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.
NEW YORK — Not long after the Mets watched Pete Alonso and Edwin Díaz move to the Orioles and Dodgers in free agency, respectively, I was speaking with a team official about the team’s offseason plans. At the time, things didn’t look super promising. The club was taking a beating in the court of public opinion. And yet the offseason, at that juncture, was still relatively young.
“I think a lot of this is going to take until late January to play out, which I know is just going to increase the angst of our fan base — which I completely understand,” the official said. “We just have to be patient.”
Just like that, the Mets added three players worth a combined 10.4 WAR in 2025. Just like that, the Mets arguably became the NL East favorites. Just like that, the Mets put themselves back in the conversation for a deep October run.
“I understand when fans see good players leaving or going elsewhere at the front end of an offseason, they’re going to be disappointed,” president of baseball operations David Stearns said Thursday, after completing the last of those transactions. “It’s also our job in the front office and in the organization to recognize how long an offseason truly is, to understand that there’s often a whole lot of transactional activity that occurs in January, February, sometimes even March. And so even as the subtractions were going on, we understood that there were going to be very good opportunities for us to make our team better, to continue to add pieces to be better.
“I didn’t know that it was necessarily going to happen all at once in the span of a couple of days, but it has. And I’m happy with where our team is right now.”
Over the course of the offseason, the Mets have turned over 30 percent of their 40-man roster, adding a dozen new names to the mix. Gone are some of the longest-tenured Mets, including Alonso, Díaz, Brandon Nimmo and Jeff McNeil. In their place are a host of fresh faces, highlighted by Peralta, Bichette, Robert, Marcus Semien and Jorge Polanco. The group of Mets that reports to Spring Training is going to look quite different from what fans have been accustomed to seeing for much of the last decade.
There’s an intangible cost to all that change, of course. Lots of Alonso jerseys will remain hung in closets around the tri-state area this summer, if not piled into donation boxes during spring cleaning. A roster full of newcomers is going to take time to jell.
But on some level, this did seem necessary. As far back as early October, Stearns was clear in stating that after missing the playoffs in excruciating fashion, the Mets could not simply run back the same team. He then went to work on building a roster that’s clearly his own.
Whether success follows remains to be seen, but at least the Mets are trying something different. Their hope is that they’ll emerge a whole lot better.
