In Stearns and Mendoza, Mets Finally Have Continuity
By most accounts, the last decade or so has been a success for the Mets. They’ve found a new face of the franchise in Francisco Lindor, developed homegrown players such as Pete Alonso, Brandon Nimmo, and Mark Vientos, have made the playoffs four times, have made a pair of National League Championship Series, and were League Champions in 2015.
Despite serious levels of success, the names at the top of the Mets organization have been a rotating door. Terry Collins and Sandy Alderson led the Mets to back-t0-back playoffs in 2015 and 2016, but the end of their era together saw the Mets enter a five-year playoff drought that was eventually ended in 2022 by the general manager and manager duo of Billy Eppler and Buck Schowalter. Before the 2023-24 off-season was able to kick moving, both Showalter and Eppler were out of their posts in New York.
Since the 2017 season, the Mets have had six managers, highlighted by Carlos Beltran and his few moments at the helm. On the flip side, the Mets have had nine general managers, which includes an astounding five interim GMs. The Mets had a triumvirate of interim general managers in 2018 after Alderson stepped down, and they needed two interims to complete the 2021 season after Jared Porter’s firing and interim man Zack Scott’s DUI arrest.
For a mostly successful decade, the Mets averaged about 1.5 years per general manager, whether full-time or interim, and about two seasons per manager. Regardless of the sport, building a sustained winner while averaging a new brain trust every two years makes the task incredibly difficult, and has hardly ever been accomplished, let alone done so consistently.
Needless to say, the Mets clearly have lacked continuity atop the organization. This can plague an organization, and it has definitely impacted the operations of the Mets. Following their Cinderella 2024 season, it appears as if the Mets might finally be curing this disease, and others are noticing. On Monday night’s installment of Baseball Night in New York, SNY’s Andy Martino argued that one factor the Mets have in their favor in the Juan Soto sweepstakes is continuity.
For a franchise that has lacked continuity in every sense of the world, having continuity now as a strength is a welcome sight. The current head executive of the Mets, president of baseball operations David Stearns, is just 39 and will likely be in his role with the Mets for some time to come. Stearns, as all Mets fans have surely heard by now, is a lifelong Mets fan and is currently the lead executive of his childhood team. His first major move was to hire a manager to lead his teams, which ended up being now 44-year-old Carlos Mendoza.
Mendoza and Stearns truly appear to be the future of the Mets franchise, and are a unified front under the ownership and finances of Steve Cohen, who seems to have no desire of going anywhere anytime soon. The Mets have a pair of younger leaders at two important positions, and if success follows their incredible 2024 run, it would be fair to assume both men might hold their positions for some time to come.
When looking around baseball, there are two organizations that have been consistently at the top of baseball for over a decade now: The Yankees and the Dodgers. For the Mets’ cross-town rival, Brian Cashman just finished his 26th year as the Yankees’ general manager and has only had three managers under his leadership: Joe Torre, Joe Girardi, and Aaron Boone. The stability and consistency atop the Yankees organization is a major factor as to why the team has reached the playoffs 22 times in Boone’s 26 years.
As for the Dodgers, Dave Roberts has been manager of the team for nine years, and they have won two rings and made the playoffs nine times under his leadership, a 100% success rate. He was hired by Dodgers President of Baseball Operations Andrew Friedman, who since taking over the gig before the 2015 season, has not missed the playoffs with LA. The current Dodgers leadership offers unparalleled continuity, with a 19-for-19 record of making the playoffs between the manager and head executive.
If the Mets still aim to become the “Dodgers of the East,” the first must find their head executive and manager of the future. In the Stearns-Mendoza duo, the Mets seem to finally have that. Stability and a clear long-term vision would be a welcome sight for any major free agent, and if the reporting of Andy Martino is correct, it could be a major feather in the cap of Steve Cohen during his negotiations with Juan Soto and Scott Boras.
A once unobtainable goal for the Mets could now be a deciding factor that lands the biggest player acquisition in team history. With Stearns and Mendoza, the Mets might have the continuity that turns them into the “East Coast Dodgers,” and that turns this franchise into a champion once again.