I approached Francisco Lindor before Thursday’s four-game series finale against the Diamondbacks and began a question this way:
“I have watched these last few games and what I’m thinking …”
At that moment, Lindor cut me off and said, “I am thinking it too.”
Lindor is too diplomatic and nice to use my exact language after watching the Diamondbacks for a few days, but how in the heck could the team with the highest payroll ever (by a lot) be unable to figure out how to be as good (or bad?) as Arizona?
In fact, this year-end schedule is like a troll to the 2023 Mets — Arizona, Cincinnati, Miami, Philadelphia, Miami, Philadelphia. It is one matter to discuss the high bar established by the Braves to win the NL East. It is another to look at the low bar that is the NL wild-card race, which is led by the Phillies and features a four-way battle for the final spot in which Arizona, Cincinnati, Miami plus San Francisco were separated by one half-game going into Thursday. It feels as if these clubs think they can lose their way into October.
First team to 85 wins (84? 83?) will probably gain postseason entrance among the flawed quartet, with the suddenly struggling Cubs threatening to make a quintet from which two will emerge. It is not an impressive lot, and somehow the Mets could not even make it to this late round-robin. They tripped on the low bar.
“Sure, I am thinking about what could have been,” Lindor said.
The Mets took three of four from the Diamondbacks, culminating with an 11-1 romp in which Kodai Senga was dominant with 10 strikeouts in six innings.
But flip back to the previous night and you will find a confluence of what David Stearns will be encountering immediately when he officially takes over as Mets president of baseball operations. The Mets routed the Diamondbacks to improve to 6-1 this year against Arizona and to 23-13 against the six teams pursuing the three NL wild-card spots.
Near simultaneously, the Braves were clinching their sixth straight NL East crown with two-plus weeks left in the season, an achievement aided by going 10-3 against these Mets.
Stearns arrives at a time when Steve Cohen has stated he expects his 2024 team to take a step back in championship potential from what were the odds going into this season yet still contend. But that the priority above all else is not to disrupt construction of an organization that will compete for championships annually.
So, Stearns is going to be asked to live in two worlds at the outset — fashion a roster that, at minimum, can amass the 85-ish wins necessary to dabble with the riff-raff at the bottom of the wild-card race. But do nothing that impedes long-term construction of an infrastructure that will upend the Braves’ NL East rule and then resemble its sustainability.
I do assume the Mets will be in the win-now bidding for Shohei Ohtani (because he is Shohei Ohtani) and Orix Buffaloes ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto (because he just turned 25 last month and literally has world-class stuff). This kind of financial flex will be foreign to what Stearns was allowed to do with the Brewers.
But, for the most part, I think the Mets’ plan this offseason is to try to assemble a contender in 2024 by shopping largely at the margins and with short-term contracts so as not to clutter the long-term future.
This was Stearns’ wheelhouse in Milwaukee. While the Mets have had difficulty with one administration after another unearthing bargains — Tommy Pham this season was an exception, not a rule — Stearns regularly augmented a contender via under-the-radar winning trades for a Travis Shaw or Corey Knebel or Manny Piña or plucking a Jesus Aguilar off of waivers or stretching the dollars available on Milwaukee’s tight budget to wait out a free-agent market and get short-term winning deals with a Yasmani Grandal, Mike Moustakas or Kolten Wong.
There is no phase that strong organizations find useful (or better pieces) than in relief. And if the Mets are going to contend next year, Stearns will have to do better than the dumpster dive that cost the club so dearly this year and included (but was not limited to) failed results from Jeff Brigham, Tommy Hunter and Dominic Leone — and Sam Coonrod, Trevor Gott and Jimmy Yacabonis. And … well, you get the idea.
Cohen is empowering Stearns mainly to see his big, long-term plans through. But watching the bottom end of this playoff race is a reminder that Stearns has a 2024 mandate as well — to, at minimum, clear the low bar of wild-card contention.
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