.

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The Mets were never in on Ohtani, or Soto. They were all-in on Yamamoto. Cohen would say afterward that his team “left it all on the field.” It doesn’t change the fact that the Dodgers just did the kinds of things that Mets fans expected Cohen to do when he bought the team. Now there is as much pressure from that fan base for the owner and management to dramatically improve the team as there is in Boston, where the Red Sox are coming off another last-place finish. The Mets finished fourth in the NL East. But it felt like last in New York, because of the expectations, and because of last season’s record payroll.

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Cohen has already shown he’s not afraid to spend money, especially after the lavish contracts he awarded to Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander. But now Scherzer is with the Rangers and Verlander is back with the Astros. Soto is a Yankee. Ohtani and Yamamoto are Dodgers. And Mets fans really do want to to see if the future for their team actually starts now.

“The future is always now,” Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said after the Soto deal, in a time when the Yankees were also very much all-in on Yamamoto. For Mets fans, that means 2024, and not 2025 and beyond.

There is still plenty of time before pitchers and catchers report to Port St. Lucie, Fla. Baseball, with few exceptions, is generally quiet between Christmas and New Year’s, even if the Dodgers did introduce Yamamoto this past week to great fanfare. The Mets aren’t the only team that has been relatively quiet so far, no matter how loud December was in Los Angeles, as loud a December as the Dodgers have ever had.

But the only significant acquisition the Mets have made since hiring David Stearns after last season ended in such a disappointing way is the hiring of their rookie manager, Carlos Mendoza. Now Mets fans wait and they see, after a season that saw one of the great Trade Deadline sell-offs in the history of their team, when New York shipped off Scherzer and Verlander and David Robertson -- the closer who had replaced the Edwin Díaz -- and even Tommy Pham, who ended up helping the D-backs make it all the way to the World Series.

“We’re going to be thoughtful and not impulsive and thinking about sustainability over the intermediate long-term, but not focused on winning the headlines over the next week,” Cohen said. “I think there’s a couple of ways to build a team.”

It is a well-established fact in baseball that the team with the largest payroll does not always win the World Series. You have to keep pointing out that only two of the last 10 World Series champions had the largest payroll: the 2018 Red Sox and the 2020 Dodgers. The Rangers just won the World Series with the fourth-highest payroll in the Majors and the team they beat in the Fall Classic, the D-backs, ranked 21st.

So, Cohen is right: There are different ways to build a team. Mets fans see how the Braves have done it in the NL East, and the way the Phillies keep doing it. Mets fans now wait to see which path Cohen and Stearns will choose. They are aware of all the speculation about free-agent-to-be Pete Alonso, one of the great home run hitters in the sport, and whether he is going to get a long-term contract that will keep him in New York for the rest of his career. Mets fans are also aware of all the holes in the starting rotation. And no one knows how Díaz -- one of the best closers New York baseball had ever seen in 2022 -- is going to come back from the knee injury suffered in the World Baseball Classic.

Again: Long way to Spring Training. Even longer to Opening Day. Doesn’t change the fact that the people running the Mets are on the clock now. Soon as the ball drops. This is New York. Future always is now. As in right now.