What David Stearns will bring to the Mets

This story was excerpted from Anthony DiComo’s Mets Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

Earlier this week, the Mets agreed to terms with David Stearns to become the first president of baseball operations in team history. It’s a significant hire that the Mets hope will reorient their franchise for decades to come.

But who exactly is Stearns? What has he accomplished? Here’s a snapshot of the man and his work:

Background
The story of Stearns becoming a Mets intern for a brief period around 15 years ago is well-known in baseball circles. Lesser known is the fact that while Stearns was still studying at Harvard, he took a summer internship with the Mets’ Single-A Brooklyn Cyclones affiliate, just a (long-ish) commute from his Upper East Side home. In that role, Stearns pulled the tarp, fixed seats, painted fences, power-washed bathrooms and even, on occasion, donned the team’s seagull mascot costume.

Eventually, Stearns moved onto more targeted summer internships with the Pirates in player development and baseball operations, an administrative job with the Arizona Fall League, and finally his Mets internship (which exposed Stearns to the scouting room, as well as other areas of baseball ops). From there, Stearns began his climb through the Major League front-office ranks with stints in Cleveland, Houston and Milwaukee.

His newest role takes him full-circle back to the Mets.

Transactions of note
Any discussion of Stearns begins with the most significant trade he made as Brewers GM: the acquisition of Christian Yelich from the Marlins for Lewis Brinson, Monte Harrison, Isan Díaz and Jordan Yamamoto. Yelich was coming off a reasonably productive year in Miami but was about to get expensive, due a $7 million arbitration salary in 2018. He was also still young, entering his age-26 season, with plenty of breakout potential. And break out Yelich did, winning National League MVP honors the following season.

Yet the trade wasn’t a success solely for that reason. The players Stearns gave up in the trade combined to contribute -6.0 WAR during their tenures with the Marlins. Six years later, none of them are still in Miami.

As flawlessly as the Yelich deal turned out for Milwaukee, Stearns’ career there wasn’t defined by a single transaction. There was also the 2015 trade of Adam Lind that netted the Brewers, among other players, a teenage pitcher named Freddy Peralta -- now one of the NL’s top arms.

In 2018, Stearns swung a waiver deal for Curtis Granderson, who produced an .846 OPS in September for a Brewers club that won the NL Central by one game. Three years later, he matched up with the Rays to acquire infielder Willy Adames and reliever Trevor Richards for pitchers J.P. Feyereisen and Drew Rasmussen -- another notable “win” for Stearns despite the recent success of both departing arms.

The most obvious knock on Stearns’ resume is his 2022 trade of Josh Hader to the Padres for four players including Esteury Ruiz, whom the Brewers later flipped in a deal for William Contreras. Stearns himself later acknowledged the imprudence of the Hader trade, which played a role in Milwaukee missing the playoffs (and which affected him deeply, according to one person close to Stearns).

But no GM has a perfect record, just as no GM can expect to make trades as clean as the Yelich one. The Mets simply expect Stearns to win deals more often than he loses them.

Agenda items
The Mets intend to make Stearns’ hire official shortly after the end of the regular season. Once they do, the new GM will have several important issues to address almost immediately. Among them:

• The future of Buck Showalter: Stearns is going to have to decide if Showalter, who is under contract through the end of the 2024 season, will remain as manager. If not, a search for a new top dugout official -- and likely new members of the coaching staff -- will commence for the fourth time in seven years.

• The future of Pete Alonso: This could ultimately turn into a back-burner issue, because the Mets have the option of letting Alonso play out his final year of team control in 2024 before engaging him in free agency the following winter. But if Stearns determines that Alonso is worth a long-term deal now, the move would -- if nothing else -- endear him immediately to the fan base.

• An offseason pitching plan: Most of the acquisitions Stearns makes this winter figure to come on the rotation side of things, where the Mets will return Kodai Senga, José Quintana and whole bunch of question marks. Identifying which pitchers to target will go a long way toward defining the Mets’ overall agenda. But the blueprint isn’t obvious for a team looking to avoid the types of long-term contracts that could hamstring them for much of the next decade.

• A rookie/third base analysis: Right now, the Mets don’t have an obvious starting third baseman for 2024, but they do have a trio of young players who could take that job in Brett Baty, Ronny Mauricio and Mark Vientos. Stearns must figure out which of those three fits best at third, then choose what to do with the other two. (And if the answer to the first question is “none of the above,” perhaps a free agent could be the solution.)