The Mets had a pretty good day on Tuesday. They won a game on “Bark in the Park” night, which is a holy event for lovers of good dogs (of which ALL dogs are), Ronny Mauricio hit his first big league home run, and the team hired David Stearns to be their new President of Baseball Operations.
The hiring of Stearns is a gigantic deal. As trite and corny as it sounds, strong and capable leadership is the difference between winning and losing. Not just in baseball, but in the real world where most of us work jobs we pretend not to hate. A good boss can make a job tolerable while a bad one will send you out the door.
For many years, the Mets have been a burning tire fire in the front office. The owners, who were involved in a Bernie Madoff-Ponzi scheme, were cheap and incompetent. Their reign of moronic lunacy included sexual harassment, re-signing a domestic abuser at shortstop, and the hiring of an agent with no front office experience to be the General Manager. It wasn’t awesome.
Now we have an adult for an owner. Steve Cohen from day one made hiring a full-time President of Baseball Ops a priority. He didn’t rush the process. Cohen wanted the right fit at the right time. And it was no secret that he wanted Stearns.
Our new President, like our owner, grew up a Mets fan. Raised on the upper east side of Manahattan (a richer!), Stearns checks all the boxes for a modern day executive. He went to Harvard (Nerd!), cut his teeth working for the MLB, and worked himself up through the Cleveland Guardians and Houston Astros to become the GM and eventual President of Baseball Operations of the Milwaukee Brewers.
Working with limited resources in a smaller market, Stearns presided over one of the more successful stretches in Brewers history. The team made the playoffs every season from 2018-2021. He helped build a solid farm system for a contending big league club in what was, at the time, the best division in baseball. Stearns also orchestrated difference-making trades at the deadline to secure high-producing rentals at reasonable prices.
Consider what the Mets pulled off this trade deadline. They turned two massive underperforming contracts (Scherzer and Verlander) into a wealth of top prospects. The team also flipped several other expiring vet deals into young talent with an eye on the near future. It was a redistirbution of Cohen’s investment from the team on the field into the organization as a whole.
While Stearns couldn’t have been involved in all this; that would be illegal; he surely was impressed by it. Cohen and GM Billy Eppler cleared the decks of contractual dead weight and freshed the minor league stores with talent to develop. Here kid, it’s all yours. Now go and play.
The kid’s got a tough job in front of him. Taking time to develop talent is not something that usually flies in the New York market. But Mets fans will have to show patience. It’s unlikely the team will go for high-priced free agents on the market this offseason.
While the mouths of many a Mets fan water at the thought of Shohei Ohtani in a Mets uniform, it’s a long shot. Ohtani will command a long, albatross-sized contract of historic proportions. It’s rumored he wants to stay on the west coast and there’s uncertainty about his long-term health. Will he still pitch? If he does can he stay healthy? If he doesn’t then you’re spending an inordinate amount of money on a designated hitter. Better to spend the money in other ways.
Locking up Pete Alonso in a long-term deal will be a priority. But first, Stearns will have to assess the trade value of the big man. While Mets fans are in love with Alonso, and for damn good reason, we may have to lose him. His numbers will command big money for a long time. Whether it will be worth it to sign a massive power hitter with limited fielding range is for the Harvard guy with the big brain. Not the handsome bastard with the blog or the loud, yell-y guys on Twitter.
Developing pitching will be a priority. The Mets, known historically for developing young pitchers, are woefully short on it right now. It’s astounding that the organization that brought the world Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan, Dwight Gooden, and Jacob deGrom is forced to go the free agent market for starters. It will take time to draft, trade for, and develop young arm talent. It certainly won’t happen in just one offseason.
But time, that eternal bastard, the thing that obssessed Shakespeare, and the winner of all eternal races, will have to be respected. Next season will probably see the Braves, a bunch of godless farts, win the NL East again. If not them then the Phillies. Less gross but still ugh.
People who know me in real life know a few definite things about me: I am devastingly good-looking and I love old movies. This week I rewatched His Kind of Woman from 1951 starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell. The movie is a fun, weird, almost batshit film noir.
In the movie Mitchum, one of the world’s coolest humans, is a gambler that winds up in a Mexican resort for reasons not even he can comprehend. Along the way he meets Russell, who changes his life along with the life of every man she’s ever met. Somehow, the movie turns into an espionage thriller where Vincent Price plays a ham actor (worth the price of admission alone), and Jim Backus (Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island) are involved.
The film is loaded with cool, noir dialogue like, “Guess I was just shooting the moon” and “She’s beautiful, that’s always interesting.” What makes the movie insane came from the President of RKO Pictures at the time: Howard Hughes.
Hughes was a world-class abuser and creepy sonuvabitch. He had his girlfriends’ homes and phones bugged and his perceived enemies followed. Hughes manipulated the lives of many young Hollywood starlets and turned their thirst for fame into sex and captivity. Yep, that’s right, captivity. He literally had young women help hostage under contract and gave them nothing to do but service him when he showed up at thier homes.
Hughes took His Kind of Woman, which was finished, and ordered it re-shot with characters that serve no purpose and plotlines that make no sense. I’ve seen the movie at least six times and I still don’t know what it’s about. At one point early on Mitchum says, “Hey I’m not knocking it, man. I’m just trying to understand it.” Feels like an ad-lib about the whole experience.
A solid, little film noir got turned into a bloated ego trip. It’s like what happened to America under Donald Trump. A decent idea got turned into a megalomaniacal nightmare.
The point is leadership matters. Mets fans have dealt with a poor top executive team for so long we don’t even know what a good one is. But I think we’re about to find out.
