It was just under 22 months ago that the Mets won their last postseason series. It was a National League Division Series against the Phillies. Francisco Lindor hit a rousing grand slam to effectively end that one, Sean Manaea pitched seven strong innings in winning a crucial Game 3 and their kid catcher, Francisco Alvarez, was behind the plate for all four games. They were part of the core of the surprising Mets team that lit up their fanbase and made that run.
Those three players are still Mets, even after the their Trade Deadline sell-off this past week. Lindor will certainly remain a prominent fixture for them, even at the age of 32. But suddenly, there is a new core for the Mets going forward, built around Lindor, Juan Soto, Bo Bichette and a bunch of other 20-somethings even younger than they are:
Outfielders Carson Benge and A.J. Ewing and pitchers Nolan McLean, Christian Scott and Zac Thornton. Meet and greet those Mets.
David Stearns, the president of baseball operations for the Mets, now hopes to get things right at Citi Field with them after just about everything that has gone wrong since the middle of the 2025 season. And that really does mean just about every possible baseball thing.
It is why Stearns just traded away eight players and got a dozen prospects in return, mostly because he’d put himself in a position where he had no choice but to hit the reset button, no matter how dramatically. His team was 45-24 last June. Since then, the Mets are 40 games under .500, at 84-124.
What happened over the weekend then, and happened even bigger on Monday with all the trades Stearns just made, did not happen in a vacuum.
Bichette just got here, and even though he can opt out of the final two years of his contract, that seems unlikely given the uncertainty of free agency and the down year he’s having. Soto isn’t going anywhere, not just two years into the biggest contract in baseball history. And Lindor still has $160 million and five years left on his own contract. Then there are kids who have managed to show promise, and sometimes great promise, in an otherwise lost season:
A.J. Ewing, who turns 22 next Monday.
23-year-old Carson Benge.
24-year-old Zac Thornton.
25-year-old Nolan McLean.
27-year-old Christian Scott.
Stearns and Mets fans can only hope that at least a few of the Minor League kids who became Mets over the past few days are eventually going to become big players in New York, perhaps as early as next season.
Stearns was asked about that in the aftermath of the Trade Deadline.
“First and foremost, we added a tremendous amount of talent all throughout our system,” he said. “Different shapes and sizes, different positional groupings, arms and bats, really good defenders. So overall, we believe that we’ve added to our system. We added players that will help us in New York and overall strengthen the quality of our farm system.”
He added this before he was finished addressing the current state of the Mets:
“Our goal is to move the organization forward in the best way possible, to ensure that we have a far better season and each season beyond.”
What Mets fans are being asked to believe in, now and into the future, is Stearns’ vision. The Mets team that did make that improbable October run less than two years ago, that was essentially a team assembled by his predecessors.
As close as the ’24 Mets came to their first World Series in nearly a decade, Stearns clearly did not feel that team was sustainable in the long term. And even when Soto was added to that group, signing his historic $765 million contract, the Mets fell apart across the summer of ’25 and ended up missing the playoffs by a game. Once the Mets fancied themselves as becoming the East Coast Dodgers. For now, Cohen is probably hoping his team turns into a New York version of the White Sox, who lost 102 games last season and now find themselves in first place in the American League Central.
Cohen has stated publicly that he has no intention of dismissing Stearns, still just halfway into his own Mets contract at Citi Field. Again: Stearns felt as if this sell-off was the best path forward. Now he has to believe — and has convinced his boss — that he can build a team of his own around an outfield of Soto, Benge and Ewing; with Bichette and Lindor on the left side of his infield; and Alvarez still behind home plate.
You know that giant-sized apple behind the outfield fence at Citi Field, the one that rises up when a Met hits a home run? New core to it.
